Student of Trinity

That's exactly it: armies can't actually afford to be too tough to take. The superior's goal in an army, after all, is for you to obey him at the risk of your life while you are armed. Fear and intimidation are poor strategies for that. In really large armies, there are bound to be failures where things go really wrong. But normally military life is not that bad.

What I'm saying is that harshness in leadership just isn't really very effective. Even armies are usually a good deal more mellow than some of the 'leaders' you can encounter in volunteer organizations.

Alorael, I believe this Bud's for you.

Implying that "critical humor ... at privates' expense" be it "insulting" or "absurd" doesn't produce the same effect.

Nah, it really didn't. It was too silly. Zum Beispiel:

(Soldier's hair is about a millimeter beyond regulation and so he needs a haircut.

Sergeant detects this on parade, and shouts at the soldier from directly behind him.)

Sergeant: Am I hurting you?

Private: No, sergeant!

Sergeant: Well I should be! I'm standing on your hair!

(This is not one I made up. Yes, it's stupid. But every brick in ten thousand barracks around the world has heard it ten thousand times.)

Most of the new topics these days use the Nuclose feature. Only cool people can see them.

Sorry about that.

It's not clear this is relevant, but one odd thing I was taught in the army was that an officer should never be sarcastic. And sergeants have a long tradition of critical humor, shall we say, at privates' expense; but if you listen carefully you notice that it can be insulting or it can be absurd, but sergeant humor isn't sarcastic.

I think the theory was that sarcasm is really dismissive. It talks right past you on purpose, and that says you really don't matter. You can take that as a joke from a peer, but from someone who has actual power over you, it just isn't funny.

It's important to remember that your grandfather's own grandfather died, too. Your grandfather probably lost a lot of people he loved, in the course of his life. He grieved but went on.

Your grandfather grieved but went on to live his own life, for which others were grateful, including you. If you can remember that, and use it to help build your own life, then that's one more thing he can have given you. I bet he'd want you to have it.

(This seems to be a misleadingly titled thread. Or at least bait-and-switch. Anyway.)

Am I going to die for random junk? Heck, no. I know what these adventurers are like. First of all, in order to beat them, I have to kill every last one of them before any of them makes it to the town gates. Otherwise they'll come back in about ten seconds, all juiced up again. And will I have time, while they're gone, to rally the townspeople in defense against these brazen criminals? No, I will not. Talk about apathetic citizenry. These merchants and loafers just do the same things they always do, no matter what happens. Half of them are only here to suck up to adventurers, anyway, to get ten rat tails or a bottle of wine for uncle Ted or something. They don't pay me enough to fight adventurers. Do they even pay me at all?

And then even if I do manage to wipe the whole party of adventurers all out, you know what will happen? Nothing, that's what. There'll be a bright flash, and suddenly I'll be back again, dealing with them again as if the fight never happened, except now they'll know all about my healing potion, in advance.

I know, because ol' Captain Darbo told me about it, before he died of the shakes. At night I often think about it. Will there be a bright flash for me, when I die? Will I respawn somewhere nice? Or will it just end?

I'm sorry for your loss. It sounds as though your grandfather was a good man.

Is the webcam for watching the gladiatorial combat or the breeding pits?

Two sites. One camera.

With this inauguration, the world quietly marks a significant turning point. We can all pause to reflect.

Fifty years ago, the conflict over zombieism claimed billions of lives and brains. Twenty years ago was the infamous Wall Street Journal article claiming that the sharp housing price differential between animate and zombie neighborhoods had a biological origin. Have the scars really healed?

Even now the lyrics of controversial rapper Arrinarr remain controversial. But public buildings everywhere now have low-rise steps appropriate for the gaits of all ambulant citizens, whether shambling or walking. And tonight, as the reanimated corpse of President Bill Clinton takes the oath of office for the third time, no-one can doubt that the era of conflict has given way to something new.

This is Walter Cronkite, bidding you all good night.

The sole victor [piece of rock] is rewarded [with] a spot in the breeding pits.

I recommend installing a webcam, and letting the hits roll in.

i originally read this as "counts Archmage Micael as my dad" and really, really wondered how that could be debatable

Luke. I might be your father.

Alas, Bobby Henderson, our Great Prophet, doesn't care about our little community and refuses to use good forum software or update it. He thinks it's a hassle. Thus we have this system, where new members must post in a certain thread, get the post approved, then post in any other thread and get that post approved, before they can become part of the community.

I'm surprised at that level of uptightness, in a forum for the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Maybe the Great Prophet needs a little poke from a Noodly Appendage?

Hail, Caesar!

We could cope with sleet, but we can't work in hail like this.

There's probably a technical solution to the spambot problem, because we really don't have much trouble here. Find a better host. Though that might also be an issue: this place is a marketing forum for Spiderweb Software, Inc. So Jeff pays for it. Free sites may not get the good anti-spam measures, whatever they are.

For all the random vagaries here in General, these boards do actually have a serious core purpose. Well, not save-the-world serious, but not just random spammage. There are games. People discuss them, offer tips, compare strategies, reveal Easter eggs. Another active board I'm on is similar in having a mix of totally random discussion with an actual purpose. I think that's a good thing for almost any community.

I don't really know much about Pastafarianism, but I'm not really so surprised that it's having a tougher time. It's a good gag and all, but that's probably just not enough, you know?

I agree with Alorael's comments. I'd like to emphasize the softer side of moderating. Sometimes you just have to ban people, and do your best to do that when you should and not do it when you shouldn't do it. But you can do a lot more than you'd think with much less drastic measures. It's like the "broken windows" theory of policing. The mods here try to make an effort to be around, to set an example of civility, and to PM or post brief comments when someone strays too near an edge. When older mods become less active in those ways, we bring in new mods. It seems to be working pretty well, most of the time.

There's a cost to everything. As most old-timers will tell you, life here is tamer now than it's been at times in the past. This means that for some hardier souls it was a lot more fun before, though it may have been a harsh place for a lot of people who were just driven away. What makes a good forum depends on what you want in a good forum. By some measures what we have here now is very good, and by some measures it's not.

I think there's one thing you need for any kind of good forum, and that's creative input from people. You need people making posts that other people want to read. The main thing that brings in the kind of people that do that, or that turns people into that kind of people, is other people making posts that they want to read. So you need a critical mass. A board with only one or two engaged and articulate members is doomed, but one with a couple of dozen will be self-sustaining. So active posters who contribute a lot of interest tend to get a bit of slack; they can get away with pushing the envelope a bit now and then. That's not a problem; that's how it should be.

Sometimes interesting posters lose interest, or just get too busy, and they drift away. So you need to keep bringing in new members, and you need to make it as easy as possible for new members to evolve from lurker through newbie into community stalwarts. For me, this is what distinguishes a good forum from just a good group of friends. And I think that for this reason it's better to err on the side of maintaining civility, rather than letting raucous oldbies have free rein. A free-rein forum like that may burn bright, but it burns itself out in a few years. So there's a balance to be struck between staying welcoming and staying interesting.

You young whippersnappers. And your carefree antics. Whippersnapping, for instance. What even is that? It sounds carefree and antic, all right, but also a bit reckless. What if the whipper snaps back? I bet it would smart. Better not chance it. Sure to be bad for the rheumatism.

Apparently I joined a whole five days before Nikki. Let me tell you, though, those five days were the best. You young people have no idea. You might think you get it, but if you weren't there, then, No, you'll never get it, and you'll never even know what you missed. When your carefree recklessness starts to irritate me, I remember that you'll never know days like those five, and my vexation turns to pity.

I liked those books when they first came out but the series somehow went downhill enough that I stopped reading it. I forget exactly what my complaints were, but I think it was mainly that he'd pulled out so many stops early in the series that he ran out of comparably interesting things to do after that. Just jumped the shark, I suppose.

Looking at that linked summary, it seems the main shortcoming of the study is that it only looked at schools pretty near the top of the heap. They still cover a big range in prestige and tuition cost, but kind of in the way that 'upper class' includes the family doctor as well as Bill Gates. Smaller colleges and less renowned state universities weren't included. So it may be that teaching really does start to slide at some point down the pecking order.

One reason that might make sense is that professors are produced by cascade. Top-tier schools grant dozens of times more PhDs than would be required to maintain their own faculties. Most of those people trickle down into jobs at less famous schools. So even if you don't go to Harvard, there's a fair chance your professor did. They know what their course was like when they took it at Harvard, and they'll be doing the best they can, under their circumstances, to make their course as good as that one. But below some point on the totem pole, Harvard-trained faculty start to thin out. The best you can get may be professors whose professors went to Harvard.

I don't mean to take seriously the premise that education quality consists in degree of separation from Harvard. But there may perhaps be some partial effect along these lines. Universities aren't closed systems. They generate each other's faculty, and there's a kind of prevailing wind in the direction of flow.

What exactly is good writing for medieval combat scenes, anyway? Realism is hard to assess. Re-enactors can talk about how heavy weapons are to swing, and so on, but nobody re-enacts to the death. Realism to the point of vividly describing gruesome injuries is probably not going to sell all that widely. It might even get boring, if I'm right in guessing that what mostly happens is blood.

I liked the handful of fight scenes in The Lies of Locke Lamora. They're done as plot rather than description. Something happens, so something happens, so something else happens. You can follow the thread of events and it seems to make sense even when it's surprising. In that way, I'd say that there's probably no big difference between writing battles and writing anything else. Descriptions are boring and action is better; show, don't tell.

6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."

I might not be so surprised if Thrun's Stanford course wasn't really that deep.

One of the dirty secrets of elite schools is that selection is a bigger part of what they do than they'd like to admit. How much of the value of a Harvard or Stanford education accrues at admission, when you're marked as someone who got into that place? A lot more comes from hanging out with the other students, so how much is left to come from the actual courses taught by those big shot professors? Obviously people learn from them, but in most cases people at less prestigious institutions learn the same things from their smaller shot professors.

Sometimes I think that the future of higher education will see universities withering away, while fraternities thrive.

I'd be curious to learn how Udacity works out. It should work well for CS if it works well for anything.

I'm hoping to do a masters course in either critical theory or twentieth-century literature, though I'll have nine months between finishing one course and hopefully starting the other.

The subjects are certainly interesting, but I'm curious as to what exactly you want to get out of a formal course on them, as opposed to just reading in your spare time on your own, or joining a book club. What's the interest in the course as such? The credential? Expert instruction in person rather than in book form?

Higher education is changing, and I've thought a fair bit about how it might change in physics. I'm not sure everything that's currently an on-campus course, or a course at all, should stay as that. I wonder about the humanities as well.

The shocking thing about teaching is that results do not correlate well with effort. You can put in hours and hours of preparation for a lecture and have it go badly in every way. The students are bored at the time and none of them ever learns much from it that they wouldn't have learned otherwise. Or you can whip something up in a few minutes and see it take off.

The trick my wife discovered was to make the students do more of the work. In-class discussions and debates are so awesome, they ought to be illegal. You spend about fifteen minutes thinking up some good topics, while drinking a beer. You take an hour or so to post a list of good references for the students to consult. Then you're set for the week. The students will get into it to an astonishing degree, especially if you've chosen cool topics and references, because this kind of thing is what students think college education is supposed to be about. They've been waiting to do this, through every lecture they've attended.

All you have to do, during the class, is inject a few comments from your own background knowledge. You'll appear much more impressively erudite than in a lecture, where you still have to cover the parts that don't really make sense to you either, because when you don't know what to say, you can just keep mum. The students will think you're a deity of higher education. You'll work two hours a week, outside class.

Okay, it's not quite that great. You can't quite pull the same trick every time. But you can really do it a lot. Lampshade it, tell the students loudly that this is your advanced concept of learning.

If you're having trouble getting discussions going, I can offer an exercise that I invented myself. It's a kind of homework assignment, that you do have to grade. Each student has to submit an 'idealized transcript' of the actual classroom discussion. They are supposed to quote selectively and to paraphrase, to make a coherent discussion. And they are allowed to inject fictitious comments from themselves — things they should have said in class, but didn't — for up to 50% of the text they hand in. The lines they attribute to others, however, must be basically accurate. So you have to take decent notes yourself, so that you can judge accuracy fairly when you grade.

The grade should reflect both accuracy in representing what people really said, and coherence and substance of the discussion in the transcript as written. You might need to hand back one week's assignments giving nobody more than 4/5, just because the discussion that took place was too shallow. Fidelity alone should not be enough for an A. Length can be short, at least at first — a page or two.

In my experience, even fairly slow classes get the idea pretty quickly, and it makes for quite interesting discussions. Somebody says something that seems intelligent or interesting, and there's a pause while everybody scribbles it down. It really makes the students listen to each other. The main problem is that the discussion can remain coherent but go off the rails. The students may end up having a vigorous debate that is based on totally false assumptions. So you do need to moderate, and you need to provide references in advance so that they can arrive at least minimally informed.