The incident last week of a ninth grader with an Arabic name disassembling a digital clock and passing it off as his own invention to try to impress his teachers is telling, in many ways. I actually did build a digital clock--when I was in the 11th grade, out of SN7490 SSI integrated circuits. When I saw a picture of Ahmed's clock, I knew immediately it could not possibly be a bomb and was certainly not something he'd invented. It had a big LSI chip that handled virtually everything. Ahmed is better at electronics than 90% of 9th graders for being able to take it out of its case without breaking it, but he's passing off the work of a team of professional engineers as his own. Most teachers can't be expected to know enough about electronics to know how to rate a claim of invention, but a teacher that knows so little that they can't tell that there was nothing there that could explode needs to seek another way of making their living.
In a long commentary on facebook, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who was more precocious with electronics than I was, saw the same thing and mentioned how he really got his start in electronics because he had an idea for a prank. He did it and got into trouble--one of his teachers thought he'd made a bomb--unsurprisingly, because the device was meant to sound like one. He learned from this to keep his pranks secret. From the sound of it, his pranks were a little scarier than mine--several of them involved shocking people, and he spent a night in juvie for the fake bomb. Several of my stunts involved pyrotechnics, but I was always very careful to make sure lots of people understood what I was doing, especially my safety precautions. I still have all my eyes, ears and fingers...
Woz also said that "From
the most creative people I meet in high tech, I'd suggest that slight
misbehavior is an essential ingredient of creative thinking". This is exactly my experience. In fact, I'd go so far as to say, if you don't have at least a little bit of a rebel and scofflaw in you, you have basically no chance of ever doing anything very creative.
The schools today are removing a great many of the exhilarating things from the curriculum. Cuts in the arts and recess are only part of it. I made lots of things that went poof or boom or flash in chemistry lab. I learned a lot from these games. The teacher kept an eye on me and realized that I was probably the safest kid in the class, precisely because I was always looking for ways to have fun and understood, better than most, that these things could hurt me. He even helped offered suggestions for a few of my projects. He was a great teacher. Thanks, Mr. Wong. Today, most of the chemicals I used are gone. I'd have been stymied. Chemistry would have been boring.
Zero tolerance has been one of the most harmful ideas ever imposed upon the school system. Kids get major punishments for bringing toys to school. Kids need to rebel a little. It's what makes them feel different and creative, and in a lot of cases, actually be creative. If you stop the little fun, their only option becomes unsupervised fun. Big fun. Kids doing bad things, things with consequences and that may deserve real punishment. Little fun stays little and it can satisfy kids creative urges if they have enough of it.
Creativity requires rebellion. Doing the same thing over and over is not creative, but it is one of the definitions of insanity. If we stop our kids from being creative, we are over as a nation.
30 September 2015
03 September 2015
Trump the Troll part II
Trump is still doing far better than any serious pundit could have imagined, polling in the 20s, by going for the lowest, most racist, most hateful positions. It seems to me that he's capturing all the people who won't vote for any democrat because they're too nice. Today, he has signed a pledge to the GOP that he won't run as a third party candidate and made a speech that he's all in for the GOP. In my previous blog entry on this subject, I suggest that Trump is playing stalking horse for the Democrats. I see nothing to change this view.
Trump's success is only in the GOP and I'm pretty sure is only among GOP voters who are dumb enough to think that bluster and belligerence is helpful when you're playing in the big leagues. It's hard to imagine this is more than 20% of the voters under any circumstances--he'd only have to have about 10% overall support to get poll results he does. In the unlikely event that he actually wins the nomination, he'll get about 30% in the national election from the people who are more loyal to the GOP than sensible, and win only a few small states where there are very few non-republicans: Idaho, Utah, Mississippi and a few others, and lose by one of the biggest landslides in history. Success for the troll.
Because the support is functionally grass roots (even though Trump himself is the very opposite of that), if the more traditional GOP tries to run a third party candidate (Mitt Romney would be my best guess), it will end the GOP, and the defeat will be even more complete. The GOP is dumb, but I don't think that dumb.
Far more likely, the GOP will find some way of kicking Trump out of the process. Almost no matter how this happens, Trump will call foul and today's "pledge" will be torn up (and a few borderline people will turn against the GOP over this) Trump will take nearly all of his votes to the third party, and the final tally will be something like 55% for the D, 35% for the R, and 10% for Trump. The troll will have succeeded.
It's most likely that some other GOP candidate will get more votes than Trump in the end. If this happens, Trump will claim the election was rigged and will cry foul and run as a third party candidate. Given the behavior of the Republican leadership over the couple of decades, it almost certainly will be rigged, although the press may do no more about it than they did with the rigging of the 2000 and 2004 elections. Same final result, with Trump not taking quite as many votes from the GOP. Trolling success.
In any case, I think Trump has highlighted what drives an awful lot of GOP voters, and has forced the "normal" republicans to step all over themselves trying to outflank him... They are saying all sorts of things that would make them completely unelectable in a sane country and may even do that in America. He's forcing the press and even the Republicans to speak truths that they have been unwilling to give voice to for 40 years. Trump may actually achieve his slogan and "Make America Great Again", by giving an overwhelming victory to a sensible Democrat and a more progressive congress than we've had since FDR.
Trump's success is only in the GOP and I'm pretty sure is only among GOP voters who are dumb enough to think that bluster and belligerence is helpful when you're playing in the big leagues. It's hard to imagine this is more than 20% of the voters under any circumstances--he'd only have to have about 10% overall support to get poll results he does. In the unlikely event that he actually wins the nomination, he'll get about 30% in the national election from the people who are more loyal to the GOP than sensible, and win only a few small states where there are very few non-republicans: Idaho, Utah, Mississippi and a few others, and lose by one of the biggest landslides in history. Success for the troll.
Because the support is functionally grass roots (even though Trump himself is the very opposite of that), if the more traditional GOP tries to run a third party candidate (Mitt Romney would be my best guess), it will end the GOP, and the defeat will be even more complete. The GOP is dumb, but I don't think that dumb.
Far more likely, the GOP will find some way of kicking Trump out of the process. Almost no matter how this happens, Trump will call foul and today's "pledge" will be torn up (and a few borderline people will turn against the GOP over this) Trump will take nearly all of his votes to the third party, and the final tally will be something like 55% for the D, 35% for the R, and 10% for Trump. The troll will have succeeded.
It's most likely that some other GOP candidate will get more votes than Trump in the end. If this happens, Trump will claim the election was rigged and will cry foul and run as a third party candidate. Given the behavior of the Republican leadership over the couple of decades, it almost certainly will be rigged, although the press may do no more about it than they did with the rigging of the 2000 and 2004 elections. Same final result, with Trump not taking quite as many votes from the GOP. Trolling success.
In any case, I think Trump has highlighted what drives an awful lot of GOP voters, and has forced the "normal" republicans to step all over themselves trying to outflank him... They are saying all sorts of things that would make them completely unelectable in a sane country and may even do that in America. He's forcing the press and even the Republicans to speak truths that they have been unwilling to give voice to for 40 years. Trump may actually achieve his slogan and "Make America Great Again", by giving an overwhelming victory to a sensible Democrat and a more progressive congress than we've had since FDR.
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