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GeekNights 080103 - Epiphanies
Tonight on GeekNights, we discuss epiphanies. In the news, doorknobs are dead as, well... doorknobs. That, and CES is coming.
Scott's Thing - Paper Plane
Rym's Thing - Giant Sticky Man
Scott's Thing - Paper Plane
Rym's Thing - Giant Sticky Man
Comments
And that giant sticky man idea has been done. Okay, probably with a computer, but a year or two or maybe longer ago there was a Dr. Pepper commercial on TV where a dude had lost some bet, his friends stuck sticky balls to his hands and feet, stuck him to a skyscraper and gave him a sip of the drink. Then he started to fall down like a sticky man should.
Some might say that disgrace is harder to cope with than death, because you can only die once.
When I first saw a photo, I though Scott looked more like the old owner of Studio 54 than Mr. Bean.
I fall into the naysayer camp, but I'm 24.
Funny enough, I also stopped giving a damn about high school at the end of my sophomore year/beginning of my junior year. I still pulled A's, even without trying, but the school couldn't challenge me. If they didn't care, then I wasn't about to care either.
My greatest epiphany came in my troubled younger years, when I was both religious and socially inept. I would get picked on a lot, and didn't know how to deal with it, except to pray to God that it might get better. One day, at the end of 7th grade, I realized, "Y'know what, God's not there. I'm the only one that can help me out." From then on, I was an agnostic/atheist, and a lot better off.
Also, I had an epiphany in seventh grade, when I realized I was really an atheist. I don't know how I started thinking about it but I was in my room doing stuff and I thought "if only the people who follow God are going to heaven, almost everyone is going to hell. God's a jerk." And from there I just kept thinking that nothing I'd been taught in madrasah (Islamic Sunday school) made any sense. If all of those miracles happened then, why aren't they happening now? This is all fantasy. None of this should be taken seriously. I can be a good person without the threat of hell looming over me constantly.
Also, you can't open a doorknob with greasy fingers. Which means your room is safe from people with greasy fingers.
Also dogs, cats, and other animals without prehensile thumbs can't open doorknobs. Safety from lesser evolved beings.
Also people with mittens. Who needs them? Not the people in my rooms of choice. Doorknobs mean the enmittened stay outside.
The only real drawback of doorknobs is that people carrying two trays of food and drink to you take slightly longer to get into the room. The system calculates that the being has no available thumbs. It think he is a greasy-fingered dog-man with mittens on, and assumes you don't want them to enter your room. Which would only be correct if the being was a pyramid-guard in Stargate after eating a dozen wings outside in a blizzard.
Although my slight epiphany of atheism is still in progress. Nothing is convincing me on either side. Until that day I'm agnostic.
Nineless: I concede that I have no cats. Also that I am a very low level thief/rogue.
Apreche: thank you, this explains why I keep not sucesfully breaking into rooms with crowbars.
Life is good!
Oh my god, reading all these old comments about not doing work in school: are American schools really this shit?
I was pushed to do hard work for my entire school years. Everyone always checked your homework. There are rubrics that all essays are held to. You can debate about rubrics being a good way to grade essays, but everyone was held to a high standard. The criteria for essays and homework was clearly defined and well documented and understood. There are no excuses for inadequate work. This was what normal classes were like. Guess what, I decided to do the IB, which is the international equivalent of AP. In fact, I would say 90% of my school decided to do this, entirely of their own will (and maybe some parental influences). Never were essays judged on who wrote them. You can get on a teacher's good side, but they are not afraid to give you a bad grade.
The only time I could ever half ass-homework was in French class where we're given grammar exercises. This was about 1 year of my entire time at school. Oh yeah, and you would hope that the teacher wouldn't ask for them to be collected if you half assed-it. Homework accounted for up to 20% of your grade (depends on the teacher), and the type of homework I got was things like english commentaries and comparative essays, science labs, a well rounded plethora of math questions, grammar practice, and (unique to my class) economic commentaries. Oh yeah, there's a bullshit philosophical class which provided no insight to me and all my friends agree.
You know when I could stop caring about school? Middle of the senior year, after being accepted into RIT. That's when I stopped caring, because my grades were no longer important as long as I kept them from falling to unacceptable levels. I would still be able to get into RIT, and keeping a GPA above 3.0 would allow me to keep my scholarship After submitting a 12 page essay on a topic of my choosing, 3 lab reports, 4 economics commentaries, 2 english essays, 2 mathematical exploration pages in which I discovered mathematical principles on my own, and an english and french oral examination recording for external examination, I was finally given a time of rest to do, guess what, studying for my final exams. Well, I ended up studying 15 minutes before the exams and still passed, and now I'm going to RIT. It was a lot of work, and I certainly won't be looking back at my high school years fondly.
You know what? All my friends who applied to a british university would still have to work hard to the end of their senior year because they request the final grades as well as mid-year grades. American universities tend to accept based on mid-year grades: The grades that you have when you apply. Unless it's a conditional acceptance.
Granted, my experience is that of the IB, I wouldn't have to do a 12 page essay if I didn't take the IB. the essays and commentaries and all that were still part of the curriculum. I also took IB Chemistry. FUCK that class, with a chainsaw nun-chucks. I think we have another person doing IB here that can agree with me.
Then again, my High School has been voted within the top 100 of the Country, I think, so...Yeah...Maybe some other people just wound up in crappy high schools.
However, I know that I would grate under such a school. You see, I avoided homework as much as humanly possible. I did projects and essays and reports, but never regular old homework. I got good grades regardless. Look at me now with my degree and my job. The results show that I was right to skip doing the homework. Some other kids, maybe most, should probably do it, but I didn't need to.
This is really a fundamental problem with schooling. If you don't treat all kids equally, it creates an unfair disparity. However, the kids are actually different. I didn't need to do homework, but some other kid probably should be forced to do it. How do you force one kid to do homework, and grade them on it, while at the same time another student isn't required to do any homework at all?
I'll always remember my current events class in 10th grade. Awesome teacher. He calls out one of the other students for not taking notes. The kid says "Scott never takes any notes" teacher says "Scott gets As on all the tests." OH snap!
If I were a teacher, I would hand out homework in proportion to test performance. Got an A? No homework needed. Got an F? Pile of homework.
I do agree with you, but I would do really great on things because I did the homework. However, I was excited when in the 11th grade, my AP US History teacher decided we would not be graded on the notes we took from the textbook, which I didn't do. I would read the textbook if I felt I had to, and then I would learn what was in it. Occasionally, I wouldn't ace a test, but I got a 5 on the AP, so clearly my methods were quite alright.
I also think that you knew what you wanted to do with your life, and instead of doing homework, you hacked and programmed and worked on computers and played games in your spare time. Thus, when you went to college, you already had the skills you needed. Someone who instead develops the skills to actually learn a lot from a class, do the homework, and work hard at it, doesn't need to necessarily get very good at computers before going in for a computer major, because I can learn through a class, unlike people who can't but try to.