College Bubble Extrapolating

Some folks say that there is a bubble in college education. That having more people going to college leads to more demand for college training from employers, but little actual gain in knowledge. The thing is, employers don't want to hire people without college training since it provides at least some evidence that their hires have something between their ears.

Now let's do some futuristic extrapolation of how the college bubble could burst.

1. Reliable services could exist that evaluated potential employees on the basis of the material that has been posted by and about them on the internet.

2. More contests, not related to college, could spring up. If this were the case you might look to hire members of the top ranking pre-accounting team in the state, rather than folks with a degree in accountancy from certain schools.

3. Large employers could offer there own training programs and move the people who do well in these up the ladder.

I'm not sure which of any of these ideas would work in real life but all of them might make fun background material in a science fiction story.

Writing Fighting

In popular fiction there are a lot of fights. I've been in only a few and all of those I've lost but here are some observations from Karate class and other places. Use them, if you want, to make your fights more vivid.

1. Reach and range matter. If you are too close you won't have power, too far away and you won't connect. You need to be aware, hopefully more aware then your opponent, of what range you are at.

2. Training for fighting is partially mental, you have to get used to looking at your enemy even though he or she is noisy and intimidating.

3. Fighting people who are bigger is hard. They are obviously more powerful then you and they also have a longer reach. I don't what the best way to do this is but I would think that grappling or coming in below their guard would be more useful than trying any kind of jumping move.

4. People, to a degree, rise or fall to their level of training. Training, except when you are dealing with extremes, is more important than innate abilities.

5. Powerful weapons, such as modern firearms,  reduce the need for skill. An ignoramus with an AK-47 is very dangerous, at least in the short term, an unskilled guy swinging his fists around much less so.

Have good and hopefully, peaceful, day.

Satire -- Why Most of us don't count

This thing about autonomy is really overrated. The fact is most people can be shown, using brain scans to have one or more areas in their brains where the connectivity is just plain lousy or, due to genetic factors or, perhaps, lead poisoning, to have a smaller than average frontal cortex.

Though nearly everybody is capable of developing some skills, because of their cerebral limitations, relatively few are capable of of seeing the big picture and acting appropriately. Given the fact that we live in a time of cultural disintegration brought on by advancing technology and disrespect for religious and spiritual traditions as well some real and serious environmental problems, we need folks with the best quality brains available to lead us.

The people who should lead us are, in fact, the working rich. By showing their ability to create wealth they have displayed for all to see the excellent quality of their brains. The rest of us, including myself, should not venture to assert ourselves against them or to confiscate their earned wealth through taxation or other means. By earning their wealth they have shown that they in fact possess better comprehension of the world than most of us.

Another way they show their worth is by the existence of serious disagreements among themselves. This shows that they are not a monolith, incapable of changing direction, but rather a collection of vibrant thinkers and doers. The rest of us, limited as we are, would do best to get out of their way and follow their lead.

Some stuff about painting.

I've ordered several tubes of Primatek watercolors from Daniel Smith. The ones I've used so far are Sodalite, Serpentine, and Lapis Lazuli. Sodalite seems darker than a remember and granulates a lot if used in a wash, but does make a nice blue-black. Serpentine seems to consist of two components. One is extremely green and seems to stay suspended in the water for a long time. The other component is reddish, looking similar to red ocher or other iron containing clay pigments. This rapidly settles out of the wash, giving a granulated effect that I like. From a distance, a passage painted with Daniel Smith Genuine Serpentine appears an earthy yellowish-green, a good color for painting weeds or brush. Lapis lazuli despite the great name was, in my opinion, the least satisfactory paint, as it has low tinting strength. In my test painting I used it for the sky in a sunset and, while the grayish blue worked well for this, it did not do anything a mixture of less expensive pigments wouldn't have done.

Ruby

I've been going through the Edgecase Ruby koans in an effort to learn Ruby. I'm little over a third done. It's not a break though but it is an impressively elegant scripting language.

I like the orthogonal design with everything being an object. My husband, on the other hand doesn't like that sort of thing. He's sees the purpose of objects as modeling things in real life. There aren't strings and arrays in real life so why should these be objects?

Mixing Fantasies

My husband and my daughter are talking about their respective fantasy worlds. My daughter's is based on Marvel Comics and includes a heavy dose of magic and mythology, as well as a superpowered character she identifies with.

My husband does not have a hero whom he identifies with and his world is full of interesting alien races based on scientific speculation. He does not include magic and includes a lot of adult politcal cynicism. It is assuming to see my daughter mix her creations with my husband's. If an adult mixed magic with my husband's science fiction, it would be butchery, but I'm enjoying my daughter's fluid, though still immature imagination.

Men and Violence -- Writing Escapist Heroes

The other day I read an article on Science Daily suggesting that some kind of female animal, I forget which, loses interest in males who lose fights. Their was a suggestion that human females would feel the same way. For writers the implication would be that to be attractive to female readers, a male hero should never lose a physical fight.

Though I've been attracted to men who I imagined were skilled fighters, I think that human females are a little bit more complicated than this, at least when they are sober. In popular fiction, male heroes can be skilled fighters, but two other intertwined qualities are also important.

The first is having good judgement in stressful situations. The hero shouldn't be an idiot who would charge a tank with a sword, no matter what crimes the tank driver has committed. A writer can even get a little sexist and have the hero's love interest test him by suggesting doing something dangerous. The hero should be able to refuse her. He comes across as a better man if anger, fear and lust are not able to truly corrupt his judgment.

The second quality is honor. While he needn't be and probably shouldn't be a virgin milquetoast goody-goody, he should have some lines that he won't cross. He can drink, swear, and get into some avoidable fights, but he should show fidelity to a personal code, even at some cost to himself.

No doubt men and women who have acted heroically in real life might find the above somewhat silly. After all, a real hero is often an ordinary person who did the best he or she could do in extraordinary circumstances, but I am trying to describe a type of male character that would be entertaining for me to read about, not to dissect real life heroism.