Scattered things...

[pmb]

• I remain skeptical of quite a few things that Hillary Clinton stands for - increased censorship is pretty much always wrong, and she's too willing to roll over and find the "middle ground" between the centrist position and the loony right - but linking the federal minimum wage to the congressional wage is a stroke of genius.
• 12 catches of 5 clubs. And I could count them myself instead of having someone else tell me how many I got. That was most pleasing.
• Conference submission date is May 16th. Work work work. Then I am done with the research project that is turning out to be kind of orthogonal to the research I want to do. Then it's all area exam all the time. Work work work. Then the term is over.
• And this summer I am teaching "Intro to Programming" in Python in a 4-week intensive (7/24-8/16). Using John Zelle's book based on the advice of several people. I am psyched. The rest of the summer is going to be spent biking and hanging out and reading and recovering from a relatively rough year of grad school.

Comments

[djsendai.livejournal.com]

but linking the federal minimum wage to the congressional wage is a stroke of genius.

yeah i'm thinking some sort of pod-creature thing is going on here, Hilary is certainly not on my list of "most beloved or courageous politicians".

I see it as pretty much a posturing move, legislators across the board have a tendency to frequently sponsor/write bills they know will have no chance of getting even through committee just so they can look good to the folks at home.

[djsendai.livejournal.com]

as a followup, i'm actually not completely that cynical, I think it was a pretty bold thing to suggest. I hope it gets some real action to it :)

[triath.livejournal.com]

"12 catches of 5 clubs."

Go you!

[tdw.livejournal.com]

The Zelle book is pretty good. There is also a follow up (not by him, but obviously related, and from the same publisher) for teaching Data Structures in Python, but I'm fairly unimpressed by it. It comes close, but falls short (like not mentioning that Python lists are O(n) lookup, and building things in them like arrays. *cringe*)

[pmb.livejournal.com]

I thought they were amortized constant time access and extension. Things like a[3] or a[500] are all O(1). It's mapping item to index that is O(n). Right? Is that last one what you meant by lookup?

Testing your assertion (with Python2.3 on Debian Stable)

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Python lists seem to be pretty fast.

import random
import time

for p in range(6,21):
    a = [ 1 for _ in range(2**p) ]

    elements = [ random.randint(0,len(a)-1) for _ in range(1024) ]
    s = time.time()
    for e in elements:
        _ = a[e]
    e = time.time()
    print s - e, 2**p

Gives us:

-0.000524997711182 64
-0.000507831573486 128
-0.000765085220337 256
-0.000565767288208 512
-0.000520944595337 1024
-0.000524997711182 2048
-0.000566005706787 4096
-0.00064492225647 8192
-0.000647068023682 16384
-0.000678777694702 32768
-0.000730991363525 65536
-0.000707864761353 131072
-0.000710010528564 262144
-0.000735998153687 524288
-0.000744104385376 1048576

So list access time does grow, but it's pretty miniscule and probably due to CPU cache issues, and it is *certainly* is a far cry from O(n).

[clipdude.livejournal.com]

I really like the idea of linking the minimum wage to Congressional salaries.

[porfinn.livejournal.com]

5 clubs? 12 catches? You da man! I am once again juggling clubs to strengthen my bartending wrists, and I am starting to work on my flair tricks again (flair bartending is actually competitve now, who knew?)http://www.theflairschool.com/html/intermediate.html
It is amazing that people will pay an extra dollar to watch me juggle lemons! As if alcohol wasn't expensive enough.

[goteam.livejournal.com]

Living with Peter has completely ruined my appreciation for bar flair, it turns out: last month I went out with some friends who kept getting distracted by tricks that I didn't even notice because they're the kind of thing Peter does all the time. I just kept talking and I'd occasionally insert an "I just missed another trick, didn't I?" into the conversation. Are people like me the bane of the flair bartender's existence, or can we redeem ourselves by tipping well anyway? (Actually, I have no idea what constitutes tipping well for drinks, so if you care to fill me in on how to avoid being a jerk in the future, I'd appreciate it.)

[roninspoon.livejournal.com]

I'm of the idea opinion that congress people shouldn't be compensated at all. There are already far too many motivations to remain in office and ignore their constiiuents.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

We need more than just the idle rich in Congress.

[patrissimo.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, one might argue that the more they get paid in salary, the less they will look to get paid in bribes and kickbacks, and vice versa.

I don't know if it's true, but it's not clear that low salary is the right way to harness their greed.

[agthorr.livejournal.com]

I think linked a percentage-wise increase in minimum wage to the same percentage-wise increase in Congressional pay is mediocre at best. A 20% increase gives minimum wage workers an extra $2k/year, but gives a Congressperson an extra $33k/year. In other words, the Congressperson's raise would be 2.5 times the minimum wage worker's entire salary (after the raise).

Sadly, it may still be better than what we have now.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

True. But it at least ends up tying the minimum wage to inflation, which is a very important first step (although it's already been done here in Oregon).

[freyley.livejournal.com]

Yes, a more ideal scheme would be along these lines:

minimum yearly salary (per company) = .02*CEO's total earnings+bonus+value of benefits, etc OR .20*Congresscritter's salary, whichever is greater.

And then calculate hourly wages based on the standard 40 hour week.

Sadly, neither Hillary nor anyone else can propose that sort of thing.

[leech.livejournal.com]

I say it's a cheap stunt. Why are congressional wages a reliable measure of inflation? If the point is to raise minimum wage, how about a bill to raise minimum wage?

Of course it's a stunt, but...

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Congressional wages increase with inflation every year as part of a congressional wage bill passed in the 1940s. Tying the minimum wage to inflation has been shot down in the past, but it's much harder to come across as a good guy when you are voting to be able to increase your own salary while keeping poor people poor. It's all about making people ashamed to vote against a bill. My only worry is that the mandated increases to the min. wage will shoot down the bill. I'd prefer a straight-up tying of one to the other.

[istgut.livejournal.com]

I am also teaching intro programming in python (in 5.5 weeks), but I'm using

http://www.ibiblio.org/obp/thinkCSpy/

When does your session start?

[istgut.livejournal.com]

ah. RTFA.

[bagoffarts.livejournal.com]

My 5-clubs has hit another wall at 9 (and a really fucked up jammed finger). I'm envious. I will have it this year though.

But are you going to ireland?

[porfinn.livejournal.com]

Oh...ouch! Ick. Why does plastic sting so bad!

[patrissimo.livejournal.com]

why don't you come work for us, so you can be happy and rich?

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I think about it. But I just don't enjoy (or, at least, haven't enjoyed) coding for more than 15ish hours a week. Google wants 40+, just like every other CS job that doesn't involve teaching. And I really like teaching. I am also really bad a at separating work and life and I am unable to cease thinking about work problems after I go home. Even if the problems are not, in themselves, particularly interesting. Thus, I need work where I can think about only the stuff I really want to think about and hopefully teach as well.

And if I want to teach smart students who want to learn and not just be a warden, then I need a PhD so that I can teach at the college level. But every now and then I consider either joining Google or starting my own Web2.0 this-or-that. But Paul Graham's most recent essay contained a quote that keeps haunting me:

By compressing the dull but necessary task of making a living into the smallest possible time, you show respect for life, and there is something grand about that.

[akjdg.livejournal.com]

I have no idea what's going on in this thread, but now I'm comment #42. Yeah, I'm cool.

[amoken.livejournal.com]

I recall a somewhat whimsical discussion in the Objectivist Club wherein we decided Congresscritters should be paid a set amount to begin with, and for each new law or bill they vote to pass, they'd have to relinquish some amount of their salary. I don't believe we came to a conclusion about whether we should give some back for each law they strike down. It definitely appeals to my sense of esthetics, as well as my hatred of "I'll vote for yours if you vote for mine" and other political wheelydealies, but I can't say I'd actually expect it to work as hoped.

[zudini.livejournal.com]

I don't really know anything about economics or politics, but it seems to my naive mind that raising the minimum wage just pushes more jobs offshore, so that the real benefactors of such a bill are China and the shipping industry.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Yes and no. In theory, that's how it works. But in practice, modest increases to the minimum wage don't seem to be correlated with increased unemployment. My gut says that there exist levels of squalor that, as people living in the richest nation ever, we are not okay with seeing our fellow human living in. Starving in the streets, children losing limbs to polio, that kind of thing.

The minimum wage is then our society's expression of "People should not have to live below this level of poverty, no matter who they are".

I'm pretty sure that the idea that I describe in the first paragraph can be concretely shown to be the right thing on almost every level by using various intra-country biodiversity measurements (we all share at least X% of our genes in common), the price that people seem to assign to their own lives (1.6 to 2.5 million last I checked), and JS Haldane's remark that he wouldn't die to save his prother, but he would die to save 2 brothers, or 8 cousins.