Policy matters

I admit it. My eyes glaze over on a lot of important public policy issues. It’s especially foggy when you’ve got one group of advocates loudly advocating one position, and another group advocating something different. And then when it’s something remote from my direct experience, like UK public health policy, it’s even harder to focus.

So, for instance, I tried to puzzle out the Health and Social Care Act of 2012, and even the Wikipedia page was too much for me. I got bogged down in the details, and when the occasional name I knew, like “David Cameron”, came swimming out of the murk, they just discouraged me even more from trying to follow along.

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Emotionally invested in despising philosophy

Yet again, people are asking why are so many smart people such idiots about philosophy? I have a different answer than you’ll find at that link. It’s because so many smart people are idiots about psychology. I deal with a lot of atheists, and one of the many flaws in that group that have been coming to the fore lately is the obliviousness they have to their own motivations.

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Brains are so confusing

Do you need a good, basic introduction to Neurodiversity 101? Here you go.

Neurodiversity is, according to activist Nick Walker, “the diversity of human brains and minds – the infinite variation in neurocognitive functioning within our species.”

Basically, it’s a fancy name for the fact that all our brains and minds are unique and individual. Like snowflakes, no two brains and no two minds are exactly alike.

But that’s not enough! The article also points out that within that range of variation there are some brains that work in a way that society finds acceptable — the neurotypicals. I think it’s safe to say I’m a standard neurotypical, which is not to say that some of the workings of my mind are out of sync with the larger culture, but that I can fit in reasonably well in most circumstances. While someone who is neurodivergent in some way might have extreme difficulty with situations that I find not at all stressful, but that does not mean they are somehow inferior.

Shouldn’t all of this be elementary and taken for granted by teachers, and maybe made part of standard training? I ask because I never did, and it’s taken years of gradual awakening to see what’s going on. It’s also because I’m looking over the midterm status of my students and wondering what I can do to reach some of them who are struggling. I know it’s not because they can’t, but because something I’m doing is failing to communicate.

You can all be grateful for tenure

Otherwise, I might have to pursue this alternative career path.

Also, I have to say, that if a professor wants to do porn in their spare time as a hobby, and it doesn’t affect their work, the University of Manchester has no good grounds for carrying out an internal investigation, and I should hope that at the end of it all, they would simply shrug their collective shoulders and recognize that it’s none of their business.

What about the biology of space battles?

reavers

An interesting discussion of the physics of space battles brings up a lot of good points — those science-fantasy movies with spaceships flitting about ignore a lot of basic physics. Star Wars was basically WWI biplanes whirling around at speeds under 60kph, which is kind of ridiculous. But fun.

This article points out that that’s not how things would play out if ever there were a real space battle. The ships would have to obey physics and orbital mechanics, and there would be a priority on speed and acceleration and rapid maneuvers; also, explosions are kind of useless in a vacuum. So he talks about using big gyroscopes to whip mostly spherical ships around, and they’d be zooming about in complex spirals to take advantage of gravity wells.

But then he talks about crews.

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He’s being silenced…SILENCED! He shouted.

Milo Yiannopoulos is still upset that Twitter removed the little blue verification check mark from his profile. I don’t even get what that is for, how to apply for one, or why anyone would bother, but it’s very, very important to Milo, and he’s been complaining bitterly about it for the past month now. It is an attack on his free speech, don’t you know, and we all know how important it is to these wankers to be able to shriek in public.

Just so you know how important this is, Milo crashed a White House press conference to confront the press secretary. My verification check was taken away for making fun of the wrong group of people, he whined. This is a whole new level of obsession over petty trivia.

I’m speechless.

I think I’ll walk down to the coffeeshop for my morning pick-me-up, and they better not be out of bran muffins today — a man my age needs his fiber. But if they are, I’m just going to turn around and go to the airport, get a flight to Beijing, and demand that President Xi Jinping do something about it! So I might be distracted for a few days.

FYI: I made it to the coffeeshop, and they had ONE bran muffin left. It was so close. Jinping can count himself lucky tomorrow, that by such a narrow margin he has avoided an international incident as an outraged American stormed his office and demanded that he deal with the muffin shortfall.

The compassion of Christ

The Handbook of the Mount Saint Charles Academy, a Christian school, starts well.

Mount Saint Charles Academy admits students of any race, color, national origin or ethnic background to all rights, privileges, programs and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the school. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin or ethnic background in the administration of educational policies, loan programs, and athletic or other school administered programs.

Notice anything missing? Nothing about sexual orientation, and nothing about transgender…oh, wait. They do have a statement on that last one.

Mount Saint Charles Academy is unable to make accommodations for transgender students. Therefore, MSC does not accept transgender students nor is MSC able to continue to enroll students who identify as transgender.

What special accommodations do you need to make for transgender students? Do they have special plumbing? It seems to me that transgender students are able to use the facilities they already have for men and women in the school, so this is a very strange restriction.

You know, if you lack something you need to support a set of your students, the right answer is to fix your facilities; the easy answer is to kick out those students. But that’s also the wrong answer.

Especially when your handbook babbles about the compassion of Christ.