It sounded good on paper....

Today's episode will be covering things you think at first are good ideas, but in reality may not be.

Let's start with a simple one. Pure democracy. Everyone has a single vote, majority wins. Yay power to the people and all that. The only problem is this relies on an informed governed/voter population. Unfortunately, the USA is really really bad at this. We rely too much on the echo chamber of the media for our 30 second sound bites to tell us how awesome this one idea is. So, maybe having smarter people in power would be nice. Problem is, this same population has to vote them in. Oops. Solution, inform your public. Yay mandatory schooling! Just make sure you make people learn. But, that's for another rant.

Here's one closer to Mudd. Clinic. Pretty awesome on paper. You're working with a liaison and as an undergrad you're getting real world experience. Awesome! However, you're trying to solve real world problems while in school. Oh, you mean you forgot you still had to do Hum papers or that lab for the other class? Oops. Bonus points if your liaisons don't actually know what the problem really is. One Clinic team (which will not be named here) has a really cool project. However, we're past the half-way mark and they still don't have a good grasp of the problem. It's a problem that relies heavily on sample data, but they don't seem to have any accurate data. Plus, many times they ask for information, the liaison says "figure it out," they come back and present their solution, and the liaison goes "yeah, that's what we were thinking." As much as I'm a fan for finding things out myself and giving people freedom for creativity, sometimes the optimal solution is already known. Please share. So, be warned that Clinic is a huge undertaking. Probably worth it, I'll let you know at the end of mine, but a giant time suck. Plus, you've got to do it in conjunction with other classes. Unless you were awesome, planned ahead, and don't have many classes during Clinic.

Now, another of my gripes. Diversity. Yay multiple views and experiences. The question then becomes, are we doing things for the sake of diversity? It's become a huge question in the College Application Process if a college is accepting and rejecting people based on nationality or gender. After all, we love having numbers with huge non-white and female incoming classes. Makes the news, good stuff for publicity. However, are you lowering the quality of the incoming class? Cheapening the brand of a degree? This also hurts the minority who have to second guess if they're there because they deserve it or because it was a "diversity" choice. Blargh. FYI, I'm a minority. Unfortunately, Asians have this weird idea that we aren't underprivileged, so we don't give out many Asian scholarships. Also, we're one of the largest minorities in the West Coast schools, so we typically don't get preferential treatment. As the saying goes, UCI is the University of Chinese Immigrants and UCLA is University of Caucasian Lost in Asia. =]

Back to recent events, Halloween was pretty awesome. I hope Kyle posts about his Dr. Horrible costume, because it was made of win. If you don't know what Dr. Horrible is yet, go here. But yeah, I didn't dress up. Thought about it, then decided to be a sleep deprived engineer. Turns out it worked well. =] Other favorites were a Music Pirate, a Hamlet/Westley/Random dude in black with a sword, the entire Evil League of Evil including Bad Horse (another Dr. Horrible reference), a random lady costume as an excuse to wear her corset, and Martin dressed up a Room Draw. Yeah, that thing we're not supposed to talk about. East had Trick or Cheese. Each suite buys Cheese, sometimes crackers too, and you go around sampling cheese. This is the counter to Trick or Drink in West. There was also a group who took tin foil, wrapped themselves up, and went to Chipotle. Chipotle gives free burritos to people who come dressed as a burrito, and since they wrap their burritos in tin foil, well...

Anyways, time to get back to my lab. I'm implementing processor interrupts today. yay!