Sixteen Volts

The article "The Ultimate Blog Post" at Wired sardonically explains what would be the ultimate post in certain well-known blogs. Especially the ones about MetaFilter and Fark are pretty spot-on. Even if for the life of me I can't understand why Fark would count as a blog, since it is a news aggregator. Of course the whole concept of a blog is somewhat vague and fuzzy, but if Fark is a blog, then so is the CNN front page, yes?

I don't know how I could possibly miss Udolpho's long post "Computers, huh! What are they good for?" about computers in classrooms that is so excellent that I don't really have anything to add to it. You don't have to be a whiny hippy like that guy... what's his name who looks sounds like Mr. Van Driessen from Beavis and Butt-Head and is mainly known for his opposition to computers in schools? I read a few of his books years ago but can't remember... anyway, you don't have to be like him to see that computers in elementary schools are the stupidest possible idea ever, with no redeeming features whatsoever. Jesus, I don't even want to imagine being a teacher in a classroom where each tweenager kid sits behind a PC that is connected to the Internet. Brrrgh. I am sure that computer and software vendors and salesmen push the doctrine of "Kids can't wait" very enthusiastically, though. Compared to the PowerPoint presentations that these people probably employ in their sales pitches, I bet that "Chris' award-winning pie presentation" is the height of deep intellectualism.

Vox Day wonders in his post "Why you REALLY don't want to marry a career girl" whether a woman expecting to be able to monopolize the sexual affections of her husband while simultaneously believing that she has no responsibility to satisfy his sexual needs is really a feasible strategy in our modern world:

What I find weirdly irrational about most married women, even the more traditional wives, is their screwed up sense of priorities. No wife has a problem with her husband eating at a restaurant or hiring a cleaning lady, and yet many of them place a higher priority on everything from cooking, cleaning and watching TV than on having marital sex. It makes no sense, especially in today's pornotopia.

Joel has a new essay out, "A Field Guide to Developers" that explains how to make programmers more productive.

Some day in the future, Uwe Boll will be a revered cult figure, the way that men such as Ed Wood or Visa Mäkinen (aka Frank Siponen) are today. The YouTube clip "Uwe Boll vs Oso" shows Herr Doktor taking on one of his critics.

With personal computers, even though the main processor could in principle compute everything, it is more efficient to delegate certain types of specialized computations to hardware that has been specially designed to perform those computations and those only, and can therefore execute them much faster than a general-purpose processor that is free to do other tasks. Graphics cards are a good example of this kind of thinking, especially since the steps of generating 3D projection graphics are so straightforward and the field is so important in games. For other computational tasks that are close to Turing-completeness than projection graphics, we haven't similarly seen special processors being market. Yet. However, eventually this had to happen: "New chip promises better AI performance in games", which apparently means speeding up pathfinding algorithms with hardware. The only problem is just how to get the game programmers to support this card, which they won't do until it has been sold enough, which won't happen until enough games support this card...

What, is it the sweeps week again? "Students, Moms Make Ends Meet As Strippers". For some reason, this immediately made me think about a recent post of Tiedemies, in which he lists some of his core beliefs, including

Money is a sign of scarcity. Examples: there has been no scarcity of clean air, so it is not being sold. Tap water is cheap. Big money changes hands in the sex trade.

The post "The expensive lives of the working poor in America" at Pandagon discusses the recent Barbara Ehrenreich observation about the poor paying more for everything. (Hey, that's a handy phrase.) In the comments of this post, many readers, presumably leftists, chime in about their experiences. The comment that was the most unintentionally humorous at so many levels at once was the one by "Godless Heathen", who wrote:

Oh yeah, and here’s the kicker, where we live we can be fired for no reason at all. So there’s a lot of sudden, unexpected, unemployment. So far the boyfriend has been able to move up to a better job nearly every time, but the time between jobs is terrifying. So we’ll get into a groove of being able to pay for our expenses, then hit the skids for three months. Hurray for absolutely no job security! Every time we start a new job the uniform or dress code requirements cost us money. Neither one of us fits into standard sizes, so forget trying to rumage through yardsales and secondhand shops. In my size, secondhand shops charge more than new clothes from Wal-Mart. So starting a new job costs about $200.

The boyfriend has a college degree and a 135 IQ. I didn’t complete college because the money ran out & my family wasn’t elligible for financial aid and I have a 140 IQ. And we don’t conscider ourselves at all exceptional, most of our friends fall about in that range and all of our friends are in the exact same boat.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Thursday, September 07, 2006 at 10:16 AM