Volunteering with FTC

Yesterday night, I volunteered with FIRST FTC, a high school competitive robotics program. I had previously been a part of not one but two FTC teams, both from my high school. I'm mentoring those teams this year, and a team coach suggested that I register as a volunteer.

I did register, and was assigned the role of Pit Runner. The role description table indicates that Pit Runners aren't generally necessary, but that's OK, since this was my first volunteer role. When I got to the place, I got a badge/lanyard and was issued a copy of the match schedule. My job was to notify the teams when a match they were involved in was coming up. That ensured everybody was queued up when it was time for the match, making everything run smoother.

Almost immediately, somebody came up and asked me a question about where to find something. I had no idea (but I directed her to someone who knew), and now I understand how most volunteers I've seen from the standpoint of a team member feel!

I didn't get much chance to watch the matches, but I was moving most of the time, which I guess means my presence was useful.

The whole event took three and a half hours starting at 6 PM. Despite the tiredness, it was a positive experience. I'll almost certainly be volunteering at the next nearby FTC event.

Cryptography wins

Several US presidential candidates are calling for restrictions on encryption, in one form or another. Such restrictions or weakenings are impossible, or would do great harm to the security of law-abiding citizens.

Primer: what's so strong about strong encryption?

Encryption obscures data by transforming it using a secret key, or in some cases, part of a key pair. Encryption algorithms are computational processes that encrypt data. "Cryptography" refers to the science of protecting data with encryption. Strong encryption algorithms are mathematically proven to be exceptionally difficult to reverse without the secret key. The only way to defeat such algorithms is to try every possible secret key, of which there could be unfathomable numbers. My personal favorite algorithm, AES, could use any of about 10⁷⁷ keys. (It takes 78 digits to write that out in full.) Cracking strongly encrypted data would take eons even if you had billions of computers.

Restrictions on strength of cryptography

Many cryptographic algorithms can be used with keys of different lengths, usually measured in bits. For example, AES-256 is the form of the Advanced Encryption Standard that uses 256-bit keys. As you might guess, longer keys mean stronger security.

One possible approach to restricting encryption would be to put a limit on the length of the key. The major problem is that the code responsible for doing the encryption is already on millions of people's phones. Maybe you can somehow get law-abiding citizens to destroy all programs that use too-strong encryption (hint: probably not), but then you're just begging bad guys (not necessarily terrorists) to attack the weakened algorithms that everybody is suddenly using. Then nobody is safe.

Restrictions on export of cryptographic software

In fact, the bit above about restricting key length was done about a decade ago - but not for us at home - in the time of export-grade encryption. Some might think we can go back to that. Too late! Millions of computers around the world have code that can do all sorts of strong encryption. The algorithms are open-source, available to anybody for perusal or modification; there are copies everywhere. Think terrorists will just play along and destroy their copies of the code? Ha, no.

Sure, you might be able to stop the shipping of new cryptographic algorithms out of the country (hint: you won't), but the mathematical knowledge will soon get out, or somebody overseas could invent a brilliant new algorithm. Or, you know, somebody could just stow a computer away on an outbound plane. Also, existing algorithms are doing just fine, AES-256 will be strong for a long time.

Backdooring otherwise-strong algorithms

Some people advocate the creation of algorithms that are strong (i.e. long key length, no vulnerabilities) but have a backdoor. A backdoor is an intentionally-introduced vulnerability that is known only to its inventor. Such a thing would allow the NSA/government to use their secret special key to decrypt any communication that used the algorithm.

My first concern is, what do you do when somebody discovers the backdoor? Changing a key is easy, swapping out an algorithm not so much. If the secret key leaks out to a bad guy, everybody's security is toast. Perhaps more practically, the terrorists aren't going to start using a new algorithm until they're sure it's safe. Again, there are many very strong, very vetted, open-source algorithms already existing.

Banning encryption outright

I hope nobody is seriously considering this; encryption is essential to the safety and security of everyone. To actually ban encryption, it would be necessary to outlaw the storage of random data - good encryption is indistinguishable from line noise. Besides, clear-text transmissions can be intercepted, read, and changed by attackers. Hackers could, say, grab your credit card details while sitting near you in a coffee shop while you buy something on an Internet site over Wi-Fi.

Backdooring phones/devices

"Okay," you say, "we can't do anything about encryption, but we can backdoor people's phones or other devices! We'll just force Silicon Valley to do it!" First up, that's a great way to make profitable tech companies leave the country. Secondly, forcing companies to do something is sliding down a fairly slippery slope when it comes to American values and the Constitution and what have you. Skilled users will certainly discover the backdoor sooner or later. Asking the companies to cooperate is a much better plan, but with the exact same technical issues.

See, not everybody uses a device in which we can hide a backdoor or other feature. There are several open-source phone OSes, and technically skilled users can replace their phone's software with something they control. Alternatively, they could just use a non-mobile device, like a standard PC with an open-source OS, and then you can't do anything. Keep in mind also that attackers can use your backdoor to see all the stuff you can; it's only a matter of time.

Blocking sections of the Internet

It would be rather convenient if we could just stop all network connections to Internet addresses that we believe to be bad. Maybe we could, but we would have to set up our own version of China's Great Firewall - and stoop to that level of authoritarianism - to accomplish it effectively.

Even if a connection to a certain address is blocked, data can flow to it indirectly through proxies. For example, Tor is a network of thousands of computers that bounces traffic around the world in an encrypted fashion, making it so the destination is known only to the last server on the way ("exit node") and the source is known only to the first server ("entry node"). Besides those, only the user can know where the traffic is actually going. To let users actually find these indirection servers, Tor maintains directory servers that have a list of each server's address. But even if you constantly check that list and block addresses on it, users can set up a private Tor bridge to get them into the network and then to anywhere they want to be. 

If even one entry node or bridge is accessible, determined users can get anywhere they want to go. The only way to stop such distributed networks is to switch our country's edge filters from allow-by-default to deny-by-default (allowing only a pre-approved list of destinations), and suddenly we're North Korea.

Conclusion: cryptography wins

Encryption is a fact. We will never be able to read the transmissions of careful senders/receivers unless we get the keys they're using. Every policy option I've presented here would be ineffective at best and a danger to all citizens' security at worst. Cryptography wins - we will need to use other tools, other methods, other channels to monitor and stop terrorist activity.

Different at all costs

With a new OS version comes a new design, a new visual style. Windows 10 is no exception; icons have been flattened and the Metro (oh, excuse me, "modern") look has been brought to more aspects of the desktop.

We reached the pinnacle of desktop beauty a while ago, in my opinion, with Windows 7. It took advantage of good hardware; previous instances of Windows had to make some sacrifices to accommodate real specs. The only thing that drives designers to change is the need to make the new product look new. In other words, be different at all costs.

Windows 10 is where this becomes a problem for me. It's the first version of Windows that features icons that I actively dislike. That's just, well, like, my opinion, man, but the point is that companies really like figuring out some new theme that looks sufficiently different from the previous. That new theme then creates unnecessary surprise and confusion in non-technically-adept users.

If it's hard, there might be a better way

When I watch technologically-novice people using computers, I frequently scream inside my head "there's a better way!" I hear such people saying "computers are so hard to use" after seeing them shoot themselves in the foot with an inconvenient configuration.

I also sometimes catch myself internally complaining about a large program with which I am unfamiliar, like Adobe Flash. Such programs have immense amounts of work and testing poured into them, so they can't be impossible to use. Once I do some research, I usually find that there's a much better way to accomplish what I had in mind.

Maybe you deserved it

Every so often when reviewing new users' posts on Stack Overflow, I see a comment from a post's owner asking why they're getting downvoted. Now, I try to explain whenever I downvote, but the quality of some of these posts - especially questions - is just bad. It's clear that the users that post this stuff didn't put in any effort, and they certainly didn't read the help center's article on how to ask, or even the tips that are put in their face before they ask a question.

A lot of these low quality questions are just requests for a task to be done for them. I'm sure their posters saw that other people's questions got great, helpful answers, so they joined the site and threw something up, expecting to get something similarly amazing. When they instead received downvotes and possibly closing, they must not have considered that it was because they didn't follow the instructions and try.

One such comment really hit me in the face: "I tried but this is the best I can do" (paraphrasing, since I don't remember the exact content). The question was a wall of code, with no visible attempts at problem solving and no evidence of research. Then there are the whiny blog posts from people who posted a question they thought was good, but got closed. Sure, some people will downvote without good reason, but it's highly likely that the poster deserved it.

Then there are those in real life that brush off valid criticism and carry on their way. These are the people who would call someone rude or invasive for gently suggesting that, say, smoking is unhealthy, or that some other behavior is not appreciated in the venue. It's certainly true that for every action there will be people who like it, people who dislike it, and people who ignore it. It's not true that everyone who provides criticism is a "hater."

Success in Stack Overflow, and in life, requires that you actually have merit. Don't let criticism get you down, but stop to think that maybe you deserved it - and then improve your ways.

Internet Sympathy vs. Competency

As a member of Stack Overflow and Super User with over 500 reputation on each, I have the privilege of reviewing content in the Triage (SO only) and First Posts queues. Basically, I am presented with a fountain of questions and answers that have a strong chance of being unacceptable in some way and therefore worthy of moderative action.

One thing I have noticed is that users who have their avatar set to something involving the French flag - in support of the victims in Paris - tend to produce lower-quality content. (Context for future readers: there were several serious terrorist attacks in Paris a week or so ago.) By "lower-quality content" I mean that the question shows little research effort or says in so many words "give me the code", or that the answer is a guess or actually a comment.

Now, I know that content sent into these review queues is mostly from new users, and it makes sense that newly registered users with the chance to set their avatar for the first time would be more likely to set it to something than existing users would be to change it. I'm not convinced, however, that the phenomenon is that simple.

My guess is that there's a negative correlation between being thinking/analytic/StackExchange-material and being the type of person to set one's avatar to this and that in support of the cause du jour. People of the latter kind prioritize feeling, and there's probably a "fitting in" political correctness motivation there too. Armchair activism makes those of a certain personality type feel like they've done something, while thinkers (for which StackExchange is built) actually need to do the thing. Therefore, thinkers - producers of quality content - help the cause in meaningful ways, or just remain disengaged from the events if they're not interested.

We pray, but never move
We sing, but never do
It's time we get our hands dirty
Realize there's a whole lot of hurting
-"Be One", Natalie Grant

Representation vs. Reality

I have noticed a tendency in people to confuse how something looks with what it is or how it works. Take, for instance the Registry Editor in Windows.

My view of the Registry Editor, looking at HKLM\SYSTEM\RNG

In every folder (technically called "key"), there is a line in the main pane titled "(Default)", usually with containing the string "(value not set)" in the Data column. Notice how I didn't say it contained that text as its data. You'd be surprised how many programmers write that literal text to an entry literally titled "(Default)".

The thing is, there is no entry called that, and its value isn't that string; it's not set. What the Registry Editor calls an entry named "(Default)" is a holdover from 16-bit Windows. It could be thought of as data attached to the folder/key itself, rather than an entry in it. "(value not set)" indicates an absence of that data.

So, make sure you're not confusing the representation of something with reality. Do some research; see what's really going on.

Bind the Minimum Wage to the Consumer Price Index

This is an excerpt from a paper I wrote for a "government and politics" class. After sharing my ideas, I was encouraged to post this one online.

The minimum wage exists to prevent employers from exploiting their workers. However, as the minimum wage is increased, it decreases the demand for labor. Small businesses simply stop hiring unskilled workers when the wage required to hold an employee is above the value of the employee’s contributions. In this way, the minimum wage, when set too high, prevents small businesses from expanding and makes it difficult for unskilled workers to get any job at all. As with other price floor impositions, it creates surplus that few are willing to buy. Additionally, a minimum wage that grows too fast removes the financial incentive for those unskilled workers to become skilled, leading to a decline in overall productivity.


It is, on the other hand, reasonable and appropriate that the minimum wage be periodically increased to account for inflation. The Consumer Price Index measures changes in the value of the dollar by comparing the prices of certain goods in the present to their prices at a fixed point in the past. If the minimum wage is set to an agreed-upon dollar amount in the present and bound proportionally to the CPI, it will forever have that same value; the periodic debates on whether to increase it and by how much will be gone. The cost of living is different in different areas of the country, so it is reasonable that state and local governments should decide on the present dollar value that buys the goods needed to live in their areas, and then bind the growth of that amount to the CPI.

Landscaping vs. Decapitation

There's a lot of talk in politics about "leveling the playing field" so that everybody gets the same opportunities. Usually, the same people that use that phrase also support major tax rate increases for the successful, or all-out income redistribution at the extreme. Those policies push apparent success toward uniformity.

The leveling of the field is an important goal. It's really a shame that a person born in a certain place could have almost no hope for a high-paying job compared to someone born just a few miles away in a nicer city. (Bring your own race anecdotes.) However, it's not such a noble goal to make everybody the same.

Let's break out the physical world analogies. Suppose we have a group of people standing on a field, and that this field isn't level (i.e. some parts are physically higher than others). These people are going to partake in some competition or event in which height is advantageous. Of course, it's not fair that some people should start lower than others. The event organizers should do some landscaping to ensure everybody has the same chance before merit is considered.

However, let's suppose the event organizers subscribe to the "redistribution" philosophy, and want everybody to have the same success - that is, the same final height - so they need to take off from the top. That's not landscaping, that's cutting people's heads off.

So before we start trying to level the playing field, let's stop to make sure we're landscaping the ground under people's feet, not decapitating them.

Accessibility of Presidential Debates

I don't have a cable subscription, but I do have an interest in the 2016 presidential debates, so I figured I would just go to the CNBC web site to livestream tonight's debate. To my chagrin, I was presented with a "sign in with your cable provider" screen when I tried to actually watch the event.

It seems strange to me that people should have to pay to watch events that are entirely dedicated to helping them choose who to vote for. The whole situation is begging for accusations of allowing only the rich/successful to vote. Usually I'm not a fan of allowing the government to tinker with media management, but I wish the hosts of political debates were required to make the event freely watchable.

Stop the updates, I want to get off

There are rumors that Microsoft is going to move to a subscription model for Windows licensing in which every machine will just get new versions of the OS as they come. I can't know whether those rumors are true or not, but I do know that there are programs and companies with that licensing model, and that with Windows 10 Microsoft is approaching an OS that automatically updates itself without any choice from the user.

I am not at all OK with that.

There is no reason a computer should require an Internet connection to function. Operating systems are not like cable subscriptions; the only service being provided - updates - is not strictly necessary. If I buy something, and I pay for it, then I should own it, and not have to change what I own whenever some company thinks I should.

If, for whatever reason, I don't like the next version of a program or OS, I should be free to keep the version I have - the one I bought and paid for. If I happen to like a later version, I'll happily pay for it, but that's my choice.

Lojban StackExchange Site Proposal

The StackExchange network is composed of moderated, community-run Q&A sites, each with a defined scope. New sites are added through a democratic process, in a place called Area 51. (Yes, really. But not that Area 51.) Currently, there is a proposal to create a site about the Lojban language. I think that would be really neat, so I participated in the proposal's definition phase. It is now in the commitment phase, so it needs people that are in effect signing up for the private beta.

If you're interested, visit the proposal and commit!

How are you going to pay for that?

People like to make and talk about plans for things they want to do. That's great - planning is always helpful - but it's easy to slip from strategizing into shopping. I recently watched a certain political event, and I noticed a theme of promising things that would require all sorts of extra revenue to implement. (Of course, the other party has been guilty of this too.) How are they going to pay for that? I have no idea.

The FTC team I am mentoring is currently trying to put together a plan, but they keep slipping into lists of features (some of which will be exceedingly difficult if not impossible to implement along with other important features), completely ignoring the reality that somebody has to figure out how to make it work. Lots of things that look easy when part of a ten-point "plan" will turn out unexpectedly thorny in practice. Make a plan, not a shopping list.

Delivering feel-good speeches about miraculous government programs and writing about all the amazing things a robot will do might appease constituents and impress coaches, but you will be in serious trouble if you try to carry out the cardboard-mockup plan before the details are figured out.

Remembering Mundane Tasks

Every night, I need to perform a certain task: closing the chicken coop so no predators can get in and eat the chickens. I've closed that door every night for years, and it's totally routine by now, so it's not surprising that I can't always recall the act of closure after I get back in the house. Sometimes I go back out later to check whether I really closed it, and I almost always have, but there were a couple times that I forgot.

I find that the best way to remember the completion of a mundane task is to do something irregular shortly after it. For example, I might go out of my way slightly to hop over a piece of stray wood while leaving the area. Then if I wonder whether I actually closed the door, I remember "oh, there was that log by the door", and continue my activities without worry.

The Peace Sign

It seems some people are really looking for something to be offended at.

Take, for instance, the peace sign. It started being a thing during the Cold War. I have met people that are offended by it because they think it looks like a broken cross and is therefore an assault on Christianity.

Well, it's not.

The peace sign stands for Nuclear Disarmament - the chords on the circle represent flag semaphore signals. The low diagonals are the N, and the vertical line is the D. Nuclear disarmament would, theoretically, lead to peace, hence the name "peace sign."

One could make a case about the possibility of symbols being co-opted for something other than their intended purpose. (Obligatory example: the swastika.) But the peace sign is still used for something like its intended purpose - "peace."

Relevant, and hilarious: Windows brings out the Rorschach test in everyone

Student Hunger Drive Kickoff 2015

The Quad City Student Hunger Drive, in which my high school participates, had its kickoff tonight. Our National Honor Society chapter, plus a couple of other interested students, spent the last few weeks preparing our entry into the annual skit competition. In our skit, we follow choreographed motions around the stage holding boxes with letters on them while singers in the foreground sing our parody of some popular song (I forget which) until the end, when we stack the boxes in such a way that the letters on them spell "River Bend", the name of the food bank backing up the QC Student Hunger Drive.

I noticed that almost every skit was composed of a parody of a popular song sung by a handful of people and some movement from the rest. Maybe the other schools saw that we won last year with that arrangement and followed the model. Though some were thoroughly entertaining, it got a little cheap after a while. In my opinion, the most powerful skit was the one without any spoken or sung words, only a solemn tune in the background. Food was handed over and a sign with "actions speak louder than words" was held up.

After all the skits concluded, the judges deliberated for a moment, and produced a proclamation that there was a tie - involving my school - for first place. Each school performed its skit again, and the winner was determined by the loudness of the cheers. We lost that tiebreak and the two-ton bonus from Hy-Vee went in full to the other school, but we were satisfied with our own performance.

Efficiency in the Unconscious

It's fairly well known that the human mind continues working on problems even when not consciously thinking about them. It is also known that with practice, a "feel" for the task - an intuition - can be developed. Explicitly thinking about every aspect of the task every time it is performed would reduce effectiveness dramatically. It follows that it is advantageous to move thinking processes to the unconscious mind, where the results can come together with a minimum of conscious effort and stress.

The distinction between Windows user mode and kernel mode comes to mind here. User mode is the CPU mode in which normal processes - personal apps and most OS components - function. Kernel mode accesses the hardware more or less directly and works in ways not visible to user-mode code. The team responsible for IIS (Internet Information Services, a web server) at Microsoft made the decision to move much of the functionality into kernel mode because it is so much faster, but not understandable from the conscious (user mode) side.

Practicing complex tasks eventually gets them into the mind's kernel mode. Though what happens there might not be expressible in user mode (in words), it has access to more resources and power.

Automatic Restrooms, Amusement Phones

I noticed this sign in an airport in a movie, which I render here as ASCII art:

  AUTOMATIC AMUSEMENT
<========== =========>
  Restrooms Phones

To me, this sign appeared to be composed of two columns, each with a direction and a place -presumably to be found in that direction - described with an adjective on top. Therefore, automatic restrooms were to be found to the left, and amusement phones to the right, or so I thought, until I realized that neither of those made sense.

In reality, the sign was indicating that restrooms were to the left and that phones were to the right, and automatic amusement (an arcade?) was somewhere nearby, possibly up ahead. Hooray for typesetting!

Don't Let the Moderators Anger You

I just watched the Republican presidential debate, and one common occurrence was the inciting of conflict by the moderators' choice of questions. Prompts frequently included divisive language like "why is [other candidate] wrong" or "[other candidate] said [bad thing] about you", and seemed designed to nettle one person or another, occasionally leading to raised voices and talking over one another. Several candidates were careful to not get into such arguments, but some did fall into the trap.

When chaos breaks out, everybody looks silly and no productive discussion is done. The moderators are trying to put on a show - one even said so before the debate. They want people to tune in to see the fireworks. My advice to the candidates (ha!) is to make your responses lively but intelligent, and don't get angry at sound bites, that is, don't get sucked into arguments with the other candidates.

Manito-wish 2015

This week, I was away - out of town and out of communication. I was up in Boulder Junction, Wisconsin, on my high school's annual trip to the Manito-wish YMCA's leadership and outdoor skills camp. This year, my class was sent on a three-day, two-night, completely outside camping trip amidst the normal Manito-wish activities.

The first day (Tuesday) consisted mostly of the eight-hour bus ride from the school to the site. Upon arrival, we unpacked into our cabins and were introduced to our counselors. For my group, those introductions included a summary of what we would be doing, along with advice on what to bring along on the camping trip ("on trail", as they call it). After dinner, we were shown all the non-personal equipment that would be brought on trail, like a compass, the map, a dromedary, utensils, pots/pans, water purification chemicals, et cetera. Those items were packed into a wooden box with backpack straps.

The next day after breakfast, my group brought all our personal stuff (e.g. clothes, water bottles, flashlights) to the main building, all packed in a small drawstring bag, to get packed. It was a challenge getting all the sleeping bags and sleeping pads in the big Duluth bags, but we managed it, and were soon walking to the dock. A three-and-a-half hour canoeing trip ensued, with one break for lunch on a convenient lake shore. I thoroughly enjoyed canoeing, especially down the river in which obstacles such as sandbars, rocks, and fallen trees made navigation interesting. Transporting the canoes and bags around a dam was not so enjoyable, especially in the brief downpour that occurred at that exact moment, but we got through it.

When we arrived at the campsite landing that evening, we put the canoes on shore and carried the bags a half-mile to the actual campsite. Tents were put up, a clothesline was hung (for wet stuff), and a fire was started. For dinner was chili, the ingredients of which had been brought along in the wooden box. An exceedingly great amount of cayenne pepper was accidentally added to the chili, so it was very spicy. Cleaning the pot afterwards was also a worthy challenge, as we were not allowed to leave any trace of human activity on nature, that is, not even small amounts of food could be left to decompose. So we scraped the burned bottom into a trash bag, and strained the lake water we had used for soaking it. We got to sleep around 11 PM.

On Thursday morning, we got up around 7 AM and began scrounging for firewood to make breakfast. I would have been fine with something simple (read: trivial to prepare), but the counselor had planned for us to cook potatoes, eggs (real eggs), and bacon. We also had to bake the bread that would be eaten with peanut butter and jelly for lunch. By the time we had all that cooked, eaten, and cleaned up after, it was almost noon. We walked the half mile back to the landing and began the canoe trip back upriver. The rapids proved unmanageable from the other direction, and much getting-out-and-pushing was had. After four hours of aquatic hauling, we finally reached our second campsite, which was slightly less than a mile away from our original starting point.

No portaging was necessary to get to the second campsite - it was literally right on the shore - so after putting up the canoes, we got right to work with the tents. With one night of experience on our side, we were slightly more effective than previously, but the cold was still a challenge. (I was much, much happier after changing into a set of dry clothes.) That night's dinner was a simple quinoa soup/stew with onions, garlic, corn, and whatever other spices we had left over. Since we were careful to not overcook the food, the pot was easy to clean. The tarp (which we used to protect the extra bags from possible rain) was difficult to set up in the dark, especially considering that one of the four ropes needed to tie it up was attached to one of the canoes and not possible to remove. We eventually got a triangular configuration going, and went to bed. Sleeping that night was difficult with the cold, and I woke up several times from it. It didn't help that no dry long pants were available. Fortunately, getting into certain curled positions and wrapping my jacket around my legs brought sufficient heat.

Friday morning, we were in a little bit of a rush to meet the appointed paddle-in time. No fire had to be made for breakfast, but we were dangerously low on fuel, and the portable stove went out once. It was rather convenient that we didn't have to sterilize the dishes that time (since we were about to head home), and effective delegation got the bags packed and canoes in the water just in time. Meeting up with the other two on-trail groups at the appointed bend in the lake, we sang the required song as we paddled ashore. The work did not end there - we cleaned the canoes and hauled them back to on-shore storage, and went to the main building to clean the other gear.

Much brushing was required on the tents, which seemed to continuously fill themselves with sand as if by magic. The Duluth packs and the plastic liners inside them were washed, hung out to dry, and then brushed. The Dutch oven in which we had baked the bread over a fire proved Herculean to clean; the soot on it required many cycles of washing and scrubbing with steel wool. We did get all the cleaning done in a total of about two hours, and were permitted to go shower. (Yay!)

After that and lunch at the dining hall, it was time for the ropes courses. My group first went to the giant swing, which is a bar onto which two people are hooked, hung on a line pulled up along to a telephone pole by a row of people, at the top of which a release rope can be pulled that will send it swinging the other way at exceptional velocity. Now, heights are stressful for me, but I went on that device last year, and I decided to do it again this time, joined by my canoeing partner. It was scary going up, but the swinging part was great. The next element was a catwalk, for which I only served on the belay team, both for the sake of time and because I had had enough height-induced terror for the day. My group ended with an element of the low ropes course: a setup that challenged us to get everybody across a short divide from one platform to another via a swinging rope. We never succeeded - two people could never quite get their legs up enough - but we had a lot of fun, and I learned that I can successfully swing on a rope.

In the evening after dinner, we did a reflection activity in which we found components of nature that symbolize our experience. That was brief and relaxing, and it gave us a break before we finished cleaning that Dutch oven. When that was sufficiently polished, we were permitted to join the other groups around the campfire. There, s'mores were had, and I joined the mathematics teacher, a guitar-playing student, and a dean in entertaining the other campers with music from a book of old songs. Good times were had by all.

Saturday morning after breakfast, detail cleaning was done on the main building and in the cabins. With everyone available to help, we finished in good time, and sat with all the counselors for a final time of reflection. At 10 AM, we got on the bus, and I went into a low-power state for the whole ride back to school. I've never been so happy to see home.

Motorcycle

A few months ago, my parents bought a Harley Davidson motorcycle at an auction. It's been sitting in a garage all that time, and today my father brought it out and took me along for a ride. I had never ridden a motorcycle before, so it was an interesting experience.

Initially, it was pretty terrifying moving at 50 miles per hour so close to the road and surroundings, that is, without the walls of a car. The only part of the ride that required my attention was turns; all occupants must be careful to lean appropriately when the motorcycle makes a significant turn. After that, my mental state was calm, but my legs continued to shake nervously. (Compare Ferris wheel rides, during which I freeze in panic for the height.) Overall, it was a fun thing, and I hope to do it again.

Me, examining the vehicle after the ride

The 2015-16 Academic Year Begins

Tomorrow, classes begin again at my high school. My schedule is more intense than ever, with three AP classes. AP English has effectively already started: an assignment (essay plus presentation) has to be ready on the first day; without that, entrance to the course is denied. I finished it today after hearing about it yesterday, so I have somehow managed to start getting stressed about due dates before school even starts. Hooray?

The college class (introduction to physical anthropology) I'm taking this semester is a compressed eight-week course, and begins later in October. Things are going to get really busy when that starts. Excitement there has already been had as the textbook for the course changed after I ordered it.

Visiting Family up North, Part 3

My immediate family and I spent all of today driving back from the family reunion. After breakfast, we checked out of our room at the Park Street Inn, which was an excellent place to stay. (If you're looking for a place to stay in or around Nevis, I highly recommend it.) On the drive back, I got some more practice with the manual transmission; I managed not to stall the engine at all today.

The relatives sent me this picture of two cousins helping me try to water-ski:

Trying to get the skis aligned properly

Tomorrow, it's back to the online class work.

Visiting Family up North, Part 2

Today was the second and main day of my visit to Akeley, Minnesota for a retreat with the extended family. I started the day by going around the neighborhood to see the attractions, including the statue of Paul Bunyan:

The world's largest Tiger Muskie

An unfortunately-named funeral home

Shortly after arriving at the lakeshore, I made my first attempt at waterskiing. I was not at all successful even after several tries, but in my defense the lake was unusually wavy. Along with the large group of extended family members, I walked the trails by the cabin my grandfather owned.

After lunch, I played the card game Bang! with several cousins. I had played only once before, but I like the game very much and have previously tried to recreate it as a networked PC game. (I might restart that project sometime.) That was a good deal of fun. Wandering about and watching things happen around the lake occupied the remainder of the afternoon.

The day was wrapped up by attending a show at the Woodtick Theater. It was a lively collection of songs in an assortment of musical styles; I enjoyed it very much.

Tomorrow will consist entirely of the drive back down to western Illinois.

Visiting Family up North, Part 1

Today my immediate family and I made a nine-hour drive up north to visit some extended family in Minnesota. The drive itself was without notable incident, but when we arrived it was already fairly late.

I've only been up here two hours, but in that time I met some cousins, uncles, and aunts I more or less forgot that I had. I also went canoeing on a beautiful lake with my father.

On the agenda for tomorrow is, among other things, water skiing, which I have never done before.

Reporting Phishing/Spam from .edu Addresses

Today I received a standard phishing (credential theft attempt) e-mail, the kind I wrote about in Mark Junk/Phishing Mail as Spam. However, this message claimed to originate from a .edu e-mail address. So, I went to that university's web site and looked for a contact e-mail. I then sent a message of the following form to that address, CC'd to abuse@[domain].edu:

Hello, 

I received the below e-mail that claims to have been sent from a [institution] address. It is a standard phishing/scam attempt; I have no doubt that the linked page will attempt to either drop malware or present a fake login screen to steal credentials. 

If the e-mail was indeed sent from that account, its user has probably been infected and the account hijacked by an e-mail worm. If the message did not originate from your servers, you might want to look into SPF to ensure nobody can impersonate your users. 

Sincerely, 

[Name]

A few hours later, I received a thankful reply from the Enterprise Security person at that institution. The account had indeed been compromised; the situation has now been dealt with.

So, new task for good Internet citizens: notify educational institutions of spam from their domain. Feel free to copy and fill in the above note if you receive such messages.

Things to do this summer

Today was the last actual school day of the 2014-15 academic year for me (yay finals are done!) so now it's summer. This means I have a lot of time on my hands, and I hope to accomplish something more publicly visible than reading a bunch of interesting stuff on the Internet, as much as I like doing that. These are my ideas:

• Make Abiathar Online. This will require learning JavaScript, which is something I really should do. It would also be my first actual open-source project. (I'd accept pull requests and everything!)
• Improve Abiathar (the real, desktop one) in some way. It would be kind of neat to have an integrated graphics editor, but there's not a huge amount of demand for that. Reinventing Abiathar as a total modding solution (texts, sprite behaviors, etc.) would be really awesome and also a huge amount of work. Note that such a program was the original goal of FMod, which turned into FleexCore2, which powers Abiathar.
• Learn C++. This is another language serious developers should know, and I don't. I'm picking up a few concepts through my wanderings into P/Invoke, but I'm still up in managed .NET where memory allocations poof in and out of existence when you need it. The Windows API is another thing I should know my way around, even if only to understand what Raymond Chen is talking about.
• Make Ineffable Learning. I'm kind of afraid to start this because I've never had any serious success in web programming and I'm afraid I'll royally mess up the architecture right off the starting line. The point of Abiathar Online was to get experience in web development, but it occurs to me now that those are two different types of web programming (one client-side and the other mostly server-side). There are always volunteers though - this wasn't really meant to be an individual project.
• Learn mobile app development. Having a snazzy new Android smartphone seems like a great opportunity to start creating apps for phones. That's a huge market, and I'm missing out by not knowing anything about it.
• Practice chess. I still play chess, but not a whole lot; I'm not currently getting any better. There are books of openings I should study, and online games might be helpful as well.
• Not forget all the Chinese I learned. I'm not sure where to find good resources for learning the language that are Internetty and also free. The Chinese StackExchange might help. I could also try to narrate things in Chinese to myself.
• Do things with friends. Being an introvert means I can get along fine alone (look at all these other things I could be doing by myself!) but it'd be nice to chat with people? Maybe? I guess socialism socialization is a good thing.
• Create documentation. Abiathar's manual hasn't been updated in a long time; it's pretty out-of-date. I should hammer out the updates to that document and maybe rearrange or split up the "advanced use" section. Or, I could just create bite-sized demo/tutorial videos and add them to the new Abiathar video documentation playlist.
• Write more meaningful blog posts. I find that I'm pushing half-baked thoughts out onto the Internet in the name of consistent posting. Maybe I should try to get some really interesting, thought-provoking essays together in a less spontaneous writing style. (I do have a couple serious topics I want to cover thoroughly but haven't done the necessary research.)

Exams and Plain Text Degradation

Today I had the lovely semiannual experience of taking some final exams. On one of them, the teacher had to post some corrections to errata on the exam document: some numbers were messed up because the text editor the teacher used apparently doesn't do superscripts. (But it could do Rockwell font and BOLD ITALICIZE UNDERLINE ALLCAPS what is allegedly REALLY IMPORTANT.) So, numbers in scientific notation like 10⁶ appeared as something plain-texty like 106, which is very much a different number.

Over the course of this course (ha ha), I have several times had to guess whether a number just a shade over 100 was actually that number or a misformatting of 10 to the something. In science, exactness is a big deal, so lack of text layout capability is kind of a problem.

So, my advice to teachers and anybody dealing with text in which superscripts or other non-linear text layouts may appear:

• Use a real word processor, not just a rich text editor (WordPad). You'll have lots more features at your disposal, and your document will look a lot nicer.
• Do the essential formatting as you go. Don't write something like "9.9 * 104", promising yourself that you'll come back later and fix it. (You probably won't.) Instead, learn the features of your word processor thoroughly enough that you can do formatting immediately. "9.9 ∙ 10⁴" can't be that hard to type.
• Write like it matters. If you want your students to write academic-quality scientific papers, you should be a good example of that writing style all the time. You should proofread to make sure that there aren't any "102"s left over and while you're at it, prettify the IMPORTANCE EXPLOSION into something more professional.

Here's to all the students preparing for finals!

Mark Junk/Phishing Mail as Spam

We all get the Nigerian prince scams, the webmail upgrade phishing attempts, the Viagra commercials, and all that trash in our e-mail inboxes. I can't be the only one whose e-mail management usually consists of striking the Delete key five or six times on useless messages.

However, when you get a message that is really junk/spam/phishing (rather than just something uninteresting), you should be pressing the Spam button rather than Delete. Most e-mail providers use that feedback to power a Bayesian spam recognition algorithm, which will lower the chance of you and other people getting similar junk again. By flagging spam as such, you help yourself and others.

Now I wish mail clients had a standard shortcut to mark a message as spam and delete it. Maybe Shift+Delete?

New

Today was a very exciting day for me. Three important things happened, all in the span of eight hours.

For the past semester, I have been taking NETW 274, a preparation course for the CompTIA Security+ certification, at a local college. Today was the certification exam, first thing in the morning. I finished the test in about one hour, and passed (854 on a scale of 100-900, minimum passing score is 750). I got a report printed out that tells me how to get the certificate. So, I am now a certified security professional!

Seeing as I had time to spare, I went to the DMV to attempt my driver's license road test. After two hours of waiting and occasionally showing people paperwork, I got on the road. The actual test was very easy and very short, just a few minutes of driving around the local neighborhood. There was a bit of backing up and something of a quiz on wheel directions when parking, but fortunately no parallel parking. When we got back to the DMV, the examiner noted that my backing up was a little "strange" and I drove much slower than necessary. Now, there were absolutely no speed limit signs anywhere in the area, and since I was not familiar with the region, I assumed it was 25. (It was a small town.) The examiner never explicitly said that I passed, but she directed me to the photography place after we were done, so I did get my license!

Then, after school, my parents surprised me with a new smartphone, which was conveniently included as part of a package as they upgraded their phones. Mine is an HTC Desire 612, running Android. I have only done enough with it to figure out how to call and text, but I'm sure I'll figure out more as I use it. This is actually the first phone I have ever owned. It will make communication with people much more convenient. And, I can start trying mobile development!

The Common Arrangement of Lanthanides and Actinides is Misleading

Today is in the AP Exam week. Here's to chemistry students!

On most periodic tables, lanthanum through lutetium and actinium through lawrencium are popped out of the main table into their own little section. This confuses some people (especially when new to atomic chemistry, or when first seeing the periodic table). Really, the lanthanides and actinides should be in with the rest of the table, but including them would make it super wide (see the Wide mode of this dynamic online periodic table). The shape of the table is important when learning about quantum properties of atoms and electron orbitals.

On a periodic table that I have, lanthanum and actinium are stylized with the same color as the transition metals. This is incredibly misleading. It suggests that those two elements should be in the blank spot in the table, followed by the injected 2-tall row of extra metals. That would create something like this:

*
**
**
***  !!  *** <chart continues to the right>
***      ***
**L...******
**A...******

Notice that blank space? It has a single column of transition metals (wrongly including La and Ac) on the left, the lanthanide and actinide series under it, and the rest of the transition metals to the right. That would split the transition metals, which is obviously not right.

In reality, La and Ac each start a 2-tall "valley" in the periodic table immediately after the "s" shell of groups 1 and 2. The last element in each series, lutetium and lawrencium respectively, are actually part of the standard transition metal series (the "d" block/shell). Sadly, even the colorations on the excellent PTable.com I linked earlier are misleading in this regard.

I wish Lu and Lr would be put in the blank space frequently reserved for a pointer to the pop-out, and a thick line placed between Ba-Lu and Ra-Lr pointing to rows consisting of La to Yb and Ac to No.

If I ran the world!

Farm in Spring

As spring rolls on and summer approaches, things have been happening around the farm. I selected some interesting pictures that represent what's going on:

The hoophouse's plastic was repaired, making it suitable for housing plants

The year's shipment of bees arrived and have been placed into actual hives

Holes were drilled and mulched for the addition of 400 more blueberry plants

The chickens continue to roam around - a new shipment of chicks arrived

The cats continue to manage the mouse population

On the Absolute Positioning of Chicken Heads in Space

A day or so ago, I was gathering the eggs from the chicken coop as I do each night. I needed to move a hen out of the way, so I picked her up. After holding her still for a second so she could calm down, I started moving her toward the nearest convenient flat surface. As I did that, I noticed a funny sight: the hen kept her head at the same elevation relative to the ground, rather than to the rest of her body. Moving her slowly up and down caused her to stretch her neck out in an attempt to keep her head in the same place. (She didn't want to go anywhere.)

It was really a hilarious sight to see. I wish I could have taken pictures or a video of it, but I do have some pictures of other chickens I manage:

Rooster walking about

Hens resting in the shade of a minivan

Other hens taking a dust bath

Truck

My parents were at an auction today, and purchased a '92 Ford F150. This serves two purposes: that it can serve around the farm as a pickup does and that I can drive it to school and other places. This is pretty great.

I've never driven a truck before. (The vehicle I've practiced in is a '98 Camry.) It's similar to driving standard cars, but the lanes seem really narrow because the seat is up so high. The pedals have different sensitivities than the Camry, of course, but I got used to that easily enough. There's currently an issue with the steering wheel's straight-ahead position not corresponding to actually going straight, but that can probably be fixed by some wheel inflation.

I'll have my license soon, possibly within weeks, so this is great timing.

Thanks, Mom and Dad!

Opening Night 2015

Tonight, my high school theater class presented two one-act comedy plays. The first, The Big Black Box, only had two actors, neither of which was me. The only one who was actually on stage for that did an excellent job, as did the one reading lines into a microphone from offstage (voicing the Box).

The play in which most of the students acted was A Simple Task. There was one main character, a new hire ordered to simply pick up a box of merchandise. However, a series of confusing and strange characters blocked her access to the box. This was not helped by the fact that her boss kept changing identities.

I played one of the bosses (the only instance that reappears) and one of a set of three military-style guards, the role during which I got to tackle the main character.

As the first boss

Me (left), the two other guards, and the protagonist

The last appearance of the boss

Both plays went very well, with a minimum of skipped lines and no detectable awkward pauses.

When Test Questions are Impossible

I recently had an unusual experience involving academics and wanted to share. There's no moral, comment, or witty observation here, just an at-the-time frustrating story.

I was working on a graded free-response homework assignment for my online Calculus AB class, specifically about integrals concerning inverse trigonometric functions and logarithms. The first three questions were fairly simple, but the final (fourth) one was unlike anything I had seen in the instructional materials.

The problem required me to integrate something that looked somewhat like it would become an inverse tangent. However, the normal tricks of fraction rearranging and substitution were ineffective; the degree of the numerator was just 1 too low. (Another part of the same question required me to take an integral superficially very similar to this, except the techniques they taught me actually worked.)

Though they didn't teach me partial fractions, I knew of the existence of such things and looked up how to perform the decomposition. (Having to learn or re-learn concepts using external sources is par for the course for my use of this online learning platform.) The decomposition didn't work; I had subtly miscopied the denominator and the real denominator could not be factored in a way that could be decomposed. I then learned and tried integration by parts, but it failed for various and sundry reasons.

At this point, I had been working on the problem for half a Sunday and throughout various classes on Monday for a total of several hours. Unable to get anywhere, I went to ask the on-campus calculus teacher. We worked at it for half an hour; he tried things that I hadn't seen before at all. After lots of complicated-looking approaches, we discovered that the problem was more or less impossible.

He suggested that I "reinterpret" the problem and simply change the denominator to something I can deal with. I did so, solved the revised problem, and included some analogy of this account in my submission.

The teacher gave me a perfect score.

Don't Let the College Board Send You Stuff

I took the PSAT a few months ago and was naive enough to fill in the box that allows the College Board to send me "college opportunities" via e-mail and snail mail. This also allows them to share my contact info with colleges who are interested.

It turns out that every college ever (except the ones that I'm actually interested in attending) is "interested", at least interested enough to flood my inbox, both virtual and physical, with the same unpersonalized junk all day every day. Half of these seem to be offers for some sort of guide to finding the right college, many say something like "find your ____ at _____", and still others are "people" wondering whether I got their first e-mail and/or waiting for a response.

I delete them all.

There is absolutely nothing useful about these e-mails. They are literally all the same. When I need to decide what I'm looking for in a college, I can go to my high school's college counselor. At least she actually knows (roughly) what fields I'm interested in. I'm not sure why these colleges market themselves to me as "liberal arts" when I am (and marked on the optional "possible college major" section that I am) a math/CS/physics/science/anything-but-liberal-arts person.

It is interesting that some colleges set up "individual" "web sites" for me: subdomains of their web site, named after me. Unfortunately for them, I understand exactly how this works, and it requires zero nonautomatable work: have a wildcard "*.whatever.tld." DNS entry that goes to your site and use URL rewriting (ISAPI) to mash the requested URL into a page request that results in the auto-generation of a "personal" page.

I've been clicking the tiny, sometimes almost invisible, "Unsubscribe" links for a while now, but the e-mails still keep coming in. Sometimes, the link is broken (404 error) or even nonexistent. I've considered reporting the latter to the FCC, but I don't understand the complaint form.

Anyway, the lesson you can learn here is don't check that box. You'll regret it.

Preparing a House for Refugees

Several members of my school's National Honor Society did some volunteering with World Relief, the organization through which we distributed Christmas gifts to refugee families in the area. This time, our job was to set up a house for a refugee family from Burma (Myanmar) that will be arriving later this week.

I noticed several things upon entering:

• The kitchen tiles are the dirtiest tiles I had ever seen in my life. Additionally, one of them smack dab in the middle of a doorway (that doesn't have a door) threatens to flip over or break in half if you step on it wrong.
• The stairs down to the basement are wooden and wet (which makes me afraid they're just going to break apart one day) and also really steep. The stairs up to the second floor are much more solid but just as steep. (I almost fell down them once.)
• There are scribbles, dents, and places where the painter missed a spot all over the walls and cabinets.
• There are at least three generations of phone line in the basement.
• The water faucet in the bathtub cannot be turned off.

Let me expand on that last part a bit. As far as I can tell, water had been running in the bathtub for days. The faucet can't turn it all the way off, even what should be the "off" position produces a strong flow. When I arrived, the people already there were trying to figure out how to stop it. I located the main water valve and closed it, solving the constant-waste-of-water problem, but making it hard to do dishes.

World Relief sent two of its staff; they were very helpful, bringing supplies and a checklist of what needed to be done. My first task was setting up beds from frames. Since I actually read the instructions, this wasn't too hard - the trickiest part was getting the mattresses up the very steep and very narrow stairway. After a little bit of furniture rearrangement, the room layout seems to make sense.

I then went on to cleaning the kitchen. I used some wet rags to wipe down the inside and outside of cabinets, drawers, and the refrigerator. This actually took quite a while. I had to take a break because I reached a cabinet that was so dirty the rags needed to be cleaned almost constantly, and the water situation was not such that we could do that. (By then, World Relief had called a plumber and he was working on it.)

So, I went over to the living room and moved a bunch of furniture around until I got a layout that seats everybody in the family and that I think makes sense. This involved moving certain gaudy plastic chairs upstairs where they wouldn't destroy the reasonably nice look of the living room.

We all took a short break to let the plumber finish his job. Apparently, the pipes had frozen and one had burst, resulting in the constant gush of water into the bathtub. I then finished scrubbing the kitchen's storage areas and made an effort to remove the crayon and pencil scribblings from the walls.

The final stage was to wash the dishes. Actually, by the time I got there, they had already been washed with soap - we just needed to rinse, dry, and store them. While I worked on drying them, the kitchen floor was mopped, significantly improving its appearance.

The house could still use a good vacuuming, but we didn't have one. It looks better than when we got there, and I think we did a pretty good job.

Shen Yun 2015

A banner from Shen Yun's web site

Tonight, I attended the Quad Cities performance of the Shen Yun performing arts tour at the Adler Theater. Shen Yun is a dance and orchestral organization dedicated to sharing Chinese culture and history with the world. I went to the performance with my Chinese class and teacher, and we were fortunate enough to get excellent seats in the second row of the upper level.

It was an amazing experience. The dancers (of which there were at least 16 female and 10 male) were always in perfect sync and had really brightly colored clothing, sometimes using sleeve- or ribbon-like things that fly around and look really neat. They changed outfits between dances, to fit the theme or specific ethnicity being represented.

Behind the stage was a wall on which images and animated video were projected to augment the story and setting. Sometimes they were just static images (which looked really nice), but many dances had video that "pushed" objects into the world. There was a short wall behind which dancers could hide and jump out when a virtual character in the animation was about to "exit" into the real world - it must have required amazing precision. In two dances, real-world objects were "applied" to the background to "cause" things to happen on it (like writing). That timing was pretty amazing.

There seemed to be a half-and-half mix of dances that tell a story from Chinese mythology and ethnic dances from a particular region of China. There were also three solo performances, two singers and one player of a two-stringed violin-like Chinese instrument.

An interesting thing to note is that the Shen Yun performances are banned in China. That's because they depict a particular form of meditation that the current Communist government wants to suppress, thereby throwing out the old and gaining complete control of the culture. In fact, two dances contained overt references to the Communist Party in a very negative light. (In the final dance, Communism caused a volcano to erupt and end the world.)

After the performance (which lasted two and a half stunning hours), I and my class were ambushed by news reporters asking us our opinion of the show. I attempted to express my impressedness, as did my classmate. As we were attempting to exit the vehicular deadlock in the parking complex, I saw some nuns leaving the theater. Hooray for cross-cultural experiences!

Introducing Ineffable Learning

Tonight at my school's annual Academic Fair, I presented a new idea for a large collaborative project. I call it Ineffable Learning, and it will be an online learning website where students can explore advanced topics in computing at their own pace and in subject areas of interest to them.

Most schools' computer literacy courses cover the typical peripherals, the Office suite, web browsing, e-mail, basic file system concepts, and maybe something like computer art or drag-and-drop video editing. However, there is so much more - computing is such a fascinating and deep subject - that is immensely helpful to know. For example, archive file formats, networks, privileges, local and Web paths, system administration tools, and network/Internet layout are excellent things to know about. And, there are always shortcuts that save time and effort; they should be more well-known.

I've talked about a model for class progression based on "skill trees", and I think that would be extremely helpful here. Students will follow a core curriculum assigned by teachers or suggested by the site's defaults, but every lesson creates a subtree of more advanced exploration of the topic. For example, when studying Microsoft Word, a student may choose to stick around to explore more advanced uses, like mail merges or use of the built-in bibliography tools.

The second major feature I propose is drill-down explanations. Students learn at different paces: an explanation of a certain length may be entirely repetitive and boring for one student but confusing and overcompressed for another. Therefore, a little "what?" or "why?" or "what's a ___?" link at the bottom of explanations would allow quick students to save time and the others to get more examples and basic review to help them understand.

Finally, I would like to see "infusions", broad subjects like security, ethics, or history that can apply to everything in the course. A student interested in one of those could choose to have it infused into the course, injecting extra paragraphs and lesson branches into the content.

I got two volunteers to help make this a reality, one graphics designer and one programmer/IT person. Doing this alone would take huge amounts of time, so I'm glad there are some people interested in helping. Everybody I talked to seemed really interested in this style of education.

Mute

For the past six days, I have had a cold that includes coughing, soreness, and headaches. For the past four days, I have been unable to speak above a whisper, and only then very slowly and not too long. Though I have been at home most of the time, it has been a slight inconvenience.

Hand signals and large gestures have certainly been useful. (I still need a way to indicate that I can't talk.) Asking people for things hurts my throat too much, so I found myself getting up to do it myself. Spurious communications such as "OK" or "Thank you" have been mostly eliminated, damaging politeness but saving information density and my throat.

In public places, I haven't spoken up very much at all. Doing so would probably produce a discussion, and I can't handle that. Instead, I've just listened to the speaker and probably understood more of the message than those busy formulating their next response. I reacted with appropriate nonverbals, of course, but not having to do anything in a conversation is really relaxing.

This entire experience has made me realize that I really don't have to say much to do life. Of course, school is pretty important and recommends communication, but there are always notebooks and computers. I think this whole ordeal has had a positive aspect, despite the headaches and coughs.

Maybe I'll visit a monastery and take a vow of silence.

Complicated Citations: Just Stop

Every high school and college student has had the displeasure of wrangling bibliographies (or "works cited" sections, excuse me) for whatever citation format their discipline and educational institution embraces. Whether it's MLA, APA, Chicago, or whatever Ms. Turabian decided to unleash upon the world, no citation format is easy to write or intuitive to read, especially if you're trying to cite an Internet source that isn't a periodical or a database.

Nobody has time for that

If the point of citations and a bibliography is to help you find stuff, then just use the universal identifiers and dispose of all the other cruft that can easily be looked up. Don't bother including all these weird fields like publishing city; just provide directions to find what you're talking about. If certain fields to need to be included (like author or date), don't use some crazy FORTRAN-style blob; use a table with headers for what the fields mean or, you know, words.

For web pages (which are overwhelmingly what students are going to want to cite), URLs should be all we need. Of course, the world isn't forever, URLs change. Maybe freeze it in the Wayback Machine or provide some search keywords that produce the desired page as the first result.

For books, include an ISBN and optimally a link to an eBook/PDF. Hunting down a rare book or one with a super-generic title is not fun.

For scholarly articles, anything worth citing should have a DOI. Include a URL of at least the abstract. Hopefully the actual article isn't behind a paywall!

Sadly, it isn't likely that schools are going to give up formal citation schemes soon. Accepting multiple formats would be a doable step in the right direction.

Chamber Orchestra

I am currently taking a Music Appreciation class at the local community college (something to do during winter break) and one of the assignments is to attend and report on a concert. There was only one such event reasonably close to me being held before the assignment is due, so I went to that event tonight. It was a chamber music performance in a local church's chapel. There were two performers, one on the violin and one on the acoustic guitar. They played several classical pieces (from around the 17th century), including ones from Bach and Dowland. During the performance, I wrote notes in a notebook so that I could compile the report intelligently. I enjoyed the event and I might go to another such thing outside of this class - that should be even more relaxing because I won't have to be constantly writing!