Inebriated, v2.

As Faye so aptly put it, I am once again inebriated. But I'm close to graduating, so it's my excuse to loosen up a bit. I will post the answer to last week's question, as well as a new question, tomorrow at midnight.

Thoughts on Being a Student

I recently read the first few chapters of The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom. I didn't finish it - while the content was interesting, I find Bloom taking too long to get to a point - but be that as it may, I would like to first offer a summary of what I think Bloom's point is, before offering some thoughts.

Bloom's basic thesis is that the modern drive for openness and tolerance takes away the individuality of cultures and of people. By asking students to be open to different ideas, everything becomes relative to students, and therefore unimportant. They are equally passionate - or rather, equally dispassionate - about everything. They do not argue for a way of life, and do not see things above money, happiness, and life. In Bloom's words, "they do not drink the spirit of life, but prefer the water of the crowd."

Bloom's explanation of this is the lost of the classics: people are not reading great books anymore, and therefore do not experience, through the characters in the book, what it means to sacrifice their lives for a cause, or to struggle through truly difficult circumstances. They do not have anymore what Bloom calls "wisdom". The Bible is one of Bloom's classics, and he writes,

"With [the Bible's] gradual and inevitable disappearance, the very idea of such a total book and the possibility and necessity of world-explanation is disappearing. And fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise - as priests, prophets, or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine. Contrary to what is commonly thought, without the book even the idea of the order of the whole is lost."

Personally, I'm not convinced that students are truly lost without the classics. I do, however, agree with Bloom's general belief that today's students are lacking something. I'm not sure there's a word for it, but it encompasses the desire to keep learning, the desire to be convinced of something and to work to proof or defend that conviction. Bloom uses this anecdote to illustrate what students are missing, and how modern education are failing to help students regain that drive:

I once had a debate about education with a professor of psychology. He said that it was his function to get rid of prejudices in his students. [...] I began to wonder what he replaced those prejudices with. He did not seem to have much of an idea of what the opposite of a prejudice might be. [...] Did this professor know what those prejudices meant for the students and what effect being deprived of them would have? Did he believe that there are truths that could guide their lives as did their prejudices? Had he considered how to give students the love of the truth necessary to seek unprejudiced beliefs, or would he render them passive, disconsolate, indifferent, and subject to authorities like himself, or the best of contemporary thought?

After reading this story I was reminded of an AI koan in the Jargon File:

In the days when [Gerald Jay] Sussman was a novice, [Marvin] Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe" Sussman replied.
"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
"Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.
"So that the room will be empty."
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

The moral of this story is that randomized preconceptions are not the lack of preconceptions. You just don't know what they are. The psychology professor is doing much the same thing. Simply by getting rid of what prejudices the students have which the professor can detect, doesn't mean that the students don't have any prejudices left. Worse, now no one knows what those prejudices are, and cannot act to instill a more useful set of beliefs. In computer science terms, the goal of initializing a neural network is not to get rid of any "preconceptions", but to give it the best "preconceptions" for the the neural net to start learning with.

Students, following only the common and mundane goals of money, fame, "success", are missing out from the greater enjoyment of life. Too few, and very often far too late, realize that they don't like what they're doing. "The most common student view lacks an awareness of the depths as well as the heights, and hence lacks gravity." There needs to be some energy, some driving force, whether from the reading of the classics or from some other source to propel students above hoi polloi. Bloom at one point called this "indignation". "Indignation is the soul's defense against the wound of doubt about its own; it reorders the cosmos to support the justice of its cause. It justifies putting Socrates to death. Recognizing indignation for what it is constitute knowledge of the soul, and is thus an experience more philosophic than the study of mathematics."

But what can schools and universities do? "Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to see that completion."

My favorite quote in the book simultaneously points out the problem and the solution:

The only way to counteract this tendency [that the here and now is all there is] is to intervene most vigorously in the education of those few who come to the university with a strong urge for the un je ne sais quoi, who fear that they may fail to discover it, and that the cultivation of their minds is required for the success of their quest. We are long past the age when a whole tradition could be stored up in all students, to be fruitfully used later by some. Only those who are willing to take risks and are ready to believe the implausible are now fit for a bookish adventure. The desire must come from within.

Drunk

I have too much wine in me to properly write a post, so I'll postpone that to some other time. Thanks for understanding.

Eliza the Psychologist

Last week's question: Why do children like playing on swings and slides?

You know, even after spending some time looking on Google, I couldn't find a satisfactory answer to this question. If I may, however, I would like to propose the following partial solutions:

• Swings and slides both offer the kid motion, and it's faster motion than they at that age can acheive themselves. So it offers a novel sensation for the children.
• Along similar veins, at least the slide offers a new tactile experience as well. I can't think of that much else where you can feel solid material sliding underneath your fingers.
• Slides and swings are usually located in playgrounds, where lots of children gather. The opportunity to play with other children form the last part of the appeal.

Some adults (like me!) still go and play on slides and swings, and personally I think it's for much the same reason. Of course, as herion_e pointed out, there's also the nostalgia for us, too.

Building on the last point above, this week's question is: why do humans have social needs?

Python Bashing

As a computer science major, it is not surprising that I write a lot of small programs every day. From simple things like modifying some text input in some way (a chain of sed's), to writing my alarm clock, a twitter backup, and an ISBN converter. My journal search tool was written by myself, and that goes back quite a ways.

All of the programs mentioned above, however, are Bash scripts.

I'm actually a little sheepish about this. After all, Bash is not a real programming language, but just a way to automate a few administrative operations. There is no type system, no support libraries, no object oriented utilities.

I've thought about doing more things in python, but somehow there's a barrier to entry to it. I reasoned that since what I do is mostly with text, it's easier to read from files in Bash than in python (a single cat as opposed to open().read()). But really that shouldn't be a problem. The output might be an issue too, if I wanted things in nice columns and what not. But then instead of column or paste I would just be using printf or equivalent.

I was digging around Paul Graham's older essays, and I came across his one titled "Being Popular". It's about what he things makes programming languages popular. Most of the attributes in the essay don't describe the Bash script very well, except for the section on Throwaway Programs. And that, I think, is exactly why I use Bash scripts so often.

Because I'm using Linux, a lot of my operations are done on the command line. I don't just mean the crazy programmer things like compiling or system administration, but I mean every day things like moving files, writing essays, even reading a book. My volume control, in fact, is also a command line program (alsamixer; although now I have a keyboard shortcut for that and I rarely actually open alsamixer). Given that I'm in a terminal so often, Bash is practically always open for me.

It is precisely this always available attribute which makes me use Bash. As Graham mentioned, I don't want to write something, then wait for it to compile, then run it to see if it works. Bash works as an interactive prompt, and I can type the whole program in "one line" and just run that. More that that, I can test things a lot quicker in Bash than I can in C or Java. Just open a new terminal (Ctrl-N) and I have a clean slate to test if a certain line of my program does what it wants. Python, of course, is also interactive, but it is unfortunately not as easily accessible from the desktop. I have to type a full 7 keys (P-Y-T-H-O-N-(enter)) to get to the interactive shell, and this slows down the entire process.

So until someone manages to use python as their main shell, I'm sticking with Bash.

Killing Children

It is commonly known that a lot of computer jargon are tongue in cheek, especially when they were first developed. For examples, processes are compared to people, so when they spawn other processes, the original one is called the parent and the other one the child. When you stop a process, it's called killing it. There are also times when the process is dead but still taking up resources, and very naturally we call them zombies...

Recently I ran into the problem of killing child processes. I want the output of a command in a variable, so something like this:

output="$(command...)"

The problem is two fold: the command itself spawns new children, and the command I'm running may not terminate. What I want to do is set a timer, then when the time is up I would kill the process. To kill it though, I would have to kill the youngest (inner most) child. I couldn't find a simple way to do this, so this is what I came up with:
 

output="$(command...)" &
t=1
d=0
while (( "$t" < 120 && "$d" == 0 )); do
    sleep 1
    if jobs | grep -v 'Done' | grep -v 'Exit 1' | grep 'parse' > /dev/null; then
        t="$(( $t + 1 ))"
    else
        d=1
    fi
done
if (( "$d" == 0 )); then
    ps -AH | grep -A 10 "^ *$(jobs -l | awk '{print $2}')" | grep -B 10 ps | grep -v ps | awk '{print $1}' | while read pid; do
        kill -9 "$pid"
    done
    output=''
else
    output="$(command..)"
fi 

My question is, is there a simpler way?

Swinger Party

Last week's question: What is the legal status of the verdicts shown on court tv programs?

Apparently, the legality and degree of legal binding for these shows are done on a per show basis. The People's Court's verdict is supposed to be binding, as are the verdicts in Judge Judy. Judge Joe Brown's verdicts, however, has no real judicial power. What makes this partially interesting is that both the persecutor and the defendant are paid some amount to be on the show, and whatever damages award at the end are deducted/added to that payment as necessary. The only advantage to doing this over going to actual small claims court (which has a similar damage limit of $5,000) is that you get more publicity, and you don't have to get a lawyer. Still, I would never do something like that even if the public might be on my side. I just can't take seriously people who want to go on TV during a court case.

This week's question: I've visiting a local playground a lot lately, suddenly being in the mood to play on the swings. But why do kids (and adults) like to play on swings and slides?