Category: Rant

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Minor Rant :Knowing and Doing: August 2009 Archives

This actually made me somewhat sad. I remember meeting people from other colleges in UP (College of Arts and Letters etc) who really dreaded taking Math 1 and Math2 , the basic math course of the University of the Philippines General Education program, then they instituted RGEP (forgot what this means)  wherein students got to choose the basic or general education courses they took. I feel this is contributing to the lack of whole roundness of UP grads, and in a way is leading to a decline, We often hear “I’m just not good in math etc” but the reality is if we try hard enough  we can overcome our fear of math and other subjects. The truth is that I find math hard , but I do not let that fear control me. RGEP was a way for people to evade, sometimes I fear for our future.

If only those people knew that many computer scientists feel the same way. We are in awe. At one level, we feel like this is way over our heads, too. How could these programmers done so much with so little? Wow. But then we take a breath and realize that we have the tools we need to dig in and understand how this stuff works. Having some training and experience, we can step back from our awe and approach the code in a different way. Like a scientist. And anyone can have the outlook of a scientist.
via Knowing and Doing: August 2009 Archives.

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Walkable Cities Meme::Does closing roads cut delays? | csmonitor.com

In the Philippines people practice something called counter flowing, this is the act where a driver moves his car and enters a lane that is going at the opposite direction. You see this behavior whenever only one side of a busy road is experiencing heavy traffic. Well this behavior is dependent on two weaknesses. ONe is that when they are trying to get back at the proper lane drivers are either scared or kond enough to let them back into the proper lane. This creates a feedback loop where you one up other people by not following the rules and it is expected. This is bad because this causes the other lane to be more congested and in turn creates a very bad traffic jam. I suggest that traffic enforcers be made to book these traffic offenders to lessen this driving barbarism and that we do not let these types of drivers dominate the streets. If you read the article it has a nice dissection of the problem. The individuals are optimizing for themselves and thereby decreasing the total societal value. What is needed is for traffic enforcers to be the ones, through doing there jobs, force these players into a nash equilibrium where everyone wins!

But maybe these two traffic models have more in common than it first seems. Both encourage individuals to drive more slowly so that everyone gets to his destinations faster. Both favor a holistic approach to traffic, one that designs from the perspective of the overall flow rather than that of an individual driver. And both open up more space for pedestrians.
It’s not too difficult to imagine a city designed with these principles in mind. Fewer roads with slower but smoother traffic. Spaces that can easily be converted to car-free zones to suit the needs of the network. And fewer opportunities for people to drive like jerks. Sounds like a nice place to take a walk, actually.
via Does closing roads cut delays? | csmonitor.com.

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Good Guys Lose

from this excellent post
no comment:

Fortune Favors the Brave by Dr Chris Hart

Chances are your mother always told you to go for a nice guy. Someone who’s dependable, loving, committed and getting on in life. And who likes children.

Good advice, eh? So how come it’s so easy to fall for an out and out rogue? It’s all to do with how bravery’s so seductive. Having a big brave guy at your side – even if only to boost your ego – is pretty irresistible, isn’t it? But what about the sensitive, caring ‘new men’ we’re all supposed to admire? Yes, well maybe. But heroism and risk-taking’s what really gets to us. You prefer a brave man to a wimp, don’t you? Both for a partner or as a friend? Maybe because in the past women needed brave men to protect them and their children. A man who could hunt well and provide food. Even now, in our violent world, having a man around who’s willing to protect you feels like a good idea.


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Standing Still

There’s Fight Or Flee But there is a third option to standstill.
I can’t help it if I am going to just pretend that something really didn’t happen and just go on with it!

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:Snarky Anti Strunk And White's Element of Style Rant:Overcoming Bias: Fake Grammar Experts

I promised friends to no longer be morose,depressed, etc etc. I will keep that promise but only as a companion. I’ll grieve in private (at least in my private space, the blog), I’ll be snarky only here!
I’ll be damned haha finally someone speaking something I have long been fucked about. Well I’ve read the elements of style book and I never got the way people seem to treat it as a kind of writing bible. I’ve always been a find your voice, something is wrong until something proves it right.  Read something from DFW and I’d bet you he’d brake 5-10 commandments in a single 500-1000 word essay! The fact is, the reason I am riling against them is the Expert effect. See, I hear a lot of people who seem to want to abrogate their ability to reason, to think; Nooooo, people would rather take the easy way out and let other think for themselves.  They’d rather reverberate something and sound smart, rather than(I probably am guilty of this) try to find that which they themselves thought about, no matter how awful.

April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved and admired throughout American academe. … The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it. …
Both authors were grammatical incompetents. Strunk had very little analytical understanding of syntax, White even less. Certainly White was a fine writer, but he was not qualified as a grammarian. Despite the post-1957 explosion of theoretical linguistics, Elements settled in as the primary vehicle through which grammar was taught to college students and presented to the general public, and the subject was stuck in the doldrums for the rest of the 20th century.
via Overcoming Bias: Fake Grammar Experts.

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rePost:Fashionably Skeptical:Seth's Blog: Poisoning the well

The Office (US TV series)
Image via Wikipedia

I couldn’t agree more.  People are just so fucking annoyed with two bit, multi faced interactions that it is personally dragging to interact with people. I remember this scene from “The Office” probably season4. Where Kelly kapoor and Darryl from the warehouse fights and kelly says. “I don’t understand him who says exactly what he means!” can’t help but feel this when talking to people I interact with hesistantly. What I mean is I tend to hang with simple people , people like darryl.  Call shit on me when I am shitting them, tear me a new one when I am getting too arrogant and all in all telling me when; Incidentally If i had only listened to them a couple of weeks ago, I probably would not be depressed and extremely fragile right now. I am like a tinderbox ready to explode any second.  Well to sum up, try to minimize the fog, speak simply and clearly, tell it to me straight and we will get along fine! In some ways I don’t like erecting walls that separate , but this is very important to me. Enough of the lies, enough of the deception tell it straight!

Which means that even if you have a really good reason, no, you can’t call me on the phone. Which means that even if it’s really important, no, I’m not going to read the instructions. Which means that god forbid you try to email me something I didn’t ask for… you’re trashed. It’s so fashionable to be skeptical now that no one believes you if you attempt to do something for the right reasons.
Selfish short-sighted marketers ruined it for all of us. The only way out, I think, is for a few marketers to so overwhelm the market with long-term, generous marketing that we have no choice but to start paying attention again.
via Seth’s Blog: Poisoning the well.

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Amazon Ships Vinyl Here! WOOT WOOT

Image representing Amazon as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase

Damn this just made my day, It seems that amazon has a nice vinyl store and  they ship here in the Philippines!
I’m still hating on them for not allowing electronic items to be shipped here.(I am personally blaming them for not shipping keyboards here; for what for me feels like repetitive stress disorder, or the pain I feel in my fingers, hand and arms because of too much typing .)
I am like a kid left alone in a candy store(considering that I could get the beatles album for around 15-30 dollars each, I consider this a bargain!)
Thanks Amazon! Hope you finally ship electronic stuff , and allow music downloads here in the Philippines!

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GMANews.TV – Sleepy student barred from taking final exams – Odds and Ends – Official Website of GMA News and Public Affairs – Latest Philippine News – BETA

City of Manila
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There was not a single class that I didn’t sleep on in college. The problem was I had this bad habit of sitting in the first or second row. If I had professors as easily offended as the one in this article , I would not have passed any of my subject! Hehe, good thing I had such wonderful professors!

Sleepy student barred from taking final exams
AIE BALAGTAS SEE, GMANews.TV 03/19/2009 | 11:24 PM
MANILA, Philippines – A second-year college student in Manila was barred from taking the final examinations by her professor after she was caught sleeping during a lecture, a television report said Thursday.
In his report on GMA News’ “24 Oras,” JP Soriano said Elizabeth Balitaan, a student of La Consolacion College, has admitted falling asleep while her Finance professor Ronald Pastrana was lecturing, but said it was due to a headache.
Balitaan said she tried talking to Pastrana but he refused to listen to her.
“Kinausap ko na po siya. Sinundan ko siya sa Dean’s Office tapos hindi niya ako pinansin. Tapos failed na daw po ako [kasi] parang nakakabastos daw ang ginawa ko,” Balitaan said.
[I tried talking to him but he won’t listen to me. He told me to consider myself failed for sleeping in the class.]
Balitaan was later allowed to take the exam by the school administration, the report said.
The incident however upset Balitaan’s mother, who went to see Pastrana to discuss the problem.
Pastrana, for his part, said he did not allow Balitaan to take the examination because she missed a lot in the lecture.
via GMANews.TV – Sleepy student barred from taking final exams – Odds and Ends – Official Website of GMA News and Public Affairs – Latest Philippine News – BETA.

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rePost:Business and Snake's Oil Men:Linus' blog: SSD followup

I wrote this yesterday about my take on business and snake’s oil sales men and realize that sometimes they are not trying to fool you into a decision.  It is sad but sometimes people don’t try to think things through and investigate the stuff they are trying to say. Here Linus Torvalds shows us why a lot of reviews cannot be trusted, and judging from the way he says this I believe he is even referring to some people who are said to be professional reviewers. Things like this used to make me sad, then I realized that when something becomes useless they tend to become irrelevant to people and they tend to be cast off, like a year old fad. The thing is we need to try to live more aware of things and try to always go beyond what is obvious and easy to get. Do not subscribe to labels and pre conceptions, exercise that which we have that makes us more than animals!

Sadly, almost none of the reviews seemed to ever catch on to that, as they were all looking at the (totally irrelevant) throughput numbers that basically don’t matter in any real-life situation. Everybody just quoted the nice big marketing numbers, because finding the numbers that matter more to actual human perception (notably: average and maximum latency) was so much harder, and most disk benchmarks are crap and don’t even give those numbers.
Which is why I was so happy to see this review at AnandTech. Half the numbers quoted are still the worthless ones (I guess you can’t avoid quoting the industry standard benchmarks, even when they are horribly bad), but much of the actual discussion is about how unusable a drive is when it has maximum latencies in the hundreds of milliseconds.
via Linus’ blog: SSD followup.

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