Benedict XVI Resigns

The world has not been waiting breathlessly for my comments about the February 11th announcement by Pope Benedict XVI that he would resign on February 28th, but, inasmuch as I've not put anything up for a while, here goes:

The end of John Paul II's life was alternately described as a pathetic old man clinging to life unaware that his time had passed or "a testament of faith".  The last being a statement of a Catholic nun.

I'm sure that in relevant religious communities "a testament of faith" is clear enough description by itself.  Not to me.  After web searches and reading descriptions of testaments of faith in several religions I sort of get it: it's the will of God and the individual will take the lumps because that's what God is dishing out.  The individual recognizes or accedes to God's will (as if there were a choice).

I decided many years ago that the simplest explanation for why bad things happen to good people is because that's the way it is.  It doesn't require anything divine.  It doesn't require a divine plan.  Stuff just happens: brakes fail, metal fatigues, someone goes postal.

Back to the pope.  For some reason I think of the two popes as JP2 and Benny.  (I think the "Benny" comes from a "Prairie Home Companion sketch in which Guy Noir, the private eye, guided the Pope around incognito.)

My guess that Benny saw how the organization lost direction under JP2's decline and wanted to avoid doing the same.

In my opinion the best joke about the Pope's resignation came from Father James Martin, cultural editor of the Jesuit magazine America: "Boy he's sure .. certainly has raised the bar when it comes to giving something up for Lent." (The official NPR transcript reads: "And my second response was, boy, he certainly has raised the bar when it comes to giving something up for Lent." ~http://www.npr.org/2013/02/16/172175231/how-will-catholics-react-to-popes-rare-retirement)

News 12 Helicopter Video

In the aftermath of yesterday's snow storm Newsday posted a News 12 video on its site (News 12 is a Long Island all news TV station): Chopper 12 over abandoned cars in Lake Grove.  As the camera zoomed in I fully expected the flash of a drone strike.

 

What does that say about our world?

On the Internet, nobody cares if you're an imbecile

This whole thing of "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" has gotten a little out of hand and has morphed into "On the Internet, nobody cares if you're an imbecile."

~ http://www.weeklystorybook.com/comic_strip_of_the_daycom/2012/05/ask_clique_and_claque.html

I was grading a student's drawing I noticed that the arcs didn't seem to join flush to the horizontal lines. 

Zooming in and sure enough.

A look at the top revealed a gap and the lines which should have ended at the horizontal lines extended beyond.

When I asked the student why the dimensions were off he responded:

I was just eye balling, I didn't realize how serious it was to follow the units, I thought they were just reference

I didn't and still don't know how to respond.  He's an Engineering student.  In my mind that means something.  All manner of snarky comments suggest themselves from a lament about American higher education to the hope that he, like many students, will change his major to avoiding domestically produced goods.

When is a Fetus Like Schrodinger's Cat?

Q: When is a Fetus Like Schrodinger's Cat?

A: When a Catholic hospital in Colorado defended itself in a law suit.

If a pregnant woman dies would you rather be responsible for a single death or for three? (She was bearing twins.)  One family's tragedy is a source of humor for the shameless. Of course now the health care system and its lawyers have to confront a doctrinal debate: Catholic doctrine has life beginning at birth.  Colorado law has life beginning at delivery.

And while I'm at it - don't look for a logical association - P.G.Wodehouse is quoted as saying after reading Norman Mailer's novel "The Naked and the Dead"

Isn't it incredible that you can print in a book nowadays stuff which when we were young was found only on the walls of public lavatories.

- NYTimes review of his letters by Dwight Garner (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/31/books/p-g-wodehouse-a-life-in-letters.html)  Garner liked Wodehouse's novels, but not his letters.

eBook: A Balanced Introduction to Computer Science

Among the perks some faculty enjoy are getting free books, or at lease looking at free books.  Most of society probably would not describe this as a perk, but something of a workplace hazard similar to black lung disease or carpal tunnel syndrome.

For some of us books are treasures which keep on giving.  eBooks?  Well, ebooks done right have one undeniable advantage over regular print books: the search feature.

Although I dd not see this first hand, one of my college acquaintances told me about a favorite prof's library and the prof's uncanny ability to support his statements by quickly finding the book and the relevant passage in that book.  (The student's last name was Barnes, first name now forgotten.  I don't know if I ever knew the prof's name.)

Sometimes the prof just knew.  Barnes felt it must have been a quote he'd used many times.  Other times the instructor had marked the book, either his own index inside the cover or bookmarked pages.

But I've strayed.  It is possible for instructors to get access to books online.  Certainly, for reviewing a book for course selection, online should be fine, because most of the books arriving in faculty offices, especially for survey/distribution courses won't be adopted.

I'll skip the argument about glossy picture books pandering to functional undergraduate illiterates on one end of the scale and abstract, impenetrable tomes at the other, and get right to the point:  if a book's genesis came from notes written for a specific course the content is perfect for that course, but the audience is limited to the captive audience of that school.  Expanding the content to seek a wider audience and authors have to include material to make the book more salable.  Paradoxically, the effort to make the book more appealing may do just the opposite as an instructor may regard material outside their course assignment as superfluous and not worth their student's money.

But that's not why I started this post.  No?  No.  I've had two interesting experiences with ebooks.  In the first, the first several pages of A Balanced Introduction to Computer Science by David Reed present an interesting challenge for the reader.

It took a little bit before I realized that what I was seeing was not just a botched image, but text where the letters v,w, and y were missing.  And not just missing, but missing from only some segments or fonts in the text.  Looking at the example, you can see that "w" and "y" appear in the italicized text, but not the standard text.

One of my students in Engineering Drawing turned in several drawings which were missing some lines.  It turned out that those lines were missing from the ebook version of the text. It was as obvious as the difference between these two: