Brainthoughts from my headmeat

When people think about this subject in the U.S. they usually think about universities.

While I don’t regret my university time for a moment and feel I gained a lot from it, as an educational experience I felt it…lacked.

From a purely economic perspective, I think university education is not so great. Without a scholarship, you really have to consider if four years tuition (plus interest usually) plus four years of *not* working is worth your enhanced earning potential.

Also a lot of prestigious universities tend to be very graduate/research oriented; from what I’ve observed, it’s uncommon to see a university really focused on undergraduate education.

Also, university education is stupidly expensive. When I think about it, it is baffling that it can possibly cost what it does. Then I think about the ridiculous amount of infrastructure a university maintains, and it starts to make at least a little sense.

So my idea is to create a chain of subject-focused post-secondary academies which also double as HR firms. They teach only one subject, teach it as well as they possibly can, and find jobs for their graduates (and also possibly pre-graduate internships). By keeping the number of students relatively low, the infrastructure costs should be much more manageable. There’s also the added revenue of being an HR firm (% of first 6mo-year salary as finder’s fee to business). Another possible business connection is to foster relationships where we accept business’s new hires as students and their employer pays for their education.

Instructors would be hired based on their capabilities as teachers, and paid to teach. It would be necessary, I think, to focus a great deal of revenue into instructor salaries, given the probable low supply of qualified and interested applicants. However, since the academy is so focused in intent, some level of instructor training may be doable, and as the academy expands to multiple locations, it can maintain a single general structure for its program of studies and teaching materials. Nobody needs to reinvent the wheel.

I would probably just start with software engineering academies, because I can see the need there (it is my field after all). If that worked, then possibly it could expand to other subjects. Also we might be able to harvest the near-graduates for free software development as class projects (if it’s not good enough for us, why should we expect it to be good enough for anyone else?).

EDIT: I took out my money calculations, because I think I did them at 2 in the morning and they were really wrong.

I’ve been reading Girl Genius for, I dunno, over a year now, and I still get unnaturally excited every time a new page is released.  I read them like four times, sometimes out loud (which is less abnormal that it might sound actually, I talk to myself / recite scenes from head out loud all the time) particularly when there is a lot of jager dialogue; and also I’m getting the trades and occasionally page back through them.

Normally my obsessions with my new hobbies / media fetishes are played out nova style in a sudden orgasmic explosion of low-productivity, like marathoning some anime or some such, but since GG comes out in such tiny bitesize delicious morsels of comic yum yum salty…spicy…*SLOBBEREXPLODE*

Uh, so the point is I’m distributing a lot of obsessive behavior over a release cycle that is constant enough to keep me attached (compare monthly comic books), but slow enough that I don’t burn out; instead it is going to slowly gnaw away my sanity until the day I come storming out of my apartment mostly naked with a ray gun constructed out of plastic cups and computer cable, and declare in a vaguely Slavic accent my intense love for SCIENCE.  Then the ray gun will explode.

And I think my friends are going to lynch me now, but I didn’t get what all the fuss was about.  Maybe I was expecting too much due to hype, or maybe it’s because the copy I was watching had sub-par audio, but it’s a comedy; that shouldn’t matter yeah?

I just…didn’t think it was that funny.  There were a few good one-liners, but I was somehow anticipating more, I dunno, volume.

It did have an interesting style to it, but there wasn’t enough movie underneath that for me I guess.

Now one useful thing I can say is: those old incomprehensible British guys?  That is *sort of* what old people from where I grew up sound like, except in a different way (since I didn’t grow up in England).

So I watch a slightly obscene amount of anime and tend to keep up with what is being newly released in Japan, or at least I used to; this tendency has dropped off somewhat with my full-time employment.

Where for most avenues of entertainment, I don’t start watching things or paying attention until I get a recommendation, for anime I have sort of been the person who *does* the recommending for a bit now. So here is anime that is good from this year. This is anime good enough that I recommend it to pretty much anybody from my general subcultures.

****** Nodame Cantabile (unless you loathe classical music; probably the best anime of the year)

* Genshiken 2 (well first you have to watch Genshiken)

* Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei (though I haven’t actually finished it)

* Dennou Coil (though I haven’t actually finished it)

* Seirei no Moribito (I have barely watched any of this)

* Baccano! (unless you don’t deal well with graphic violence)

You can get more info on these from, like, anywhere. There is an internet. Try search.

There was actually a truckload of good anime this year, and I have not had time to finish nearly everything I started (some of which you can see above).

When it’s not below freezing in my apartment all the time (for instance, because the heat is on), I don’t really mind Cleveland’s stupid winter climate so much.

Morality-vegetarians rejoice: I am joining the cause.
My contribution will be to eat as many bison burgers as possible, until those gentle beasts return to the endangered species list where nobody will be able to hurt them anymore!
Let’s try this with all the animals.

(00:08:56) Mark: http://freerice.com/index.php
(00:10:04) Me: If I wrote this, when you got a question wrong, it would take rice away from the hungry.