Debasement of Educational Currency

As everyone knows, the cost of a college education has increased to the point where years of student debt are presumed.  Long ago, before the Punic Wars, when I went to college in the eighties, my decision to go to the University of Maryland was based on practical considerations: I was paying for it myself, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, I could get in-state tuition, and it was driving distance from home. I thought I’d pick English as my major; my depression-era father ordered me to pick again.

My college experience was not the oft romanticized “college experience” that people savor forever thereafter with school swag. Life consisted of classes, studying, working or commuting in my money-sucking Gremlin.  As an electrical engineering major I had to routinely take 18 credit hours a semester to meet the steeper graduation criteria which included CORE[1] courses— general education courses required to round you out. I rather enjoyed those, especially English.

Eventually I graduated, cum laude, with a well-paying job in hand and not a penny of student debt! As I recall, I was able to husband my money well enough to make short-term loans to two siblings for their tuition and even donated a thousand dollars to a charity during my senior year—and that was a lot of money back before the fall of mighty Carthage. That’s a lot of money now.

One would think that with the high cost of college and the Herculean effort required to graduate debt free, institutes of higher learning would husband their resources to make that goal achievable while maintaining educational value. But do they? As a seller’s market, why should the industry be efficient (or even relevant) when they have a commodity item, like gasoline, that everyone seems willing to pay for no matter the cost or octane?

The promise of any college diploma equating to economic leverage (or education and knowledge for that matter) is the emperor’s new clothes. Even as college was becoming the mantra that it is today, students with little business being matriculated in the first place were routinely graduated years later, barely able to articulate their thirst for beer in a well structured sentence.  In fact, my hard earned diploma has been debased so much by our soft academic standards, fruity admission criteria and nationwide campus debauchery, I proudly display it in the cardboard tube in which it was mailed. The economy of higher education is poised for the same astronomical inflation that accompanies the excessive printing of money, and soon a diploma will have as much value as the Zimbabwean Dollar.

To add insult to inflation, my own alma mater has, over the intervening centuries, augmented the CORE requirements to mandate a study area called Human Diversity Culture[2] by which all students must obtain certain “diversity” credits to graduate. As part of the program, one may soon partake, in all seriousness, a course in women’s studies entitled WMST 498C: Advanced Special Topics in Women’s Studies: Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, and Nicki Minaj: Gender and Spectacular Consumption[3].

For a state university preparing students for the global workforce and adulthood, courses like this are superfluous, puerile and an insult– to students, to educators, to parents, to taxpayers and, dare I say it, to women, especially those in empowering tracks like engineering and computer science which are in extremely high demand for females at the moment.

This sort of disgracefulness abounds with salient low points. In 2007, the College of William and Mary hosted an on-campus Sex Worker’s Art Show shortly after removing an “offensive” cross from the centuries old Wren Chapel[4]. In 2011, a Northwestern University class provided extracurricular live demonstrations of sexual acts featuring an electric powered “device”. Countless colleges maintain tenured professors who would be fired in any other context, all in the name of academic freedom. And need I mention the adulterating effects of school athletics that give players and coaches a pass in the name of revenue.

Hamlet, lamenting the king’s customary drinking binges, puts it aptly:

This heavy-headed revel east and west makes us traduced and taxed of other nations; They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase soil our addition; and indeed it takes from our achievements[5].

I believe there are still students out there busting their chops for a debt free education, doing it the hard way, forfeiting the inane and expensive “college experience”, not occupying wall street, no time to build Apartheid shanties in the middle of campus or engage in fashionable activism du jour—individuals too busy getting a real education to be “well rounded” with a daily dose of diversity-compliance patois from Bourgeois U. , where the women’s studies program likely teaches that to husband, anything, is a dirty word.


[1] CORE is an abbreviation signifying core general education requirements in arts and science. As far as I know it’s not an acronym for anything.

[3] Diamondback Online March 7 2012 Who run the world

[5] Hamlet, Act I Scene 4

Intelligently Flawed

I was watching a documentary—I believe it was on Animal Planet. Dr. Richard Dawkins and a large team of evolutionary biologist were dissecting giraffes and showing the audience the different anatomical features that were evidence of evolution. They extended the large laryngeal nerve that traversed the entire neck up and down, rather inefficiently, as clear evidence that the giraffe could not have been created since a better idea would be to run a shorter, less circuitous, nerve from the brain to the endpoint at the larynx just a few inches away.

It was interesting but also a bit ludicrous since, almost as if playing a childish game, the team was not allowed to use a particular word, even if appropriate, fearing it might give credence to the “unspeakable” alternative theory of animal origins. Understand that I don’t disagree with the mechanics of evolution, but the Dawkins’ team was taking more than a scientific stance on this point—perhaps even a religious one —complete with threats of excommunication for those that trespassed and spoke the forbidden word: design.   I thought about the flawed giraffe and the argument that this animal with elongated neck and laryngeal nerve could not have been created, under any mechanism, intelligently; clearly not.  After all, what Mook would waste yards of nerve fabric when all that’s needed is a few inches?

There is a famous sculpture called Pietà chiseled out of a solid block of pure Carrara marble depicting the crucified Christ in the arms of the Virgin Mary. It is an astounding work by the great genius of the Italian Renaissance, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni.

Or is it?

The relative sizes of the subjects are totally out of proportion: whereas Jesus is shown to be a man of about six feet in height, Mary is a disproportionate nine foot woman. Since this is obviously a flawed design, could this have been created by anyone as intelligent as Michelangelo?

Unless of course Pietà is not a work of engineering.

Unless of course Pietà is a work of art.

Then why does it have to be anything but what the artist wants? Isn’t it His prerogative how the work is colored, cut or shaped? The prophet Isaiah is clear on this:

Woe to those who quarrel with their Maker, those who are nothing but potsherds among the potsherds on the ground. Does the clay say to the potter, ‘What are you making?’  Does your work say, ‘The potter has no hands’?

Perhaps Dr. Dawkins is looking at the giraffe too scientifically; perhaps he should look at it aesthetically with a team of artists. Either way, only an idiot would suggest that the Pietà, as flawed as it might be, would have come about by a blind collision of molecules.

Cut Hillary Some Slack

It should not be a surprise to everyone that my politics and world view and that of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton anti-correlate. Whereas I think that the traditional role of women (and men for that matter) is one of the most important elements of our society we routinely discard to our self-destruction, most laud her non-traditional role as a model for women’s empowerment. But that’s a topic for another time and on this post I would like to increase the overall entropy of my blog by (gasp!) defending her.

For the greater portion of her public life, she has enjoyed a level of media favor that her lesser conservative counterparts would only dream about. Because she represents the liberal-feminist ideal, the liberal media will often morph their own truth around her own incongruence. But lately she’s been a bit of a target for something outrageously stupid—what she does to unwind. Photos have emerged of her and a dozen of her female associates living it up at a discotheque in Columbia (South America) with a few beers and some likely outdated dance moves. It should be noted that the beers were being consumed straight from the brown, long neck bottles in the most non-traditional, unladylike fashion.

Well I’m appalled.

Personally, I don’t want to see my Secretary of State on DWTS or staggering sloshed but let’s stay on topic. Mrs. Clinton has a tough job in world full of evil and discord. I think I like her in this role much better than as U.S. Senator, First Lady and (please, God, no) President.  If she needs to cut-loose in this way, leave her alone. I’m surprised it was only a few beers. If it were me, I’m not sure I’d stop at one given the assignment.

But more important than the media’s reporting on this non-incident is the response of the public. If as a conservative, you jump up and down shouting “Aha! Aha!” remember how the media blows out of proportion the events of Sarah Palin, Ann Romney, Michelle Bachmann and the lives of conservative female figures. And, if as a liberal, you chide the media for blowing this out of proportion, remember how you respond when conservative role models are being unjustly lampooned, demonized and raked over the coals by boneheads like Lawrence O’Donnell, Chris Matthews and David Lettermen.  Do you applaud, promote it and approve? Are you part of the problem or part of the solution?

Don’t demand fairness and civility in the public square if you are only demanding it when it’s your candidate.  What good is that? In the vocabulary of the information sciences, the entropy of such responses is zero.

Corporate Idolatry

2012.04.13  Corporate idolatry

The corporate image, aura and branding that magically confer significance, meaning and coolness onto blind and faithful consumers has been identified as another form of religion, in this case, corporate idolatry.

Take Starbucks. I like their coffee—just their coffee. It’s called coffee. They embellish the name slightly to “coffee of the day” as in prayer: give us Lord our daily coffee.  It’s that important. So important I must have it every day, all the time, no matter the price. In fact we need two Starbucks everywhere just like at the mall where I can get Starbuck’s near Macy’s and one near the food court where I can pay tribute and light votive candles between pilgrimages.

This commercial God-complex is made evident as soon as you challenge its marketplace authority. Against my will, I was imprisoned at the J.W. Marriott in Orlando, Florida where Starbucks had a shop in the lobby. Nice, except that the usual astronomical pricing enjoyed by Starbucks was catapulted to the stratosphere of “resort pricing”. Since in-room brand X coffee tastes like warm water clouded with cream and sugar we were coerced to “worship” at the green goddess.  It was my turn to fetch our staff of life and bring it back to the room, possibly chanting and shuffling in hooded robe.

At the shop, I waited quietly to fused music while the usual AM throng was baptized and blessed by their barista. When it was my turn I was given the option of leaving room for cream. I usually say “No” because they usually leave enough room anyway for the amount of cream I use, and since the coffee is precious as the blood of Jesus I want as much of it as possible. But I said “Yes” because my wife likes her cream nice and coffee-y. The barista left such a huge margin—the largest I had ever seen in all coffeedom, it was downright blasphemous. My venti was a dieci by any measure and I was apostate on the spot.

“Do you want to fill this up with coffee?” I said with extreme sarcasm. Obviously they had confused me with one of their ordinary votaries who usually wear a Kool-Aid drinking grin when their barista leave enough room for further flagellation. Robotically, the barista returned the coffees and filled them up, not with coffee, but toffee — syrup.  Now I went heretic. “What are you doing? I want coffee, twenty ounces of coffee, not toffee–fill it up with coffee! And this time DON’T leave room for anything!”

I was eventually appeased with a new set of paper chalices and went back to my room with the relics. At least Starbucks understands that the customer is still clergy when pressed, even at the J.W. Marriott Chateau D’If. But Starbucks hubris is alive and well, especially at my daughter’s community college where they neither honor their own gift cards nor the fifty cent refill rule—for students no less!

I see the same culture with Apple, only a hundred times worse. The spell cast by Apple is so potent, the queue-waiting disciples think that by purchasing and using their latest consumer electronics and surrounding themselves with the technologically cool makes them tech savvy by sacrament. In the parlance of the real tech savvy, these people would be called “end-users” which doesn’t sound all that flattering now does it?  You’re an “end-user”.

What is it about Apple—not their products—but their corporate image, that keeps people rabidly devoted all the while being happily deceived? Apple enjoys a image of being open (they are the most closed and proprietary of any platform), not corporate greedy (they’re valuation has topped 600 billion and they are scrutinized by the justice department for anti-trust violations), environmental (Apple promotes a perpetual consumerism that is decidedly not good for the environment),  labor-friendly (Foxconn), and infallible (Newton, 4G iPhone, iPad 2.0, Macbook Pro, Lisa) and high quality (for design—I agree, for production quality – made in China)

I am not an Apple person because I cherish the technical freedom to do, configure and fix things they way I want them or they way they should be. Almost every turn I’ve had with the few Apple products I’ve encountered came with an all encompassing requirement for unwavering fealty:

  • iTunes – my first purchase was a Red Wall Audio book for my daughter. It was DRM so much we could only listen to it in the iTunes App at the computer. Now if we had an Apple portable audio player, that would allow us to play it on the go.
  • Despite occupying twenty discs I decided to burn the audio books to CD Audio. It wouldn’t work because a single file would span two discs worth and iTunes had issues burning across CD boundaries. After battling their technical hubris I finally figured out that it had to do with my using the CD-RW because I didn’t want to pollute the environment with twenty unrecyclable CD-Rs.
  • I purchased a season of TV shows, but alas, I could only play them on the Apple devices. Even DLNA wouldn’t work. If I purchased a proprietary cable that would output to analog video audio I might be able to play it on my TV. Of course the special cable was sixty dollars even though I have about a thousand video cables in storage (VGA, HDMI, Composite, DVI, and WTF)
  • Apple’s interfaces are all proprietary despite decades of standardizations by the tech community to promote interoperability. I have a thousand USB cables but none of them will work on Apple’s iTouch or iPhone.  It has to be white.

My latest encounter centered around a Macbook Pro—not mine but that belonging to our ward, Charlotte. The screen was blank and tell-tale sounds indicated that it might still be alive. No problem, since against all probability, the unit had a standard (PTL!) DVI output for an external monitor. But alas, no signal from it was forthcoming. Prayer wouldn’t even work.  The critical part was getting the data out since Charlotte had been working on a biology assignment for days.

After much sleuthing, it was likely the embedded video card gone bad as a notice on Apple’s website confirmed that this had been a problem with the unit; customers should make an appointment with their local Apple retail “genius bar” for a fix.

My heart started to warm to Apple—admitting their shortcomings and making good on it? Well, well, well…

Since I was tied up I couldn’t make the appointment but Kimberly went at noon the next day. Just as well since I feel like Joe Gargery in London society when I go to the Apple Retail Temple. When she returned she was as mad as a wet hornet. Apparently, the egg-heads at the genius bar pushed back on the problem:

  • “…if, If, IF it’s the video card!”  said the Grinch to little MaryLoo Who who was no more than two. “I’ll fix it out there (Curpertino) and bring it back here”, for five hundred dollars.
  • “But alas! Our recall is only good for four years. It’s been four years 1 month, 3 days, 12 hours and 1 minute,” and there is no grace here.
  • Can we get the data out? This kind only comes out with prayer and fasting, and another five hundred dollars—maybe.

Charlotte was unfazed; this was the Apple world view she was used to. Not me. I decided that Microcenter and I, Josiah of Old, would fix this problem with fire from heaven. And how:

  • Found a web site that had clear instructions on exorcising the hard drive soul of the possessed Mac book pro. Of course it required rare and exotic tools for the titanium screws and integrated demonic presence.
  • A thirty-five dollar universal drive kit would couple the Fujitsu hard drive to a windows machine which worked but windows could not mount the special Apple partition. OK so Windows isn’t all that marvelous but at least I know the score with it.
  • Kim’s Ubuntu platform took care of the special partition and mounted the unit with no sacrifices or wave offerings. After more liturgy, the lost data was recovered using command line utilities.
  • Finally the macbook was resealed, tossed into the Lake of Fire and the hard disk hermitically sealed in a Ziploc bag.

Behold!

Like Google, Facebook, Starbucks, Abercrombie and Fitch,  Apple is just another corporate Balrog full of fire and fury. And I am Gandalf hanging off the cliff telling the fellowship “Run!”, pause for effect, “You fools!”

Men of Our Era and Shopping Malls

 

Special thanks to my brother for pointing this passage out from the book Rage Against God by Peter Hitchens.

In their utter reverence for oaths, men of [Sir Thomas] More’s era were in my view as superior to us as the builder of Chartres Cathedral were to the builders of shopping malls. Our ancestors’ undisturbed faith gave them a far closer, healthier relation to the truth – and so to beauty – than we have.  Without a belief in God and the soul, where is the oath? Without the oath, where is the obligation or the pressure to fulfill it? Where is the law that even kings must obey? Where is Magna Carte, Habeas Corpus or the Bill of Rights, all of which arose out of attempts to rule by lawless tyranny? Where is the lifelong fidelity of husband and wife? Where is the safety of the innocent child growing in the womb? Where, in the end, is the safety of any of us from those currently bigger and stronger than we are?

Truth, Inculcated Falsehood

This excerpt is from The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer, an American historian.  If you haven’t read his book, you should, especially if you use Nazism as an historic prop to any of your arguments.  The author benefitted from actually living in Nazi Germany as a foreign correspondent and relayed some of the historic events of the time from a first person viewpoint—something you don’t expect in a book on an historical subject.

In this excerpt, Shirer talks about the effects of propaganda in that society which has an eerie correlation to the current climate in the U.S. as undocumented opinions from journalists and pundits become the parroted remarks of social streams, feeds and blogs. The repeated inculcation of misinformation becomes “truth” which can be dangerous when leveraged in the mechanisms of our country (public school, higher education, crowd wisdom, news outlets coupled with a populace that doesn’t read or think critically) to engineer a desired outcome, good or bad.

Do not skim:

I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state.  Though unlike most Germans, I had daily access to foreign newspapers especially those of London, Paris and Zurich, which arrived the day after publication, and though I listened regularly to the BBC and other foreign broadcasts, my job necessitated the spending of many hours a day in combing the German press, checking the German radio, conferring with Nazi officials and going to party meetings. It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda.

Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspaper. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence as if one bad blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth said they were.

As Peter Hitchens (brother and opponent of the late Christopher Hitchens) stated, “Is there any point in public debate in a society where hardly anyone has been taught how to think, while millions have been taught what to think?”

Sweet about the soul

My wife reads her Bible every morning, assiduously studying it with colored pencils and supplemental material.

I eat cereal and drink coffee.

I suppose she could be getting ready for work outside the home so that we could have additional income. Or that she could find a career that would give her some public interface to our image conscious society. Our home could be filled with consumer goods and people like me who are pragmatic, scientific, self-actualized, driven, opinionated, informed and full of useless information.

That is, until the storms of life come.

Thereupon most of us might trust in the resources we’ve amassed: education, home-equity, mutual funds, retirement accounts, credit cards, health insurance, technology, organic food, shopping, alcohol, hobbies, the Internet, associates, information, video games, escapism, celebrities or any one of the infinite number of idolatries available to us in our modern age of irreligion.

But some storms can’t be weathered that way; there is security and then there is REAL security.

If I were to tell my wife, “I just won a billion dollars in the national lottery!” She’d be excited—no doubt. But it wouldn’t change her at all. She’d be up the next morning just like every other, reading and marking up her Bible.

Conversely, if I were to call home and say, “I’m quitting my job right now! I don’t know where our next check is coming from!” her response would be “So will you be driving by the store on your way home? We’re out of bread…”

Whereas I may know a thing or two about the Bible, my wife, well, knows the Author.

 

Our signal-to-noise ratio

A tech blogger made the announcement that he was doing something unorthodox, heretical and anathema: he was going to turn off his electronic gear, computers, internet connection and mobile devices to read a book—a real book, one made of paper and ink. In making this proclamation he made reference to an idea I’d been coining in my mind for years—that is, a reference to an overall increase in signal-to-noise ratio.

For those without engineering degrees, signal to noise ratio, or SNR, is a measurement of the energy of a signal relative to the environment in which it is received. A simple example is a busy cocktail party in which a friend is shouting something to you from across the room but you can’t make it out from the clamor. Your friend’s voice is the signal which is attenuated as it travels across the room. The overall din of conversation at the party presents as a summation of noise the signal must overpower in order to be heard. Other sounds from surrounding directions may pose as interference to your friend’s message too.  SNR is the ratio of your friend’s voice (signal) as heard at your ear over the combination of things that hinder you from hearing it (noise).

Increasing SNR is the goal of many engineering domains (communication systems in particular) and can be done using a number of techniques:

  • Increase signal. Tell your friend to speak louder.
  • Decrease noise. Tell everyone else to shut up.
  • Lower transmission loss. Move closer to your friend.
  • Spatial filtering. Cup you hand to your ear.
  • Spectral filtering.  Tune your hearing aid to the frequency of your friend’s voice.
  • Correlation. Use non-verbal cues and gestures to ascertain what your friend said in context.
  • Redundancy. Have your friend repeat his statement over and over until you get the entire message put together.

Things only get complicated if the cocktail party is being held in a marble cathedral which presents another form of noise called echo. But enough of this! What does this have to do with life, the universe and everything?  Does this train have a stop?

Yes.

The noise of our daily life –the news, radio, television, internet, social networks, media, addictions, sin, idolatry, fear, self talk— all drown out the small faint signal of God’s voice, the one speaking to us over the din of the “cocktail party”.  The season of Lent is designed to increase SNR: we move closer to the one that is speaking to us while silencing those things that contribute environmental noise. As Jesus spent 40 days in the desert to fast and meditate, so Christians spend the forty days starting on Ash Wednesday in preparation and in expectation of Easter, the day celebrating the Resurrection.

So, this Lent, increase your SNR.

The 500

The 500

I am responding to the article “Sports Debate Begins at Home” (Fairfax Times).  We are one of “The 500” in Fairfax County that home educate their high school daughters while fighting off the Persians at the Battle of Thermopylae. I wish to respond to some of the statements put forth in that article.

1)      Delegate Kay Kory voted against the proposed legislation, stating, “It’s just not fair to have kids who have done all the time in the classroom and met the grade requirements compete against someone who hasn’t had to fulfill those requirements.” Kory added that if a family does not choose the public education plan that family has essentially “opted out of the system on all fronts”.

If only it were so. We’d really love to opt out on all fronts but the county doesn’t allow us to opt-out of subsidizing the government school option with our tax dollars—that’s a front we can’t opt out on. If it really were an option along with public sports program, there would be a stampede of parents opting out on all fronts. That’s what really worries this delegate.

The statement also suggests that home educated families are under the radar. The truth in Fairfax County is that those who “opt out on all fronts” must submit a statement of intent, photocopy their college degrees and send them in, annually purchase and proctor a standardized test (California, Iowa or Stanford) making sure that “opting-out” families meet requirements.  In other words, if you think that home education is, somehow, outside the system, it isn’t.

In fact, the system is stricter for those “opting out on all fronts”. If we should not meet these minimum requirements, the opting out family is put on probation. Another lapse and the opting out family is no longer opting out. In other words, as Donald Trump would say, “ya foyer-ed”. Imagine if the government standards were that high for the public option. Imagine if teachers in Fairfax County had the same threat of revocation whenever a student lapsed in meeting educational standards.

As far as kids meeting grade requirements competing against someone who has not, let me say this: what school sports program doesn’t let their star athletes “skate” on soft academic requirements to let them compete? Right.

2)      Delegate Dave Albo voted against the proposed legislation, stating, “it’s near impossible to make a varsity sports team in these large high schools. This just adds more competition for a few spots”.

Competition?  In sports? Really? We simply can’t have that, especially with tiny Sparta in the fight.

Let’s do the math:

  • In a county with over a million people, the local politicians are worried about competition from 500?
  • Of the million public school constituents, 30 felt inclined to oppose the legislation, while 6 out of 500 wrote to support it. The telling ratios are 0.00003 winning over 0.012. In other words, most constituents don’t really care if the home educated participate.
  • Of 14 members of the delegation from Northern Virginia, 2 voted for it. The remaining 12 probably view home education as a threat to a hegemony most constituents have stopped questioning. That’s what this is really about, not fairness.

It may surprise everyone that, should the County provide families “opting out on all fronts” a tax incentive, many home educators would oppose it.  The beauty and success of the home education movement is the freedom it provides its practitioners. Any government tax incentive would be tethered to a line of control and bureaucracy that would render the practice impotent.

Whether legislation is passed to allow the home educated to participate in sports available at public schools is largely irrelevant to the few, the happy few, the 500. We have already seen the benefits of home education and have already resigned ourselves to fight (or work around or simply ignore) the mighty armies of Xerxes. My daughters are already doing quite well academically and have several athletic avenues available in travel soccer, fencing, and dance.  They are getting a quality, personalized and unique educational experience—not because of our politicians–but despite them.

Devotions for the Skeptic – Part I Mathematical Meditations

This is an introduction to a potential series of essays that I’m entitling Devotions for the Skeptic.

This entry is the first of what I am perceiving as a set of Mathematical Meditations. Given the notations required including the equation editor, I have to submit the post as a link to a PDF file. I hope  you are able to read it.

2011.12.04 Mathematical Meditations

Enjoy.