The fringe benefits of CS – sadly, not babes

Microsoft continued courting the undergraduates of the CS department today with a table full of prizes and giveaways. I grabbed a bunch for use in the performance-based “fabulous prizes” offer I recently extended to the kids in my section. A Bluetooth (yet another word hardly anyone understands but still assumes is good and important) mouse and keyboard were the top prize in what was apparently a quiz-contest about information technology, but I didn’t have time to complete it so probably won’t win. (When did we, as a society, declare unanimous war on wires? They’re low power, reliable, and easy to debug. I can’t remember the last time I looked at the cords leading away from my mouse and keyboard and thought, “that is an unacceptable waste of space. and how am I supposed to surf the web from my couch?” I can’t even see that far.) Microsoft also bought pizza from Papa Johns for everyone in the labs, and even though I had eaten a large breakfast only an hour earlier, for some reason I shuffled over to the fecund boxes and helped myself. Then I felt horrible. I have a hard time turning down free food – I need to learn that “complimentary” does not equal “compulsory”.

It should be noted that Sarah and I did not see any modern dance Friday night, but instead saw The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou”, a review of which is forthcoming in the next few days. We both had a hard time abandoning the $25 tickets, given her by her father for Christmas, but in the end it just wasn’t something in which we were interested. She’s going to read a review so she can tell him how awesome the show was.

Now for a couple of newsworthy items collected from our dear friend and time waster, the intarweb.

First is this editorial by someone named Zach Parks, who named his column “Zack Attack”. Please, Zach. You didn’t see me giving into that kind of trite commercial pandering with my “Nerd’s-eye view” column, now did you? Regardless, he’s written a pretty hilarious piece for his school paper, the University of Miami in Oxford, Ohio. I can’t imagine a more misleading school name.

Students today forget that writings such as our friend Zach’s couldn’t be without our other very good friend, the First Amendment. In an alarming study conducted by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, researchers found that high school students know nothing about the first amendment or just don’t think its protections are important. More than one in three says it “goes too far”. Three quarters of them think flag burning is illegal (despite what you might hear in Missouri, it is not). Only half think that newspapers should be free to print whatever they want without government approval. I don’t know about you, but these results scare the hell out of me. These are the kids who, for better or worse, are going to be running the country some day. They’re supposed to be young, full of piss and vinegar, yelling “fuck the establishment” as they publish anti-war manifestos and tape them to lockers. Instead, they’re already eating right out the establishment’s hand. Remember, it doesn’t really take a vote by the States to change the constitution – nine men do so several times a year. And these kids – these puling little wretches to whom we as a society have failed to impart the importance of the most fundamental freedoms of our way of life – are going to be the mouth-breathing masses that roll over and accept it. See, now I’ve gone and gotten myself all worked up. And people wonder why I don’t engage politics in my writing more often.