AKMA’s Random Thoughts

"Gay" a bad word in the schools? My Pop retired from an engineering career and now he's trying to do his civic duty by driving a school bus for the local public school system.

He reports that one of the most common phrases he overhears his kids use is "That is so gay."

It certainly looks to me like attitudes toward homosexuality are not the most obvious problem here. At least on the surface. I remember in about 2nd grade for some reason all the kids had an obsession with the word "ass", or words that started with that sound, or even the word "as". However, I don't remember anyone being sent home, and frankly don't recall any trouble greater than a teacher giving a firm look or a brief word of warning.

This is probably just another example of the breakdown of liberal democracy and the lack of any coherent shared story. The teacher and the student (and family) are from different worlds and are unable to communicate in an agreable fashion.

I remember when something similar happened and it came up on the local talk radio station with Mark Davis. He just asked "What would Jesus do" and commented that as he recalled, Christ asked the little children to come to him and did not dialogue with them about their parents.

Bless their hearts.

Steve
http://adrr.com/aa/

I've been trying to look for a kind interpretation of what these people did, and the best I can do is: Could it be they simply thought the boy was lying about having two women for parents?

That doesn't excuse the bigotry, but at least it eliminates the personalized mean-spiritedness.

AKMA:

I respect the way you are speaking about the conflict alluded to above. Thank you for your example.

Regarding the present blog, I am wondering if the way the school's administration addressed the situation is the only deplorable aspect about the situation--and then only due to legal concerns. I have a hard time reading your blog any other way.

The school actions, of course, are deplorable because of the anti-queer nature of the act--everything else seems rather secondary.

Perhaps I have misread you.

The most basic duality that exists with variables is how the programmer sees them in a totally different way than the computer does. When you're typing away in Project Builder, your variables are normal words smashed together, like software titles from the 80s. You deal with them on this level, moving them around and passing them back and forth.

But some variables are immortal. These variables are declared outside of blocks, outside of functions. Since they don't have a block to exist in they are called global variables (as opposed to local variables), because they exist in all blocks, everywhere, and they never go out of scope. Although powerful, these kinds of variables are generally frowned upon because they encourage bad program design.

The Stack is just what it sounds like: a tower of things that starts at the bottom and builds upward as it goes. In our case, the things in the stack are called "Stack Frames" or just "frames". We start with one stack frame at the very bottom, and we build up from there.

This will allow us to use a few functions we didn't have access to before. These lines are still a mystery for now, but we'll explain them soon. Now we'll start working within the main function, where favoriteNumber is declared and used. The first thing we need to do is change how we declare the variable. Instead of

The rest of our conversion follows a similar vein. Instead of going through line by line, let's just compare end results: when the transition is complete, the code that used to read:

Let's take a moment to reexamine that. What we've done here is create two variables. The first variable is in the Heap, and we're storing data in it. That's the obvious one. But the second variable is a pointer to the first one, and it exists on the Stack. This variable is the one that's really called favoriteNumber, and it's the one we're working with. It is important to remember that there are now two parts to our simple variable, one of which exists in each world. This kind of division is common is C, but omnipresent in Cocoa. When you start making objects, Cocoa makes them all in the Heap because the Stack isn't big enough to hold them. In Cocoa, you deal with objects through pointers everywhere and are actually forbidden from dealing with them directly.