A year and a half ago, a teacher friend of mine told me of another teacher, Jeff Sanderson, who worked at the same company as her. He and one other teacher died after a driver struck them and fled the scene. I felt the Japanese police and Aeon cared very little about their deaths, and I wrote my feelings about the tragedy.

Today, for memorial day, one of Jeff’s friends from High School was remembering him and his untimely death. Amazingly, she somehow ran across my site during her search. She read my entry and sent me a few kind words by email.

It makes me very happy to think that things I wrote a year and a half ago still have the power to make a stranger’s day just a little bit better. I feel proud of and fortunate for my blog–over two years and 750 entries old.

As for myself, today I went to Snoqualmie Falls with two of my friends, Kaori and Tedy. I staggered before the awesome sight; the same pillowed sheets of water have been crashing down upon these rocks, filling the ravine with misty beauty, for millions of years. We hiked down to the bottom, where cool drops of mist sprinkled onto my face. I spent a few minutes watching the waterfall, letting the scene sink in. Afterwards, we ate pizza.

I feel very blessed to have lived 25 wonderful years of life, filled with joy, love and pain.

Here are my original comments about that accident that befell Jeff Sanderson.

Robert Cringely has some harsh words for Google. In essence, he calls them a bunch money grubbing clansmen who have no transparency and thieve from the little guy in niche markets. This is a far cry from the usual love fest he slathers onto the company that aims to “do no evil”.

Still, what do you expect? They make no claims to “do good”. Google is nothing if not paranoid, dilusional and secretive. They offer no explanation about how: their search results are calculated; their ads are served; their advertising rates are set; their fraudulent clickthroughs are detected and extracted; their payments are calculated…

Google is an evil, autocratic company that wants to be the Philosopher King of our virtual Kallipolis. In reality, they are merely the first 21st century advertising firm. Everything this company does can be boiled down to one motive: serving you more, better ads.

What a wretched company.

I finally see how my artistic friends look at comics: they look at the mouths. They break the visual image down into isolated components and critique them. There is no denying it; the breadth and depth of emotional expression is very deep. It why they are so enamored with Penny Arcade’s art style (that means you Ken). The realization was shocking.

And disgusting.

Sure, when you look at Ctrl-Alt-Delete in this manner, the components are very repetitive; mouths are all made of the same S+L atomic elements. But that isn’t why I read comics!!

Compare their narratives:

CAD: Two main characters met, are now engaged; burned down apartment, moved in with gf/fiance (see previous); built sentient xbox that is jealous of the 360; two main male characters had and lost jobs, found new ones; mysterious linux character still undeveloped…

Penny Arcade: …
GAME OVER. Insert Credit(s) to continue. 9. 8. 7..
Penny Arcade (continue): … Fruit Fucker? Cardboard Tube Samurai?

While the Fruit Fucker and Samurai are is a funny bit, a noun does not a narrative make. PA makes a joke, and its done; a one-off editorial about something gaming-related. I never wonder what will happen next; chances are there is no next. BO-RING.

LURID: very vivid in color, esp. so as to create an unpleasantly harsh or unnatural effect.

Example: Please tell me all the lurid details of your encounter with Stephanie while I sip from my glass of lurid Mountain Dew Baja Blast.

Slate has a Blogging the Bible feature. A sort-of-practicing Jew is reading the bible (and paying attention) for the first time. With his adult-oriented reasoning and journalism experience, he is writing about the unexpected and comical; things he never knew; things he thought he knew but had no clue.

This weekend I went to Border’s and bought a bible to follow along, dutiful Slate reader that I am. I’m enjoying the feature very much, and far more than their other gimmicks.

I heard a great joke about Alzheimer’s yesterday. It was something about how Alzheimer’s wasn’t really so bad compared to other diseases. See, these others ones were really bad; I just can’t remember what they are…

I just noticed that my website looks ungodly awful on old versions of internet explorer (5 and 6). Downright unreadable. Sorry. You should download Firefox straight away… Or just get a Mac.

I picked up a book by Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity, How to Be Good, About a Boy and A Long Way Down. The book is The Polysyllabic Spree. It is a collection of 14 months of his essays to The Believer.

He buys books, reads some of them, and writes about the ones he likes. It is a very clever concept, and I’ve dogeared a page from nearly every article referring me to a book I now want to read. I’m also going to check out the Believer. I’ll let you know if its any good. Initial inquiries suggest a well-designed website.

Also, A Long Way Down is a fantabulous book. I recommend it. Buy it now!

Dvorak is right. Education needs to change. It needs to enter the 21st Century. We should not make kids write multi-page essays in class–by hand! Quick, someone not in academia, name the last time you wrote ANYTHING that weren’t notes by hand.

You don’t. Ever.

Also, when’s the last time you needed to know something and actually remembered it from memory instead of just asking a friend or looking it up online.

You don’t anymore. Ever.

Today kids need to know how to ACCESS information that is already there. My computer science professors taught me how to make a hashtable. Why?! There are dozens of hash-tables written and debugged. I need to know how to FIND them and MANIPULATE them. Re-creating them is time wasted that could be spent doing something actually useful, like learning when to use binary trees and when to use hash-tables for instance. They don’t teach this. As a result, hash-tables are absurdly overused in programming.

The same goes for math. We don’t need to know how to do long division. We need to know how to INSTRUCT our calculator how to do it. The same goes with calculus. If we stopped trying to make every single American re-invent calculus, geometry and algebra, then perhaps we could learn something actually useful: such as INVENT ways to use theories of calculus to do NEW THINGS and TEACH your computer to do the actual grunt work.

Humanities are the same. We spent way too much time making kids regurgitate asinine snippets about terms like “Alexander the Great”, “World War II” and “Philosophy” to make sure they have memorized them. Instead we should teach the kids to LOOK UP those terms in the Wikipedia. As long as they REFERENCE them properly and put them together CREATIVELY, who cares what they can remember? By devoting less resources in our brain to memorization, kids would have far more resources left to learn to LEVERAGE that information in a PRODUCTIVE, ORIGINAL and CREATIVE fashion. I think all history assignments should involve writing or updating a Wikipedia article for instance. This would be doing REAL work that is creative and fun for the author and useful for the rest of society. The problem is that teachers are–as Dvorak mentions–in the stone age who have no idea how to properly CODE and LINK in a Wikipedia entry.

Teachers are still stuck teaching us how to succeed in a society that proceeds at a glacial pace; a society that has great, singular sources of knowledge, works in factories and communicates slowly and deliberately. In other words, the society we lived in decades, centuries and millennia ago. A society that bears no resemblance to the hyper-connected, instant, detached and amplified way we live in America today.

This seems like a good place for starting information about the vending machine industry. I’d probably get the free thing if I was starting a vending machine business…