Why are streetlamps yellow? Perhaps it flows with white headlights, green traffic lights and red taillights. Maybe the lamps brighten the alleys to deter crime. Or maybe the most economic bulb available just happens to be naturally yellow. Someone, sometime ago, had to engineer this, and he certainly did it with brilliance because streetlamps are so widespread today. So why did his plan of action—yellow sodium street lights—succeed? It was because his idea worked. It was his engineering genius, diligence, and spot-on prediction of unintended consequences that gave him the power and influence to implement his idea. With the onset of this new age, that isn’t true anymore. Take the story of Mr. Streetlamp one step further: his idea became widespread because people listened. People, both technically educated and not, listened because his ideas made sense. But made sense to whom?… more →

If you genuinely hate school, I encourage you to rethink your views. There’s this peculiar, self-perpetuating idea that exists. It’s already so thoroughly analyzed and commonplace that it’s ridiculous, forbidden even, to speak about it. It is this: the entirety of education is great. While guys in other countries have to deal with real problems, we have our easy pretend-problems that surprisingly can be corrected, sitting at a desk. It’s disturbing how easy education is, away from any sort of trouble. Even more disconcerting is the complacency with which this gift is accepted. So much so, that people will complain about it. That is an undesirable extreme. There are few things in reality that search for moderation or some sort of middle-ground. Our culture excessively focuses on the few examples of supposed ”balance” in nature because they are usually so rare: one… more →

I used to think that people were compensated for their deficiencies: if a person wasn’t too bright, he would have creativity and artistic talent to make up for it. So a week ago, Obama announced his plan to create a government-issued “Internet ID” for citizens. After only reading the title of the article, people scroll right down to the comment box and cry ”omg government can control our internets” and ”omg obama is taking away our freedoms blah blah socialists blah, blah blah 1984!”. Privacy is one of those things that people don’t understand, at all. The US Government is trying to tackle a problem that has existed for ages: identification. The password problem. What’s the password problem? Well, they exist. Now, I could write a whole lot about the ingenuity of memorizing arbitrary strings to prove your identity, but only Yahoo… more →

They sent out the schedule for finals week during afternoon lab on January 3rd. It’s always interesting to see what they come up with. I bet some guy at the district office has to work out these schedules every time something weird happens. The times give priority to consistency for as many students as possible, which excludes periods 2-7 people. So, Mrs. Davies was the first to present the schedule. As a science teacher, she takes an holistic look at the schedule and is satisfied because, well, the data’s all there. What more does science require? Then Mr. Belcher shows it to us and even prints us all a copy, because apparently he likes doing that. He’s like “it’s very confusing, but it makes sense. the logic is there.” He shows us how we get review sessions the day before… more →