Welcome to School, Commence the Begging

But I will no longer sell, cook, walk, wash cars, run or beg for any school fundraising project. Frankly, I've done my time. I've sold my share of candy bars, wrapping paper, tumblers of tiny jelly beans, cookies and books. I deserve time off for good selling. I'm tired of begging.

That was from a great column in the Washington Post on the begging that children are forced into by their schools. It's really really stupid to waste children's time this way, and teaches them some goofy principles about selling overpriced garbage for a good cause. Why can't they sell something that people want at a fair price? If schools want to go into business- let them...have the students earn money on the mechanical turk so they can learn the true value of their labor.

In the meantime, shouldn't they be wasting their time doing homework? Graded homework sucks- school is about learning, not about proving who can do the most work. If you need two hours of homework to get the test scores you want, then do it. If you don't, then don't! There was nothing worse than sitting there going through hours of problems that were easy but time consuming, making stupid things on poster board, etc. It totally demoralized me in school...but now I am much better at dealing with meaninglessness...

Asobi Seksu

How out of touch am I? I knew/know nothing about this crew, except that maybe they are from NYC, etc. from their bio. Beautiful music though. I found it with one of those "people who liked this also liked" features when I was grabbing some early 90s Moose ("Honey Bee") on emusic. There is a lot of music out there these days that has evolved from that line of shimmery guitar stuff. I can trace the temporary demise in my interest in guitar music to the ascendancy of plague known as grunge. Loved Nirvana, hated Pearl Jam and there guttural imitators.

There's something nice too about not having to understand any of the lyrics that are in Japanese. It's always a worry when there is a band you like, but the lyrics are exceedingly vapid. I prefer to just hear total nonsense, or something that I just have no hope of understanding. Of course, there is the danger that they are saying totally idiotic things and you are singing along. A tough guy Russian cab driver that took me from the airport in Moscow to my hotel while singing along to the Backstreet Boys comes to mind. Fortunately I can't sing, so there's little danger of that particular embarassment.

Anyway, this Asobi Seksu album, Citrus, is more structured than a lot of the shoegazy stuff. The rhythmic underbelly of the band is a lot more modern sounding than the 90s stuff was. It gives the vocals and the guitar effects something to ride on, really a lot more pleasant to listen to.

I'll have to give it a few more listens before I drop my final rating on it, but it's got some definite 5 star tracks and few real clunkers.

iTunes Music Store = Garbage

The iTunes Music Store is for the short-sighted. Speaking as recently cured member of this sect, I have to say...stop buying AAC files now! What's an AAC file you might ask? Why, it's a file that only plays on your iPod and in your licensed copy of iTunes. Unless you burn it to a CD and burn it back to a nice format, like OGG or MP3- losing all track metadata (artist, title, album, etc.) unless you burn the CDs whole, which doesn't work if you're only buying the good songs, as is my wont.

You may not have been burned by this yet, but as more non-Apple options for entertainment become prevalent- you will be, you will be.

The alternatives- if you like independent music, emusic.com is great. If you like buying from dodgy Russians, allofmp3.com is even better. And now, MySpace is letting artists make money more or less directly from downloads on their pages.

Prediction: Fox will be one the biggest "record labels" in five years, if the others don't adapt, they could just go away.

I am interested to see what Universal's Spiral Frog thing turns out to be, but if it doesn't output MP3, I am not interested.

Pride...

The Dilbert Blog: Yay! Both Sides Won!

If you want to win the Nobel Peace Prize, figure out a way to trade land for pride.

I don't think it's all about pride in the mid-east, but I do think we need to approach the negotiations from a different perspective. We can't give the same land to everyone: people can't seem to share. Getting back to pride though, it's unfortunate that pride often means dominance over an other. That's the cheapest way to get respect.

Lock down the cell phone networks

Another disturbing story- buying prepaid cell phones for resale is a pre-terrorist act. I think it is ridiculous that people sell consumer electronics with features disabled. In this case, they are doing it so they can sucker people in for a low initial price, but the major US cell phone networks frequently turn off features to try to force you to use their services. Rather than create all of these unbalanced markets, it is better to keep the hardware and the services sectors separate...supposedly too complicated for the American consumer. That's ridiculous, if there is one thing the US is good at, it's shopping.

Devolution

http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2006/8/13/4967

I am sure there are going to be a few articles about a statistical analysis that showed up in Science [non free content - see ArsTechnica for coverage]. Basically, only 39% of Americans think the theory of evolutions is correct, and a slightly greater number think it is false. The correlation between religous belief and acceptance of evolution is much higher than it is in other countries- mostly because the Republican party has been using Christian belief as a differentiating feature, divisive issue. The abuse of religion for political gain has likely damaged the thinking of around 1/5 of Americans, amongst the 40% or so that believe evolution to be a false claim. How can the USA expect to compete in a century where genomic science is going to become a competitive international technological field? It can't. It really can't. Not if we can't even look at the data for fear of offending the gods.

Liquid Stupidity

This is ridiculous BS. No liquids at the security checkpoints- so we'll pour them out. Because they might contain explosives. Which will...explode? But put whatever you want in your checked bags- since they can't explode. Or something.

I hate these stupid little terrorists and the stupid reactions of the DHS/TSA/etc. (They better end this policy very, very soon.) And when the hell are the exploding people going to realize that we don't give one crap about them? Anyone who thinks that bombing an airplane (or dropping bombs from airplanes for that matter) is going to get them into heaven should just kill themselves now and save us the trouble.

From Boing Boing:

If the liquid could be explosive, why are you dumping it in a crowd?: "Mark Frauenfelder: xopl asks a fair question:

So CNN is reporting: 'Because the plot involved taking liquid explosives aboard planes in carry-ons, passengers at all U.S. and British airports, and those boarding U.S.-bound flights at other international airports, are banned from taking any liquids onto planes.'

And then they have the photo of the TSA guy dumping a tub of confiscated possibly explosive liquids into a garbage can in a crowd of people.

Figure that shit out for me.

Testing for Dummies

I really wish the Freakonomics guys would make this their issue:

Schools around the country are now being forced by the immoral "No Child Left Behind" program to judge themselves by the quality of the students they are given. The primary method of judging a school is this- compare how this year's 3rd grade students score to how last year's 3rd grade students score. Given that a school doesn't really control its population, and the result of failing evaluations under nclb is that more good students leave, you basically create a false appearance of schools getting worse year after year.

What should be measured is how much students improve from the beginning of the year to the end (pre-test, post-test). The measure of a non-selective school should not be the quality of the student body, but how well it educates the students it has. We shouldn't confuse good students with good schools. That said, measuring the quality the student body is a good criteria for choosing which neighborhood to live in, you want your child to be with students that are on their level or above, but it has nothing to do with the quality of the teachers, the curriculum, or anything that anyone can do anything about.

Here's what's happening in DC-
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/27/AR2006072701668.html
They switched tests, so now it looks like schools are getting worse, when really they may not have changed at all.

The next time you hear some idiot complaining about the quality of schools, make sure they aren't complaining about the quality of the students...

Arab Strap

"Stink" by Arab Strap is a sick song. I love it. These guys are for real. It's also some kind of thing that Belle and Sebastian have a song called "the boy from the arab strap". It would make you think that this is some kind of twee-fest, but it's not. As I intimated, it's serious stuff. If you've had it with music for suckers, you should listen to this truth. Forget about the music, just listen to that boy from the arab strap talk. I'd love to hear a tape of him just telling stupid people to shut the hell up.

Drug Prices Down

I find this piece by Gladwell amazing. I find it amazing that the Times did not publish what would be the logically more attention grabbing headline: "Drug Prices Down". It's criminal that our health costs are skyrocketing because people are demanding brand name drugs. If you're reading this in the USA and are on Prozac and have health insurance- I demand you switch to generic fluoxetine. Look, you'll still be happy either way, only this way, I'll be happier too. It's a win-win-lose, but we'll be the winners!

The Times' Drug Problem: "The New York Times led its business section today with the headline: “Drug Prices Up Sharply.” The subject of the piece was a study by AARP showing that prices of prescription drugs rose 3.9 percent in the first three months of this year, four times the rate of inflation. Outrageous!

But wait: it isn’t until you read a little closer that you realize that the price increase just refers to brand-name pharmaceutical prices. And what the article never mentions at all is that the AARP released a second study yesterday, showing that generic drug costs in the

United States were unchanged in the first quarter and fell 0.1 percent over the past year. Here is the key paragraph from the AARP report, which—unbelievably—never made it into the Times piece:

'The rate of increase in average annual change in manufacturer’s list price for generic prescription drugs most widely used by older Americans was about one quarter the rate of general inflation for 2005.” "