O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, 
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won, 
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, 
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring; 
                         But O heart! heart! heart! 
                            O the bleeding drops of red, 
                               Where on the deck my Captain lies, 
                                  Fallen cold and dead. 

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; 
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills, 
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding, 
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; 
                         Here Captain! dear father! 
                            This arm beneath your head! 
                               It is some dream that on the deck, 
                                 You’ve fallen cold and dead. 

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still, 
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will, 
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done, 
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won; 
                         Exult O shores, and ring O bells! 
                            But I with mournful tread, 
                               Walk the deck my Captain lies, 
                                  Fallen cold and dead.

Some people are ecstatic at the news. Some people are furious. It'll hit the national news cycle in about twelve hours.

Basically, it's another Friday at Harvard.

Every lunchtime conversation is about the same topic, in hushed tones. Friends measure their words, not quite sure whether what they're about to say will cause offense to their closest friends. One can't sit in the dining hall without overhearing tense, but hushed, conversations about it. "How about that President Faust?" is acceptable as a casual greeting between friends.

It's not just another Friday at all.

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Today President Faust announced by email that she's accepting Dean Khurana's recommendations that:

1. For students matriculating in the fall of 2017 and thereafter: any such students who become members of unrecognized single-gender social organization will not be eligible to hold leadership positions in recognized student organizations or athletic teams. Currently enrolled students and those who are matriculating in the fall of 2016 will be exempt from these new policies.

2. ...any such students who become members of unrecognized single-gender social organizations will not be eligible to receive the Dean's endorsement letters for those fellowships that require such endorsements.

...

These new policies will not prevent undergraduates from choosing their own paths while at Harvard. They are not designed to regulate the internal affairs of the unrecognized social organizations; the organizations retain the authority to set their membership criteria, even as the College will continue to urge them to adopt inclusive and non-discriminatory policies. Likewise, students will be able to continue to join these organizations and remain in good academic standing with the College. The recommendations are instead focused exclusively on decisions belonging to the College about

We've had, what, two posts in the past six weeks? Sorry, guys, I had a senior thesis (pdf) to write. And we're only kind-of back, since I'm luxuriating a bit in the calm after the storm.

But an article I read in the Crimson on Monday got me mad enough to jolt me out of my stupor (this is usually how I get un-slumped from blog hiatus), and I've got an op-ed in today's paper:

Harvard’s a funny place. In the span of a single day, I can attend a lecture about securing the University’s computer systems from foreign hackers by Jim Waldo, Harvard’s former Chief Technical Officer and, just a few hours later, read an article in The Crimson about the Undergraduate Council’s uninformed request that Harvard postpone its plans to upgrade the same outdated password system that makes it difficult to defend the school’s computers. (...)

It begins, as do some of the best op-eds about computer security, with a quote from Chesterton that I can't remember if I first heard from Leah Libresco or Scott Alexander:

G. K. Chesterton, in his 1929 book The Thing, wrote of reforming institutions: “[Imagine] a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the

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.