The Long Arcs of Human Existence

Imagine me, 16. I'm a junior in high school, this is October 1998. I'm on the sideline of a football field, in the blue and gold uniform of the Olathe South Falcons. It's a Friday night and we're playing our town rival, the Olathe North Hawks. And we're losing badly.
Of course, I didn't normally dress varsity. I was a junior at a large school, so the odds were stacked against me just due to the sheer amount of talent available to the coach. But also I was pretty small, and not especially good at football. I played defensive back, along with about 15 other guys, so my chances of getting playing time at the Varsity level were pretty slim. Which was fine. I wasn't 100% obsessed with football. There were guys that would go ballistic when our team would score a touchdown, running up and down the sideline screaming their heads off and I would not at all understand this kind of ferocity. And I got knocked on my ass a lot.

But I'd had a particularly good week at practice, and combined with a couple guys getting stomach flu, I'd eased my way into backup backup backup varsity free safety for a night. So I stood on the sidelines as Olathe North absolutely demolished us. By the 4th quarter, we were miserably behind, and our chance of winning was gone. So I sidled up to the coach and asked to be subbed in. I figured this might be my one and only chance to ever take the field at a varsity football game, why not seize it? So I fired myself up and told the coach "sub me in, I want to turn the game around!" and the coach kinda smirked and sure enough he subbed me in.
So there I am, trotting out onto the grassy, lined plain. There's something magical about a Friday night football game. As soon as I got on the field I understood better why people liked playing football under lights. I eased up about twenty yards behind the D-line, watching the Olathe North offense work. Most of their starters had been pulled - they too understood the concept of a foregone conclusion. But their starting runningback, a sophomore phenom, was still in. His name was Darren Sproles.
Their quarterback took the snap and I saw him duck low as he moved to hand it off. Other defensive players began to shout "RUN" to as they recognized the play evolving. I kept my feet moving, quickly pulling in towards the defensive line to intercept their runner if and when he came through. My head was moving left and right as I wildly scanned the field. If the runner got through the line, I was the last defense stopping a touchdown.
And just like that a white and red blur went past me. No human being could move that fast. Some sort of projectile had been launched by the offense. I whipped my head around and watched Darren Sproles absolutely torch me for a touchdown.

That was my one and only play at the varsity level. Coach, after turning a funny shade of cherry red, pulled me off the field and I was promptly sent back to JV the next day. And shortly after that, I quit football. Not because I didn't like it, or because I felt ashamed that I wasn't especially good, but because I treated extra-curriculars in high school like a buffet, sampling as many as I could. Football was replaced with some other sport. I tried tennis, track, theater, Science Olympiad, marching band...the list is long to tell.

Off I went to college. Years passed. I neared graduation, and had applied to several graduate schools. On April 24th, 2005, I was sitting in the living room of the house I was renting. A letter had arrived from a graduate school and I was nervously opening it. It was the school I wanted to attend most. As I read, with a great, glowing satisfaction, their acceptance letter, on the television the Paul Tagliabue was on stage at the NFL Draft and he said "With the 130th pick of the NFL draft, the San Diego Chargers choose Darren Sproles."

Off I went to graduate school, then to a job, then another job, then to my current job. And last night, wife and two kids in tow, I headed over to have sandwiches at Chick-fil-a. There was a strange line outside the restaurant. Apparently people were waiting to meet some celebrity that going to be there signing autographs. My family went inside, we ate, and came back out. And as we were leaving I saw the celebrity had arrived. The people in line were wearing K-State Jerseys, or holding San Diego Chargers memorabilia for him to sign, or New Orleans Saints memorabilia. And as we walked past the little booth they'd set up for him, he looked over at me. Its been 15 years but I recognized Darren Sproles immediately.

15 years of life, and two humans who could not have possibly taken more different paths, who met as kids on a football field for 10 seconds...meet again in the parking lot of a Chick-fil-a for 10 seconds more. I'm not sure what sort of conclusion to draw here, other than that the arcs of our lives are impossible to predict. Where we'll be a year from now...five years from now...fifiteen years from now...is surely a wildly different place than what we think it will be.


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Bill of Rights

First Amendment - Justice Department Secretly Obtained Phone Records of AP Journalists

Second Amendment - Obama Administration Ignores Justice Department Researchers That Show Assault Weapons Ban Won't Decrease Gun Violence

Third Amendment - FBI Uses Drones For Surveillance On U.S. Soil

Fourth Amendment - UN Torture Chief: Treatment of Bradley Manning Was Inhuman, Cruel

Fifth Amendment - Obama Signs NDAA 2013: U.S. May Still Detain U.S. Citizens Indefinitely Without Trial

Sixth Amendment - John Walker Repeatedly Asked For Lawyer, Was Not Given One

Seventh Amendment - U.S. Citizens May Be Assassinated Without Jury Trial According to President Obama

Eight Amendment - Drone Assassinates U.S. Citizen Without Trial or Charges

I could keep going, but I'm too embarrassed to do so right now.


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Electrical Engineer Unemployement Soars

My stance on immigration has always been one of open arms and open mind. That's all been tempered in the last couple years, as it became clear to me that many companies in the tech industry are pushing for the expansion of the H1B visa program solely so they can bring in cheaper workers and undermine the wages of degreed engineers already in the USA. R&D labor is expensive.

So here's an interesting little article from Computerworld (back in April) talking about a recent surge in unemployment among electrical engineers. The article also mentions the very low unemployment among "software developers." And finally, it touches on the IEEE-USA's attempts to inhibit random expansion of the H1B visa program.

A few thoughts:

1) In this modern app/software era, it is very possible that many electrical engineers have simply migrated from hardware to software. Typically an electrical engineer can program too, so its not that uncomfortable of a switch. And apps is where the money is right now. I have a friend who worked for Honeywell as an electrical engineer but he's now doing Indie games for iOS and making a killing.

2) It's interesting the IEEE-USA refers to the cohort as "software developers" and not "computer scientists" or "computer engineers" or "software engineers." My guess is that this group includes all the above and more: people doing software development that don't have a 4 year ABET degree.

3) This H1B visa thing reminds me so much of the old days when bosses would try to break the union worker's strike by bringing in foreign labor. And yet the idea of bringing in more STEM is generally lauded. What a strange paradox where bringing in foreign tech labor boosts the American economy while simultaneously driving down wages in one of the last high-paying wage sectors.

You can read more I've written on the STEM controversy here, here, and here. And I already linked to it above, but this is the most important article I've written on this subject.

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Competing Interests in Environmental Friendliness

Bike lanes encourage cities to be more environmentally friendly. So do driverless cars. But to me they seem competing in interest. A city with bizarre bike lanes set ups will be inherently much more difficult for a driverless car to navigate. Further, a flow of bikers will represent a complex and fluid array of potential hazards the car's computer system will need to avoid.
On the other hand, driverless cars, by their very nature, are way more fuel efficient than manually-controlled cars. And thus a city interested in protecting the environment would want to create a road system that was driverless car-friendly. Which might mean moving bikes as far off the road as possible in order to eliminate hazards to the cars.


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The Hypocritical Failings of Andrew Sullivan

OMG Andrew Sullivan. The worst kind of person is the one that when proven categorically wrong doubles down on his position. This is exactly what Andrew Sullivan openly loathed about right-wing pundits circa 2008-2011. This sociopathic behavior was one of his strongest criticisms of Sarah Palin. And thus, he has become exactly what he most loudly hated. But then, isn't that how it always goes?

Seriously Andrew, can ANYTHING make you disappointed with Barack Obama?



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Privilege

Sully posted a link to this video of Tim Doner, a 17-year-old polyglot who can speak (to varying degrees) nearly 20 languages.

It is barely mentioned in the video, but Tim attends The Dalton School. And to me that was the singularly most important detail about this boy, and we can draw so many conclusions from it.

While its easy to celebrate Mr. Doner's accomplishments and truly I would be a jackass to not acknowledge that the kid is obviously brilliant, what would be equally egregious is if I didn't ask just how many languages he would have learned if he had grown up in Kansas City Public Schools? Or in East St. Louis? Or anywhere other than a posh prep school in the Upper East Side of Manhattan that regularly matriculates a vast number of students to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton?

Ask yourself, as you watch that video, two questions. The first is the one I've spoken above...how would Tim Doner have done without all that privilege?

The second, vastly more important question, is what our society would look like if every teenager had access to the education quality found among ultra-rich Manhattan prep school attendees. What if every school was a Dalton School? What if every American student could be taught Mandarin by a native-speaking Chinese teacher in a class with a student/teacher ratio of 3/1?

I think there's a deep cynicism in America right now, evidenced by Federal and State budget cuts to education. It implies that humans are no longer something the Government thinks of as a good investment. I realize crony capitalism and lobbying and what have you tend to drag government dollars away from things like education, but nevertheless many Congresspersons are parents and therefore have to realize by cutting state education budgets they are crippling the ability of future generations to create a productive and vibrant society and economy.
Or...they are secure in their own privilege and subsequently their children's privilege allows them to attend a local Dalton School analogue, making the state education cuts meaningless to them personally. Nevertheless this indicates cynicism, because it means those Congresspersons believe that state education will not produce anything but bad apples and chaff, so why bother spending state money on it, and the students within it.
Or...they are simply so cynical about the future of American society that they'll throw it away in favor of a hedonistic, cronyism-filled present.

Because unless you are cynical about the future, you'd be throwing everything you can at the kids. They're our salvation. You'd be shoving free biology textbooks into their hands, begging them to find cures. You'd give them unfettered access to high-performance computing facilities and climate data and beg them to solve anthropogenic climate change. You'd install gigabit internet in every school, give every student a laptop, maybe an iPad. You'd demolish old schools and build new ones with big north-facing windows and ask the kids to sit there for an hour a day and dream up a brighter future. You'd pay the best teachers a small fortune to go into the slums and teach kids there. And in places where kids left school everyday and had to go to an unsafe home, you'd open cutting-edge boarding schools where they could learn in an environment of trust and security. And you'd not give two shiny shits what any of this cost because you'd realize the cynicism should be turned back on your generation, and not projected forward onto the children. You broke the world. But the kids can fix it. That is, if you just stopped knee-capping them the day they're born.

Honesty is necessary, too. We can't have a world where 100% of children turn into Tim Doner at age 17. The reality is that a bell curve exists. Someone else might learn as hard as he can and achieve the best he can achieve: Air Conditioner Repairman. But at least he will have come to that profession honestly, as opposed to now, where a privilege pyramid exists and honest, good service professions are looked down upon from above by those who were born into a caste that would never have had to do that work anyway.

There are few things that annoy me more than state budget cuts to education. When you cut education funding, only the rich get educated.


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Parenthood

Is way more fun than blogging.

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