As the band launched into One Bono urged fans to climb up and sing with him. “One love, one life, when it’s one need, in the night,” Bono cried out. “This audience, this generation, has had enough. Enough! Enough of despair! No more! So Paul Martin, I’m calling you!”"I can’t even mock this, for so perfectly does it embody the Platonic ideal of self-parody that anything further I could say or write would only serve to dilute it. Truly. Even the doe-eyed actors in Team America weren’t such sycophants. Or such puppets.
Archive for April, 2005
[I've had this post in the wings for nearly two weeks; I'm dusting it off because end of April seems like a good time to wrap up talking about teaching, seeing as how I DON'T HAVE A TEACHING JOB ANYMORE.]“Three times in my teaching career to date, I have assigned final grades of zero. All three of these students failed make a single appearance in my class during a quiz, a test, or exam; hence the zeroes. The na
On May 17, British Columbians go to the polls for a vote and a meta-vote: the vote, on the new provincial government; the meta-vote, on whether to reform the way that British Columbians choose their governments. Right now, BC’s government, like those of the other nine provinces and three territories, is a parliamentary system, with the province divided into 79 constituencies, each of whose electors select one representative to send to the legislature. The representative who receives a plurality of votes in the riding wins. An advantage to this system is that every voter has, in theory anyway, a local representative to the provincial government. A disadvantage is that that government has the potential to be anything but representative: the most dramatic example of this in Canada was the 1993 federal election, which saw the Progressive Conservatives get over 20% of the popular vote – and fewer than 1% of seats in the House of Commons.”The proposal is to replace this system with single transferable voting (STV), a system already in use in Australia, which would broaden the consistutencies and allow voters to rank their candidates from most to least favourite. Each constituency would then send between two and seven representatives to the provincial legislature.”With the referendum on STV a mere three weeks away, it would seem that Teh Media would have a lot to say about this new system, right? Well, they do, and they’re all in agreement: STV is complicated, and Canadians don’t know much about it. And that’s about it:” * From the Vancouver Sun: [Pollster Angus] Reid predicted that the system of proportional representation will fail to get the support it needs to become law because it is too complicated.” “No one can explain what this is all about. I’ve got a PhD in stats and I can’t explain it,” he complained.” * More from Reid, on the polling company’s own site:” Very few adults in British Columbia are informed about a proposal to elect lawmakers in a different way, according to a poll by The Strategic Counsel released by CTV and the Globe and Mail. 42 per cent of respondents in the Canadian province say they know a little about the single transferable vote (STV) system, while 47 per cent know nothing at all.” * The Globe and Mail agrees, spending six paragraphs rehashing British Columbians’ ignorance before making some lame attempt to remedy it with an STV By Dummies, For Dummies approach, and concluding with a poll reiterating how ignorant we all are:” The STV system would ask voters to number the candidates on the ballots in order of preference.” By tallying alternative choices, candidates who in the current system might have gone down to defeat could win.” The number of ridings would be reduced and each riding would have more than one MLA.” Under the STV system, if a party received 40 per cent of the votes, it would obtain 40 per cent of the seats in the House. (Ed’s note: no, it won’t. STV will approximate proportional representation better than a parliamentary system, but it’s completely inaccurate to equate the two.)” * And here’s a bizarre and dreadfully formatted article from the South Delta Leader that raves about how much people are learning about STV. The article then links to some cartoons on a partisan website (see also, “Dummies”, above) that, according to a promoter of STV, “provide the
1. Is there a research grant available for the development of a mirror of variable curvature that would allow people who aren’t wearing their old glasses to see what they’d look like in new glasses? And don’t anyone bother suggesting contact lenses, or friends with good taste. We deserve better than that. Didn’t we put men on the moon so that we could insist upon such ostensibly-simple-but-as-yet-nonexistent advances in technology?” 2. Not that I was going to get new frames anyway, as a) my current ones are still functional; b) my insurance won’t cover much more than the cost of the lenses; and, most importantly, c) the invisible hand governing trends in eyewear has decreed that peripheral vision is for nerds and old people, and hence, all of the trendy, cutting-edge glasses are basically the ocular equivalent of bikini tops that cover only the nipples. The eighties and early nineties got a lot wrong, I’ll grant, but to their credit, they did give rise to eyewear that allowed people to look up, down, or askance without twisting their necks.” 3. Not a gripe, but because there is magic in threes: I spent my entire life, until two weeks ago, without polarizing sunglasses. I don’t know how I did it. It was certainly easier when I didn’t live near large bodies of light-reflecting water.”Someone else field this one”" Righteous Indignation, Those Who Can’t.”Dear Moebius Stripper,”I don’t understand why you won’t just give me the mark that I want in the course whose exam I missed for legitimate reasons, even though you have explained it to me twice already. Other students might make up excuses for missing their exams, but not me! I can even provide a note explaining my absence. I think you’re being very mean. If I were making up an excuse for missing the exam, then I could understand why you’d be giving me an incomplete in the course and making me go through the ordeal of setting up an appointment, at my convenience, basically anytime during the next five weeks to write it. But since I’m honest, and going through some difficulties in my personal life, I think you should just give me the mark I want.”Obviously you don’t understand how hard my life is right now. I paid for a tutor to help me do better in this class of yours that I’m paying for, and I did okay on the rather easy last test. This should be enough to convince you that I don’t need to take the final exam to prove that I have learned the first two months’ worth of material, can deal with problems out of context – or even that I still know the concepts that I hastily committed to memory back in late March. Please understand that it would really cramp my style to have to actually write the exam in the next month, because I was counting on not having to write it and so I stopped studying three weeks ago and have forgotten everything I learned. See how desperate I am, telling you that in writing! If that doesn’t convince you that I deserve to be exempted, then you either don’t get it or don’t care.”All of my other professors are nicer than you. Could you please reconsider your decision? I know that you said that me writing the exam – which I even said I’d do last week, before I broke my appointment with you on two hours’ notice! – was “nonnegotiable”, but I suspect that when you said that, you just didn’t realize how much I was counting on taking advantage of what seemed to be a gaping loophole in the system.”Sincerely,”My Life Is Hard, And So Is Math