Turtles all the way down

I was pleasantly surprised to see McCain win Florida. I’m not a huge fan of his, but he is clearly the lesser of evils in my mind when compared to Romney. Sticking to my belief that social conservatives always choose the president except when they splinter, I expect that Huckabee will drop out, they will flock to Romney, and eventually Romney will get the nod over McCain. However, if Huckabee stays in the race for another week, he might just pull away enough potential Romney support to give the nomination to McCain. So let’s hope the Huckster stays in.

On the Democrat side I still don’t have a strong preference of Hilary or Obama, though I lean towards Obama. My gut still says that Obama will fight off the Republican Character Assassination Machine ™ better and therefore possesses a greater chance of winning in November. However, right now it looks like Hilary has the edge.

So right now I would give the best odds to Hilary vs. Romney in November with Romney probably winning that contest. However it could still go any way amongst the big four (I’m officially writing Huckabee off, with great relief).

It didn’t take long. One week into classes and I’m strung out on caffeine already.

Well, ok, I’m doing fine but I had the distinct feeling that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. Besides a heavy workload at the office, I have two lecture classes to stay on top of as well as a 15 page writing assignment already. And I’m studying for the patent bar.

My tentative plan is that once I get a date upon which I can take the patent bar exam, I’ll count backwards for three weeks and try to clear off my office work for that period so that I can focus on the exam in the days and classes at night.

Or so I hope.

Requirements for getting your new iPod Nano working.

1. Figure out funky user interface.
2. Plug into Windows PC and find that you need a new version of iTunes.
3. Download new version of iTunes.
4. Find out that new version of iTunes requires XP service pack 2.
5. Think about how badly your PC got hosed the last time you installed XP service pack 2 on it.
6. Punt on the idea of upgrading Windows just to make your iPod sync.
7. Spend some time playing around with open source programs that allow iPod sync’ing without iTunes.
8. Find out that wife doesn’t like open source solutions.
9. Decides to move MP3 collection to kid’s computer.
10. Set up FTP site on main PC and FTP client on kids computer that already has XP service pack 2.
11. Take shower while files are transferring.
12. Download iTunes and make coffee while it installs.
13. Get it to sync to the iPod, then make playlists.
14. Plug iPod into Bose docking station, enjoy music.
15. Wonder why this was so much more complicated than just using your 2 year old MP3 player that acts like a USB drive on any computer and costs less than 1/3 as much.

Apple is plug and play as long as all of your hardware is made by Apple and you use their software. Otherwise, good luck.

I’ve always guessed that learning can be very effective as a social activity. This article seems to agree.

Having found that the mental age of two children was, let us say, eight, we gave each of them harder problems than he could manage on his own and provided some slight assistance; the first step in a solution, a leading question, or some other form of help. We discovered that one child could, in cooperation, solve problems designed for twelve-year-olds, while the other could not go beyond problems intended for nine-year-olds. The discrepancy between a child’s actual mental age and the level he reaches in solving problems with assistance indicates the zone of his proximal development. . . . Can we really say that their mental development is the same? Experience has shown that the child with the larger zone of proximal development will do much better in school. This measure gives a more helpful clue than mental age does to the dynamics of intellectual progress.

Ironically, when I was teaching graduate school, I used a similar technique. I didn’t give timed exams and generally let students take as long as then needed to on tests. However since this could go to extremes, at what would be a normal “time limit” of the testing period, I would walk around to the approximately 10% of the class still taking the exam and ask them where they needed help.

Of these students, some only needed a gentle push in the right direction, and were able to answer questions correctly or mostly correct. In some cases, their grades were improved by half a letter or more. Others just didn’t “get it” and no amount of assistance, aside from just giving out the answer, seemed to help.

Perhaps on exams we should let students, “buy a vowel,” losing a couple of points to get a hint at how to gain a lot of points.

Despite the fact I’m generally thrilled with my Treo 755p, I’m still disappointed in the lousy battery life. It just seems to sit there and eat the battery even when it isn’t doing anything…or is it really not doing anything?

I’ve noticed that once you log onto the Sprint data network, the phone never seems to log off. For example, if you check email then don’t use your Treo for several hours, then check email again, you already have a data connection and you don’t have to log in to data again.

For you CDMA geeks, what I’m saying is that it seems as if the phone is not hanging up the PPP connection. Normally the network would time out the phone, but this device seems to be “always on.” Not a good thing when that means only 24-30 hours of battery.

To test the theory out, lately I’ve been power-cycling the phone after hanging up a data call. Viola, the battery life has improved, and I’ve also noticed that the phone does not seem to be as hot.

Well, it’s official - some people are genetically predisposed not to learn from their mistakes.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany have found a genetic factor that affects our ability to learn from our errors. The scientists demonstrated that men carrying the A1 mutation, which reduces the amount of dopamine D2 receptors in the brain, are less successful at learning to avoid mistakes than men who do not carry this genetic mutation. This finding has the potential to improve our understanding of the causes of addictive and compulsive behaviors.

And we’re all saying to ourselves, “That explains a lot!”

This is a topic I’ve often thought about, with the goal of trying to figure if success is something that is more inherent in some of us, what we all can do to improve our chances of success (probable answer: just plain old hard work).

But this discovery has interesting implications in the fields of criminal punishment, where at least in the US, rehabilitation is out of vogue. It also is a possible factor that could be used in genetic determinism…, “Bob is A1, so he’ll never learn.” But only if we let it.

More on IPv6:

A few weeks ago, David Siegel of Global Crossing looked at some high-profile websites and found that none of them have made the switch to IPv6, the supposed replacement for today’s 32-bit Internet addressing scheme. The IPv6 protocols have been finalized for a decade, and major operating systems have supported it for several years, so one would expect Internet-savvy companies like Google and Microsoft to have started running IPv6 versions of their sites. But it appears that so far, nothing of the sort has happened. Indeed, progress toward an IPv6-based Internet appears to be at a virtual standstill.

Ok, they got that right…

The situation becomes less mysterious when one realizes that the primary rationale for the switch to IPv6 — the exhaustion of the IP address space — is basically bogus.

Oops, strong words that may have to be eaten some day…

The x86 platform had extremely broad support in the industry, and it has turned out that the costs of limping along with a crappy architecture are smaller than the costs of switching to an entirely new one. I think something similar may be true of IPv4 addressing.

Bingo! Two out of three is not bad, I suppose…

Last night I had my first property class. Aside from a bunch of stuff about animals and the “negative community,” the prof talked about one thing that’s close to home.

He said, and I’ll paraphrase, that property law governs scarce resources. If there is no scarcity, then property law is probably not applicable. Given the recent changes in the music industry, it seems as if property law probably no longer applies to it. There is no scarcity of the property of music, only abundance.

The scarcity is in my time to listen to it. This seems to be a simple, formal explanation of why the music industry ultimately had no choice but to change their distribution philosophy.

…and I’m laughing. Out of my three courses, two were all lecture then a massive final exam, which was the only grade. The third was writing and research, which had a series of assignments, feedback, and no final.

For the writing course and one of the lecture courses, I did quite well. The other I didn’t do so well. But overall the grades were good enough to put me at a pretty nice class rank…not that I’m too concerned about that, or the grades either.

The irony is that for the lecture course I didn’t do too well in, I studied very hard, read the cases several times each, attended every lecture, found the lectures interesting, participated in class and came out of the final feeling pretty good. I scored right around or slightly below the median.

For the other lecture course, I was routinely bored in class, didn’t read the cases too deeply, waited until the last few days to study, and essentially learned the course in those few days. I scored in the top 15% or so.

Go figure.

I have a theory about the grades. The course that I enjoyed probably just had a tougher curve. It was less material, easier to memorize, and the exam came first. It really wasn’t all too difficult. So more people did well and the class was curved appropriately. For the course I didn’t like so much, there was about 50% more material to learn and memorize, the exam was 4 1/2 hours long, and it came 9 days after the first one. It was inherently more difficult, nearly impossible to finish, and the students were just burnt out and tired at the point they walked into a marathon exam.

Or so I think. I’ll get copied of my exams soon and maybe I’ll determine otherwise. In the mean time I can’t complain, but I can continue laughing.

My second semester of law school begins today. Well, classes begin but I’ve been reading the initial assignments for a week.

I’m ambivalent. I enjoy the material, the challenge, and am generally happy with my decision to attend. However I do not miss the workload, sleep deprivation, not getting to spend most evenings with my family, and lugging tons of books around while commuting.

On the other hand, its over in 4 months.