Maura's Illuminated Manuscript

My apartment has baseboard heaters, which naturally run more in the winter.
Bad: my electric bill in the winter is about quadruple what it is in the summer.
Good: when I hang up clothes to dry, they're done in sixteen hours.

I've been studying Spanish on Duolingo for not quite two months now, and I finally broke down and paid for a subscription. Why?

• I love learning languages.
• Spanish is hella useful if you live anywhere in the Americas.
• It might appease the ghosts of my father, my paternal grandfather, his father George, George's mother Maria, and all of Maria's ancestors going back to the Romans. All of them were fluent, and only my father had to learn Spanish as a second language*.

What do I think of Duolingo as a learning tool? I'm not sure. The convenience is fantastic. Mixing up the different skill sets — listening, speaking, translation — in a fine-grained way might be a good thing. I'm still not sure about the [ETA: nearly] complete lack of explication; a paragraph of that could be worth an hour of study. And it's often possible to apply testmanship to Duolingo, which you can't do in a real-life situation. But I am learning. Maybe someday I'll be able to give somebody directions around Seattle in Spanish.



*My grandfather got a job with USAID in Peru in the late '40s, thanks in large part to being a bilingual college graduate. He took his family with him, which meant my dad and his siblings needed to learn Spanish when he was in his early teens. On those rare occasions when my dad and his brother got together during my lifetime, Spanish words and phrases would creep into their speech. I think they associated Spanish with happy memories of their childhood.

I went to the Woodinville Unitarian Universalist church last night for a one-hour panel discussion about trans people. The audience was about 25 junior high school students. The format was three to five minutes for each of the five of us for a bio, then we answered questions that the kids had written on cards. (The people in charge thought the students would be too shy to ask out loud, which kind of amazes me.)

I had a grand time, and we covered a lot of ground, from violence against trans people to the risks of hormones to the meaning of "genderqueer". We had a good selection of panelists: two trans women, one mother of a trans man, one college-age genderqueer, and her trans boyfriend. The questions were right on, too. We ran ten minutes long, but we could have kept going, no problem. And the kids showed little sign of boredom, which is amazing for that age.

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Nibs went on a date and didn't get home until midnight on Saturday night. Ordinarily I wouldn't mind, and I still don't mind that much, but it was time change eve and I had zappy in Tacoma the next morning. I thought she was staying the night. In fact, m'boy told me that she had told him that she might. Well, well. Nibs told me when she got home that our son misunderstood her. What she'd said was that if she stayed the night then blah blah blah.

She said she was late because needed to sober up before driving. She apologized. I do believe she's beginning to like going out at night. That's almost certainly a good thing, because it means she'll be motivated to get to Splitsville, and it'll be good for her mental health. The only thing that bothers me about it is that if her dry spell ends before mine, I'll be distinctly miffed.

Almost two years ago I took a stab at solving the grade inflation problem. Basically, my earlier scheme boils down to a ranking system, but it's missing a couple of things: slack for teachers, and a guarantee that how teachers use that slack won't screw students. Here goes.

Let n_k be the number of students in class k where k is in [1..c], and let there be ranks i in [1..m_k] with b_i,k students in each, where higher i means the student has done better, such that for all i and k b_i,k > 0, and

Sum[i=1..m](b_i,k) = n_k
Administrators can impose constraints like for all i and k, m_k >= 3 and max(b_i,k / m_k) <= 0.7.

Here's where it gets interesting. Define

w_k = Sum[i=1..m_k](ib_i,k)
Let r_j,k where j is in [1..n_k] be the rank to which student j belongs. The score s(j,k) for a student in rank r_j,k is

s(j,k) = 2^(r_j,k/w_k) - 1
giving you a score strictly between 0 and 1 and guaranteeing that for all k

Product[j=1..n_k](s(j,k)+1) = 2

Student j's cumulative score across all classes is then

S(j)=[Product[k=1..c](s(j,k))]^(1/c)
which will also be strictly between 0 and 1. The higher S(j) is, the better a student j has been, say his teachers. Assign letters to specific, non-overlapping ranges between 0 and 1 if you must, but never, ever change them.

Teachers, especially those who aren't numerically inclined, may squawk, but I could write an Excel spreadsheet to compute s(j,k) and check at least some of the constraints.

Please forgive my bastard notation. Next: a closed-form solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

ETA: The underscore is to indicate a subscript.

ETAA: b_i,k is b with two subscripts, i and k. Curse you, neuro42!

Her Nibs & I just got back from Good Night, And Good Luck. It was a pretty good flick, but that's not what I'm writing about. What I'm writing about is that our sitter, the much-loved Natasha who recently graduated from WSU, had never heard of Sen. Joe McCarthy, whose hearings are the backdrop for the movie. Jitt! Urngh! AAGH!