any sufficiently advanced blogging is indistinguishable from blather

I was listening to TWiT #100 today and they mentioned an article by Ryan Paul about declining interest in Computer Science at universities.

In the article, Paul says:

I have less than fond memories of my own experiences with computer science education. I was frustrated with the emphasis on niche commercial development tools that I had never used before and have rarely used since. I also got frustrated with the emphasis on technical minutiae that aren’t particularly relevant to general application development. Assembly programming and compiler design skills acquired in college aren’t going to be very useful for software developers who enter the workforce and get paid to write web applications with ASP.NET or Ruby on Rails. That particular problem could largely be resolved by the emergence of new academic programs that differentiate between computer science and web application development. Few schools do this, however.

YES. Exactly! Being a Computer Science major at George Mason University, I can attest to this. (And I still have two semesters to go that I’m not really looking forward to.) Anyway, I’m always somewhat delighted to find someone out there who I don’t know who seems to agree with me on something. I have far less than fond memories of especially the past two semesters, in which 90% of what I learned is just crap I’m not going use. It’ll definitely be useful for some people, but I think my time could be much better spent. It’s very frustrating to be interested in emergent properties, game programming, and artificial intelligence when professors waste your time with math problems and assembly programming assignments. (But if you tell the professors this, they will say that you need a change in attitude if you want to be successful, the same kind of advice spouted off by vacuum cleaner sales men, as if such a position is really high on the what-I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up list. Attitude is much more likely to be influenced by success than vice-versa, so give me a break. And then there are the adults who think there’s no such thing as a lousy professor and advise young people to learn every piece of pointless knowledge they can and always be happy because they wish they could go back to college. And then they say learning is a life long process. Ok, then, why do I need college to learn if I’d be learning anyway? And I would think I’d learn a lot more with an actual job doing something useful than doing math problems out of text books and programming binary trees in LISP.)

Ah, fun rant…

Further, Paul says:

Improvements to computer science education are being touted as a way to prevent the United States from continuing to lose relevance in the technology industry, a problem that is also becoming pervasive across the board in other fields relating to math and science. Although increasing the number of computer science students could make the United States more competitive in the tech industry, there are other factors that should be included as well. Encouraging students to become technology entrepreneurs isn’t going to do much good if abusive patent litigation, for instance, prevents them from innovating and developing products.

More good points! I just read The Black Swan, and I think I remember the author saying something like “the reason capatalism works so well is that it allows for Black Swans.” (Not an exact quote, check the book for the actual words.) I think this could easily be applied to the field of computer science as well. Let the Indians do the tech support, there’s not going to be a Black Swan out of there. Let China manufacture the plastic toys, no Black Swan out of that either. Let the Japanese be good at their math problems and piano playing, no Black Swans there. Oh, you can make a fine living out of any of the above, but the best thing I think American universities can do is encourage students to be creative and “become technology entrepreneurs”, because that is where the Black Swans lie waiting somewhere in the dark. (And for all you bad professors out there, that means give your students less math homework! And please do not think saying “I challenge you to be creative and think out of the box!” is truly any kind of encouragement. You have to encourage it through your actions and your teaching style. I had one professor who always said “I’m trying to teach you to think out of the box!” and then gave us dippy math problems while spouting off anti-Microsoft rants because they’re successful and he had to become of professor.)

Ok, I’m done for now. And don’t think I’m going to change my opinions when I’m 40. I’ll hopefully just be less annoyed by all the time I was forced by the education system to waste because I’ll have more interesting things to think about…

I’m on page 90 of The Name of the Wind, and while it seems pretty well written, there’s something about the characters I don’t like. Unfortunately I just can’t pinpoint it… it’s like a cognitive dissonance in my mind that I can’t sort out… very annoying.

One thing that bothers me is the characterization of the main character. He’s narrating his childhood, and it turns out he’s an amazing 11-year old prodigy who can learn things unrealistically quick. I find that I don’t really care about him. I think perhaps the problem is that he’s just too independent, or perhaps he’s not tortured enough. (Granted, I’m only on page 90. Maybe something tragic will happen. Seems like it should. Still, he seems rather arrogant, not someone I’d want to have lunch with, and most main characters should strive for that desire.)

Prodigies need to be tortured, don’t they? I think one of the most prominent examples of the tortured prodigy the poor brilliant little Ender Wiggin (perhaps paralleled by Bean), who not only has to save humankind, but struggles with the need to be loved. (It can sound a bit corny in a blog, eh?) There’s also the chess kid, Josh something, from the film Searching for Bobby Fischer (who’s in Iceland), who must also bear the burden of amazing intelligence. There’s also that Little Man Tate, poor thing, and I just saw a preview for some foreign film called Vitus (I think), about some prodigy piano player who just “wants to be normal”, whatever that means. Boo-hoo.

But it’s not really prodigies that need to be tortured, that’s the burden of being the main character. Main characters need to be tortured somehow. Not necessarily physically (though that’s a possibility), but the main character’s torture is the entire point of any story, isn’t it? What the main character goes through. It’s common literary advice to make the main character suffer as much as possible. Who doesn’t relate to suffering? (Autistics?)

So if the need to be tortured comes from the burden of being a story’s main character, what makes a prodigy so popular among young main characters? How often are genius adults main characters? Old smart people are just jerks. (That’s a joke, by the way.) They may work perfectly well as supporting characters, but if the main character is recognized as a brilliant genius, then he’s probably 14 years old or younger (and also probably male, as male is the dominant sex in our society, whether you like it or not). And, come to think of it, main characters are probably not over 50 anyway. There are exceptions, but I can’t think of many main characters who are in their 70s. If you’re going to live through a story in someone else’s shoes, you probably prefer it to be someone young and good lookin’ (like me).

Oh, and another thing. I hate seeing main characters on book covers. I suppose it works fine for children’s books, but on adult book covers they try too hard to make people look attractive. Perhaps it helps sell books (though I’d want hard evidence of that if any publisher claims it, as I doubt there is any), but it annoys me endlessly.

Ah, I missed a day. Well, this counts for yesterday, so there.

We continued having a garage sale today. My parents made hundreds of dollars.

Geez, I have run out of stuff to blog about… 🙁

Oh, I saw the remake of Charlotte’s Web the other day at a free film festival with a sibling. It had great animation and great music. I was surprised to see that Danny Elfman did the music… it doesn’t really sound like his style. But it sure was good. Maybe I’ll have to buy the soundtrack. Is the Shrek 3 score out yet? I’m too tired to go look. I’m going to get a drink and go to bed. I’m tired. Bye.

I finished Taleb’s The Black Swan yesterday. Certainly one of the best nonfiction books I have read in a long time, I highly recommend it to everyone (though I can think of some people who would probably want to burn it). I must admit I became a bit lost in some of the more technical parts, but this is one of those rare books which I’d love to read again sometime. (The only book I’ve actually ever reread is Ayn Rand’s The Art of Fiction. I’ve been meaning to reread Godel, Escher, Bach again for some time, but never made myself find time for it.)

I was introduced to Taleb’s work through Michael Allen’s blog. He wrote a book (which is available as a free PDF download) called On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile, which I also highly recommend (at least for writers). I was quite happy to see Allen’s book referenced in The Black Swan. (I also recommend Allen’s The Truth About Writing, also available as a free PDF download.)

Many thanks to Taleb (and Allen) for the great books!

And, of course, I do have some quotes from The Black Swan that I’d like to add to the book quotes blog eventually. (I’m really lazy about all my other blogs.)

Wouldn’t it be awesome if bookstores in the not so distant future had POD technology right in the back room? Then when you’re looking for some obscure title, or just some title the bookstore doesn’t have in stock, they can simply print one off for you in just a few hours or so. Heck, they could even customize it by putting “Property of Sean the Best” on the cover or something. Wouldn’t that just be great?

Although… wouldn’t be awesome if bookstores had Amazon.com prices?

Also, if you are a publisher and are looking for someone to read through the slush pile (for a good salary), I’d be happy to do it. I know about Black Swans.

You know, you only have to change one letter in ‘swan’ to get ‘Sean’. Meaningful?