Linear Algebra Update

Grades in my masters course are based on homework and tests, and I haven't had a test since the 1st one.  I just emailed a homework packet, and spent the entire 49er game today on the couch working on part of the next one.  Within 2 weeks I should probably take the next test, on which I hope to do better than I did on the first one.

Tests are to be done within one hour--and both my proctor and I are diligent and honest people.  I could have used another 10 minutes on that last test but I put my pencil down at the one hour mark.  I wonder if my brain operates more slowly than it did in my undergraduate days, as math tests didn't used to take me the entire time allotted to finish.

Raiders are still trailing Denver, I think I'll go to the gym....

This, Boys and Girls, Is What's Called a "Wackadoo"

Is this guy just off his meds or something, or is he just a freakin' loon?

A Florida high school teacher who is accused of masterminding a murder for hire plot against another teacher has a history of disciplinary problems...

Pepe, a social studies teacher at Bloomingdale High School in Hillsborough County who liked students to call him "Doctor Professor Pepe," was arrested at school on Thursday.

In a Sept. 13 phone call, Pepe, allegedly told an undercover officer that he was willing to pay $2,000 for "an issue that he might need taken care of," according to WFTS-TV.

He is accused of trying to put out a hit on Robert Meredith, a former co-worker. The two men had apparently worked together at Strawberry Crest High School...

Meredith told WFTS-TV he knew of Pepe, but did not socialize with him and has no idea why he would be targeted.

"When you are at school you have limited time to talk to co-workers, period. So, as far as going out and having a drink, never," Meredith said. "This came as a complete shock."

Pepe reportedly told police he and Meredith were best friends and had a falling out. He also claimed Meredith was spreading rumors that he was a child molester.

Meredith, who is still a teacher, said he never had any harsh words or a confrontation with Pepe.

"I don't feel that I'm in any way culpable for this," he said. "If there is a problem, it is 100 percent on the other side."

Very strange.  It will be interesting to learn more about this and see which one of them is lying.

The Workers Paradise of California

In just the last week and a half the Sacramento area has been hit with devastating job news:

Campbell Soup shutting down its plant in Sacramento

“We employ about 700 people at the Sacramento plant and unfortunately those jobs will be eliminated,” said Campbell Soup Company spokesperson Anthony Sanzio. “This is a tough day for the company, for the employees. No one likes to do this.”

The company says the Sacramento plant, built in 1947, is the oldest in its network and has the highest production costs on a per-case basis...

Most of Sacramento’s production of soup, sauces and beverages will be shifted to Campbell’s three remaining thermal plants in North Carolina, Ohio and Texas.

The company is also closing a spice plant in South Plainfield, New Jersey...

Campbell does have several other facilities in California that will remain open. There are about 450 full-time and seasonal employees at its tomato processing plants in Dixon and Stockton. They also own Bolthouse Farms in Bakersfield.

Comcast closing call centers

The Comcast call center in Natomas will be closing Nov. 30, along with two other northern California call centers.

Three hundred employees in Natomas are affected by the closure. Two other centers, in Livermore and Morgan Hill, are also closing. One thousand jobs in total are leaving the state.

Comcast will be opening new centers in Seattle, Portland and Denver.

VSP (the provider of my school district's optical insurance) threatens to leave:

California's rollout of the federal health care overhaul, still in its infancy, has prompted one of Sacramento's most important companies to threaten to leave the state.

Vision Service Plan of Rancho Cordova is protesting a decision last month by the agency that is building California's online insurance market, a key piece of President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act. The decision by the California Health Benefit Exchange would keep VSP from competing for a big chunk of consumers.

The exchange said it would not allow stand-alone vision plans, like those sold by VSP, to be offered through the exchange to individual customers. Such a provision would greatly limit vision services available through the exchange, since most are offered through stand-alone plans.

VSP, which employs 2,100 Sacramentans, has suggested that the exclusion could prompt the company to move its headquarters to another state.

These follow other big news from last December:

Waste Connections, Inc., is moving their headquarters out of California.

The company announced Monday morning they are relocating their corporate headquarters to The Woodlands, Texas because the Houston suburb “offers our employees an attractive, lower cost, and more centrally located community…” said Waste Connections’ Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Ronald J. Mittelstaedt.

In an interview with FOX40, Mittelstaedt also cited a bad business climate in California, depressed housing market and a lack of good schools for employees’ kids as reason for the move.

I don't know where the liberals expect the jobs to come from if we keep  pushing jobs out of this state.  Instapundit always quotes the song, and it seems true: They’ll turn us all into beggars ’cause they’re easier to please.

Update:  Crazifornia:

It’s probably too late to save California. Laer tries to inject some optimism at the end of each chapter and in the conclusion to his book he notes that voter patterns might finally be changing (although recent polling data makes me less optimistic). As cities go bankrupt, gas and food prices rise, businesses bail, and the California middle class becomes poor, some of the voters might finally be growing up. Whether they can reverse California’s downward trend remains questionable. Laer has some excellent suggestions for getting the political pendulum unstuck from its far Left position, but it will be ugly, and it will have to be carried out by people who have been subjected to one hundred years of California’s Progressive propaganda.

The President

Lefties will try to change the subject because these facts are darned inconvenient:

+8 percent unemployment.
<1 .5=".5" br="br" gdp="gdp" growth="growth" percent="percent">-$4,000 in median income.
+15 million in new food stamp recipients.
$4/gallon gasoline.
+$5 Trillion in new debt.
U.S. Ambassador murdered.
Al Qaeda flag flying over U.S embassy.
Aimless in Afghanistan.
And he . . . goes on the View? This is not a serious man. In love with being President but utterly clueless when it comes to actually governing, leading the country. A failure in the job by ANY measure. 40 days to decide. What are you gonna do?

From a comment here.

I Wonder If This Is True

I received this in an email today but have no idea if it's true:

EXECUTIVE ORDERS ISSUED…

Teddy Roosevelt 3

Between Teddy to FDR NONE

FDR 11 in 16 years

Truman 5 in 7 years

Ike 2 in 8 years

Kennedy 4 in 3 years

LBJ 4 in 5 years

Nixon 1 in 6 years

Ford 3 in 2 years

Carter 3 in 4 years

Reagan 5 in 8 years

Bush 3 in 4 years

Clinton 15 in 8 years

George W. Bush 62 in 8 years

Obama 923 in 3 1/2 years!

Even if not true it's probably, as lefties said eight years ago, "fake but accurate" :-)

People said President Bush practiced an Imperial Presidency. If the above information is true, what does that say about the incumbent?

Bush Administration Quadrupled Warrantless Wiretaps

Psych, it was really the Obama Administration, according to the ACLU.  Where's the outcry from the left?

If you're serious about civil liberties you must vote Republican.  Only Republican presidents get the press scrutiny that ensures that tyranny stays at bay.

They Must Really Want To Get Buzzed

(bumped to the top 10 days after initial posting, and updated)

I'm reading the article Parents Beware: 11 Dangerous Teenage Trends All Parents Should Know About, and ohmigawd, I can't imagine my students' doing this:

Tampon Drunkenness

A tampon is soaked in alcohol and then inserted in a girl’s vagina or a boy’s rectum. The alcohol is soaked up by the vaginal walls, creating the feeling of being intoxicated without sipping alcohol directly. Besides the obvious risks to those private body parts, the tampon can soak up about a shot of alcohol, increasing the risk of alcohol poisoning.

My first thought is that if someone wants to get high that bad, maybe we should just let them.  On the other hand, if someone is going to do something so bizarre, maybe there are some mental health questions that need to be addressed.  Keep in mind, the above is in addition to other nifty ways of chemically altering perception, several of which are dutifully cataloged at the link above.

Comments?

Update, 9/26/12:  Snopes may say the above actions don't really take place, but this CNN story discusses some that are darned similar:

The University of Tennessee says it has suspended a fraternity chapter indefinitely and may refocus its alcohol education programs after police said a student was hospitalized following a weekend incident involving alcohol enemas.

Twelve Tennessee students were cited with underage drinking and one with disorderly conduct following the incident early Saturday at a Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity chapter house, according to a university spokeswoman...

"Upon extensive questioning, it is believed that members of the fraternity were using rubber tubing inserted into their rectums as a conduit for alcohol as the abundance of capillaries and blood vessels present greatly heightens the level and speed of the alcohol entering the bloodstream as it bypasses the filtering by the liver," Knoxville Police spokesman Darrell DeBusk said Monday in a statement.

In my mind this kinda settles the "is it true or is it false" debate.

Timing Is Everything

Yesterday, just as school began, we got an announcement over the PA system--our district network was down.  We had no internet and no intranet.

It's amazing how much of our world stopped.  Attendance?  Discipline?  Schedule changes?  What kid's in what class?  All done by computer in our all-encompassing school management system, Zangle.  If teachers didn't have some sort of roster pre-printed, I guess they just had to ask the rest of the students who sits in that empty seat....

Last week I vented to my principal about what our tech services people do to every computer I've purchased for my stats lab.  Among other things it turns out that if they're not connected to the district network, they're very good paperweights.  Oh, you can run Excel on them, but you can't save your work, not even to a flash drive.  What's the point?  Essentially, they cannot be used as stand-alone workstations, they must be connected to the district network.  This is time-consuming on boot-up and fairly worthless, as the only networked function I need from them is to print to a printer that's located in the same room as the computers.

It's a good thing I didn't need that lab yesterday, or I'd have been completely dunken verstunken.  I needed them today; it was a close call.

Yesterday during 5th period we got the announcement that network operations had been restored.  Upon logging in I noted that our tech services people had sent us two emails that day--the first notified us that the network was down, and the second notified us that the network was back up.  Honestly.

Racism

Just read this.

Reynolds' Law

Named after Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit:

Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them. 

About what is he speaking?

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

This is part of where socialism and other redistributionist policies go wrong.

Money For School Facilities Improvements

Shouldn't a district budget for such things, rather than going hat in hand to the voters every few years?

San Juan Unified needs money to fix leaky windows, replace aging portables and make schools more energy efficient, according to school district officials.

They are asking voters to approve Measure N – a $350 million bond – on the Nov. 6 ballot...

San Juan Unified was successful in 2002 with Measure J, a bond of the same amount to upgrade school facilities.

District property owners are still paying on that bond, as well as on Measure S – a $157 million bond passed in 1998.

The district's budget is about $360 million a year--so they're asking for a full year's budget. Wow.

Kinda makes you wonder.

The Definition of Socialism

In 2011, payments to individuals were 65 percent of federal spending, up from 26 percent in 1960. America has created a welfare state, whether Americans admit it or not. link

It's B-a-a-a-a-a-ck

Just over a year ago I wrote about a bill working its way through the state legislature, a bill that would allow (not yet require, just allow for now) specially trained teachers to administer Diastat to students during a seizure.  I forgot that the bill passed.  I am not a fan.

Why would I be against this?  Because Diastat is a goo that must be administered with a syringe.  Anally.  While a person is undergoing a seizure.

This is a job for a medical professional, it is not a job for someone with a couple hours of training from a doctor.  This is also not a job for someone who is forbidden to give a pain reliever to a teenager with a headache.

As I said last year:

I'm sorry your kid gets seizures, but I'm a teacher and not a medical professional, and neither do I desire a career related to medicine. If I desired one, I'd already be in that field. "Duh" just isn't strong enough...

You know what my fear is? Eventually they'll make it required that I do this.

That's still my fear.

Our union rep told us about this today, giving us the union's suggestion for what to do if we're asked to volunteer:  Just Say No.  Their reasons are different from mine, no doubt, but the end result is the correct one.

This is not a job for a teacher.

Heard Anything About Global Warming Lately?

Antarctic sea ice set another record this past week, with the most amount of ice ever recorded on day 256 of the calendar year (September 12 of this leap year).  link

I'm convinced that we don't know enough about how climate really works to make definitive statements about global warming.  I'm beginning to think that the best we can do is make observations and comparisons, but drawing too much in the way of conclusions is beyond our capabilities at present.  The science just isn't mature enough yet, and we have a long way to go.

Got My Test Results Back

I thought that since I aced the review problems that I'd be OK on the test.  That was not correct.  I was definitely more confident going into the test than coming out of it, and I was right to be.

85%.

I've got some more work to do.

Requesting Substitutes

A month ago I posted about our district policy that required that teacher absences be filled from the "laid off teacher list", whether or not that teacher knew anything about the subject matter of the class they're supposed to teach that day.  Being blunt like I usually am, I noted that if I were absent a laid-off third grade teacher could cover my class but I couldn't call a retired teacher who I know would actually teach.

Today we got the following information from our school secretary:

As of today HR has removed the restriction of not being able to request and confirm subs of your choice. Hurray!

Guess that means there are no more laid off teachers in my district?

Guess What I Just Did

I wanted to check one of my answers in my Linear Algebra course, so I broke out the HP-15C that was issued to me at West Point in 1983, broke out the user's manual (which I probably hadn't read since 1984 or 85), and did a little matrix reading.  Checked one of my answers--turned out to be correct--now I have one short blog post to go and then I'm off to bed.

I also have the HP-15C app installed on my iPhone (which I don't use as a phone, but that's another story).  It's a great calculator.  Who has two thumbs and loves RPN?  This guy!

P.S.  Still haven't received word on how I did on the test I took last Friday.  I'll admit to being a lot more confident going into it than I was coming out of it.

A Man Who Understands Freedom

For those who try to blame some filmmaker for the riots in the Middle East (what was their excuse before this film?), heed the words of Salman Rushdie, who knows a thing or two about threats to freedom:

"A book which was critical of Islam would be difficult to be published now," he (Rushdie) told the BBC's Will Gompertz.

He said the only way to solve the issue was for publishers to "be braver".

"The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff," he said...

"If you look at the way in which free expression is being attacked by religious extremism, the things of which these people are accused is always the same - it's blasphemy, heresy, insult, offence - it's this medieval vocabulary.

"We're in a difficult place because there's a lot of fear and nervousness around."  (boldface mine--Darren)

I'm reminded of a quote:

"The notion that you can somehow defeat violence by submitting to it is simply a flight from fact. As I have said, it is only possible to people who have money and guns between themselves and reality."
--attributed to George Orwell

Talking the Talk vs. Walking the Walk

California's Governor Brown sounds eminently reasonable in this SF Chronicle article; the problem is that he either can't or won't do what he says he will.  Each time push has come to shove, he backs down and does whatever the liberals want:

Gov. Jerry Brown is willing to remake California in his own austere image, but he doesn't think the 37 million people living in the Golden State will like it.

Californians face a "day of reckoning" this November, when they will have to make the hard choice about how much government they are willing to pay for, the governor said Saturday in an interview with The Chronicle.

"There is a lot of magical thinking in Washington and in Sacramento and, maybe, I might even say, Western civilization," he said. "We had it easy and now the moment of truth is upon us. ... We've got to pay for what we want.

"And if we don't want to pay, then we have to deprive ourselves of that which we would like, and it's very hard to get people to make that choice."

Brown said the result of his Proposition 30 initiative on the November ballot will be a "compact between the people and the government" that he will implement.

But voters need to realize that without the new revenue, the cuts needed to get the budget into balance will leave California a very different state.

I guess we'll see in a few months, but I'm certainly not holding my breath that he'll do what's right here.  Remember, because of a law passed only a couple years ago, the legislature needs only 50% (not the previous 2/3) to pass a budget.  The Democrats own this state's economic problems.

I've Been Saying Forever That This Is What Your Hardcore Lefties Think

What's sad is that these hardcore lefties aren't so far from the center left anymore; imagine, if you can, Truman or Kennedy or Johnson supporting the Occupy types as Obama has. I fear that this kind of idiocy will become mainstream before too long:

A renowned University of California-Riverside professor recently advised students to save Mother Earth, eat vegetarian, only have 1.5 kids - two at the most – take up social justice causes, and “lower your standard of living.”

Biology Professor Richard Cardullo – recently tapped by several federal agencies to assist with redeveloping how college students across the nation study life science – offered the advice to a room full of middle school students as part of the university’s online science lecture series, recorded on the campus earlier this year. A video of his talk is posted on YouTube.

I'm reminded of the following quote:

"A civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself."
--French writer Jean Francois Revel