Why would-be engineers end up as English majors.

** Update: finally found this video on YouTube. **

Reading through it, I began to realize that some of the assumptions I’d made about education in my part of the world is pretty much true. For the most part, people find science and mathematics harder to understand and study than they do subjects like history, English, and others that fall under the umbrella of liberal arts. The question I had to ask myself is why. Why do so many people have such a hard time with one area of focus, but not others? Is it because the college coursework for English majors is less complicated and demanding than what engineering and science majors have to deal with? After spending long hours in study-sessions with Hanif Houston, a recent graduate of UC Berkeley’s English undergradute department, I’d say this isn’t true. His workload consisted of sometimes reading an entire novel per week, analyzing it, and writing several lengthy papers at once. My workload consisted of dozens of math problems, physics questions, and code-writing projects each week; all of these together often times didn’t amount to the amount of time and effort Hanif spent dissecting Shakespeare or building arguments for why Philip Roth’s sarcasm should be bottled and sold as a remedy-cure for common stupidity.

Given, I’m still a lower-division computer science and electrical engineering major, while the comparison is to upper-division English studies. Nonetheless, the CNN article describes people dropping out of their first or second years as science majors to pursue liberal arts degrees instead, taking a path of less resistance. So why is it really, then, that people decide that liberal arts are a path of less resistance to a degree? The obvious answer I can give here is that math and science classes in the public K-12 school system aren’t nearly adequate enough to prepare students for college-level work, but that’s not really the only problem. After all, courses in history, English, art, music, and the like are just as lacking in high school and below. So, perhaps there’s a bigger issue to look at. . . maybe it goes back further and deeper than our educational system.

Growing up, I never quite realized how often I heard the same set of mantras: “I don’t care about the science, as long as it works,” “I’m no good at math,” “when am I ever going to use this stuff?”, and of course, “if you spend all your time studying [math, sciences, or other 'nerdy' subjects], you’ll have no life and never get laid.”

The issue here is that all these things are so damned passive, we don’t realize we think this way. When I used to think of professional writers, for example, I used to imagine the people I saw in movies, like Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets, playing Melvin Udall, living in an expensive New York apartment and writing books at his leisure. Or I’d picture Michael Douglas in Wonder Boys fighting writer’s block, Sean Connery in Finding Forrester as a reclusive shut-in, coming out of seclusion to help a young writer earn his professor’s respect. All of these guys had two things in common: they didn’t seem to actually work all that hard for their money, and there’s never a time we see them struggling to earn that money. Easy living, right? Just write books, cash your checks, and have all the time in the world to deal with life’s other little problems. How hard could that be?

Scientists, on the other hand, get a different image in pop-culture. Up until recently, physicists, chemists, mathematicians, biologists, and all flavors of engineers have been portrayed either as quirky side-characters, or as eccentric, awkward head-cases that are either used as foils for more charismatic characters, or as “ugly ducklings” that need to be brought out of their shells by friends or a love interest. (See Q from the James Bond movies, the protagonist of the Nutty Professor movies, Doctor Emmet Brown from the Back to the Future series, etc.) The cases where a scientist is considered a sex symbol, a true main character, are the cases where they are more occupied with flashy action sequences than they are with their area of expertise, (see Doctor Jones from Indiana Jones, Doctor Gordon Freeman in the Half-Life video game series, and Doctor Ian Malcom in Jurassic Park.) This is also true for those “lonely nuclear/astro physicists” played by attractive blondes in James Bond movies. The issue here is, simply put, real science isn’t sexy. Most of those nerdy engineers and scientists used as side-kicks and comic relief in movies aren’t what the majority of people want to be.

I say most, however, because there is an exception to the nerdy scientist image. When the movie, video game, book, or television show in question is attempting to make the science, itself, sexy is when we see the geeky scientists become the charismatic protagonist. One good example of this is Dana Scully from The X-Files, as well as Peter Venkman from Ghostbusters and Hawkeye Pierce from M*A*S*H. Often times, with the notable exception of the latter, the main characters are made to look a lot more sexy by virtue of the fact that the science is either questionably feasable, or dumbed-down in order to make for more exciting action or drama. These are people we want to be, for sure, but for the same reason we want to be those writers from a few paragraphs back: their lives consist of other concerns, outside their jobs, that make their existence a lot more fun than our own. Scully performs autopsies on camera, Dr. Venkman actually does perform experiments in psychology, and Hawkeye spends a lot of time in surgery. These scenes, however, aren’t the main focus of the story, they’re merely vehicles for the characters to further conflict between other characters, set mood, or used as a backdrop for later sequences to play out. (Hawkeye also spends a lot of time drinking in his tent and arguing with higher-ranking army officers about the patients he’s worked on in the OR.)

So what’s the payoff for having read this far? My point is that we either paint math and sciences as too dull, too boring, or too difficult. It’s okay to rationalize your C grade in algebra because no one will fault you for saying it’s not your strong point or that you’ll never get any use out of the quadratic formula in your adult life. On the other side of the coin, we sometimes make technical fields seem easy and fun like they are for Indy and Doc Brown, and people are blown away by how much work they have to do in college to achieve a fraction of the progress these characters make and are disillusioned. This isn’t all too different from martial arts movies, signing up for karate classes, then dropping out after a few weeks because you got your ass kicked in a fight after school. The real world isn’t the movies, and usually the jobs we have to do aren’t exciting or sexy at all, so we pick the perceived easier path in order to avoid that work. Between that slap or reality and the stigma of working in “nerdy” fields of study, in my opinon, it’s no wonder people either switch from, or outright avoid, sciences and engineering in school.

How do we rectify this kind of attitude? I suppose we can try to instill in our kids that hard work is a part of life, and if you pursue your intersts you’ll probably end up having a lot of fun as well as studying your butt off. Regardless of the field, reality needs to be observed and people need to start getting genuinely excited and interested in their pursuits. Being an English major isn’t easy, and physics isn’t as hard as you’ve been lead to believe. And honestly, at the end of the day, both writers and scientists are equally geeky in their own right; so are FBI agents, firefighters, and medical doctors.

In the words of the great Ben Croshaw: “Allow me to hold your head under the putrescent waters of knowledge.”

Is the IT industry elitist? In a word: yes. It’s one of the few industries where the words “entry level” actually mean you should have several years of experience before applying. It’s an industry where there is always someone younger, someone smarter, someone willing to work longer hours out to take your job and steal your promotion. It’s an industry notorious for its demand that we update our skills faster and faster with each passing year, and that’s simply to stay current with the job(s) we already work in.

However, there are some pretty good reasons.

The first reason is that, in IT, the spectrum of responsibility you are expected to carry can range from simply making sure a few office-workers can connect to the internet and download their email, to keeping system-critical servers and equipment working for hospitals and banks. We need to stay sharp, we need to keep ourselves up to date, and we need to grow with technology or we can’t do our jobs and maintain that technology. That, of course, brings me to another reason.

Technology changes, the needs of businesses and users change, and we have to change with them. There is no way to do business today the way we did in the 80′s, the 90′s, or even the way we did in 2005. If you want to complain because you’re just now learning what a server is, and most companies want someone who understands virtualization, that’s nobody’s problem but yours. One of the points that Ayn Rand once made is one I whole-heartedly agree with: a person is not hired for a job to his or her best, they’re hired to do what is necessary to complete that job. This industry requires a VAST amount of knowledge on our part, a great deal of flexibility, and a practical understanding of how to use that knowledge to keep the world running. On to the next point.

As Sabalo mentioned, there are lots of people who get into IT thinking it’s easy money, then complain when they find out it’s harder than they thought. Oddly, no one expects to be a doctor, physicist, astronaut, firefighter, or engineer without a lot of work beforehand, and this industry is no different. And, honestly, it’s not for everyone. Not everyone “has the right stuff”, and some people even spend anywhere from two to eight years in school before they figure out that IT isn’t for them. (This is also true for those other professions I mentioned, as well as many others, like computer science.) You keep working, you keep learning, and then you figure out if this is the path for you or if your best simply isn’t good enough and another path is a better choice.

It sounds like you’re fresh out of college, so you’ve got plenty of time to decide what to do with your life. You were told you weren’t a good fit for the job(s) you applied for, so right now you’ve got a choice:

A.) Blame the hiring manager(s) that turned you down for being unfair not realizing your genius.

B.) Figure out why they didn’t want to hire you, and work on those things.

Maybe you need more experience? Volunteer your time. Maybe you need more certs? Study and earn them. Maybe you need to work on your interviewing skills? Talk to professionals, (like the ones on this board,) and ask them for help. Maybe your communication skills are rusty? Take some writing and speech courses. There are lots of things we all need to improve on, don’t expect to be the exception to the rule.

If all this sounds a little harsh, it’s because it is. IT is a competitive industry, and it doesn’t suffer fools. It’s better to know what you’re getting into and try to live up to that, than it is to get thumped on the head a few times and grow bitter because of it. We’ve all been new to IT, and most of us are here to offer help. . . but only if you can accept that you just might need it.

The political landscape of this country can be summed up in one word: vicious. In my lifetime, I’ve never seen the kind of outright partisanship that’s dividing this country into distinct blue and red factions. President Obama’s being called a nazi, a communist, a Kenyan, and the word liberal is still considered a derogatory term by many. So, who is to blame for this onslaught of venom from the right? Why, we are. . . the very same liberals who are under the gun.

During the George W. Bush years, the outrage over his administration’s policies boiled over to such a degree that nothing was taboo. We called him a nazi, we called him a fascist, we burned effigies of him in the streets, and there was nothing sacred about the posters carried during anti-war rallies. Does this mean that we were wrong in feeling outrage? Of course not, there was plenty to be angry about during the Bush years. However, regardless of how we may have felt about the issues, that doesn’t excuse the tone and approach we took. We, who are supposed to be the “intellectual elite”, let ourselves get goaded into a screaming-match that is the basis for what the right is flinging back at us now.

Regardless of if we were right or wrong, no matter how strongly we may believe we were right, we set a horrible precedent. We sank right down to the level of the conservative mud-slingers and gave the conservaties, particularly the Tea Party, all the ammunition they ever needed to rally support. They can now call us freedom-haters with the same poison language we used against them. After all, why wouldn’t they? They’re simply one-upping us, stepping only a few steps over the line that we drew and then ran over. We gave them the weapon they needed to fight us: self-righteous outrage fueled by memories of our attacks on them. And when you give a chimp a gun, you don’t blame the chimp when it shoots somebody.

We made some pretty horrendous mistakes that the right has taken and run with. So, what can we do? It’s simple, we simply have to rise above it and continue moving forward. The issues at hand are important, but this time we have to address them like the adults in the room, instead of sinking down to the shouting contest of the past. Let the Republicans and other conservatives shout, rally, scream, and yell. They are more than capable of sinking their own ships, especially now that a new crack in the armor is appearing.

During the health care debates, the presence of a group known as the Tea Party was undeniable. Their rallies, promoting mainly fear of the coming changes, were showcases of the kind of rabid ideology conservatives are ready to embrace in this day and age. The Tea Party is a far-right answer to the Republican party’s standard right-of-center  politicians, and there have been several cases where an incumbent Republican politician has been voted out in favor of a Tea Party candidate.

The Tea Party is dividing the Republican party down the middle. And, as one prominent Republican once said, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” The first targets of the hyper-idealogical Tea Party  are the centrist Republicans, not the Democrats. This creates an interesting set of circumstances: Republican politicians will either have to shift their policies to appease the Tea Party, potentially alienating independent and right-of-center voters, or they’ll be under threat of being replaced by a Tea Party candidate.

What happens next is the tricky part. The Democrats will lose seats in both the senate and in congress, but it’s very unlikely they’ll lose their majorities. Sure, the filibuster-proof majorities will be gone, but that doesn’t matter since the Dems never had the guts to use them anyway. The tension will continue to grow as the Tea Party picks up more and more steam, generating more empty outrage over the Obama administration, putting more pressure on centrist Republicans to fall in line or be ousted in the next election. My advice to them is to run, run across the aisle and stand with the majority in order go get things done. Results will always win over ideals and outrage.

As time passes, the current Tea Party candidates will fail to live up to the impossible ideals of the Tea Party and the rhetoric of the likes of Glenn Beck. Their own candidates will begin to take heat for not bringing change fast enough, much like they did to Obama starting the week after his election. There will be blood in the water, that’s for sure, and Republicans will be scrambling to ensure their seats in congress and the senate come 2012. As I said, results will matter more than promises, and the only way they’ll get any results under their belts, not to mention the support of anyone outside the Tea Party, will be to vote with Democrats on upcoming bills.

So where does that leave the Democrats? They have to rise above the bickering, the name-calling, and stop acknowledging the blubbering outrage of people like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. Realizing that Beck and Limbaugh are far more concerned with their ratings than the ideals of their party is going to be the first step, and we’re not going to win any elections or approval ratings trying to shout down or even get into debates with radio personalities. President Obama, in particular, needs to worry less about the resistance his policies see in the here and now, and focus on moving his policies forward. The only way for Barack Obama to ensure a victory in the 2012 presidential race is to bring results of his first four years in office, in order to give credibility to the promises for the remaining four.  In the end, history will remember what was accomplished, not what was attempted.

The same can be said for all of us. It’s time to stop engaging the Tea Party and the outrageous claims made by their leaders. Of course Obama is American, of course he’s neither a nazi or a socialist. We know that, Glenn Beck knows that, but the average Tea Party supporter doesn’t know any better and is whipped up into a frenzy based solely on the emotional response produced by hearing those things. We need to rise above them, be the adults, and stop giving in to tempter-tantrums. Debating issues with a Tea Party follower is useless, they have faith that their own views are right and earnestly believe that liberals are evil people out to destroy their way of life. We cannot get caught up in emotional warfare with them any longer. We have to rise above all that and ignore them, let them torpedo themselves, if we are ever going to see reason win out over zealotry.

The truth of the matter is that the deciding factor in the upcoming elections is going to be the independent vote, as it was in the last election. As long as we stick to our principles and avoid jumping down in the mud with the conservatives, we will win. An undecided voter isn’t going to look favorably on the Tea Party’s extreme viewpoints and unfounded claims, but they’re not going to look favorably at us either if we show them exactly the same thing. I say let the conservatives eat each other, we have a lot of serious work to do and it’s far too important to let fear-mongering and self-righteous nationalism distract us from that fact.

It’s no secret that web anonymity breeds a high level of douche-baggery. Why bother with outdated concepts such as respect, open mindedness and base decency when no one knows who you are?

Why, indeed, when it so easy to set up a new forum account or a blog and write things which you would never say aloud? Why?

Because of the illusion that your actions, your words are completely consequence free. I say illusion because it is just that, an illusion, it’s false. There are always consequences to our actions, though it may not be ourselves who suffer them.

More than a punch to the head, words do hurt. What you write laughing in your bedroom at 4am about another human being can deeply wound that person.

When a time comes that I find myself writing about another person, I always ask myself a simple question: Would I say that to his/her face? If the answer is yes, I hit publish. If the answer is no, I delete.

I wish I could institute this policy to the web as a whole, but I simply don’t have that reach. My hope is that some of you at least will take these words to heart, and like our mother’s taught us to think before we talk, please think before you type.

The reason I bring this up is because I’ve been following the recent dust up between Perez Hilton (who I consider to be complete trash) and Will.I.Am. If you haven’t heard about it yet, do yourself a favor and try and ignore it, it will make you feel just a little bit worse about humanity.

Still, it did make me think.

Violence is not an answer to any question, it is not a solution to any problem. I would also say the same about what Hilton does for a ‘living’. Dozens of times per day, he goes on record to millions of loyal readers and bashes, makes fun of and judges people in the media’s eye. It’s a deplorable thing he does, and thus far, he’s never faced any consequences for his actions. Until now, until he was punched in the head.

Hilton isn’t a victim, he was held accountable.

Should he have been punched? No. But he wasn’t blameless.

How would you have reacted if someone said to your face what Hilton says about others on a daily basis, either about you, a family member or a friend?

Hilton shouldn’t have been attacked, that is wrong. People should stop supporting what he does, that is also wrong.

While the media will no doubt be talking about this for the next few weeks, I honestly hope that people will realize this incident can be applied to the vast majority of the internet using community. And that maybe, we can learn from it.

It’s easy to do the right thing when everyone is looking, but how about doing the right thing when you’re alone at your computer?

As opposed to this being nothing but a funny entry on a comedy blog, (I laughed when I saw it, just as I laugh at other “blooper videos”,) it actually turned into news when PETA showed outrage at the incident, no joke: PETA miffed at President Obama’s fly “execution”

PETA’s blog points out that they were approached for comment about the incident and did not make any unprovoked statements,

Believe it or not, we’ve actually been contacted by multiple media outlets wanting to know PETA’s official response to the executive insect execution.

In a nutshell, our position is this: He isn’t the Buddha, he’s a human being, and human beings have a long way to go before they think before they act.

Immediately following these comments, they were quick to plug a product they sell and stated that they’ll be sending him a humane bug catcher for future use. . . yes, my head hurts too. They’ll never back down on the position that we shouldn’t even swat flies, but I’m hoping that the present is at least an attempt at humor and that there won’t be follow-up stories of a letter containing lecture on cruelty to animals to go along with the thing. Hopefully, they realize that they were only contacted by other news organizations because somewhere, some producer saw the video and suggested his reporters ask PETA for comment between fits of laughter.

This is what they’re sending him: Katcha Bug™ Humane Bug Catcher

If nothing else, maybe this will boost President Obama’s approval ratings with conservatives and his critics. He’s sending a strong message to the rest of the world: if this is what he does to flies, just imagine what he’ll do to Kim Jong-Il if North Korea doesn’t back off their nuclear weapons program.

I think her answer was so stupid it actually gave me cancer.

Top 100 Iconic Internet Videos

(Sadly, while on the list, the Numa Numa song didn’t quite make the top 10.)

Protesting the Cluttered Skyline of San Francisco. . . IN A MOVIE!!!
Local Trekkie Upset About Scale of Buildings in Futuristic San Francisco

Yes, he’s genuinely upset about the state of the city in an imaginary future.

(Imaginary) Animal Abuse Outrages Several
Earlier this month, Joystiq reported a story about student protests against Call of Duty: World at War due to the treatment of attack dogs in the game, (you have to kill them before they kill you). Now, naturally, PETA has taken up the cause as well.

Chemical Scare Evacuates School
This was my favorite stupid moment of the day. A high school in Chicago was evacuated when chlorine was discovered near the swimming pool. Yes, you read that right, they evacuated the school because there was chlorine near the swimming pool.

FROM STNG WIRE REPORTS
A North Side high school has been evacuated as a precaution after a chemical was found in the school Monday morning.

A Level 1 HazMat situation was called about 10:45 a.m. at Senn High School at 5900 N. Glenwood Ave., according to Fire Media Affairs spokesman Quention Curtis.

The school was evacuated as a precaution after a chemical believed to be chlorine was found near the pool, Curtis said.

No injuries have been reported but crews remain on the scene as of 11:05 a.m.

With that, my head hurts. I’m going to take three martinis and lay down.