Yesterday I was invited to be one of several judges at a middle school history fair. It turned out to be eight times more enjoyable than I expected, partly on the strength of the turkey sandwich they fed me, but mostly due to the quality of the presentations and my impression that the kiddies truly enjoyed their research.

One of the exhibits resembled an iPhone. The app icons opened like doors to reveal quotes and anecdotes about Apple. It was clever. And I learned a lot from it, too. I learned that Steve Jobs invented the very first personal computer. I also learned that until the Apple II, computers took up entire rooms and you couldn’t even play games on them. Then another group member mercifully cut the speaker off and corrected the timeline. I wistfully hoped they’d find a way to work the C64 or TI-99/4a into the conversation, but no such luck.

Another exhibit involved the Berlin Wall. Apparently, when the Wall came down, they made some West Berliners move to East Berlin “so both sides would be even and fair.” I also learned that– well, let’s just go to the transcript:

VDV: So who built the Berlin Wall?

Student [looking at presentation board]: Mikhail Gorbachev.

VDV: No, no, who built the Berlin Wall?

Student [with absolute confidence]: Mikhail Gorbachev.

VDV: Are you sure?

Student: Yes.

VDV: Gorbachev built the Berlin Wall?

Student: Yes.

VDV: You’re sure you’re sure?

Student [less confident, double-checking the board]: …Yes.

VDV: Do you get why I keep asking you if you’re sure?

Student [the light dawns on him]: Yes.

VDV: So who built the Berlin Wall?

Student [smiling]: Gorbachev!

I tried. The kid had guts, I’ll give him that.

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The Gorbachev kid reminded me of one of my high school science projects. It involved calculating the mechanical advantage of different bicycle gears on a 10-speed. I can’t remember what exactly I was measuring and/or calculating; I think it was mechanical advantage, so for the sake of the story (if not historical accuracy) let’s just go with that.

I turned the bike upside down and built a rudimentary frame around it to keep it stable. I used a half-gallon jug of water to turn the crank 180˚, and then timed and recorded the number of tire rotations. Did some math and voilà, I had whatever it was I was calculating. Changed the gears, repeated the process, did the math, wrote up the results, pasted them on a foam-core backboard.

So presentation day arrived. I blathered on about my project, I showed that mechanical advantage rises as you go from low gear to high gear, my burned-out hippie teacher seemed content enough, the chicks were impressed with my math skills, I was on my way to an A.

I opened the floor to questions. There was just one question, and of course it came from the one kid in the room who actually raced bikes and did endurance rides.

He said, “Actually, the mechanical advantage falls when you shift to a higher gear.” Translation: “Your entire project is wrong.”

Without missing a beat– without blinking or flinching– I said, as though I’d anticipated that question and was thoroughly prepared for it: “Normally that’s true, but remember the bike was upside-down and the tires weren’t touching the ground, so there was no external friction.”

It was a glorious moment. I should’ve bitten into an apple. Everyone bought my explanation except Burned-Out-Hippie and The Bicyclist. They both looked at me suspiciously but clearly respected my bovine scatology enough to let it slide. I think I got an A on the project.

Now that I’m a teacher, I’m a little less proud of that moment. Hopefully engineering licensure boards are a little more demanding than a particular high school teacher was on that day.

In 2010, Jon McNaughton unveiled “The Forgotten Man,” which depicts President Obama standing on a tattered copy of the Constitution as his predecessors look on. According to McNaughton, the man on the bench

“…represents every man, woman, and child who is an American… he hopes to find the American dream of happiness and prosperity… But now because of unconstitutional acts imposed [on] the American people by our government we stand on the precipice of disasters.”

I only found out about this painting a few days ago. I was amused to see McNaughton’s take on the earlier Presidents’ reactions to Obama’s horrific and unprecedented abuse of the Constitution. I also tried to see if I could identify each of the other Presidents without looking them up. Here goes, from left to right:

1. The guy who picked a fight with Mexico to win more slave territory.
2. The guy who died too quickly to ruin anything.
3. The guy who sold out the freedmen in order to take the White House and used troops to break up a railroad strike.
4. The guy who signed the Chinese Exclusion Act.
5. The guy who forced five Indian tribes out of Georgia and threatened to invade South Carolina.
6. The guy who did nothing to protect freedmen’s rights during Reconstruction.
7. The guy who signed the toughest Fugitive Slave Law ever.
8. The guy who suspended habeas corpus and deported political opponents.
9. The guy who signed the Comstock laws.
10. The guy who liked the Dred Scott decision.
11. The guy who tried to take over Cuba.
12. The guy who expanded the drug war and raised Social Security taxes.
13. On the bench: the “Forgotten Man.”
14. Another guy who died too quickly to ruin anything.
15. The guy who signed the Sedition Act just a few years after his involvement in passing the First Amendment.
16. The guy who signed the Tariff of Abominations.
17. The guy who signed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the Second Morrill Land Grant Act.
18. The guy who annexed Texas without a treaty so he could have another slave state.
19. The guy who embargoed the whole world and bought Louisiana in spite of his former sniveling about strict interpretation.
20. The Trail of Tears guy.
21. The guy who called one entire hemisphere off-limits to the other hemisphere.
22. The guy who created the first Bank of the United States and signed the first Fugitive Slave Law.
23. The guy who nationalized the highway system and created the Department of Education and added “under God” to the Pledge.
24. The guy who signed the anti-everyone-but-Western-Europeans-immigration act.
25. The guy who wiretapped Martin Luther King, Jr. and created the Peace Corps.
26. The guy who created Medicaid and Medicare and passed the Public Broadcasting Act and the Fair Housing Act.
27. The guy who seized the railroads and the steel industry.
28. The guy who jacked up the Fordney-McCumber tariff.
29. The guy who created the DEA and EPA and imposed wage and price controls and used the CIA to spy on the FBI.
30. In the “What are you DOING!?!?” pose: the guy who approved the Second Bank of the United States and invaded Spanish Florida.
31. The guy who passed a one-time corporate surtax and jacked up railroad subsidies.
32. Yet another guy who died too quickly to ruin anything.
33. The guy who banned the import of certain rifles and increased federal involvement in education and expanded unemployment payments.
34. The guy who signed the PATRIOT Act and expanded warrantless wiretapping and passed No Child Left Behind and expanded Medicare.
35. Barack Obama.
36. The guy who signed FISA and bailed out Lee Iacocca.
37. The guy who passed the Brady Bill and limited salary write-offs to $1 million and tried to nationalize the health care system.
38. The guy who lent money to failing businesses and passed the Davis-Bacon Act and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff.
39. The guy who created Social Security and the FDIC and the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the Works Progress Administration and threw Japanese-Americans in internment camps.
40. The guy who created the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve and federal income taxes and passed the Clayton Anti-Trust Act and promoted Prohibition and threw political opponents in jail.
41. The guy who prosecuted 90 companies for antitrust violations.
42. The guy who passed heavy railroad regulation and threatened to seize coal mines and wrested Panama away from Colombia.
43. The guy who used the Army to stop a railroad strike. He should appear twice but doesn’t.
44. The guy who annexed Hawaii and jacked up tariffs.

How’d I do?

A friend of mine recently lamented that too many people don’t know the difference between “it’s” and “its.” He wrote what he hoped would be a simple mnemonic device that would help writers use the terms properly. I would like to think that this would help folks make the distinction, but I know better.

Therefore I make the following suggestions to help our youngest learners avoid the problem altogether:

#1: Replace “it’s” with “tis,” as in “Tis the season to be jolly.” It means exactly the same thing, will fool people into thinking you’re smarter than you really are, and eliminates the homophonic confusion altogether.

#2: Contract the most troublesome two-word-combos (generally “it’s,” “there’s,” “they’re,” “who’s”) by smushing them together (“itis,” “thereis,” “theyare,” “whois”) instead of dropping a letter and adding an apostrophe. Note that when typing these new smushwords, they require just as many keystrokes as the old contractions.

Note that I specified the most troublesome combos. We can still get by with “won’t” instead of “willnot,” and so on.

#3: Stop teaching contractions altogether. They do not save that much time when speaking, writing by hand, or typing. Screw’m.

#4: Be lazier. Use “yer” to mean “you’re” and “your”. Use “thar” to mean “their,” “there,” and “they’re.” Put the pressure on the reader to figure it out; you’ve got too much other stuff to write about to worry about whether anyone understands what you’ve written.

#5: Stop caring about the difference between homophones such as “it’s” and “its.” Seriously, stop caring. There’re bigger fish to fry.

Suggestions four and five aren’t quite compatible with the others.

In my “Resolutions for 2012,” #9 was “I shall make a 9th resolution before January 31st, 2012.” I opened the floor to suggestions, and Dr. Hmnahmna’s idea seems good enough.

My buddy “As I’m A Bassi” is getting married over Memorial Day weekend in Rochester, and the timing virtually demands that I fly up there. Thus do I hereby resolve that:

9. I shall fly on an airplane in order to attend As I’m A Bassi’s wedding.

I shall also fly back.

Might visit the Canadian side of Niagara Falls while up there– it’s an hour or so away from Rochester– but I’m worried they might try to keep me.

Finished the book Against Intellectual Monopoly. Actually, “finished” may be a bit of a stretch since I skimmed some parts; I’ve got a flood of DBQs coming in this week and I wanted this book out of the way. The book’s got gobs of history and thorough arguments, but I’m not totally sold. ‘Tis true that there’d be plenty of creativity in the absence of intellectual property law, but I still worry about innovation in fields with high fixed and low variable costs like pharmaceuticals. I’d feel better about the matter if, concurrent with reducing IP protection, we also liberalized testing requirements and drove down some of the up-front costs of drug development (which the authors do suggest). But while I can see the public supporting the abolition of drug patents, I can’t see them supporting the reduction of the FDA’s testing requirements.

Furthermore, I don’t think the “first-mover” argument is as strong as the authors think it is. The first-mover argument is that even in the absence of IP law, innovators would reap adequate and socially optimal profits simply because they were first to create the product. I can buy that when it comes to tangible products, but not so much when it comes to digital media. As technology improves, it becomes easier to copy digital media and enjoy it prior to public release–i.e., before the innovator and would-be first mover moves. Sure, the creators can figure out other ways to earn profits, or maybe the market (or profit margin) for such material is too big to be socially optimal anyways and the lack of IP protection will cause it to shrink, but either way the first-mover argument seems a little bit flimsy when it comes digital media.

At least in regards to the arts, IP law may one day be rendered moot without being abolished or diminished. A lot of folks take MGM’s motto, “Ars gratia artis,” seriously and not ironically and are willing to give their work away, free of charge. Take me, for instance. I don’t charge anybody to read this website (though I will sell you ad space). This sort of art is more readily available than ever before, and technological advancements are making special effects and editing less and less expensive. That may drive Hollywood and the music industry out of business before a lack of IP protection does.

I’d like to know the opinions of my buddies who probably hold patents and copyrights. I’ll be contacting them shortly and soliciting their opinions on the matter. Hopefully they won’t charge me.

…

If they ever do abolish IP law, the government should still provide protection to all materials published prior to abolition. If patents and copyrights were legally acquired, they should be enforced until expiration.