Tuesday, May 09, 2006

TRUTH VERSUS REALITY, PART II

Remember my blog post a while back wherein I showed how much bullshit the Tim Todd Ministries could pack into a 6-page comic extolling evangelical Christian virtues? Well, I was just scratching the surface. Let's analyze another comic or two, shall we?

And be sure to read the original first, if you haven't.
Follow the yellow-brick hyperlink: http://mrbadaxe.blogspot.com/2006/03/truth-versus-reality-theres-something.html

COMIC TITLE: "Bibles not Bullets"
ISSUE: School Violence/School Prayer
SUMMARY OF THE COMIC:
Tommy is facing down a student with a gun, trying to calm him down, while the voices in the student's head are telling him to shoot. The student is subdued by a SWAT team, and Tommy is safe. Mr. Witski, a teacher, calls Tommy's actions foolish and dangerous, but the principal praises his boldness. The next day, Tommy is telling other students about his new school bible-study group when Mr. Witski interrupts him and gives his disapproval. Tommy makes the argument that "now instead of bibles, we have bullets!" Mr. Witski continues to hound Tommy, eventually taking his complaint to the principal. Unbeknownst to Mr. Witski, the principal has already approved their action, and the bible-study group continues as planned. At the first meeting, a student asks, what if Mr. Witski sues us? Tommy informs them that there's a number they can call for a lawyer who will take their case free of charge, but then adds that their enemy isn't Mr. Witski. "You took your best shot, Satan! Now the youth of America are fighting back! With god's help, we are legally smuggling bibles into public schools to stop the violence!"

ANALYSIS:
On the first page of this comic, we see the student with the gun. What really stood out was that the student in question is using what appears to be a hunting rifle. Now, don't get me wrong: I do not condone school shooting. I do not support school shooting. I have never handled a loaded gun (once I got the opportunity to hold an unloaded M-16). But I know this much: IF you plan on shooting people in a school...you should bring something that can be CONCEALED better.

A hunting rifle is not only nearly impossible to hide (school uniforms video scene in Bowling for Columbine notwithstanding), it's not easy to shoot multiple students with, especially if you have to reload after every shot. I personally would have used Derringers. They may only be able to carry two bullets, but I bet you that I could hide three of them in each shoe, one in each of the rear pants pockets, three or four in the front pockets, a few in the knee pockets if I was wearing cargo pants, and one in each of the dozen or so pockets in my ski jacket (if I decided to shoot up the school in the winter). While you're firing two shots from one, you can be reaching for the next. Now you're talking armed and dangerous.

Now back to the message behind the comic. This can actually probably be split into two points: One, If there is prayer in schools, there will be no violence. Two, the inverse of the first point, If there is no prayer in the schools, there WILL be violence.

Point number one might be true. My high school, Chelmsford High School in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, had the Mustard Seeds Christian Club. I have no idea if it still exists now. Their picture wasn't in the yearbook in 2004, the year I graduated, but they could have just missed the cutoff for yearbook pictures. My brother, who is a senior there, says he's never heard of them, which makes me believe they're gone. While I was a student at CHS, there were no school shootings there. But I can't attribute that to a high membership in the Christian club; according to their yearbook pictures in previous years, there were maybe six members at any one time out of a student body of about 1500. Ultimately, all we've found is a correlation, not a case of cause and effect.

But that no prayer in the schools CAUSES violence? This is absurd. Violence in schools is caused my many things, some we'll never know, but lack of prayer isn't one of them. No student ever shot another because we just wouldn't say the Our Father every morning. As far as I can tell, most school violence revolves around social acceptance or lack thereof.

And I thought that when people advocated "prayer in schools," I always thought they were talking about mandatory prayer as the school day started, say, just after the Pledge of Allegiance. (That became a schoolwide event after 9/11 at the insistence of our principal.) I don't advocate that because it's not fair to the Jewish and Atheist students, of which there were many. But if the right to form a club like this is all they want, fine, they can have it. I wouldn't have gone, but I'm not stopping you from meeting.

But it was bad enough having to think of something to fill the space where "under god" would have been in the Pledge of Allegiance, so having to think of some way to occupy my time while the student body recites a Hail Mary would have been even more annoying. And if someone saw me sitting there silently, I'd suddenly have several new friends sitting with me at lunch. Friends that tell me, "You know, Jesus died for your sins..." and I'd be forced to pull out this great line paraphrased from Jules Feiffer: "Well, it would make his death meaningless if I didn't commit them." And they'd begin bombarding me with bible quotes. I wouldn't be listening. I'd actually be thinking of shooting up the school, so that these Jesus fanboys would leave me alone so I could eat my government-issued reheated chicken parmesan sandwich in peace. (Those sandwiches were real good. Not great, but about the best a public school cafeteria could get.)

And that's it for that comic. More coming!

Monday, May 08, 2006

SEMESTER #4 AT UMASS

It's just today that I realized that every single class I'm taking this semester is useless.

Linguistics 101? I think the reason I thought I might like this class is my moderate interest in constructed languages, like Esperanto and Klingon. I made an effort to learn Esperanto from a book, but absorbed very little of the vocabulary. Mostly just grammatical rules.

So I thought, might be an interesting subject to learn about. And it is. But I can't think of a single place I'd use it.

Math 235, Linear Algebra. Again, I thought, "well, it deals with number matrixes, and those are kind of cool..." in that pseudo-math-nerd kind of way. I think some of these things are cool IF I can understand them. Most of these, I get right away. And when I can't figure it out, I start to ask if it could be used later in life. So far, the teacher (not a professor, mind you, unless Ms. Mairead Greene has become a professor in the one short year in between this class and my first semester here when, as a grad student, she taught me Calculus II) has done nothing -- absolutely nothing! -- to make me believe it is. Usually, with other branches of mathematics, like Algebra, or Trigonometry, or even the first parts of Calculus, you can at least fool me into thinking there's a practical use by giving me Word Problems. No such thing here.

Physics 152. This course covers electricity, magnetism, and the ideal gas law. All things that make great science fair projects, but don't really come in handy in the kind of office-setting job I'd eventually end up in.

I'd love to see a first-person shooter computer game incorporate these kind of concepts into the game engine. Wouldn't you? Imagine, you're using your flamethrower to heat up a tank of gas to increase the pressure inside so that the tank explodes and the gas suffocates everyone except you, who has a gas mask. BLAM! too slow. Your opponent, who only kept in mind the basics of mechanics and kinematics, just grabbed the nearest rocket launcher and went for the head shot. Now we get to see "rag doll" physics in action. Using s = s0 + v0t + 1/2gt^2, we can tell exactly where your severed head will land. Fun!

Computer Science 287, Programming Language Paradigms -- now hold on, you said you were going for a CS degree. Surely you must care? Negatory, nicht, nein, non, and not as such. The course is taught in a language called Scheme, which is a derivative of another language called LISP. I had previous experience with Scheme when I took a summer course with the Johns Hopkins University's CTY program. I didn't understand then. But then again, I was in eighth grade and knew only a fraction of the knowledge of computer programming I do now. I understand most of that now. And we managed to cover all of that in the first week of class here.

But more importantly, how many programs do you know of that are written in Scheme? Probably none. And you wouldn't be alone in your left-in-the-dark-edness. (New word! Let's get it into Oxford!) I knew of none when I came in to the class, and I can only name ONE major program that uses it now, three weeks or so from the final exam. Audacity, the open-source audio editing tool, supposedly uses a dialect of Scheme to do...something. Yeah, well, the rest of the program is written in C++, as are THE VAST MAJORITY OF ALL OTHER PROGRAMS OUT THERE! And yet, how many courses have I taken in C++? Zero. Not a one. 0x00000000. CS132 I skipped because of AP credit, CS187 was taught in Java, and CS201 was taught in Assembly language for the ARM processor.

Well, if not C++, why not more Java? I like Java. I want to learn to do something fun in Java, like...write my own messaging program, like AIM. Just because I can. But no, apparently it's necessary to the major that we understand what snippets of code rife with "cons" and "lambda" do. Why bother learning about this shit when I calready know how to do this in another language? And not just any language, but an object-oriented, platform-independent one, named after a variety of coffee?

A semester wasted. Gotta get my mind off this. I need sleep.