deathmtn

I found the guy listening to music from Link to the Past on his own this morning. It is linking us to the past!

Well, my neighbor does not want to pitch in for a fence right now, which is understandable. But I think we want it anyway, and he said he's OK with us building next to his, so we're going to try to do that, as costly as it is.

At the music programming group, we committed to doing the audio signal processing Coursera course. But knowing how these things usually go, we said we'd go at half the suggested pace. Hopefully, this will result in slightly less disaster?

I also started putting some kind of narration into Flooding. I still don't know how I'm going to not make it intelligible, but since I can't think of anything, my best shot is to put it in there see if anything pops out at me.

Maybe most importantly, I listened to the entire thing, which I haven't done in a couple weeks. Fresh ears are rare when working on this thing. The good news is that it's way more listenable than it used to be. The bad news is that it may be too listenable, and it has lost all of its challengingness.

I ran into one of the guy’s old teachers at the grocery store. There’s a lot I don’t like about Cambridge, but I do miss that particular school.

One thing I learned about the paraprofessional (assistant teachers, special subject teachers) life: Those jobs aren’t permanent! She had been at the school for four years, but she had to reapply for a job every year. That sucks, and Cambridge is one of the better school districts.

”The hydrogen in your body, present in every molecule of water, came from the Big Bang. There are no other appreciable sources of hydrogen in the universe.” Huh, I did not know.

If you read between the lines, what Chang is really saying is TSMC cannot find enough qualified American talent to do the jobs TSMC needs to operate. So it must spend extra money (more cost) to send every new hire in America to Taiwan to get trained. Furthermore, due to this talent shortage, additional engineers from Taiwan must be hired, trained, and deployed to America to make TSMC Arizona function (with doubled salaries and extra benefits to boot). These trainings are not some two-to-four week corporate offsites, but up to one and a half years long!

I don’t think I’ve heard of this kind of commitment to training from a company before. I hope it works out, but something about Arizona makes me feel like this will end in an ugly way, but I can’t really back up that feeling.

I bookmarked this recording of Ravel's String Quartet in F Major nine years ago. The second movement has a lot of pizzicato (string instruments plucking), which I think is an underrated mode.

There’s a dense cardboard curtain in Yoshi’s Crafted World that indicates that it’s dense by moving more slowly than other objects when Yoshi pushes it.

The guy grunts when talking about it, like it is an actual real heavy object. Video game magic!

Grief-stricken Bangladeshi community protests the fatal outcome of a confrontation with police

Pervin Chowdhury of Medford, president of Bangladesh Association of New England, said “Police are supposed to save lives, not kill someone,” and that if police were not held accountable for Faisal’s death the Bangladeshi community would “shut down the city.

I suspect this is yet another situation in which police did not know how to handle a mental health crisis (the kid was trying to kill himself), and thus ended in pressure and shooting.

I'm impressed by the Bangladeshi organization. This is not typical "keep your head down" immigrant stuff.

There was a stabbing at our high school a few weeks ago. This is bad…because someone got stabbed.

But it's also bad because we thought the school seemed decent based on state statistics and other people living in the town with similar values to ours sending their kids there. In what kind of environment do conflicts reach the point of stabbing and bringing knives to school?

I remember no stabbings at my school, which was terrible, in terms of dubious metrics like test scores, but also actual student outcomes and experiences. Illinois is generally considered one of the worst states in the US for education, and my school was nowhere near the top of that very humble hill.

Although: some cursory searching reveals that a student did shoot another student, and there was a race riot there in years since my matriculation. Regardless, I feel we can do better than a stabbing school.

However, is it really a stabbing school? A single stabbing can happen anywhere, even the finest prep school in Weston or Beacon Hill or something.

I'm irritated that I have to find out because it greatly complicates our lives. There is quite a bit of home improving to do on our home, but some it may not be worth doing if we have to move. And moving famously destabilizes kids.

Or, if we have to go to private school, I have go back to working at a for-profit company, and at a large and probably terrible one, to boot.

The other source of irritation is that I don't know how to research high schools well. I'm not sure anyone does.

State-provided test scores don't tell me anything unless they're extremely bad. And I have no idea how school ranking sites come up with their numbers. Probably the best way to figure this out is to know a bunch of high school students, but I don't know any.

Well, when I don't know how to do something well, sometimes I start by doing it badly in hopes that will give me clues. So, I went to niche.com, which has mysterious rankings, but also comments from students.

Unfortunately, this is a lot like looking at Yelp comments, which are sometimes helpful if you only need to hear about one credible bad experience to eliminate a choice, but this isn't one of those situations.

There is a well-written, revealing comment here and there, but most of them are like this:

The school has newly built science labs with modern technology and equipments. it also has a football field
…
The air conditioning is horrible honestly. Teachers/students bring in their own fan that eventually bloes hot hair after a couple of weeks .
...
The only thing I really like about this school is the diversity among the students. Other than that, this school makes it very hard to learn in. The environment is so nonchalant, and no one thinks about the future. No one in this school is mature enough to relate to.
...
Bulling is not the issue at medford school
...
I don't really go and buy lunch from school but on certain days i might buy myself some lunch that i usually like, like hamburgers, grilled cheese and chicken sandwich.
...
The school nurse is awful. One time a boy was throwing up and brought his throw up to the nurse and they didn't send him home. They didn't send another boy home with pink eye too. But when it comes to safety the school it is very good.

One thing I did get out of this is that a lot of the students think that teacher quality is wildly variable, so it wasn't for nothing.

It now occurs to me that I could find out about how violent the cultures at various schools are by finding crime statistics by school. That's probably not that easy, however.

I started looking at other schools, too. The private schools seem inappropriately high-pressure and are also all $40-60K/year. Some of the high-ranking public schools seem to not have great student-teacher ratios, which may mean the burden of learning is all on the student and their family, though I could be wrong.

The superlative of free is spelled "freest". Very strange-looking!

A caveat about the ProPublica article I just posted about cellphone radiation: It does not present any actual proof of harm.

The thing about there not being much regulation is true, though.

And a friend pointed out to me that ProPublica has made a big mistep somewhat recently.

ProPublica on cellphone radiation.

Huh:

Government-approved cellphones are required to keep radiation exposure well below levels that the FCC considers dangerous. Those safeguards, however, have not changed since 1996, and they focus exclusively on the unlikely prospect of “thermal” harm: the potential for overheating body tissue, as a microwave oven would. The government guidelines do not address other potential forms of harm.