House of Eratosthenes

Ooh. I kinda like that. Makes this a sort of Republican movie: The bad guy is into “sharing,” thinks there’s something wrong with the good guy because he won’t share.

Actually, that feeds into why Superman is my favorite Superhero. The origin. Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, Fantastic Four, The Flash, Spider Man…they all put themselves in certain situations. Yes, external factors exerted a motivation on them, but they enjoyed the benefit of choice. I’ve always identified with Superman because he never consciously selected a single thing, ever, not once.

And every single adventure the Man of Steel has, is centered around the singular question of: How can I use my gifts to effect the best possible outcome?

Meanwhile, jealous little people talk smack about him because he has ability, and for no other reason. But his abilities are still limited. He makes his way on the salary of a senior reporter for the Daily Planet, walking to work from his humble apartment at 344 Clinton Street, Metropolis, Apartment 3-D. On some level, I’ve been identifying with this. My entire life, really.

The latest: I’m still re-adapting to bachelorhood after my wife lit out of here in December 21st. Her duty as doting daughter is fulfilled, her father passed away surrounded by friends and family, December 29, at 11:39 at night local time, or something very close to that. That happens to be — in a cruel twist of fate — our first wedding anniversary. It’s now January 5th, he’s cremated, she’s ready to bring back a portion to scatter into the Pacific Ocean. (He always wanted to come, but was scared of our earthquakes, supposedly.)

But, the blizzard. She’s trapped. She’s lost her Dad, I can’t do anything to comfort her except talk to her on the phone, and she’s trapped.

As for me…oh, can we please get this one thing straight? I DO NOT HAVE A GIRLFRIEND IN CLOVIS, CA. Yes, I did head down there. You know why? Because they had an economical but high-quality hotel, and Starbucks, and Hooters, all within one square mile of each other. That’s it, and that’s all.

My Monday-to-Friday brain cycles have been entirely devoted to work…I’ve got my own stuff I’m doing, on evenings and weekends, and lately I’ve hit a bit of an impasse, even though what I’m trying to implement (for free, with nobody cutting me paychecks for accomplishing anything, let alone just trying) is vastly, vastly, many orders of magnitude simpler than other things I’ve managed to get done. The kitchen is a fucking goddamn mess. The car is a mess. Everything’s filthy. I miss my wife terribly. And when everything is completely quiet, it still feels like there’s a John Phillips Sousa band playing in my head because I can’t concentrate on what I’m doing.

So, yeah. I clock out and actually book a hotel room. Take my Trek 7300 with me. Apart from the bike, it’s really no different from what Christopher Reeve did in Somewhere In Time…except my woman is separated from me by distance, not by time. It’s just old-fashioned writer’s block.

In this case it breaks down pretty simply. I have two problems. One, I needed to figure out how to instantiate a new object with symbol-lookup, every time a “call” command was invoked within a new scripting language I’ve kinda sorta been inventing, in order to implement an effective regression test against a math library I put together. Two, I’ve been coming to grips with a rule that I had not confronted until now: You can’t put anything in a union that isn’t POD. Well, I solved problem #1 between 1:30 a.m. and 4:30 a.m. in my hotel room. Then, I solved it some more between 6:00 a.m. and 7:30 a.m. at the local Starbucks. Problem #2 I knocked out in ten minutes after I returned home. See? That’s how it works. You can sit at home with your thumb up your butt wondering what to do, FUCKING ENDLESSLY, or you can get away, spend a little bit of time and a little bit of cash, and solve the goddamn mutherfucking problem.

I’ve been around the block with this kind of stuff, I know how it goes. To me, it’s all part of the routine. You try little things to get past the barricade, then you go on to bigger things. Occasionally, it rises to the magnitude of renting a hotel like Christopher Reeve did. You just do whatever it takes.

But, I’m on Facebook. And all our friends know about what’s been going on. “Why are you in Clovis??” “Why are you in Clovis??”

I AM IN CLOVIS BECAUSE I DON’T WANT TO BE TOILING OVER THIS STUPID FUCKING BUG AFTER MY WIFE COMES HOME AND I’D MUCH RATHER BE WATCHING TEEVEE SHOWS WITH HER SITTING NEXT TO ME. That’s why I’m in Clovis. Or, a few hours ago, was in Clovis.

Because I’d much rather be watching teevee with my wife by my side. Even though what we’d be watching, in all likelihood, is NCIS. I’m rather burned out on that. But I’d lunge for it in a heartbeat, if it meant I could watch it with my wife. I happen to like her. I miss her. And…truth be told, I’m wishing I spent a bit more time watching her “stupid” teevee shows with her, before she had to take off because her father’s vital organs started shutting down.

All of that is a digression, though. I come back home to find out: The Niners won. In spite of that — perhaps, because of that? — none of my Facebook friends want to offer anything by way of: Why can you not declare a C++ object to be a part of a union, even though you can declare it within a struct? They’d rather think about football.

Well. Who can blame them!

But there is something going on here that concerns me, and more than a little bit. I’m a child of the seventies and eighties. Contrary to what has been thought by the many, many liberals who have “debated” me on the Internet over the years, I am not the product of old-money. There were no resources available to send me to college, and if there were, I did not have the GPA to justify it. I have never been college material. But I was raised to solve problems. I did that, and life has been good to me. I am not a candidate to be interviewed on Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs…although, I should be, and if it were to happen, I would consider it a very high honor. I do not wear my first name on a badge on my shirt. Although, in my mind’s eye, I do. I do not think of computer programming as any kind of white-collar, let alone savant-intellectual, affair. I never have. I have always thought of it as on par with stacking lumber. Just problem-solving. Nothing more than that. More blue-collar than white-collar. Just implementing stuff, so that the people way-up-there who have to make real decisions, can concentrate on those decisions, after I make sure the machines do what they’re supposed to be doing. All these years, on some level, I’ve always thought of myself as a sort of janitor or something.

And, I’ve always thought of myself — always had to think of myself — as the beneficiary of an uncommon bit of good fortune. No, wait. That is an understatement. An historical bit of good fortune. Fantastic fortune. Like, you fire a bullet out of your gun, someone else fires a bullet that hits your bullet and knocks your bullet out of the air. That kind of good fortune.

Since about the seventeenth century or so, we have had this institution we have called “college” that is supposed to — let’s be honest, okay? — put on this good show about trying to educate the masses so everyone can be moar-better-equal, while in reality, laboring tirelessly to preserve and perpetuate a caste system.

The era to which we have become accustomed over the last thirty years, which we are now abandoning, typified by this unforgettable commercial…

…is coming to an end, I sense. My last job interview I was asked three questions — which I aced, but the interview was a fail and probably because I’m too expensive for the gig (since this is all pretty much freshman-knowledge):

What is 2 to the power of 5?

what is 2 to the power of 16?

Please e-mail me a code fragment that will read in a string of characters, reverse it, and output the result to console.

When the above commercial came out, you could ask people in their mid-thirties these questions and, at the very, very least, they might display a sense of intellectual curiosity (even though that would make them baby-boomers): Gosh, yeah, you know I should make an effort to look into that. See, back then everybody understood the concepts: Computers were doing all these wonderful and amazing things, even though at core, all they were doing was distinguishing a zero from a one. All these cool things they did were derivative of that. It fell to humans to figure out how the more complex problems were being successfully puzzled out by machines that, internally, could only resolve that most simplistic problem, distinguishing a zero from a one.

Nowadays, so much more has become possible. And the humans have become stupid — again. The man-in-the-street is no longer intrigued by how complex problems can be made possible by a stupid machine that can’t do anything more than distinguish zeroes from ones. Thirty years later, today’s man-in-the-street sees that all as “geek stuff.” It isn’t something he should make the time to sit down and figure out. Jersey Shore beckons.

I’m coming out of an era in which the seventeenth-century, “college kids rule” model has been upset. I do not have any college experience. At all. Well, save for three quarters of a corporate accounting course at a community college, and that (if memory serves) was all on video. My only real diploma is high school, and that, I think, was a GPA of 2.65 or some such. And yet I am a builder of applications. I have managed requirements for large projects. Huge projects. I have coded my balls off. I have been a project manager. I rose to become the senior engineering resource for a blue-chip company, responsible for deploying all applications throughout the enterprise, of a ten thousand seat wide area network. That is not a testimonial to me being smart, or even to me being bull-headed. It is a testimonial to my blind dumb-ass luck. I had been born, and had come of age, when Prometheus came around with a whole new brand of “fire” to offer to the mortals. It is phenomenally good luck, on the magnitude of a bullet knocking another bullet out of the sky.

Folks, we are fucking blowing it.

These kids growing up now, who are younger than my son, they’re getting the shaft. Good and hard. They should be just like me, each and every one of them. It isn’t happening, because this stuff relies on just a little bit of intellectual curiosity on the part of the moppet. But if the moppet shows just a little bit of this, quicker than you can say “blue pill” he is medicated.

My son has a diagnosis of “severe Autism” because, and only because, his mother wanted him to have one. After an entire decade of everybody arguing about this non-stop, nobody has stepped forward with a good definition of what it is he isn’t supposed to be able to do. It isn’t just him. There’s a whole generation behind this. Kids who aren’t supposed to be taught things, because they can’t handle the emotional trauma of learning to do things they aren’t supposed to be able to learn to do. But the authorities who say so, can’t define what these kids can’t learn how to do. It’s all blind-faith stuff. It’s all manufactured-disability. We found that out, for sure, after driving six hundred miles so we could go to the disposition meeting and find out why my son is being diagnosed. Turns out, there isn’t a shred of real “science” to it at all. I asked the doctor what this “brain” thing was she thought she found, and she said I was “bullying” her, then proceeded to bully me, refusing to answer, refusing to consider, refusing to discuss. So that’s where we are. Pushy women refuse to discuss things, and we project the dysfunction onto the next generations of boys who aren’t showing the proper qualities of malleability. Then we diagnose-it-out-of-the-way. And call it “science,” even though none of the “scientists” can answer any questions.

Manufactured. Disabilities.

And this in the age when high-school graduates can become architects of how everything fits together, when they can dictate how it’s all supposed to work, if they just show some work ethic and take the initiative to figure out cause-and-effect…since no one else is bothering to. Prometheus has come around a second time, to give us fire from the gods. We just told him to go fuck himself sideways. Now we’re going back to our football games, after making sure our kids have been properly medicated…so they don’t develop any of this unhealthy curiosity about complicated numbers and computers and shit…GOOAAAAALLLL!!!!!!!!!!

Revenge of the Nerds? It happened. It came and it went. Now we’re medicating.

We are blowing it. Big time. Words cannot describe.

I miss my wife. My son, too. So much.

I miss the olden days. When strength was strength, something to be adored. When weakness was weakness, something to be abhorred.

I really don’t know what motivates us nowadays. You want me to state it really honestly? I feel like the whole thing has sort of passed me by. I don’t understand why we treat weakness as strength and vice-versa. I’ve got some ideas about it. But, like a lot of old people from our times and from days gone by, I find myself grappling with a newer confusion about it all. I want to stay curious, and to do that, I have to stay humble so I want to stay humble.

But if you forced me to take a guess about it, like, with a gun to my head — I’d say we’ve been losing our way because we’re just too comfortable and we’re just too bored. We’re losing our grip on reality.

I don’t understand why we treat weakness as strength and vice-versa.

Me neither, but if you wanted my one-sentence statement on what’s wrong with the world, that would be it, right there. I’m not gonna say autism doesn’t exist — your comments are infested by a group of bona-fide Asperger kids right now — but it’s waaaaay the fuck over-diagnosed. I’ve got friends and family in the education racket, and they all joke (sub rosa, of course) that the first week of the semester is the disability sweepstakes. Endless lines of kids coming up after class with their endless binders of forms, all detailing all the “help” they “need” for their “learning disabilities.”

999 cases out of 1000, they’re just special little snowflakes caught on the horns of that most modern dilemma — everyone insists everybody is unique and special, yet nobody knows how to deal with anyone who isn’t a complete push-button, check-box conformist. Tommy doesn’t have autism; he just needs a swift kick in the ass, but he won’t get one, because his dad lives out of state and the guy that lives with his mom is a bigger slacker than he is. Janey doesn’t have “dyslexia;” she reads Twitter and Facebook &c just fine. She just needs to put them away and pay attention in class, but she won’t, because Mom’s far more concerned about her making the cheer squad than learning anything.

And so it goes, all the way down the line. If you can’t be distinguished in any other way, get yourself a “learning disability.” Hey, it’s attention! Finally an authority figure has to care about you as a (kinda sorta) individual. It beats bewildered indifference, which is the default parenting style of the Dumbest Generation of Narcissists in the History of the World.
- Severian | 01/06/2014 @ 08:28
The primary purpose of the public education establishment is to provide the idea of victimization throughout the population and promote the idea that it is the fault of the white guys. The white guys can not be victims so there is little to keep the educational establishment from drugging and doping them up to keep them quiet and passive. You need only look at the glassy eyed shooters in school that are being ramped up or off of psychotropic drugs. Both elementary educators and the welfare class are the matriarchy of the day and they are failing to produce productive citizens. They may have banned the horror of dodge ball but we are winding up with a self destructive class that feels entitled to its every wish and many willing to kill for those wishes if that’s what it takes. They speak of inequality but the inequality they should focus on is the inequality of violent crime as they could locate who the problem children actually are. Look at a violent crime map and figure out who raised the criminals…who bore them, preached to them, and educated them?
- indyjonesouthere | 01/07/2014 @ 12:22
Please enlighten me as to why the second question is even relevant off-hand as an interview question. I don’t consider myself a programmer, but I have spent a lot of time WITH programmers and do have a tiny amount of knowledge of the subject. From what I have seen once 10,000 units are hit terminology simply switches to the next iteration, aka “kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta, exa, yotta” yada yada yada. Is there something particular to coding that would make this number something an interviewee must know without pen and paper?
- P_Ang | 01/09/2014 @ 15:56
With hardware programming it often is handy when engineers have thatt arithmetic “down cold,” you might say. It helped me. But I would never try to assert that it’s absolutely vital to getting the job done, even within that discipline. Think they were just using it as an indicator.
- mkfreeberg | 01/09/2014 @ 16:13
Ok, thank you for the answer. I have a B.A. in English and an A.S. in 3D animation and game design, but honestly the programming (and discrete math) for the second degree really burned me out. I don’t think I could handle the constant brain drain of heavy math and/or programming. I do have a great respect for the people who can do that daily, especially those who can both do that as a job, and yet write eloquently at home.
- P_Ang | 01/10/2014 @ 15:20
Yeah, actually I was a failure in that job. Turns out “hardware” programming requires “soft” skills, or it did at that company anyway. They wanted me to get jiggy-wit the technical details, not by way of things actually written down, but by way of hob-nobbing and such. I’ve never been too strong in that department.
- mkfreeberg | 01/10/2014 @ 23:01

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We’re Telling Prometheus To Go F*ck HimselfSunday, January 5th, 2014

We’re Telling Prometheus To Go F*ck Himself
Sunday, January 5th, 2014