Wrong measurements

Pinkie Pie has been talking about going back to school in the fall.  She is eager to try this out, largely because she wants to spend time with her friends.  She has enjoyed a great many books and shows about high school in her time, and I wonder if she has the wrong idea about what high school entails.

I have grave doubts.  Some of those doubts surround her ability to cope with high school and the workload, as her mental health struggles have made it extremely difficult for her to do the education we are doing at home, and I can't see how she could cope with a full courseload.

My other doubts surround the way school operates in general, particularly the way grades work.  I found a youtube video talking about many of the problems with grades and educational structures and it resonated strongly with me.

The youtuber in question leads off with a story about a kid who gets straight As but who is crushed by the school system because it encourages them to focus entirely on grades instead of learning and inquiry.  That is a negative consequence of our system to be sure, but kids that get straight As but are bored aren't the biggest trouble with the system.  The kids that can't cope with the structure and end up falling through the cracks are much more of a concern.

Still, the main point that grading takes over everything certainly stands.  We are stuck in a situation where parents and governments demand to have education measured.  It is extremely difficult to measure learning, so we rely on test scores as a stand in.  As is so often the case, we end up building the whole system to maximize our results on the metrics we made up, so we end up trying to raise test scores instead of trying to teach more effectively.

Some people will of course argue that we need test scores for university admissions.  There are schools that don't give marks and mature students that don't have standard marks and we make that work, so I don't think we need marks at all.  Still, if we had a bunch of tests for university admission at the end of grade 12 I would be fine with it.  However, numeric marks for younger kids is just a plague with no redeeming value.

We don't need to carefully rank children's learning.  We need to spend our time teaching them more, not working on giving them a number that isn't useful.

All this makes me not want to send Pinkie Pie to high school at all.  Sure, there are lots of things she will learn, but she will also spend way too much time grinding out pointless crap just so the high school can give her a number at the end.  I don't need any damn numbers, and neither does she.  She needs to learn, and to feel like the things she is doing are relevant.

Just like I did in high school, Pinkie Pie sees marks as pointless, and that will sour the entire experience.

Schools have been designed as a training ground for obedient cogs, setting them up to take their place in the machine.  Education is part of the mandate, but the structure is primarily designed to keep them under control and rigidly evaluated.  We are slowly changing this over time, and Ontario is gradually making progress, but it is at a glacial pace.

This shouldn't be taken as an attack on teachers - naturally, there are terrible teachers, but the vast majority I have encountered in my life or through Pinkie Pie have been dedicated to education and wished they could stop wasting so much time on standardized tests and marking.  Unfortunately when you work within the system, there is only so much you can do.

We need a huge rethink of what schools are for.  Unfortunately it will come too late for Pinkie Pie in any case, but if we want a society of creative problem solvers we need to stop spending their entire childhood telling them the thing we want from them is precise regurgitation of particular facts on one particular day.

I don't want a boss, employee, friend, or citizen to be ranked by their ability to score highly on a test, so let's remove that nonsense from our schools.

Am I a criminal?

Today I got in another altercation with religious zealots on the streetcorner.  It irritates me when they stand there handing out literature, but I don't do anything about that.  Today though they ratcheted up the annoyance by setting up a loudspeaker and blasting their "Repent you are going to hell" schtick at extremely high volume.  It was so loud that even in my condo 12 floors up and a block away it was unavoidable.  They had it going for a couple hours and I gradually got more and more angry.  Hundreds or maybe even thousands of people are spending their whole day listening to this pounding noise with its wretched message, and I am not okay with that.

This sort of thing is tricky to navigate because Wendy and I see it so differently.  She hates when religious folks make noise like this, but the idea of doing something about it directly leaves her anxious and upset.  I talked about going down there and yelling at the proselytizers, and this left her deeply worried.  I am sure it was partly social anxiety, but she was also worried one of them would shoot me or something.

I react in the opposite way.  I despise letting jerks crap all over everybody and not doing something out of fear.  I got more worked up as time went by and finally hit a point where I couldn't just sit anymore.  It was time to go get in a fight.

Before I arrived at the point of conflict though I had to make a decision.  Would I ask for change, or demand it?  Asking isn't going to get me in trouble, but it also won't do anything.  They will tell me that they are saving souls or some bullshit and keep on with their noise.  If I demand change though then I have to be ready to have my bluff called.  What do I do when they tell me to go to hell?

The fundamental question is this:  Am I willing to grab their loudspeaker and smash it to pieces if they refuse to turn it off?  Am I willing to commit a crime in order to get some jerks to stop polluting the public space?  Am I a vigilante?

I have to know the answer before I go in.  They don't necessarily know if I am bluffing, but I have to know.  I don't want a short stint in jail, but I also don't want to live in a society where we are so terrified of random assholes that we let them lower everyone else's quality of life.

Realistically of course if I grab a loudspeaker, smash it on the ground, and run, the chance of facing any consequences at all are remote.

I decided I was willing to take the risk.  I would prefer to do the smallest dollar amount of damage possible because that mitigates my risk so I would rely on angry yelling at first, and then would hope to steal their cables or something to render the loudspeaker inoperable.  If the loudspeaker needed smashing though, I was ready to smash it.

I stalked towards them, filled with rage, ready to create a tremendous scene, and realized that the noise had stopped.  A cop was standing beside the religious people talking to them, and had clearly made them turn off the loudspeaker.

I stalked up next to them, stood there staring death at the religious guy, and got a glance from the cop that said "Oh crap, another angry person to death with, maybe if I don't meet his gaze he will go away."  

I did not go away.

I waited a minute and then went on an angry rant about how everyone in their homes around here can hear this junk and have been putting up with it all afternoon.  The cop politely told me it was under control.

The level of tension dropped.  The cop went off to talk to another religous person and the leader and I started talking, but the stakes of this conversation were extremely low.  There is a cop 4 meters away.  We can yell at each other, but we both know neither of us is going to take a swing at the other.  Violence will not ensue.  If the cop hadn't been there though, the encounter might go entirely differently.  At that point we might be hesitant to threaten each other because the other person might actually turn to violence, so anyone escalating would have to worry about personal safety.  As it was though we were free to scream at each other knowing that it wouldn't go further than that.

So we screamed at each other.

Dude:  I *had* to make the volume super loud, because of the construction nearby.

Me:  You *chose* to make it so loud that it was a huge detriment to everyone within a block, this wasn't something that happened to you, this was you being an asshole.

Dude:  Hah!  I am trying to save you and bring you into the arms of Jesus.  What were you gonna do about it anyway?

Me:  If I hear that crap again, I am going to come down here, grab your loudspeaker, and chuck it into one of the construction holes where it will smash to pieces.

Dude:  You don't scare me, with all your big muscles! I was in prison! (Actual quote, I swear.) 

Me:  I am not trying to scare you, you moron.  I am *telling* you that if that speaker goes on again, I will destroy it.

Dude:  You are just made of meat, and you will stand before Jesus in judgement.

Me:  Really?  Are you going to threaten me with the wrath of Odin?  How about Zeus?  Or Nanabijou?  Maybe the Easter Bunny?  Your best friend invisible space wizard is a *myth*.

Dude:  You will go to hell!  Repent!

I didn't repent.

Thankfully, through some combination of serious legal threats from the police and threats of vigilante property destruction the loudspeaker has remained silent.  I feel so much better, sitting in my kitchen *not* hearing fire and brimstone coming from the streetcorner.

I should do this more often, it feels great.

Heavy

A few months ago I looked at myself and realized that I had put on some weight over the course of the pandemic.  I had noticed a few times that I had a bigger tummy than before, and finally it was undeniable - this was no longer a 'drank a lot of water' or 'big dinner' tummy, but long term weight gain.  Upon realizing this, it was obvious why.  I had spent many months sitting in my chair, not getting proper exercise.  I was still doing all my weight training but I wasn't doing any walking except to go to the grocery store.

I was also getting high late at night and snacking on all the things way too often.  The pandemic has led to me being frustrated and lonely, not able to do the things I am used to doing that bring me so much joy.  My DnD games were on hiatus, my travels for gaming conventions were all cancelled, board game nights not allowed, and even visiting The Flautist was off the table.  That left me feeling blue, and pot and snacks helped dull the pain and upset.

My response was quick.  I needed to get more active and stop piling junk into my body.  I added on 30 minutes of walking every day and cut out most of the late night snacking.  This was good in other ways too, because quite frankly I didn't need that food and the walks gave Wendy and I time together and improved my mental health on its own, entirely separate from body shape or size.

I am one of those lucky people whose hunger effectively regulates my weight.  If I just eat when I am hungry and eat healthy food my body maintains a weight I am happy about.  I don't have to starve myself to get to a good weight, I just have to stop messing with my appetite with drugs.

Over the past 2.5 months my weight has dropped back closer to where it was pre pandemic.  Before I began weightlifting I was at 175 pounds, and over the last five years I added on 30 pounds of muscle to sit at 205.  In March of this year I was up to around 215, and now I have dropped back down to 210.  This got me thinking a lot about how I think about my body and how society thinks about fat.

The most absurd thing is the way BMI scores me.  For most of my life I was extremely skinny and yet I scored right in the normal range for BMI.  The system takes your height into account, but it does it so badly that everyone who is tall is shifted heavily towards the overweight side of the spectrum.  Right now I am officially overweight by BMI, which is absurd.  I am a skinny guy with a bunch of extra muscle and five pounds of extra fat, there is no possible way I should be considered overweight.  This picture, for reference, is of an officially overweight person.

Yeah.  'Overweight'.  Now it is clear that BMI does not take into account muscle mass.  This makes it a stupid system, but the fact that it takes height into account so badly that tall people of totally normal build are considered overweight is pathetic.  We shouldn't be using this system for medical diagnosis, or anything else.  It is a classic case of measuring what we can easily measure and confusing that for measuring the right thing.

Figuring out a simple system to categorize people's weight isn't easy.  I don't have a replacement system to offer.  (Improving BMI to properly take height into account is easy, and the fact that we haven't done it is an embarassment.)  However, if a system is garbage we shouldn't stick with it just because we don't have an easy alternative.  Sometimes you just have to toss the system out when it is crap.

This did get me thinking about why I so quickly decided to change my lifestyle.  The main thing was I could see that snacking and sitting weren't good for me.  That is true regardless of my weight, and adding in extra walking and fixing my diet are good by all metrics.

However, I can't deny that part of the motivation was that I didn't like the way my tummy looked.  I was thinking to myself "Dammit I do 200 pushups, 56 deadlifts, and 56 rows a day.  Shouldn't I have a bloody six pack?"  I have never had a six pack, and at this point I am never going to.  My extra bit of belly still bothered me though, and it shouldn't.

That 10 exra pounds around my middle is not a health hazard.  Nobody needs a six pack, and in fact getting one is actually hazardous to the health of most people.  Our bodies are made to store some fat!  I looked fine.

But no matter that I have tons of muscle, no matter that I looked fine, my brain still insisted that I absolutely had to change things.  Vanity and desire for status clearly drove my behaviour no matter how much I could use health to justify it.

That is the way our society deals with fat in a nutshell.  We moralize over people's weight, and go on about health hazards, but most of that is just denying the truth that we want to be skinny for status, and we mock heavy people for that same lack of status.

It sucks.

No matter that I know all this, no matter that I don't want to villify fat, I still made a swift and binding decision to change things when I got some of my own.  

A health condition

A few days ago I was getting groceries and had a difficult interaction with a person in the lineup outside the store.  He was an older man who was wearing a mask in a half assed fashion with it loosely covering his mouth but slid down so it no longer covered his nose.  As we stood in line his mask slipped further and further down until it was sitting around his chin.

It is possible that he didn't notice, and this was entirely unconscious, but I am willing to bet a lot of money that the actual explanation isn't "whoops!" but rather "I don't give a shit about covid transmission and masks are annoying, so I will pretend this just happened and I didn't notice".

I politely said to him "Oh, in case you hadn't noticed, your mask appears to have slipped down."  In text that could appear innocuous, but obviously everyone is going to read that as "Put your damn mask on properly fool, I don't want to get covid from you."

He replied by saying that he didn't *have* to have a mask on, because he had a 'medical condition'.  He followed up by snarkily saying that he would put his mask on, just for me.

I found this infuriating.  I am not trying to enforce some sort of arbitrary dress code.  I don't give a shit about the rules!  I care about disease transmission.  This isn't about me trying to make sure everyone does as they are told, it is about me wanting to end this damnable pandemic.  It isn't about whether you *must* wear the mask, it is about doing so because it is your civic duty to protect other people even if you don't care about your own health at all.

I didn't yell all of that at him, much as I wanted to.  He put on his mask, and for the moment it covered all the breathing bits of him.  He got into the store and immediately took his mask off again once he was more than a few meters from me.

Does he actually have a medical condition that makes mask use unsafe for him?  Possible, but I doubt it.  He was wearing and using a mask, but used it only enough to create plausible deniability.  However, his actual medical status doesn't change my situation at all.  I am still pissed about all the people I see putting in the absolute bare minimum amount of effort required to get people off of their backs.  I am pissed about the woman in my building who held a mask five centimeters in front of her face while talking to the concierge in an attempt to pretend she was actually wearing it.  I am grumpy at all the people wandering about the mall with masks hanging half off of their faces, just having it on enough to not get yelled at.

I wish I knew what I should do about these things.  I am a big loud dude - if I get aggressive with people about this stuff, they are likely to do whatever I say.... for just long enough to get out of my presence.  Is it even worth trying to convince selfish jerks to do the right thing if they are only going to do it as long as my gaze is directly on them?

I don't know.  What I do know is watching people who chafe under the restrictions of the pandemic behave in ways that extend the pandemic makes my blood boil.

Love and Monsters

I just watched the Netflix adventure movie Love and Monsters.  It was great, in no small part because of the superb job done by the lead actor.  There are two things it did well though, and I wanted to comment on them because so few movies get them right.  The two things it did best were monsters... and love.

There will be a spoiler warning halfway through.

First, Monsters.  Love and Monsters is set in the near future in a world where monsters arose from a freak weapons accident and smashed human civilization.  Scattered remnants of humans live in hiding but monsters walk the world freely.  The reasoning given for the monsters was kind of silly from a scientific perspective, but I am totally willing to forgive that.  The important thing is that There Are Monsters, and I just ask that the movie tell me a story from that.

Mostly movies fail at this sort of thing.  They write themselves into corners and then get out with ridiculous Deus Ex Machina endings or insert senseless MacGuffins into the plot to cover for their shortcomings in writing and planning.  You have to strike the right middle ground where you continue to reveal things about the world you have created without making the things you have said previously seem silly.  Each new reveal in a science fiction story should follow from the previous one such that the viewer says "Oh, okay, I see how that would be.  Makes sense."  even if they wouldn't have *predicted* that reveal.

That is the key there.  You want to surprise people a bit, keep them guessing, but you want everything to fit together in the end in a logical manner.  After all the reveals are done, the characters need to have made reasonable choices given the world in which they live.  Love and Monsters does a great job of this.  Throughout the movie you learn more about the monsters and how the world works, and each time it all fits together with what you learned previously.  I couldn't have told you what the final act would look like, but it fits cleanly into the rest of the story so far.

I can accept all kinds of nutty stuff (space wizards with laser swords come to mind) as long as the rest of the story follows sensibly from there.

Now we get into spoilers as we talk about Love.

Twu Wuv appears way too much in movies.  I particularly object to it because of the built in assumptions of exclusivity and eternal duration, but also I think it doesn't well reflect how actual people work.  Relationships are messy, and that messiness does not have to detract from their beauty.

The hero of the story, Joel, is a guy with a crush.  Before the monsters he was dating Aimee and they were in love.  Then monsters came and they were separated by a huge tract of monster infested world.  Seven years pass, and Joel is still desperately in love with Aimee even though he has only spoken to her over a radio a couple of times since.  He has put her up on a pedestal so high that he has convinced himself that he can never be happy without her.

So he suits up and marches across more than one hundred kilometers of monster filled territory to find her.  Without a decent map, a compass, or any sense of how to survive.  This is idiotic, obviously, but it is exactly how lovesick, desperate people behave.  Grand romantic gesture!  Find my Twu Wuv or die in the attempt!

Naturally since Joel is the hero he makes it.  Many trials and much learning occur on the way, of course, because it is an adventure movie, but finally Joel arrives at Aimee's doorstep.

This is the point in a bad movie where they would kiss and reunite and Twu Wuv would make all the problems go away.

But not here!  Joel arrives and finds out that Aimee has moved on.  She still thinks of him fondly, you know, as that guy who she dated in high school who was a real sweetie.  But this whole "I would walk 500 miles" schtick is WAY too much for her.  She has her own life now, and while she is duly impressed by his feat, that isn't changing her mind.

Love and Monsters doesn't try to paint one of them as bad and wrong.  They realize the mixup, both feel kinda bad about the whole thing, and try to muddle along.  I love the idea that love doesn't have to 'work out' or be about betrayal and villainy.  It can just be a thing that is there, and we can empathize with the struggles of the heroes without a canned, predictable conclusion.

More adventure happens, and finally Joel goes back home.  His choice to risk his life mattered, both for his own group and Aimee's.  He learned things and got better, and more importantly he learned to value the things he already had like friendship, instead of pinning his hopes on Twu Wuv with someone he barely even knew.

Maybe someday those two do end up in a relationship.  The ending doesn't prevent that, it just has them in different places, on different courses.  It leaves them like real people, in a spot where even if you love someone or lust after someone you don't have to choose between Twu Wuv or Only Friends or Bitter Enemies.  You can have a thing where there is some love, and fondness, and maybe some lust, and who knows where you end up over the years.

This has immense appeal to me.

Relationships are complicated, and they can be good and fulfilling even if they look nothing like a fairy tale.  I enjoy when movies acknowledge that, and give us some stories that reflect the complexity of real life.

Joel is a character I can believe.  Aimee is a great complement to him, especially because she isn't some damsel in distress that he 'wins' - she is doing her own thing, has her own agenda, and gets her moments of bravery and heroism too.

I want more science fiction like this, where a logically coherent world evolves out of a simple twist.  I want more love stories like this, where people struggle with love in a complicated situation and find paths to happiness that aren't Twu Wuv.  

This was a great movie, and you should watch it.

On my way to hell

Random guy on the street, wearing a speaker:  Fornication!  Adultery!  Prostitution!

Me:  Fornication?  Sounds great, I am in.  (Making finger guns at the guy, and winking while sashaying slowly towards him.)

Guy:  No!  Fornication is bad.

Me:  But it is so fun.

Guy:  But it is bad.

Me:  But why is it so fun then?

Guy:  You will die someday.

Me:  Yes, definitely.

Guy:  And God will judge you!

Me:  Dude, God is a myth.

Guy:  You will go to hell!

Me:  Hell is where all the fornicators go, right?  I would rather go there, thanks.

Guy:  .......

I think these people who yell religious nonsense on the street really get used to being ignored, and they just don't know how to handle someone who plays back at them.  Next time I will hang around awhile and engage them in religious debate.  Perhaps I can get them to give up and take up a life of godless hedonism. You know, join Team Good.

Throwing stuff away

There is a voice in my head that is desperately worried about wasting stuff.  It is the thing that causes me to always eat whatever food in the fridge is the oldest because I cannot stand the idea of tossing food out.  It is that same voice that gets me to use shoes until they have multiple huge holes in them and my feet start sliding out.  It also triggers when I see other people doing things that waste resources, even if the things they are doing are otherwise pretty neat.

For example, I recently have been watching some youtube videos about people making wacky inventions with their own equipment.  They use 3D printers, plasma cutters, and all kinds of high end tools to produce things like bullet powered baseball bats, automatic pool cues, and supersonic pitching machines.

It is neat to see a slow motion shot of a baseball moving at Mach 1.35 ripping through nine baseball gloves while hardly slowing down.

It bothers me to see all those gloves thrown out though.

It isn't a matter of cost at all.  I know the people making supersonic baseball cannons aren't worried about the couple hundred dollars they spent on baseball gloves.  It isn't much money in their budget, and it isn't my money, but I still *hate* watching all that perfectly good material be tossed away.  Bits of plastic, hunks of metal, and all the other detritus of construction pile up when these videos are made and it all just gets sent to a landfill.

These creators are doing neat things, entertaining people, and even educating them to some extent.  That part is all good.  No matter how much I recognize that though, I can't quite ignore the cost of what they are doing.

Making youtube videos about home construction projects is a miniscule part of the waste our society creates though.  It is just that it is easy to see the waste there when it is captured on a video.

By far worse than these creative types are extremely rich people.  If you have a big house, you are creating a lot of waste.  If you have five big houses, you are creating dramatically more waste, and doing so for far less return.  Four of those houses are sitting empty, and all the energy you use to maintain them and all the materials used to create them are wasted.  When I hear about rich people working in one city and then flying home to another far away place constantly it makes me frustrated and bitter.  Not at the money, because it isn't my money, but just at the ridiculous use of resources.

This sort of feeling is why when my vaccuum broke and I could no longer repair it myself I hunted down someone who fixes up old vaccuums and gave my vaccuum to him.  I did not do this for the money, certainly, since no money changed hands, but simply because I wanted the parts of my vaccuum to be used for something if possible.  Some of it is going to be junk, but I can't avoid that, so I tried to make sure as much of it as possible got used.

I wear shirts until they are big holes in them.  I don't do this because I am cheap, but rather because I cannot stomach creating more pointless waste when I have no need to do so.  The shirt still works, so I shall not toss it.  I don't mind spending money.  I do hate wasting resources.

When a cost is something that is solely borne by me, that makes decisions easy.  If the only cost of a thing is money, then I can make a simple decision of whether or not to acquire that thing.  The hard part is that the resources to create things are shared across all people, and the cost of throwing them away is much more difficult to calculate.