For some reason, I decided to read today's oral arguments to Whole Women's Health v. Hellerstedt today, at Leah Libresco's recommendation.

...what am I talking about? I read through all 90-whatever pages just to listen to Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, and the Notorious R.B.G. mercilessly sass the respondents from Texas. Select quotes:

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Can I walk through the burden a moment? There's two types of early abortion at -- at play here. The medical abortion, that doesn't involve any hospital procedure. A doctor prescribes two pills, and the women take the pills at home, correct?

MS. TOTI: Under Texas law, she must take them at the facility, but -- but that is otherwise correct.

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: I'm sorry. What? She has to come back two separate days to take them?

MS. TOTI: That's correct, yes.

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: All right. So now, from when she could take it at home, it's -- now she has to travel 200 miles or pay for a hotel to get those two days of treatment?

MS. TOTI: That's correct, Your Honor.

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: All right. Let me ask you something about that two-­day -- wait, okay, or -- or that travel time. How many other States and how many other recognized medical people have testified or shown that there is any benefit from taking pills at the facility as opposed to taking the pills at home, as was the case?

MS. TOTI: There -- there is ­­ there's absolutely no testimony in -- in the record and -- and no evidence, you know, in -- in any of the amicus briefs that there is a medical benefit to having a medication

"The Perils of JavaSchools", by Joel Spolsky, is a wonderfully fun read for students of computer science. A veritable demigod of the software world tells a story -- ringing with appealing truth throughout -- of a tragic fall from grace in modern CS curricula...and at its core, that great deluder Java.

It's relentlessly snarky, and feels relentlessly true, as it lays out in gruesome detail the extent to which kids nowadays are being coddled and left tragically unprepared for the big scary world where pointer arithmetic, abstraction, and recursion are inescapable necessities. It's hard to read it without coming away with the sense that Spolsky has hit upon the great uncomfortable truth in computer science -- that some curricula simply fail to properly train young minds in key concepts.

It's a fun read.

But it's got some problems.

Though I am loathe to disagree with such a titan of my field, I respectfully submit that Spolsky not only misses the broad point of a computer science education, but gets it so badly wrong that he manages to align himself with one of the most pernicious systemic problems facing the field of computer science -- and the broader tech community -- today.

Since I have a great deal of respect for Spolsky, this post turned out very, very long. (Even after I pushed off large portions of the initial concept to other posts.) If you're more in the mood to read a shorter post where I throw out unsubstantiated claims and don't stop to explain everything, I've tried to summarize my main points in a summary-post.

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The heart of the essay is in two early paragraphs:

You

One of the things that inevitably happens during shopping week is that classes are overfull. Since almost all students shop weakly more courses than they end up taking, even classes with correctly-sized rooms end up crowded, short on chairs, and/or with students sitting on the floor.

I've noticed that this problem is remarkably bad in upper-level CS / Math / Stat courses (it might also be bad everywhere else; I just don't have enough data to say). Once you get past the intro-programming and intro-theory sequences, concentrators have almost-infinite freedom in selecting technical electives in the department, so there's a lot of comparison-shopping going around.

To make it worse, a phenomenon I'll dub "window-shopping" is particularly egregious in the CS department -- in-the-know concentrators will show up for the first two lectures of a well-liked professor's class just to hear funny one-liners, even if they know they won't be taking the course that semester.

What this means is that it's not uncommon for the attendance at the first lecture of the semester in a 100- or 200-level class to be 150-200% of the actual enrollment the professor and the College had planned for.

I shopped five courses this shopping week, and in four of them, the professor remarked on such over-attendance.

In two, the professor made a half-joke along the lines of "Well, this is obviously too many people to fit in the room, so

On July 20, 1969, two men born on Earth set foot on the moon. And, since they came safely home, then-President Nixon had no use for the speech In Event of Moon Disaster, prepared by William Safire. The full original text is here (pdf), but I found it appropriate for today, when we do have tragedy to mourn in memorial:

(abridged and slightly modified for the occasion)

Rick Husband—William McCool—Michael Anderson—Kalpana Chawla—David Brown—Laurel Clark—Ilan Ramon.

These seven men and women lay down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send her sons and daughters into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.

In ancient days, we looked at stars and saw our heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man’s search will not be denied.

Per aspera ad astra; Godspeed Columbia.

This semester, I'm taking a creative-writing workshop on devotional poetry. I've worked with the instructor, Josh Bell, before, and I'm incredibly excited to be working with him again.

Assignment zero for the workshop was "For fun, start thinking about songs (I'm of course talking pop songs, but interpret this how you'd like) which are in the devotional mode. Then send me links to those songs. And I'll start sending those songs around to this list."

I had a lot of fun exploring several of the possible dimensions of "devotional" with this exercise, especially when I asked my friend Leah for suggestions and she introduced me to several incredible songs that I'd never heard (of) before. And when I was done, I figured that I'd share the ten that I ended up submitting here, just in case any of my readers were interested.

To be clear, I compiled this list for a very specific purpose, and plenty of songs I like a lot got cut in late stages because I felt they fit insufficiently well with the assignment specification. But I still think that the ones that made it all explore (distinct) modes of imagining oneself in relation to some divine entity, which I believe is a useful exercise, whether or not you believe that any such exist.

(Hat-tip to Leah Libresco for recommending "How Glory Goes", "Lot's Wife", and "Stronger". I also first found "The Summons" in one of her old blog posts.)

If you've got other suggestions to add to the list, drop them in the comments below, or mention them

And perhaps we've forgotten the courage it took for the crew of the shuttle; but they, the Challenger Seven, were aware of the dangers, but overcame them and did their jobs brilliantly. We mourn seven heroes: Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe.

We've grown used to wonders in this century. It's hard to dazzle us. But for 25 years the United States space program has been doing just that. We've grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we've only just begun. We're still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers.

And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.

The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and "slipped the surly bonds of earth" to "touch the face of God."

Per aspera ad astra; Godspeed Challenger.

I published 72 posts in 2015, with the first on January 1 and the last on November 18, for an average of 1.6 posts/week on that interval, up 70% from 2014's 0.9 posts/week. These 72 posts accounted for about 47% of the 152 posts published through December 2015.

According to Google Analytics (which ignores my pageviews), I saw an average of 57 views per day, with non-homepage views-per-day up 97% from the last half of 2014 (before which I don't have GA records). September 18 (when 2015's overall most-viewed post was published) was the single-day high, with more than a thousand more views than any other day in Faults history. GA thinks that 41% of all sessions originated from Facebook.

tl;dr I am writing posts and people are reading my blog. I'm pretty happy with these numbers.

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The ten My Faults My Own posts published in 2015 with the most total pageviews were: (in ascending order)

• A Liberal Critique -- in which I attempt to explain why calling out harmful discourse is especially important when the people I'm calling out are on the left.
• October 28 Links: Thinkers, Statesmen, Economists, Doctors -- The only linkwrap to make the list; no, I'm not sure why, either.
• Putting money where my mouth is and Okay, you can stop it now., in that order. -- A two-part rant in frustration with the entirely ugh-y renaming of my school.
• Yes, you should hire college-educated computer scientists -- contra David Gelernter, who looks to hire only "people who taught themselves to code in high school and still can't get enough of it."
• Something About Bernie -- In