deathmtn

Anything can happen at a company at any time, but I think this new job is actually going relatively well? It’s by no means some kind of adventure of imagination or something, but it does tick these boxes, which is rare:

☑️ Non-evil (possibly even helpful) with little chance of me getting turned into a tool again
☑️ People generally seem cool with me changing things that don’t make sense without making me prove why before a jury
☑️ Not boring enough that I have to create weird (usually ineffective) incentives throughout the day
☑️ OK with my four days per week schedule

The big box it doesn’t check, though is:

🔲 Employer-provided health insurance

My last employer-provided insurance was worse than the kind I can buy on the exchange, though, so I’m now OK with that. Bar lowered!

An attempt at year-round schools in Virginia

Research released by Harvard and Stanford last fall found that Richmond’s fourth through eighth graders had lost two full years of ground in math and nearly a year and a half in reading. Even more apparent was their difficulty with basic interactions — fifth graders hadn’t been in person since third grade; second graders, since kinder­garten. “Socialization with each other was huge. How to be around each other — those are building blocks for ages 6 to 10,” Wright said. “There was a whole retraining — what does it look like when you and another student disagree? They had missed that, not being in the building.”

This is just too real. Here, we’re fine on math and reading because of the way the guy happens to be wired. But the social learning vacuum was highly consequential.

It also shows that the falloff was far greater among Black and Hispanic students than among whites and Asians, expanding disparities that had been gradually shrinking in recent decades. “This cohort of students is going to be punished throughout their lifetime,” Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, said at a conference in Arlington, Virginia, in February. He presented findings dem­on­strating that the economic consequences of pandemic-related learning loss could be far greater than those of the Great Recession.

The greatest challenge is finding extra hours for supplementary instruction. In early 2021, as it became clear that Richmond was not going to reopen its schools that spring, Jason Kamras, the superintendent of schools, shared in online forums the rudiments of a possible remedy: switching to a year-round calendar, with summer vacation limited to July, and four two-week breaks during the school year. Most students would still have 180 school days a year, but the district would select 5,000 students to receive up to 40 days of extra instruction during the breaks. Teachers who volunteered to work would be paid more.

Kamras cited a report issued by staff of the Virginia legislature which indicated that, according to recent research, a year-round calendar produced varied results over all but had clear benefits for Black students. Harris Cooper, a professor of psychology at Duke who has researched the issue, told me that, though most students suffer from a “summer slide” in math, losses in reading are bigger for students from low-income families, possibly because wealthier kids are more likely to have books around at home. He said that it made sense for districts to rethink summer break, which was a vestige of a more agricultural era and longer than in peer nations.

…

After the comment session was over, Tracy Epp, the district’s chief academic officer, reminded the board just how dire the educational setback was shaping up to be. She presented the latest data on early elementary students, which showed a large increase in the number of children who were considered at high risk of struggling to read, especially among Black and economically disadvantaged students. More than half of all first graders were at risk, up 14 points from the previous year. “The science is clear about what it takes,” Epp said. “There’s a lot we can do during the school day, but, when we look at 50% not being on track, we’ve got to find more time to tackle these literacy issues.”This is a good story, but to save you time, after a lot of talk about how year round school would be good, school board members in that district dug in and held the status quo — but they did let one school extend the school year, to the great relief of the mostly Black families there.

This is another thing that sucks about the defaults in America. Year-round school is just given in other countries. But because it’s not, to get it going, you have to fight push back from wealthier families who have fancy vacations planned.

Other countries: It is deeply unwise to let have anyone have a gun.

US: Let’s pray after each of the 27 school shootings that happen a year.

Other countries: It is good for people to have free healthcare since working bodies are just a basic goal of human existence.

US: Obamacare makes me want to buy extra guns. Medical decisions should be made on the basis of maximizing perceived shareholder value.

From the Black Hole Survival Guide:

If you play one definite chord, you are not playing one definite note.
You could try to reverse the musical analogy.
Play one note by superposing chords such that all notes are canceled except for the one that you want. (Consider the technology of noise-canceling headphones.) Then a note is a superposition of chords, just as a chord is a superposition of notes. There can be a chord or a note, but not a sound that is simultaneously a chord and a single note.

True, and it actually feels kinda deep? They’re all just amplitude over time, and we classify amplitude over time patterns in different ways.

Ganon in original Zelda looks less impressive than he did in later games. We thought he looked a little more surprised than surprising. Katt has captured the vibe perfectly.

PT ab stuff. Crawling back toward normal. I guess I really should be able to do this every other day.

45° screw. In another context, this would be really skillful.

A Verizon cable became detached from our house. It took thirty minutes to schedule a fix.

It required me to:

- Ask for help in their web chat.
- Talk to a CSR on the phone.
- Open a live video web app so I could show the cable to the CSR live on the call.
- The CSR kept asking me to type in the chat even though we were on a voice call because otherwise we'd get cut off.
- The CSR was then forced to pitch me some other service plan for several minutes.
- Then, I had to open some other link and click on things "officially".

Really, what this should have been was a web form where you just say that a cable has become detached from your house and when the service guy should come around.

Verizon is $40 less per month for us than Comcast was and way faster, so it's good to be out of the monopoly zone. But there's not so much competition that not making people do unnecessary stuff is something ISPs want to differentiate themselves with, apparently.

The web site of the author of Murderous Maths. Behold!