Conrad Wolfram thinks math education needs a major refresh. He asserts that the way we teach math to children today in no way matches the ways it needs to be practically applied once you’ve moved into the job sphere. To change that, he suggests that we start teaching math by way of programming.
I am happily biased on this topic and I agree wholeheartedly. My interest in math wasn’t sparked until I discovered the programming features of my TI-83 calculator. I haven’t reflected on my math education in many years, but I am now angry at the disservice my educators did for me. Once they learned that I knew how to write these tiny programs, they wouldn’t allow me to use the calculator during class or during tests. Every other student sat there with the same TI-83, the same access to utility, and I was forced to use a 10-key calculator and show all of my work on paper. The sad truth is, because I wrote the program, I knew more about the actual mathematic problem at hand than anyone else in the room.
I’m happy to say that I wasn’t discouraged. I still followed my fascination with being able to make real world problems more simple not only for me, but for everyone. I followed that path right into my current position, where making software is my full time job, and I love it.
We should be teaching children how to solve real world problems as much as possible.
I’ve always been of the opinion that while supporting your favorite candidate is important, when election day nears, the final push and vote should be for someone with a chance of winning. Any significant split vote can easily lead to placing the worst possible candidate into office.
I understand why young people are killing themselves.
When you are gay, who do you have to turn to?
No matter how supportive my family is and how many close friends I make, I still feel a constant loss and I still harbor incredible amounts of anger. Although I’ve surrounded myself with people who love me, I am still surrounded by the constant din of hateful rhetoric. Whether directed at me, or just mindlessly spouted into the collective, it hurts.
And who out there is watching out for me? I’m not asking who can I call that will tell me they love me or who can I go hug and share my anger with. I’m asking who, in a position of power, is watching out for me? Our “fierce advocate” Obama? Nope. His administration’s clear ambivalence to our plight and lack of action are evidence that his campaigning was little more than hollow, lifeless, careless promises. In my eyes the biggest policy decisions he has made about LGBT people is to defend the Defense of Marriage Act and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the two harshest laws discriminating against us. Fair weather fan, I guess.
What about other elected representatives? Well considering Congress won’t even vote yes to debate something as simple and widely favored as Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, I guess I can’t turn to anyone there.
Perhaps I can count on the media. After all, it is the media’s responsibility to investigate and report. They’re the unwritten part of the system of checks and balances. When all branches of our government go haywire, we can count on reporters to set the record straight. Then, on Coming Out day, Washington Post publishes a vitriolic (and completely false) mess of hate speech. My face is still bruised from that slap.
Unfortunately I can’t turn to the country as a whole. Those are the people I need the government to protect me from.
We can tell clearly from NY Gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino that everyone is willing to reap the benefits of LGBT people, and nobody in the upper echelons is willing to stick their neck out for us. Despite leasing his properties to two gay bars in the past, one run by his son, he campaigned saying “I don’t want them [children] to be brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option.”
So when every day you are faced with wondering whether mentioning a bar you were at, or a song you were listening to, or the clothes you are wearing, or the name of someone you went on a date with will end in ridicule, or worse, violence, what would you do?
Well I get really angry and write about it. I know I’m preaching to the choir but it makes me feel a little better. Not everyone is that strong though. For some people, when faced with this level of discrimination, and given seemingly no way out, death seems like a better option. It’s not, but I can see where it might look that way.
The good news is there are places for gay people to go and be safe. If I wanted to get rid of this stress and hurt, I could just stop paying attention to the news and shuffle around some of who I follow on Twitter. Escape isn’t that far away and maybe that’s why I can handle it. I also know that within my lifetime the majority of these silly laws will probably be gone, and while gay people may not be seen as equals by all, it will be a heck of a lot easier.
I just wish everyone would see that while I’m different, I’m not different. The difference between gay and straight is no greater than the difference between brown and blond. And I wish that people realized that changing our laws to recognize that fact is no less urgent than ending our war in Iraq or balancing the budget or finding a cure for cancer.
There is an unspoken epidemic in this country. It’s not people being gay. It’s people who are gay who are depressed and angry and who have no remedy but to sit and wait while those in power decide when the appropriate time is to say “now you are equal.”
I spent hours upon hours today trying to figure out why the Django 1.2 CSRF system was not working for me. There are obviously a lot of struggles with existing Django installs in converting to 1.2 because of the CSRF protection, but none of my searches turned up a useful resolution for my particular problem. What I saw was the typical “CSRF verification failed” message but I’d installed the middleware and inserted the token and passed in RequestContext so it should have worked. Then I switched off my tornado server and tried it via Django’s built-in server and voila! It worked.
Django 1.2 works with the latest versions of Tornado (I’m now running 1.1) but if you have a very old version I suspect you may run into the same problem I did. Save yourself the headache and make sure tornado is up to date and you don’t have any old versions installed.
A few years ago, when Picasa was only an application and it only worked on Windows machines, I worked at Google and jumped on some of the earliest betas of Picasa Web Albums. Consequently, I managed to grab the username jordan.
Fast forward a couple years and suddenly that username begins working in a strange manner with Google Calendar. People enter “Jordan” into their calendar invites, and they show up, quite mysteriously, on my calendar. This results in all sorts of hilarity when my friends, who I share my calendar with, see all the fun things I have planned.
A few weeks ago I had horse camp. That was fun. Today I am going with my friend Kim to get gas at Costco.
I’m very excited for Friday, when I’ll be travelling to Virginia to receive an award! Don’t worry, I won’t let the recognition go to my head. Sunday I’m serving food to the homeless with a youth group.
The 14th of every month I have a recurring reminder that “he” asked me out on July 14. I love incremental anniversaries!
I think the most disconcerting events to show up are the multitude of doctor appointments. Most days show at least one. A stranger to my calendar would think I was either the most diseased person in existence, or that I was the world’s biggest hypochondriac.

