Procrastiblog

Free public Wi-Fi in the courthouse!

It’s always been a problem and, apparently, it’s getting worse. (Though, in fairness to the discipline, enrollments in CS are down dramatically across the board and seem to be down proportionally somewhat less for women, especially at the doctoral level (which I inferred from squinting at this graph)).

What can I say, ladies? It’s not all programming, but programming is an important part of it. If you don’t like staring at a screen all day… well, then you’re probably not cut out for 21st century office work. You can only read so many papers (and even papers don’t have to be on paper if you don’t insist on it).

CS could do a better job of selling itself as a mathematical rather than an engineering discipline—it’s really a little of both, and you can choose the proportion that works best for you depending on your interests (for instance, my work is probably 60/40 math/engineering; most of my peers/colleagues are probably more math-centric). Neither math nor engineering are at gender parity, but math is better than CS and engineering is worse.

On the glass-half-empty side, CS is—and is likely to remain—a male-dominated discipline. And the men you’ll find, while not necessarily the classic pocket-protectored nerd (I’ve never once seen a pocket protector on a computer scientist; I think that’s a slide-rule-era stereotype), tend to be socially awkward in one way or another. (But academia, in general, seems to attract introverts.)

On the glass-half-full side, universities, research labs, and funding agencies are absolutely desperate to encourage women to pursue computer science as a career. If you are a math- or technologically-inclined female (especially if you are an American female: China and India produce proportionally more female computer scientists (I think, no data to back that up)), you’ll have a comparative advantage in CS vs. math and the physical sciences. Which is not to say you’ll get a free ride. But there will definitely be a thumb on the scale in your favor.*

* Must… suppress… white male… resentment… So hard… being white… and male…

First, I’d like to observe—uniquely, I think—that people like me ought to pay less.

Second, it hardly needs to be said that it would be both good politics and good policy to simplify the tax code and payment system. You see, if paying taxes wasn’t complicated, time consuming, and painful, people wouldn’t mind paying them so much. John Edwards is apparently hip to this, as are the wing-nuts. (Via Becks via Neil the Ethical Werewolf)

Finally, if you are a giant corporation with an internship program, a nice benefit you could provide—nicer even than a ping-pong table or free snacks—would be free tax advice. Along these lines, you could also make a little effort not to put your interns in an annoying, complicated tax position.

P.S. Oh, yeah, I meant to say: it’s your patriotic duty, blah blah blah.

I’ve been meaning to blog the LitterMaid self-cleaning litter box for months now. Every time I come into contact with the damn thing it makes me want to call my congresswoman (hi, Nydia!).

If you’re not familiar with the product, it’s a litter box with a sensor and a motorized rake. A few minutes after a cat jumps in the box, the rake makes a pass over the litter and scoops whatever is clumped there into a little plastic bucket. Sounds pretty great, right? Wrong.

People on the Internet are not happy with this product. A lot of complaints are centered on the apparent fact that the motor breaks down quickly and often. But even with a fully operational motor, this is a deeply flawed product.

1. If you fill the box up to the line marked “Full”—or even just somewhat near it, say, anywhere above the line marked “Add Litter”—or, actually, to tell the truth, even if the box is not the least bit full but the litter is somehow unevenly distributed into unfortunately placed dunes—the rake will actually get stuck, going back and forth and back and forth all day or night—oh, and did I mention that it’s really fucking loud—until you turn it off and remove some (or a lot of) litter and smooth it out and pray.
2. The rake teeth are about a half inch apart and don’t reach down to the bottom of the box. Tiny poops escape unharmed. A layer of fine urine-soaked dust accumulates. Stench ensues. The thing weights 20 or 30 pounds, so dragging it into the bathroom or backyard to scrub it out is a hassle.
3. With a regular litter box, if you want to ignore it for a week or more, you just have to play chicken with your cat’s inclination to go start pooping and/or peeing somewhere else. Usually, at least in our case, the box will become just completely unacceptably stank long before the cats give up on it.

   With a LitterMaid self-cleaning litter box, if you ignore it for more than a few days, it starts scooping poop and urine-saturated litter onto the floor. Thus, the self-cleaning litter box, far from relieving you of the stresses of litter box management, actually makes careful attention to the state of the litter box more important.

4. Somehow, because of the way the dirty-litter bucket is wedged into a little gap on the side of the box, you are actually more likely to come into contact with cat shit in the process of changing the litter than with an old-fashioned litter box and scoop.

So, to summarize, here is the litter box of the future: it’s loud, it’s stinky, it scoops shit onto your floor, and then makes you touch it. And then it breaks! It gets my highest recommendation.