The Daily Parker

The last two days, I've been in meetings more than 7 hours each. I'm a little fried. Meanwhile, the following have popped up for me to read over the weekend:

• Making people reveal their real names stops online trolling, right? Um, no.
• A poet discovered that two of her poems were used in Texas' state assessments, but she couldn't answer the test questions about them.
• Hanselman asks, should we teach programming from the machine up or from the glass down?
• Photographer Kaylee Greer has a video about how to photograph dogs in challenging situations.
• Aurora, Ill., is throwing a months-long "Wayne's World" 25th Anniversary party. Excellent!
• Apparently Trump's Defense secretary nominee hates all of his other nominees for Defense positions.

I'm now off to the opera. Thence, perhaps, to sleep.

It's fascinating how working from home doesn't seem to give me more time to, you know, work. So these have backed up on me, and I hope to read them...someday:

• Simple Talk has a (year-and-a-half-old) article on MongoDB vs. Azure Document DB.
• UTA professor John Traphagan worries about America's cult of ignorance.
• Washington Monthly's Paul Glastris bemoans how the press is making the Clinton Foundation in to the new Benghazi.
• Fallows' 95th Trump Time Capsule entry points out the simple logic of Trump refusing to show his tax or medical records.
• I recently discovered Chicago's smallest neighborhood, the Villa.
• Lake County, just north of Chicago, demonstrates the profound differences between rich and poor school districts.
• Another year-old article, this one in Slate, lists all the hip-hop references in Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton.

OK, so, that's going to take a few minutes...

Amen:

Overreliance on slides has contributed to the absurd belief that expecting and requiring students to read books, attend classes, take notes and do homework is unreasonable.

Courses designed around slides therefore propagate the myth that students can become skilled and knowledgeable without working through dozens of books, hundreds of articles and thousands of problems.

If slide shows are so bad, why are they so popular?

Universities measure student satisfaction but they do not measure learning. Since organisations focus on what they measure and students like PowerPoint, it stays, regardless of its educational effectiveness.

On the other hand, when I see something pervasive that exists counter to my own values, I wonder (a) are my values out of step and (b) what are the incentives? I think more research is needed.

Scott Hanselman suggests that, rather than dividing the world into technologists and non-techies, the division is simply about curiosity:

I took apart my toaster, my remote control, and a clock-radio telephone before I was 10. Didn't you? What's the difference between the people that take toasters apart and the folks that just want toast? At what point do kids or young adults stop asking "how does it work?"

There's a great interview question I love to give. "When you type foo.com into a browser, what happens? Then what happens? Then what happens?" I ask this question not because I care how deep you can go; I ask because I care how deep you care to go. Where does your interest stop? How do you THINK it works? Where does technology end and where does the magic (for you) begin? HTTP? TCP? DNS? Voltage on a wire? Registers in chips? Quantum effects?

Perhaps curiosity is an innate thing, perhaps it's taught and encouraged, but more likely it's a little of both. I hope that you're stretching yourself and others to ask more questions and explore the how and why of the world around you.

And he has a great quote on Twitter (from himself): "Non-technical people, here's a secret. We tech folks have no idea what the problem is. We just try to narrow it down, removing variables."

I'm debating what new area I should explore, assuming I have the time:

• SignalR, maybe by making the Weather Now home page auto-update?
• Python, maybe by putting together some scripts that use a new API I create for The Daily Parker?
• Bootstrap, maybe by overhauling the Inner Drive Technology corporate website?
• Raspberry Pi, maybe by making a cute little device that responds to a Weather Now API?

I'm thinking about a few side projects, obviously. And this article on new "universal remote" apps in today's Times got me thinking about home automation, too. But that's less a skill to learn than a set of toys to play with.

I have three books in the works and two on deck (imminently, not just in my to-be-read stack) right now. Reading:

• Neal Stephenson, Seveneves.
• Christopher Dickey, Our Man In Charleston.
• Gene Kim, et al., The Phoenix Project.

On deck:

• Kevin Hearne, "Iron Druid Chronicles" book 8: Staked.
• Kim Stanley Robinson, "Mars" trilogy book 2: Green Mars.

Meanwhile, I have these articles and blog posts to read, some for work, some because they're interesting:

• Deeply Trivial dissects the bogus claim that six coin tosses going the same way (a) decided the Iowa caucuses and (b) is improbable.
• Speaking of statistics, meteorologist Tom Skilling simultaneously describes our very mild winter and the coming Arctic blast next week, noting that the cold weather will be caused by significantly warmer-than-normal weather in Western North America.
• Bruce Schneier calls attention to the growing planet-sized robot we're creating. (No kidding; it's not even a little bit sci-fi.)
• The Chicago Public Schools have just borrowed $875 million at a penalty interest rate 75 bps over what they expected and something like 700 bps over prime, meaning the loan might be worse than not borrowing the money.
• Illinois State Senator Daniel Bliss (D-Evanston) points out that the dispute between Gov. Rauner and the State Legislature is philosophical, and the governor is flat wrong.
• Chicago has mixed politics with snow removal basically forever.
• L.A.'s iconic Sixth St. Viaduct is going away, as is the concrete river under it.
• Ted Cruz might have gone farther if he weren't such an asshole.
• Microsoft Azure Stack is a thing I need to learn about.
• So is ReSharper 10.1.

Time to read.

Meanwhile, I seem to have a cold. Yuck.

This is what happens when you work across the street from the Chicago Teachers Union:

As part of their negotiations with the Chicago Public Schools and the City of Chicago, the CTU are withdrawing their funds from Bank of America. The Tribune has background:

One day after the Chicago Teachers Union rejected a contract proposal from Chicago Public Schools, district officials said they would slash school budgets and stop paying the bulk of teachers' pension contributions — moves CTU's president quickly blasted as "an act of war."

CPS officials told reporters of their plans while announcing the district would make a fresh attempt Wednesday to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars to keep the school system's finances afloat.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel is also taking shots at the union:

[B]y intentionally and unilaterally whacking tens of thousands of CTU members right in their wallet—and spreading word that Rauner is trying to sabotage the bond deal—Team Emanuel did something more: make it clear that, the Laquan McDonald controversy or not, they're tired of playing patsy.

CTU doesn't like it, and is planning a big protest rally. It accuses Emanuel of “intimidating” the union. But there's no sign of a strike, and the union will have to convince Chicagoans that its members deserve a defined benefit pension with a 3 percent compounded annual inflation hike for only the 2 percent of salary members still will have to pay.

Of course, the 500,000 children who could be turfed out of school should the union strike, and the parents who will have to stay home from work to care for them, would be the proverbial grass that suffers when elephants wrestle.

I'll have more about the news trucks outside my building later today.