While I thought your talk was interesting (and I really dig all the great work Counsyl is doing), it sounded like a 13 year old who just discovered Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" for the first time and thought they had everything figured out. Your Silicon Valley neoliberalism is nothing new.
Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron predicted this back in 1995 in their essay, The Californian Ideology: "Their politics appear to be impeccably libertarian - they want information technologies to be used to create a new 'Jeffersonian democracy' in cyberspace where every individual would be able to express themselves freely. Implacable in its certainties, the Californian Ideology offers a fatalistic vision of the natural and inevitable triumph of the hi-tech free market - a vision which is blind to racism, poverty and environmental degradation and which has no time to debate alternatives."
A bigger red flag would be if almost all of the students passed the final. I'm not an advocate for deliberately failing students: the exam should be designed so that an A shows true mastery and understanding.
Many of my university's teachers took pride in their low pass rates. Not because they failed so many students, but because they passed a minority that had truly mastered the material.
The job of a university teacher is to help students learn - if a student fails the class, then the teacher has failed to do their job. Sure, it's possible that some of the blame for that failure may lie with the student, but nonetheless, the teacher still failed to achieve what they set out to do. A teacher failing a student is like a programmer shipping buggy software - it may be the case that, because of circumstances beyond your control (incomplete specs or dysfunctional management; unmotivated students or weak syllabuses), you couldn't do your best work in a particular instance, and you don't necessarily need to feel guilty about that; but you shouldn't be proud of it.
The problem with this point of view is that X classes are taken in parallel. So you start getting competition among the managers/teachers for your time, as each one understands that "spend all your time on just my class, my suggested resources, and as much time with just me as you need" will lead to the optimal amount of help they can give. They can't do any more as ultimately it's the student's job to learn and the transfer of tacit knowledge is incredibly difficult -- you can lead a horse to water etc. Some teachers give up on doing anything important around the crunch times, knowing they can't win (typically humanities teachers at a primarily technical or engineering or project-based school), some teachers just lessen the load as much as they're comfortable with, others take an "I'm the most important and difficult" attitude and the only one who will get an A will be the one who got an F in at least one other class.
I wish schools would restructure to be serial with context-dependent branching, much like learning on the job tends to be, that way you can spend Y weeks focusing intently on a small spectrum of topics, then move on. Some classes are 3 hours every week for 12ish weeks, if you serialized that you could be done in 12 days. Plus the student and the professor would be in harmony, each having the other's undivided attention.
And some of my university teachers simply made the exams so difficult and long, the scores had little correlation with actual mastery of material (Jim Barby, I'm looking at your midterm).
Try something with Cellular Automata or something akin to Conway's Game of Life. I don't think there are any hard scientific applications for CA, but you could make some pretty nice wall art, and you could probably finish it in a semester.
Why not donate to the maintainers of Debian, Software in the Public Interest? http://www.debian.org/donations
They are the root of all those awesome dpkg's that we all know and love.
How would it dramatically destroy the movie? The term is existentialism. It may all be a dream, but that doesn't mean that you can't give your life (or the movie for that matter) its own meaning. I personally find this more liberating, than the idea that life is a game to played.
>It's already not real.
Dreams are real while we are in them.
Well... just off the top of my head, it would make the film insensible for a variety of reasons:
(1) It would make a mockery of what Nolan seems very clearly to intend as a positive ending. In the script he actually tells us he is centering the film on a simple, positive emotional message. So what is that message?
(2) It would create a glaring inconsistency with the symbolic landscape of the rest of the film. Case in point, the dream worlds are strongly associated with water symbolism, which even creeps into the real world when the dream world intrudes: it is a glass of water that sends Fischer to sleep on the plane, while Cobb's waking hallucination occurs while he is washing his face. And yet... unlike any other dream... there is no water at the end of the film. In fact, we have the exact opposite, since we are told the events take place in a garden on a cliff.
(3) An aside, but anytime you have people who are named after apostles frolicking in a garden with Dad, you should jump to asking yourself if there might be Christian imagery lurking there. So what's with all the biblical imagery, or the constant references to "leaps of faith"? Is it really accidental when characters blaspheme, or invoke religious imagery?
(4) the visuals of the children building castles on the beach would suddenly serve no purpose. There would also be no explanation for why Mal is supposed to be bad, when her name clearly suggests she is a malevolent character. Likewise, the names of James, Philippa and Ariadne would be meaningless. Ariadne's mythological role is helping Theseus out of a maze, so what is Cobb still doing stuck in one at the end?
(5) Cobb clearly develops as a person. Why does Nolan go to such pains to show this, and what does it matter if these changes accomplish nothing of significance? Which brings us back to point one, why doesn't Cobb just stay in limbo with his wife?
(6) This is a bit esoteric, but you'll get stuck arguing that Saito's palace is destroyed by water because Cobb was pushed into a bathtub rather than the opposite: that Nolan engineered the bathtub scene in order to find a way to destroy Saito's palace in a storm. This requires a violation of the principle of Occam's razor unless you're prepared to argue that there isn't really any water symbolism in the film, in which case you would be wrong. :)
This article is a joke. There is no evidence offered to support his conclusions, it's basically a long slander article that his peddling his shitty startup.
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