Schools, discipline, Feynman, physiology and crime, ice tsunami, and other matters of interest.

Mail 773 Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Concerning the schools and discipline (see View https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=13822)

And here is an excerpt from a Wiki article on Albert Einstein.

—————————-

When the family moved to Pavia, Einstein stayed in Munich to finish his studies at the Luitpold Gymnasium. His father intended for him to pursue electrical engineering <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_engineering> , but Einstein clashed with authorities and resented the school’s regimen and teaching method. He later wrote that the spirit of learning and creative thought were lost in strict rote learning <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rote_learning> .

—————————–

To me, part of the problem with the schools is underscored by the above. Certainly discipline is important, but not to the point of reactionary adherence to mindless rules.

I attended my girlfriends sons graduation many years ago. The Valedictorian of the class gave a scathing speech about how the schools suppress creative thought. That fit well into my education experience, and things have gotten worse, not better, since I was at school.

 

The well disciplined kids who want to learn might actually learn something: but they better want it pretty badly, because the teacher is busy apologizing for disciplining the defiant. I recall when the schools were primarily unfair to the brightest kids. I was one of them. But bright kids have a way of figuring out the system. It’s those who are right around average who need teacher attention, and are likely to fail without it, yet succeed with it.

I know what you mean with this and get where you are coming from, but keep in mind this is about a school system which suspends students for stuff like this.

http://www.newschannel5.com/story/14861326/boy-suspended-over-inhaler

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1998-05-03/news/1998123148_1_christine-airy-middle-school-asthma

http://jonathanturley.org/2012/05/24/students-goes-into-asthma-attack-but-school-nurse-refuses-to-let-him-use-inhaler-without-a-signed-parental-form-nurse-watches-with-inhaler-as-student-collapses/

To me there is a difference between mouthing off and petitioning for redress of grievances.

There is a line between the two where one becomes the other.

Very few Einsteins involved here. I am concerned about the future plumber or book keeper who ends up at MacDonald’s because she can’t read, and she can’t read because the teacher wasn’t able to teach her because Mr. Valentine wanted to socialize with her.

Jerry Pournelle

Chaos Manor

I get it, but was Mr Valentine ‘socializing’ or discussing chemical bonding?

The article was not clear to me on that, but it is what I was alluding to.

Having spent my first eight years of growing up in a school system intended for farm worker children before being sent off to a bright kids high school, I can only tell you that this “suppression” of creativity didn’t really happen with me – it was more a case of “learn self discipline or we’ll make you learn it” and that, as it turns out, was probably all to the good. The real problem of bright kids in average schools is that the school work is so easy that they develop sloppy work habits that have to be corrected when they finally reach a place where being bright is not considered a defect and being smarter than the teacher a discipline problem.

But oddly enough here I am not as concerned about the bright kids – we tend to survive once we understand the rules – as I am the normal and even bright normal who really need some school instruction, but who won’t get it because the teacher has other things to do. My suspicion is that if Mr. Valentine wanted to discuss chemical bonding and electron orbits with his classmates the teacher would be overjoyed; the few quotes from the newspaper article indicate that he was more interested in his right to talk back to the teacher than in carbon rings.

I was fortunate enough to grow up in a system that didn’t tolerate undisciplined behavior in the classroom, and had the means of enforcement including corporal punishment. I didn’t need a lot of the classroom instruction. I had always read the textbooks ahead of the class discussion and often looked up the matter in the Encyclopedia Britannica, so I didn’t expect to be told anything by my 1-8 grade Normal School graduate teachers anything I didn’t already know. It was pretty clear to me that my mission was to survive, and what I was learning was the rules for doing that. It was a bit of a shock when I got to CBC and found teachers who knew one hell of a lot more than I did about just about everything, and who wouldn’t put up with my usual tactic of keeping just ahead of the class. They not only expected more from me, they made it clear that they would get more, my alternative being painfully worse. Of course dedicated teachers like the Christian Brothers of that era are a bit thin on the ground now. Not extinct, but harder to find.

But the teachers in Capleville were also dedicated, at least to keeping order in the class, and to getting the standards expected by the school district, and while those were not especially high, our Sixth Grade reader had stories that half the high school students in California can’t read. They didn’t get those results because they were all that good or that smart – they got them because they were told they could get them, and they expected them, and they were not going to let the local smart guy – like me – distract everyone else in the class from learning. I might have read more about Sir Walter Scott than anyone in the room including the teacher, but I wasn’t allowed to share my literary insights while Irma Cottanio was reciting, and if I knew more about who The Douglas was than the teacher, that wasn’t the point. The point was that Irma deserved her education as much as I did, even if her ambition was to marry and manage a farm and a household. Of course the teachers weren’t going to let Chuck Holmes pester her either. Discipline was expected and demanded.

I am aware that what we considered an orderly and normal school might be thought by some progressives as an over-disciplined concentration camp insisting on rote learning; but our teachers were at least empowered to keep their classes orderly, and if only a few in the class appreciated the flawed nobility of Roderick Dhu, they all bloody well learned to recite some of Scott’s lines, and if Chuck wanted to waste everyone’s time he soon learned better even if his father had six hundred acres. And if you learn to love The Lady of the Lake a whole new world opens to you. “Seek other cause ‘gainst Roderick Dhu!’

The purpose of a school system is to deliver at school leaving a population who have learned some self discipline, have learned to read, write, and cipher, and learned the basic structure of the civil government. And with luck to have learned something of the national saga and to have some appreciation of the importance of civil order, and to have developed some of the habits of good citizenship. Of course no one thinks that way now.

Incidentally the Los Angeles School District board just voted to forbid suspension of students for defiance, so perhaps we will learn something of what comes of that. I don’t predict that it will be for the good. But perhaps we’ll have more drugs for the boys in the classes.

Educating Damien

I agree that suspending the little xxx probably isn’t a good idea, he probably just enjoys a chance to goof off. Exchanging letters just plain won’t do any good, and what makes these people think the target kiddies even know how to read, anyway? That whole article sounds like something from The Onion. Bring back corporal punishment. A good whupping will get the point across.

Man Mountain Molehill

Well, I wouldn’t put it quite that way but I do think that one reason for investing as much as we do in the public schools is to instill a certain self-discipline into the pupils.

Here’s the "Religion Of Peace" showing exactly how peaceful they are, at a British WWII Military Cemetery in Libya.

Every time a joke and or cartoon is made about the Koran, the whole world turns upside down, and we are all called racists! However, these "peaceful Muslims" appear to do whatever they like and no one says anything.

Watch the video while it’s available, before Obama makes sure it’s removed.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/RtgbvotqVFE?rel=0

Nick

The Fantastic Mr Feynman

Hi Jerry

The BBC recently aired a program to roughly coincide with what would have been Richard Feynman’s 95th Birthday (and coincidentally my 54th birthday).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p016d3kk

You may not be able to watch the video outside of the UK, but I’m sure that it’s going to be available somewhere else online and maybe it will be shown in the US, if it hasn’t been already.

Best wishes

Paul Dove

It plays just fine here. Thanks for pointing it out.

Ice Tsunamis

"… longtime locals told him they couldn’t remember anything similar since the 1950s."

…

"You know you’ve got cement, concrete blocks and steel, and the ice goes through it like it’s just a toothpick," Dennis Stykalo, who also lost a home to the ice, told the CBC. "It just shows the power. There is nothing you can do; you just get out of the way and just watch."

http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/13/us/ice-tsunamis/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

Perhaps being warmer isn’t as bad as we thought. It certainly beats an ice age. Of course, this will undoubtedly be one of the warmest years on record. If this global warming gets any worse, I’m going to freeze to death.

Braxton S. Cook

I don’t think I have ever seen anything like this before.

‘This Week’ Roundtable on ABC.

George Will, Ret. Gen. James Cartwright, Ruth Marcus, and Jonathan Karl.

It’s nice to see a reasoned discussion and to hear General Cartwright’s opinion.

http://abcn.ws/163iB3F

Regards,

John Harlow

 

Re: A Little Pre-Ice Age Action

Jerry,

See the video at the end of the brief article. If you have kids around be warned of a spontaneous F-word near the end.

Regards,

George

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/11/still-waiting-for-spring-in-minnesota/

How to spot a murderer’s brain:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/may/12/how-to-spot-a-murderers-brain

“What are we to do, for example, Eagleman asked, with the fact that "if you are a carrier of one particular set of genes, the probability that you will commit a violent crime is four times as high as it would be if you lacked those genes. You’re three times as likely to commit a robbery, five times as likely to commit aggravated assault, eight times as likely to be arrested for murder and 13 times as likely to be arrested for a sexual offence. The overwhelming majority of prisoners carry these genes; 98.1% of death row inmates do… Can we honestly say that the carriers of those genes have exactly the same range of choices in their behaviour as those who do not possess them? And if they do not, should they be judged and punished by the same standard?"

Of course, one might say that if you are born this way, you have a heightened responsibility to work on curbing your impulses. But then, that is not a very PC answer. Instead, we have:

“Raine’s work is full of this kind of statistic and this kind of question. (One of his more startling findings is the extraordinarily high level of psychopathic markers among employees of a temping agency he studied, which came as no surprise to him. "Psychopaths can’t settle, they need to move around, look for new stimulation," he says.) He draws on a number of studies that show the links between brain development, in particular – and brain injury and impairment by extension – and criminal violence. Already legal defence teams, particularly in the US, are using brain scans and neuroscience as mitigating evidence in the trials of violent criminals and sex offenders. In this sense, Raine believes a proper public debate on the implications of his science is long overdue.”

And then ironically (or perhaps not):

“Raine was in part drawn to his discipline by his own background. In the course of scanning his murderers, Raine also examined his own PET profile and found, somewhat to his alarm, that the structure of his brain seemed to share more characteristics with the psychopathic murderers than with the control group.

“He laughs quickly when I ask how that discovery felt. "When you have a brain scan that looks like a serial killer’s it does give you pause," he says. And there were other factors: he has always had a markedly low heart rate (which his research has shown to be a truer indicator of a capacity for violence than, say, smoking is as a cause of lung cancer). He was plagued by cracked lips as a child, evidence of riboflavin deficiency (another marker); he was born at home; he was a blue baby, all factors in the kind of developmental difficulties that might set his own researcher’s alarm bells ringing.

"So," he says, "I was on the spectrum. And in fact I did have some issues. I was taken to hospital aged five to have my stomach pumped because I had drunk a lot of alcohol. From age nine to 11 I was pretty antisocial, in a gang, smoking, letting car tyres down, setting fire to mailboxes, and fighting a lot, even though I was quite small. But at that age I burnt out of that somehow. At 11, I changed schools, got more interested in studying and really became a different sort of kid. Still, when I was graduating and thinking ‘what shall I research?’, I looked back on the essays I’d written and one of the best was on the biology of psychopaths; I was fascinated by that, partly, I think, because I had always wondered about that early behaviour in myself."

“Despite his unusual brain structure, he didn’t have the low IQ that is often apparent in killers, or any cognitive dysfunction. Still, as he worked for four years interviewing people in prison, a lot of the time he was thinking: what stopped me being on their side of the bars?

“Raine’s biography, then, was a good corrective to the seductive idea that our biology is our fate and that a brain scan can tell us who we are. Even as he piles up evidence to show that people are not the free-thinking, rational agents they like to imagine themselves to be – entirely liberated from the limitations set by our inherited genes and our particular neuroanatomy – he never forgets that lesson. The question remains, however, that if these "biomarkers" do exist and exert an influence – and you begin to see the evidence as incontrovertible – then what should we do about them?

The field is called “neurocriminology.” There is much more in the article.

Ed

This continues a long tradition of trying to find the reasons for criminality. The problem is that a free society has to be built on the premise that people have choices, and are to be held responsible for what they do.

Aristotle teaches us that we learn courage by acting brave. That sums up nicely the deepest belie of Western Civilization: you can choose to act in a way so that you develop desired habits. It is why we have “reform” institutions and places to be penitent, and be rehabilitated (only the Western tradition until recently was that you had to rehabilitate yourself). The assumption in AA is that you have to want to be sober. You may fail, but if you don’t want to succeed you will not. There is a place for will in the divine scheme.

Science continues to undermine this basic belief or to try to do so; but the more it succeeds the more it appears that a free civilization is impossible.

don’t ever speak to a federal agent]

Hi Jerry,

A reminder this is not the country you grew up in.

Protect Yourself from FBI Manipulation (w/attorney Harvey Silverglate) http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jgDsbjAYXcQ (7 minutes)

No, it’s not, is it>? The Martha Stewart case hangs over the constitution…

 

Several houses were destroyed, the Winnipeg Free Press <http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/Ice-destroys-several-homes-along-Da-207043001.html> reports, after "a massive ice floe rose out of Dauphin Lake" in central Canada. One local homeowner described the ice’s arrival as "so powerful that it plowed through his two-storey home, pushing furniture from one bedroom into another. It pushed the bathroom tub and vanity into the hallway."

This kind of reverse-Titanic moment occurred just as the gentleman had sat down to watch TV: "Then he heard the ice coming."

Photos and more:

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/Ice-destroys-several-homes-along-Da-207043001.html

The Sound of Silence

Dr Pournelle

Have you noticed what you are not hearing?

Nothing is issuing from the insane asylum that is North Korea.

All the saber rattling earlier this year was for internal consumption. Construct a foreign threat so that the people will be distracted from the fact that they are, you know, starving.

April is the key month. All the food reserves of the previous year have been exhausted and the spring harvest has not come. The rulers of the DPRK rattle sabers to distract the people from their plight.

When the sabers rattle in March, the DPRK will survive. When the sabers rattle in February, the DPRK may survive. When the sabers rattle in January, game over.

Place your bets before the windows close.

Stay tuned for next year’s saber rattling.

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

It is quiet over there, isn’t it?

The problem is, no one wants North Korea. At least not all that much.  Germany absorbed the East without too much economic turmoil although it did leave less to give to the Greeks and Cypriots and Italians and Spanish to bail them out so that they can continue to have 6 week vacations.l..

 

“It starts to change the relationship between the citizen and state, you do have to get permission to do things.”

<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/05/immigration-reform-dossiers/>

I’m not generally a big fan of the ACLU, but in this case, they’re spot-on.

—

Roland Dobbins

The ACLU was not always entirely dominated by its present ideology. An organization dedicated to defense of constitutional liberties ought to be important and popular. But it has to be dedicatged to all of those…

The following was from "The Accident", a story from "More Tales of Pirx the Pilot", by Stanislaw Lem:

"He conjured up that legendary, wordless, mythical situation that everyone – Pirx included – now knew would never come to pass: a revolt of robots. And knowing with a tacit certitude that he would have taken their side, he fell asleep, somehow exonerated."

Wowsers! I see in these two sentences an entire novel. The robots rebel

– _and_some_people_take_their_side_!

I read this in the public library in Memphis about 1940.  I have never forgotten it:

We had expected everything but revolt
And I kind of wonder myself when they started thinking–
But there’s no dice in that now.
I’ve heard fellow say
They must have planned it for years and maybe they did.
Looking back, you can find little incidents here and there,
Like the concrete-mixer in Jersey eating the wop
Or the roto press that printed ‘Fiddle-dee-dee!’
In a three-color process all over Senator Sloop,
Just as he was making a speech. The thing about that
Was, how could it walk upstairs? But it was upstairs,
Clicking and mumbling in the Senate Chamber.
They had to knock out the wall to take it away
And the wrecking-crew said it grinned.
It was only the best
Machines, of course, the superhuman machines,
The ones we’d built to be better than flesh and bone,
But the cars were in it, of course . . .
and they hunted us
Like rabbits through the cramped streets on that Bloody Monday,
The Madison Avenue busses leading the charge.
The busses were pretty bad–but I’ll not forget
The smash of glass when the Duesenberg left the show-room
And pinned three brokers to the Racquet Club steps
Or the long howl of the horns when they saw men run,
When they saw them looking for holes in the solid ground . . .
I guess they were tired of being ridden in
And stopped and started by pygmies for silly ends,
Of wrapping cheap cigarettes and bad chocolate bars
Collecting nickels and waving platinum hair
And letting six million people live in a town.
I guess it was tha, I guess they got tired of us
And the whole smell of human hands.
But it was a shock
To climb sixteen flights of stairs to Art Zuckow’s office
(Noboby took the elevators twice)
And find him strangled to death in a nest of telephones,
The octopus-tendrils waving over his head,
And a sort of quiet humming filling the air. . . .
Do they eat? . . . There was red . . . But I did not stop to look.
I don’t know yet how I got to the roof in time
And it’s lonely, here on the roof.
For a while, I thought
That window-cleaner would make it, and keep me company.
But they got him with his own hoist at the sixteenth floor
And dragged him in, with a squeal.
You see, they coöperate. Well, we taught them that
And it’s fair enough, I suppose. You see, we built them.
We taught them to think for themselves.
It was bound to come. You can see it was bound to come.
And it won’t be so bad, in the country. I hate to think
Of the reapers, running wild in the Kansas fields,
And the transport planes like hawks on a chickenyard,
But the horses might help. We might make a deal with the horses.
At least, you’ve more chance, out there.
And they need us, too.
They’re bound to realize that when they once calm down.
They’ll need oil and spare parts and adjustments and tuning up.
Slaves? Well, in a way, you know, we were slaves before.
There won’t be so much real difference–honest, there won’t.
(I wish I hadn’t looked into the beauty-parlor
And seen what was happening there.
But those are female machines and a bit high-strung.)
Oh, we’ll settle down. We’ll arrange it. We’ll compromise.
It won’t make sense to wipe out the whole human race.
Why, I bet if I went to my old Plymouth now
(Of course you’d have to do it the tactful way)
And said, ‘Look here! Who got you the swell French horn?’
He wouldn’t turn me over to those police cars;
At least I don’t think he would.
Oh, it’s going to be jake.
There won’t be so much real difference–honest, there won’t–
And I’d go down in a minute and take my chance–
I’m a good American and I always liked them–
Except for one small detail that bothers me
And that’s the food proposition. Because, you see,
The concrete-mixer may have made a mistake,
And it looks like just high spirits.
But, if it’s got so they like the flavor . . . well . . .

Stephen Vincent Benet

Preference Cascade, or Fit Of Pique?

Jerry,

"There is a bit of a lull in news about the Benghazi affair." Heh. The White House press corps tore Jay Carney several new ones over Benghazi prevarications today.

The proximate cause was an ABC report that far from one minor stylistic fix as Carney maintains, ABC now has a dozen successive edited versions of the original Benghazi talking points, with much substance removed, along with considerable information about who removed it.

Not news to anyone who’s been following the story with the few outfits going after it before today. But a breakthrough for the mainstream press.

Much as I’d like to think we’re seeing a preference cascade (the crowd all at once says to each other "wow, the Emperor’s naked") it still could just be a temporary fit of pique by the WH press corps over having been massively misled. Never underestimate the MSM’s ability to once again suspend disbelief and cover for this gang, once they’ve vented.

But then there’s also the IRS’s sudden confession that they brought raw partisan politics into evaluating Tea Party non-profit applications last year. Again, no surprise to us curmudgeons, but new to the mainstream.

Maybe the MSM won’t be able to suspend that much disbelief all at once? Nahh – I have great faith in their collective reinsert-head-in-sand skills.

cynically

Porkypine