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By the president of Cypress Semiconductor speaking before congress, in the 1990s.  Well worth reading.

Some comments on Marvin Minsky’s writing on this mistaken ways in which we teach children.  First: his article.

Looking at the systemic failures of the US education system leaves me unable to see a viable route to a high functioning system[1].  This leaves me wondering, when I  have children, how to deal with educating them when even the very best private OR public schools have to conform to a very broken system, and when home schooling might even be illegal.

The only solid answer I can come up with is to move, though I am not sure where to.  I live in Tokyo right now, but the school system there is even worse.

On a different note, I was surprised that Minsky makes the mistake of suggesting that it is a positive thing that subjects other than math are taught by bombarding students with tons of new words to remember (names, dates, etc), saying “[in other areas] each pupil learns hundreds of new words in every term. You learn the names of many countries and organizations, the names of leaders and battles and wars”

The students by and large “learn” these useless data points one week, regurgitate them for the test, and then forget them when the testing is over.  We would do far better to teach people to think for themselves, to analyze information as it comes at them, and to focus, in as much as we really want them to remember history, on the relation of people and events as a narrative story, rather than obsessing on meaningless dates.

[1] world-leading in meaningful terms, not just learned-knowledge tests.

Listening to the BBC News podcast for 2008 March 10, they have a fascinating debate between the host and a deaf parent, where the deaf parent, Tomato Licci (sp?) argues with real vigor and tremendous intellectual dishonesty, for his right to pay to have an IVF embryo that is deaf, versus requiring that IVF-created embryos of deaf parents be screened for deafness.

His key argument?  Deafness is not a disability, since there is deaf culture, and he wants his children to be part of that culture.

The host responds quite nicely but logically that obviously it is a disability, since you cannot HEAR, while certainly a hearing person can learn to sign.

The parent just retreats to arguing about discrimination and the horror of calling the inability to hear a disability.

I would like to actually hear an argument about whether parents should be allowed to choose to have disabled embryos engineered for them, regardless of the disability.  There are certainly those out there that would love to be able to choose to have a child that never became an adult.  Is that right?  Is that just?  I don’t know the answer to that.

I love the band, I love the music.  I even went to see them live recently and would gladly pay for a high definition DVD of the performance, if they ever make one, it was that amazing.

But this extremely slow film, even at 2x fast forward, still manages to express in an hour what should be about a 5 minute short film, and even then it would put me to sleep.  Avoid.

I woke up this morning after an unusually vivid dream in which I was at a tech conference and stumble upon a demonstration of a new immersive 3d viewing system where you sit down at a table that has a set of glasses with flat semi-transparent screens for lenses, attached to a swing arm (think Pixar’s Luxo Jr lamp) so it can minutely track your head’s rotation and position.  On the table were special sheets of plastic paper that the display could understand the position of, and map showing you data as if it was on the paper.  Bending and wobbling the paper even produced nice distortion of the data, and if you bent the paper too much it would sometimes fail to fully faithfully reproduce the right distortion of the virtual paper.

There was no eyestrain, and although the imagery produced was of fairly large pixel-size, the width and depth of perceived field was nearly the entire size of an office desk.