On the way home from work today, I noticed a couple trees with some yellow leaves mixed in. Its FAR too early to be seeing that. ☹

<work rant>My office is two floors, but admittedly, none of the doors are closed anywhere, and the walls are rather thin. That being said, there is a fair amount of computer noise being generated downstairs, and I hear very little of it. So the office is far from being an empty cave in which everything is heard everywhere all the time.

With that introduction comes my complaint. My boss is in today. Bossman is an “interesting” person to say the very least. In today’s complaint at issue is his use of his cell phone. Bossman rarely answers the land line phones. He sometimes makes an outgoing call from them, but even that is unusual. Bossman likes to wander around as he talks, in and out of the building, in and out of the car, wherever. Bossman thus always uses his cellphone. So far so good; cellphones have all sorts of issues, but in general I can live with people using them.

Bossman is unique even among obsessive cellphone users though. Bossman has a couple of different fears.

• Bossman has a thing about germs. The little speaker holes for the microphone, if placed close to the mouth, offer a good place for germs to grow. That aside, Bossman would probably mention that hands can be pretty germy and handle the cellphone all the time.
• Bossman is paranoid about cellphone radiation. I can sympathize with this fear a little bit. Cellphones do put out quite a bit, and studies on the subject go both ways. Most people with this concern seem to think this a reason not to use cellphones. Bossman is not one of them though.

These two fears lead to the odd reality. Bossman constantly uses his cellphone, and constantly uses the speakerphone capability of the cellphone. This is not a good, nor logical, combination. Since the speakerphone quality is poor, Bossman’s conversations tend to be stressful things, both for Bossman (who gets short tempered with people he is talking to, especially if they interrupt him (he interrupts people all the time, so sometimes it feels like interrupting him is the only way to correct a wrong impression)), and for the person he is talking to, who likely can only hear half of what is being said.

What is that you ask? You see, Bossman likes to call from the car: with road noises, and with bridges causing momentary static and so on. Bossman likes to call from restaurants, where there is all sorts of background noise. And worst of all, Bossman loves to call from airports; where you can hear the announcements more clearly than Bossman. And remember, Bossman is using a cellphone speakerphone. Which can only handle one sound a time. So if it picks up on you speaking, it does not transmit Bossman speaking (and vice versa). Worse, if it picks up on that background noise, it no longer sends Bossman’s attempt at communication.

Bossman, as I said, rarely uses the land line phones. As a result, Bossman ends up calling all sorts of people, particularly customers, from his cellphone. Customers are not always the brightest of people, but they are generally capable of noticing that if they want to talk to Bossman, they will not reach him on the landlines. So they call his cellphone. So Bossman is constantly changing cellphones and phone numbers.

But all of this, annoying as it is for me at times, is an aside today. People have heard me complain about all of this before. Today though, Bossman is wandering around downstairs, on the cellphone speaker phone, apparently working his way through some computerized menu system TIME AND TIME AGAIN. I am not downstairs to see it, but I have no doubt what is happening. Sometimes when in the office, Bossman will place a call, put it on speakerphone, and proceed to wander around a space talking to the cellphone, but not carrying it with him. So undoubtedly, Bossman, who is highly distractable, is wandering too far away from the phone and missing the critical part of the menu system when he is able to make his choice.

Additionally, for some reason, the voice of this computerized system is carrying very well.

</work rant>

As an amusing aside, the cause of this cellphone call is apparently that Bossman forgot to pay his electric bill long enough that the electric company has cut him off. Apparently this is not the first time.

The National Catholic Register has a very interesting article on single-sex schools for this week’s edition.^[1] Taking an in-depth look at the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) campaign against them, it also covers in some detail the research refuting the ACLU position. Of particular interest to me was a school that randomly assigned students into either single sex classrooms or mixed classrooms. Children of both sexes performed significantly better in the single-sex classrooms.

While the ACLU is technically right in saying that the existence of a single-sex approach to education creates the possibility of discrimination, I believe that it is wrong to say that it must cause such discrimination. It simply does not stand to reason that it should be impossible for a district to create equivalent classes in each school. The weakness of the ACLU’s position is further revealed by studies such as the one mentioned above: for in such a situation, there would be the same teacher, the same text, so on and so forth, and yet the ACLU would remain opposed.

Women can certainly do well in and provide valuable contributions to many of the areas, law, medicine, science, so on, where they have historically been excluded. That is a far cry, however, from proving that they provide these contributions while thinking and learning in precisely the same way their male counterparts do. Indeed, such a conclusion would seem counter-intuitive. If the addition of women (as opposed to a woman who happens to excel individually) brings something to the field, then it must be because they bring something to the field that was lacking before.

But that’s rather an aside. Lets look at the following quote:

According to a systematic review released by the Department of Education in 2005, of 2,221 studies, the department found a preponderance of studies that yielded results lending support to same-sex schooling.^[2]

Clearly here, regardless of the accuracy of my ideas here on how men and women contribute (differently, but both valuably), we are doing women a disservice by educating them with the guys. I am told there is a shortage of women in science, computers, and engineering. Might this be the cause? Are you positive that the situation might not be improved if we were not quite so zealous about opening each and every single-sex classroom to members of the opposite sex? For even all-girls schools have come under legal pressure to open up.

Having been told that rap is 90% of the music out there, I wonder what my CCD kids last year would think of the rules at Ave Maria University.^[1] ;-) Not that I think there is much chance that many if any of them would choose to go to Ave Maria, but it would be … interesting to see their reaction to the policy.

yay for a recent meme in the community that generates a plethora of quotable quotes. ☺ Two more for the collection:

“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.” —George Orwell

“All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.” —Carl Sagan

Proof, if any were needed (I have a quote from Freud in my collection after all), that even those I tend to disagree with can produce a pearl of wisdom now and then.

“Beware the man of one book.” —Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274)

“Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.” —G. K. Chesterton (1874 – 1936)

“The family is one of nature’s masterpieces.” —George Santayana (1863 – 1952)

“The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.” —William Cowper (1731 – 1800)

“The trouble with normal is it only gets worse.” —Bruce Cockburn

“I’m lazy. But it’s the lazy people who invented the wheel and the bicycle because they didn’t like walking or carrying things.” —Lech Walesa (1943 – )

“The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.” —Dante Alighieri (1265 – 1321)

Three local governments (councils) in the United Kingdom are trying to encourage recycling.^[1] To do this, they want to install RFID chips in the trash cans, and have the trucks calculate how much trash is in each can.  Residents can thus be charged by volume.  As the recycling bins would be exempt from this, residents would presumably start recylcing more.

There are several noteworthy things about this.   First and foremost, it ignores basic human nature:  the system is very easy to cheat.   How hard is it to take a bag or two of trash and put it in your neighbor’s can late one night or early one morning?  Would this be common? Probably not, there are social pressures to resist such attempts, as well as simple laziness.  It would, however, certainly happen.  At what rate I do not know, and it might not be at a significant enough rate to make such a plan unworkable or undesirable.

So much for the obvious level.  From the article, it appears that this is being done in response to pressure from the European Union, which is upset that the United Kingdom “has one of the worst recycling rates in Europe.”^[2] The European Union is apparently going to impose fines on the United Kingdom if the situation does not improve. I see, more and more, the European Union acting as a government and not as a treaty organization. To my mind, the difference is that the latter is far less binding, potentially ignorable, while the government has the power to enforce its decisions.

Lauren, the most wonderful girl in the world, is no longer my girlfriend: she is now my fiancée!!!!

update 2006-08-28 1904 EDT Some pictures are up here. None of the ring yet, as we were using Lauren’s camera, and she prefers not to be in pictures. As a result, many of the ones she took remain on my computer, but not up on the website. I see little point in pictures of me, no one but Lauren wants to look at them anyway. ;-)

update 2006-08-28 2053 EDT On second thought, I posted all of them. It was easier to do that after Lauren sent me the 3 of the ring, than to pick and choose again, esp. as she wanted me to set up a site with pictures with french labels for her grandmother.

The Mexican government has proposed new text books for biology. They are quite graphic. They reportedly contain an explicet statement that homosexuality and masturbation are “acceptable” behaviors. They also apparently encourage students to download pornography.^[1] This is bad enough in and of itself; I would be up in arms anyway, simply for the fact that a biology textbook is daring to make a moral judgement. There is, however, more.

In defense of this textbook, which is facing opposition from both the Church and some parents’ groups, the Mexican Health Secretary states that “at the end of the day, the government’s public policies should be based on scientific evidence.”^[2] Now, mind you, a government could do far worse than to follow this policy, even though it can lead to abominations. That really misses the point though. Since when is there “scientific evidence” that homosexuality is an “acceptable” behavior? When did the feild of ethics start being a branch of science? Can I get a bachelors of science in it from any reputable university? Are there scholarly journals in this scientific field? Who is researching it? How are they conducting their experiments? For that matter, what experements would one perform to determine the acceptability of such behavior? How is this science‽

Returning for a minute here, why should government blindly follow science? Certainly, we would end up in a ludicrous position if government ignored science, but do we really want to let scientists rule us? There is some research, such as that done by some Nazi scientists on the Jews in the concentration camps, that simply should not happen. It is a function of government to restrain science into morally acceptable channels. If government starts simply following science, it will quickly lead to moral anarchy, and from there to civil anarchy.

Finland argued that the convention is a broad statement of principles and not intended to cover specific medical situations such as end of life issues. Ironically, they argued the opposite when supporting the inclusion of “reproductive health services” that address beginning of life issues.^[1]

It is indeed ironic. Unfortunately, no one in the main stream press will call them on it.