Two Things

The first is that I just recently finished reading a book called The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon. It was really good. It's about New York City and comic books and the early part of the century. Chabon is engaging like John Irving, has a command of English as vast as Conrad's, and tells a story that is slightly fanciful but steeped in reality. Actually the reason I like it so much is that Chabon perfectly captures the spirit of the age he's depicting. Reading Kavalier & Clay feels very similar to reading Fitzgerald, if Fitzgerald had come at his subject from a very different direction. But that's just what I think; what the hell do I know, I'm a math major. Soon to be a math graduate. If I don't drop out of college before the end of the semester. Anyhow.

The second thing is Google Earth. The other day I was fiddling around on Google Maps, and was very impressed by the technology they've got powering that. You can drag maps around smoothly, you can zoom in way far, you can not only get satellite imagery of most places, but actually overlay Google's road map on top of that satellite image, and they've got all this linked with their database, so searching for things close to the spot on earth you're looking at is easy. Very impressive. Then I found Google Earth.

Google Earth has one caveat: unlike many of Google's technologies, it is a program you must download, install, and run, rather than load in a web browser. Should you choose to do this, however, you will lose yourself for hours in what has to be one of the most impressive displays of web integration available today.

Google Earth is a program which models the entire globe in real time 3D. It uses satellite imagery to paint the surface, so you can start by looking at the entire Earth framed in your window, and zoom in to a bird's eye view of your house. Depending on the age of the imagery, you might see your car parked in the driveway. Of course, that's an awful lot of satellite imagery to store on your hard drive. How does the program pull this off, exactly? In point of fact, whenever you run Google Earth, the program connects to Google's servers, and they stream you satellite imagery to power the program. That alone is a ridiculous technical accomplishment, but on top of this unprecedented model of the world, they have added their map technology so that you can see not just roads, but businesses, parks, points of interest, and everything else on this true-to-life picture of the earth in addition to viewing flybys of any trips you might be planning; they have built three dimensional models of the metropolitan areas of major cities; and they have linked all of this to an online community that allows users to add their own markers to the globe for all to see. And they are giving all this away for free.

If the fact that this blog is running on Blogger didn't immediately tip you off, I am a Google fanboy. It's hard not be a fanboy for a company with Google's philosophy, though. They look at the internet, and they find something that people are using. They say to themselves, "We are going to take this idea that works pretty well, and we are going to make it work beautifully. We are going to make it do everything that common sense says it should do. We are going to base it on cutting-edge technology, we are going to make it elegant and straightforward, we are going to make it so stultifyingly simple that anyone who knows how to click a mouse can immediately use it, and we are going to give it away for free." It's hard to argue with free.

The ETS

Those of you in high school or college are likely familiar with the Educational Testing Service, or ETS, hereafter referred to as "those insufferable craphounds." Those insufferable craphounds are running an organization that markets itself as nonprofit while still finding it mysteriously necessary to charge students exorbitant prices for the privilege of subjecting themselves to tests such as the SAT or GRE. Examining their webpage, one finds that they make much of "listening to educators, parents, and critics" (notice the exclusion of "students" from that list) in order to do a better job of helping "teachers teach and students learn." All I can say to that is they must be pretty goddamn hard of hearing, because I have not ever in my entire life heard a single, solitary word of praise for those insufferable craphounds from anybody, be they student, teacher, parent, or disinterested third-party critic. At best, people grudgingly put up with them as some sort of necessary evil. And I can also say to them that, speaking as a student, the only thing those insufferable craphounds have ever helped me to learn is to exploit common fallibilities in multiple-choice tests, which is, interestingly, a skill that will be completely useless in my professional life.

Examining their mission statement, one discovers some intriguing claims. Let's quote them, shall we?

Our Mission: To advance quality and equity in education by providing fair and valid assessments, research, and related services. Our products and services measure knowledge and skills, promote learning and educational performance, and support education and professional development for all people worldwide.

Those insufferable craphounds state that their products measure knowledge and skills. In a certain sense this may be true; in fact, if they intend "knowledge and skills" to mean "ability to quickly answer standardized test questions," then they have hit the nail on the head. If they intend "knowledge and skills" to mean "ability to effectively learn, ability to succeed academically, and ability to critically analyze and solve a variety of problems," then their mission statement is more than a gross misrepresentation, it is an outright lie. According to those insufferable craphounds, I correctly identified the relationship between "obsequious" and "stipendiary," but remarkably, I had not a clue what either of those words meant, and could not have used them in conversation or writing. According to those insufferable craphounds, I can correctly answer the majority of 28 questions relating to pre-calculus mathematics in under 45 minutes, which is clearly an important thing to know, because having a crazed lunatic point a gun to my head and threaten to kill me if I can't correctly tell him how far Farmer Bob has to go to get to the market in under two minutes is a DAILY FUCKING OCCURRENCE in my world. According to those insufferable craphounds, when I walk in to a testing center unprepared and get a good score by relying on my ability to guess well on multiple choice tests, I am more qualified to study at graduate schools than people who earned a slightly lower score by working hard to prepare for the test.

Perhaps the most shocking thing about the entire situation is that colleges and graduate schools seem to actually put stock in the tests that those insufferable craphounds administer. Particularly graduate schools. Come one folks, use your damn heads. I have been at college working hard for four motherfucking years, and you hope to glean something meaningful about my academic ability from a two hour standardized test? You're already looking at my academic record, my GPA, letters of recommendation from people who know me. What are these test scores going to relate to you? How accurate do you think that is as compared to those other piddling bits of information?

Universities, please, take Mr. T's advice and don't be fools: SAT and GRE scores are not telling you anything useful about your potential students. Look at GPAs, look at the classes they've taken, look at their recommendations; Christ, you could even try talking to them. Don't continue to subject us to the pointless and degrading ordeal of standardized tests.

I am sorry for that diatribe, 'cause I bet that I was basically just screaming at the choir. But goddamn, it did feel good to write it down. Fuck you, ETS.

Our campus has been overrun...

By anti-abortionists. There was some guy standing outside the physics building this morning shouting at us to embrace Jesus and stop killing infants, and a dude standing next to a huge picture of bloody, dead fetus was trying to hand me a flyer saying not to get an abortion. Because, you know, being a guy and all, I had really been considering one.

There was also some guy standing outside the library, telling us we're all going to hell for being at college. Because, clearly, if God had wanted us to learn, he would have given us brains. Oh, wait...

Not that anyone around here is really all that ticked off; this is the most entertaining thing to come through campus this semester. But for any anti-abortionists or other generally crazy people out there, let me give you some tips: You are not going to win a single, solitary convert by coming to a college campus and being loud and obnoxious. At college, if you're being lound and obnoxious, it usually means you're drunk, and we don't pay a lot of attention to you. The way you're going to win converts is by logically persuading us that your position is the more sensible one. Why religous fundamentalists have yet to try using this approach will no doubt remain a mystery...