Month: September 2000

School Has Zero Tolerance for Tweedy Bird; What About Illiteracy?

The Associated Press today reported that sixth-grader Ashley Smith was suspended for 10-days from her suburban Atlanta school for bringing a Tweedy Bird wallet to school. Why? The wallet meets the school’s definition of a weapon.

The 11-year-old Smith runs a web site devoted to Tweedy Bird so naturally the Tweedy Bird wallet was a given. Unfortunately for Smith the wallet contains a chain inside it which is designed to hold keys. The chain is just over the 10-inch limit the school imposes on chains, and so they sent her home for 10 days for bringing a weapon to school.

This reminds me of a case a couple years ago where a student was expelled for assaulting a school official. Certainly he deserved severe punishment for that, but more interesting was what started the argument that led to the fight. Security officials at the school noticed what they thought was a gun under the driver’s side seat of the car. They pulled the student out of class and had him unlock the car. Sure enough there was a gun under the seat — a toy gun left in the car by the student’s much younger brother.

At which point the school official informed the student that he was suspended for several days because the school has a zero tolerance policy against bringing even toy guns on school premises. Again, violence is always wrong but if somebody at the university told me I was suspended without pay from my job because my daughter left a toy gun in my car, things would get very heated.

Some schools are taking this even further. Another story that hit national wires recently was the case of several young children suspended from school for playing cops and robbers. They didn’t have toy guns, but they did shape their hands into guns and yell “bang bang,” etc., at each other. The school kicked them out saying that making your hand like a gun and saying “bang” constituted a death threat and was a big no no under the zero tolerance policy.

After thinking about both cases, one thing really bothers me about these sorts of cases — don’t you wish that some of these schools put as much effort into teaching kids to read, write and learn math as they do in kicking them out under these absurd zero tolerance rules? I remember playing “Battlestar Galactica” and “Star Wars” on playgrounds as a kid — today I guess they’d probably have read my friends and I the riot act before kicking us out.

Source:

Girl suspended for Tweety chain. The Associated Press, September 28, 2000.

FDA Approves RU486 — With Restrictions

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today finally approved the abortion-inducing drug RU-486 after more than 12 years of battles between pro- and anti-abortion forces. Unfortunately while they approved it, the FDA attached ridiculous restrictions to the drug that will make obtaining the drug more of a hassle for women.

The drug, originally developed in France, blocks a hormone, progesterone, which in turn causes the lining of the uterine wall to thin resulting in a spontaneous abortion. The drug is more than 90 percent effect in causing an abortion if taken within 49 days of the beginning of a woman’s last menstrual period.

In a bizarre, though not unexpected, move, the FDA placed numerous restrictions on RU486 approving it only for distribution by doctors who, as the Associated Press described it, “can operate in case a surgical abortion is needed to finish the job or in cases of severe bleeding — or to doctors who have made advance arrangements for a surgeon to provide such care to their patients.”

This is ridiculous. This would be like saying that only surgeons able to preform back surgery should be able to dispense medication for back pain. Millions of people see non-surgeons for heart and other ailments which might later call for surgery without having to find a doctor who himself is a surgeon.

The Associated Press story on the approval speculates RU486 might become an issue of debate in upcoming presidential election, but oddly claimed that

Republican candidate George W. Bush opposes abortion; his father’s administration banned RU-486 from this country in 1989. The pro-choice Clinton-Gore administration worked for seven years to bring mifepristone here.

No, actually, Clinton-Gore did absolutely nothing for the past 7 years while the FDA stood around and dragged its feet on a drug approval that should have been extraordinarily routine, and apparently did nothing to try to dissuade the FDA of the ridiculous conditions they attached to the drug.

Source:

FDA approves abortion pill. The Associated Press, September 28, 2000.

Latest Dave Winer Eruption

Dave Winer is at it again, throwing down with Tim O’Reilly. I’m not even going to bother quoting or linking to the specific posts in question — you can go to Winer site above and search on O’Reilly to follow the sordid tale.

To sum it up, Winer always tends to make outlandish accusations very publicly and then gets upset when people point out that he’s acting rudely. In the latest blowup Winer was actually angry at O’Reilly for posting a very public explanation of why he didn’t invite Winer to participate in a Peer-To-Peer conference, saying essentially that Winer is too disruptive.

And why, you’re asking yourself, should I care? Because it’s a great illustration of how you can have the greatest product in the world and still get yourself into a lot of trouble unless you have rudimentary people skills. Winer has written incredible programs, but he tends to alienate folks and burn a lot of bridges with people who should be his strongest supporters. It’s almost like he’s intent on sabotaging himself.

One of the most difficult things in the world for most people to do is to accept criticism without it eating at their self-respect or self-esteem, especially if the person receiving the criticism thinks that it is unfair. Winer doesn’t seem to have learned how to do that, and moreover like many people he compounds the problem by regularly dishing out unfair criticism (such as his bizarre suggestion that O’Reilly backstabbed him over RSS), which inevitably provokes tons of fair and unfair criticism in return.

It amazes me that after all those years we spent as kids singing silly “Sticks and Stones” rhymes that people still freak out because of comments made by others. Seth Dillingham mentions a common situation where relatives in an extended family say one thing or another about each other and then those things tend to snowball.

I have a similar experience both in that most of the people in my extended family really don’t understand pretty much every decision my wife and I have made and a lot of it comes back to us through the grapevine, but who cares? The bottom line is that if you are secure in who you are and know where you want to go with your life, what somebody else thinks is a minor annoyance at worst.

The key in dealing with other people, from my experience, is to become good at distinguishing between unreasonable requests and opinions, which can be safely dismissed and ignored, and between reasonable suggestions and views which are worth listening to and considering even if you do ultimately go your own way.

The Need for Speed

On the theory that faster is always better, I went out last night and got a 128 meg. RAM chip to upgrade my new Athlon 900mhz to 256mb. As Keanu Reeves would say, “Whoa!”

Before the RAM upgrade when I’d play Unreal: Tournament I settled in at 1024×768 with 16-bit color and the system was smooth as butter. After the RAM upgrade, even after setting the color to 32-bit and turning on all of the display options the frame rate was so fast the game was unplayable unless I added in a huge number of bots to keep the processor busy.

Unfortunately because of the limits of the ATI’s 3d acceleration the system was still too sluggish to go up to 1600xwhatever, so I settled in at some display rate around 1152 or somewhere in there and it’s still very purty, especially on the 19-inch monitor.

I Hate Being Sick

I’ve been sick for the past two weeks and I hate it, and unfortunately I couldn’t take any time off work because I had to finish up a lot of loose ends for a conference that takes place this weekend.

I feel like the excellent opening scene in the otherwise very bad film, Any Given Sunday. The movie stinks, but the football cinematography is excellent. Anyway, Jamie Foxx’s character is the second string quarterback who gets put in when the starting quarterback gets sacked into next week. After getting sacked himself, Foxx takes a snap and surveys the field. Everything runs in slow motion as the receivers run down the field and he sees one of them to his right open. Just as the ball gets to the receiver, out of nowhere comes a cornerback accompanied by streaks of light who zooms in front of the ball for the interception.

That’s what I feel like when I’m sick — everything’s going in slow motion and at double speed all at once.

Blah.

NBC Olympic Coverage Reaches New Lows

I have been very sick the past couple weeks and last night took some cold medicine and settled on the couch to watch some Olympics coverage before the medicine kicked in. At first I was geeked watching the thrilling end to the springboard diving competition. Then NBC cuts to commercial and when they come back they actually run this long story about the NBC crew touring Australia by train before the Olympics. I want to watch people running, jumping, and throwing, but instead I’m learning all about the conductor of a train as well as getting a history lesson on the construction of railroads in Australia.

Very, very bad.