Parenting and Filial Happiness

I recently watched a fascinating TED talk on parenting and some of its modern dysfunctions. It got me thinking.

One of the speaker's points, as I understood it, was that parents often directly seek to make their children happy and in so doing they stress out both themselves and their children. It kinda sucks all around. It's a great talk; I recommend you watch it. I'll most likely be a dad some day, so her points felt relevant.

The happiness point led me to critique this parenting style from a more theoretical standpoint: if I take for granted, as I do here in the USA, that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are elevated among each individual's inalienable rights, does parenting with the primary goal of a happy child abrogate the child's right to pursue happiness?

I guess I'll find out one day.

[rant] Searching Gmail

Dear Google's Gmail folks,

When I search for "from:email@address.com", I expect to be able to access ALL emails from that person.

Limit the first page to 20 results? Make me page through to find what I need? Sure. Don't just cut it off in January because, you know, reasons, with no way to page back to 2009. It was working fine a month ago.

On Proper Metaeducation, or Why Don't I Get Bloom's Taxonomy?

I am no educator. I'm a software engineer in testing with a hardware background.

I am also a student.

As such, I have had Bloom's taxonomy of learning and cognitive domains thrust upon me many times. My university classes' "learning outcomes" were full of Bloom's (oddly not Anderson's) terms and concepts from this set of tools for picking apart and understanding how humans in general learn. I think I got most of the concepts and even the skills (earliest kudos go to Mrs. Haufle and Ms. Hassenfritz), but I never absorbed the terms or the long lists of keywords or the definitions.

Now I'm staring at another Bloom's Taxonomy assignment:

Literature

Once upon a time there was a group of writers in Spain whose work became known as Red Fiction.

A prominent critic of their work, also a Tolkien fan, called them what?

The Writers of Roja.

(Could've been serials, in which case they were the Writers of Roja N. It just didn't sound as cool.)

Big Shiny

Just because you can see something doesn't mean that you can tell how big it is.

It took astronomers hundreds of years to develop equipment and theories that could handle the minute details of the sky, and even then it took some careful measurements of celestial coincidences to tell how far away the sun is.

That is now I feel sometimes. I used to be a tech in a small Merc much company. Sandstorms, bullets, Hell and high water didn't phase those guys. Build it small, build it tough, build it fast. They didn't have room, time, or money for the fancy stuff, but when they hit the field the job got done as quick and clean as you can imagine. We were a tight crew. Anybody could sit down with the boss and get coached on everything from Merc ops to manual combat to drinking, and when I had questions I just glanced over my shoulder and asked the guy who knew.

Feeling

Three worlds exist simultaneously.

In the first, cool, carefully prescribed inputs follow clean, mechanical pathways of polished cams, balanced levers, and oiled ways through a vast, steady ocean of linkages and stored history to produce elegant, unquestioned outputs. At the edges of the ordered world, restraining walls keep the ethereal tumult of the second out.

In this second sphere, whirling vortices clash. Great rivers of emotions slam into restraining dikes, spilling over and sometimes meeting others leading to synergistic amplification of their mutual innate chaotic intensities. Uncertainty and despair vie with hope and constancy, each flow waxing and waning as streams of anger, joy, uncertainty, vision, fear, and hope rush through the strained aether. Crossed streams variously yield singularities or supernovae, violent sparks or hardened silence depending on the nature of the meeting. It is quite hard for any solitary denizen to keep the overall maelstrom from rending the very fabric of the world; peace and silence are never an option, especially when The Accuser makes his destructive voice heard, but the sole occupant of the realm still seeks them ploddingly. This is what life is when the ordered world slowly grinds to a terrible, fatigued halt and the worlds' walls melt.

The third world is the one you, dear reader, share. It's the one called reality.

Here, when the world of emotion begins to invade the place of reasoned order and the flags for help are set, few answers indeed are sufficient to the plea "Help me feel, for I am feeling and don't know how."

Drumsticks

Gandalf opened the dusty book, slowly turning to the last written page of the History of the Mines of Moria.

After a surprised expression crossed his brow, he began reading, "Drumsticks, drumsticks in the deep!" After solemnly choosing the great tome, he declared "...there is nothing more."

Turning, he addressed the fellowship of chickens, "Fly, you fools!"