We don't need no edukashun

I bought my pocket memory thing (it's properly called USB Flash Memory) at the weekend. Rather than the 128Mb one Val mentioned I found a 512Mb for $50. It's already saved me a lot of messing about - I need the latest Java SDK for my Linux box at home and it's about 34Mb, which until now meant either downloading at home, hogging the phone line for three or four hours, or downloading it at work and burning it onto CD. The trouble is that Kevin, the only guy on my team with a CD burner on his machine, is out of the office until next week so that isn't an option. USB Flash Memory to the rescue... I downloaded it this morning and copied it to the memory, and I was all done in about 2 minutes. I took a look at the memory manufacturer's website because I wanted to see if there are any useful programs to go with it (mostly because I have an idea for a program of my own, of which no more will be said at this time, and I wanted to make sure they didn't have anything similar already). What I found instead was yet another symptom of the rot that's got into the education system. The web page, which is in all other respects a professional-looking page, says about their product, "...put it in your backpack or briefcase and your good to go". "Your good to go"? My good to go what? There was a time when you would never, ever see such a stupid error in print, but now it's getting to be commonplace. Education in this country (and others) is going down the toilet. Schools spend too much time teaching "cool" stuff like webmastering (I'm not kidding) and not enough on basic skills like English spelling, grammar and punctuation, arithmetic and basic science. Kids are leaving school illiterate, innumerate and with crazy ideas about getting full-time jobs as professional psychics. These people will be leaders of industry, politics and much else a few years from now, and they're not going to be up to the job. I fear for the future.

Kate's little python, Sierra, shed her skin again yesterday which got me thinking: how is she growing so fast? I mean, she eats maybe half an ounce a week, and most of that comes back out in the form of snake number-twos. Most of what she gets to keep she burns as energy - she's quite an active little wiggler. And yet somehow she's still able to grow at a rate that implies she's putting on more weight than she actually eats. Maybe Einstein's conservation of mass-energy simply doesn't apply to her. But that can't be right, so in line with Einstein there is only one possible, logical, scientific explanation, and that is that she's absorbing energy and turning it into mass. I did some calculations (what Kate calls, "Cypherin'"). Let's assume she's putting on about half an ounce a week. Of that, as shown by my earlier number-two observation, let's say that half of that actually comes from the food. That leaves a quarter of an ounce, or about 7 grams, unaccounted for. According to E=mc² that's equivalent to 630 million million Joules of energy, which is quite a bit. There's only one place she can be absorbing energy from, and that's the lighting over her house. No wonder our electric bill is so high. There's just one more question niggling away at the back of my mind: where do snake number-ones go?