I remember this sort of thing from symbolic logic in college. [Wikipedia]

Under threat of losing their jobs if they didn’t go along with extra work for not a lot of extra pay, the Central Falls Teachers’ Union refused Friday morning to accept a reform plan for one of the worst-performing high schools in the state.

The superintendent didn’t blink either.

After learning of the union’s position, School Supt. Frances Gallo notified the state that she was switching to an alternative she was hoping to avoid: firing the entire staff at Central Falls High School. In total, about 100 teachers, administrators and assistants will lose their jobs.

Gallo blamed the union’s “callous disregard” for the situation, saying union leaders “knew full well what would happen” if they rejected the six conditions Gallo said were crucial to improving the school. The conditions are adding 25 minutes to the school day, providing tutoring on a rotating schedule before and after school, eating lunch with students once a week, submitting to more rigorous evaluations, attending weekly after-school planning sessions with other teachers and participating in two weeks of training in the summer.

Now, I want to be clear here. This is a terrible situation. There are all kinds of real, human problems with what is going on here (the school is in terrible shape, the students improved from 3 percent proficient to 7 percent proficient in math, but come on that’s still single digits). I don’t want to minimize those.

But the unions are playing a game right? They’re playing a game that they’ve made up the rules for. One of the rules is “We will walk off the job if we don’t agree with what you want us to do.” The superintendent is basically saying “Don’t bother walking off, you’re all fired.”

One of the things that I’m learning as a parent is when you give your child a choice, you better make sure that you are okay with either of the choices the child chooses! You’ve set the rules of the choice, don’t be surprised when the child picks one of the obviously available, obviously OK rules. In this case, the union made the rules. The superintendent is calling them on it.

I want to see what happens next!

I don’t want tax cuts. I don’t want more military spending. I don’t want stimulus of any kind. I want LESS SPENDING, and, eventually, MORE TAXES² to get out of the hole we’re in. I mean, doesn’t anyone realize we have to pay this shit back!?

[1]: sadly probably not true, as I wouldn’t vote for a hard core social conservative. I have so many inconsistent³ litmus tests I put on candidates it’s a wonder my head doesn’t explode every time I enter the ballot box.

[2]: more taxes eventually because it’s a bad idea to raise taxes during an economic recession. Also, more taxes because even though I believe we were on the right side of the laffer curve at some point, as of now we need higher taxes to support our current level of spending. Its irresponsible of Republicans (or anyone) to call for more tax cuts without a plan in place to cut spending drastically at this point. We’re already running a massive structural deficit.

[3]: inconsistent from a two party standpoint, of course. Not inconsistent logically.

Imagine if Twitter forced you to follow certain people. What if Facebook randomly added folks to your friends list? You know what you’d have? The evening news. Random stories from folks you don’t know and probably don’t trust.

Best. Metaphor. Ever.

4. Parents cannot be trusted with their children.

I would add 5. Drug interactions!

Tyler hits on all of the practical reasons why it’s a bad idea. I think people should be more suspicious of pharmaceutical drugs on average, especially combinations of pharmaceutical drugs. On the other hand I’m a big fan of self experimentation, so I’m a little torn on this issue.

You may ask why I keep listening to it, well, I’m trying to fix the problem! And I can’t tell if the problem is there until I rewire and try again. Unfortunately by the time my ears hurt it’s already too late, there’s no “hurts a little bit” with this thing which is unfortunate (he says, as he types with a pounding headache).

Filtering the output causes even more oddball harmonic glitches (and loses many of the effects that make this circuit (otherwise) fun to play around with.

This is a project I’ve been working off and on with for months, and I think I’m just going to have to give up with my current schematic and design. Which is a shame because anything else I implement will take a lot more parts and/or a lot more design time.

For what it’s worth, this is the schematic for the core of the VCO: http://www.ecelab.com/circuit-vco-555.htm

The fun bits that I was adding all had to do with control voltage and modifying the control voltage before it hit the 555. In order to tame those harmonics I tried a 100 ohm/1mfd RC filter, I tried lowering the output voltage, I tried a number of other things a few months ago which I don’t even remember but still got ear fatigue after a fairly short amount of time. Ah well.

I threw up a bunch of photos on 8 eyes. I have a bunch more video that I have to sort through; unfortunately I didn’t get the best two songs on video. Boo! Chalk it up to inexperience and bad planning on my part.

One of them was by the opening act (whose name I am blanking on at the moment) who did an amazing version of Crazy by Gnarls Barkley. There’s not a version of that on the youtubes. But I did find a version of the other song:

The band doesn’t quite jell and this version isn’t as good as the version she played at the Cedar. But listen to those vocals!

Someone with more free time should volunteer to be a serf at a renfest (by which I mean, I’d consider it if I had more free time.) I mean, really a serf, bedraggled tunic and excessive deference and all. Would everything be basically cool and fun or would it be like spending a day in the Stanford Prison Experiment?