NOTHING TO SAY ABOUT A MASS SHOOTING

New Zealand is probably my favorite place in the world - we would probably move there if it weren't for the small complicating factors of 1.) it being the world's longest flight away from just about all of our family and friends and 2.) my god is it expensive to stream Game of Thrones there - so this week's mosque shootings in Christchurch were honestly like a punch to the gut. And this is one of those times where I want to write something illimunating, but honestly, nothing about this seems illuminating at all.

There is no real hidden aspect here to write about and mostly nothing you don't already know. I mean, we went through all of this when we had the Montreal mosque shooting in 2017: how one shooter with a semi-automatic weapon or two can shoot and probably kill many, many people, how conservative media and politicians in any non-Muslim-majority country have patterns of Islamophobic behaviour which helps radicalize potential shooters, how Youtube and other platforms seem to now automatically recommend radicalizing video content because that content creates extra ad revenue for them, and so on and so forth. (Most of this is transferable to the Tree of Life synagogue shooting which was only six months ago, except replace the references to Muslims and Islamaphobia with Jews and anti-semitism.)

There is nothing new to write here, except that once again very little has changed. New Zealand seems to be gearing up for major gun law reform, but it is worth remembering that Jacinda Ardem is a minority government leader propped up by a socially conservative minority party , NZ First, which has opposed her government's proposed gun law reforms before - so it is harder to be anything than very cautiously optimistic about change in that regard. But even if New Zealand's gun laws change, fixing all the other stuff I mentioned above will be so much harder - both there and everywhere else.

God this is depressing. Don't we have a more fun topic?

AND NOW: PLANE CRASHES

I guess not!

The Ethopian Airlines crash and subsequent worldwide grounding of the Boeing 737 Max-8 class jetliner made huge headlines this past week, and Donald Trump's government looked particularly stupid or at least more stupid than they usually do when A) the USA was the last country in the world to ground the planes B) probably because Boeing had made a lot of efforts to personally get the support of Trump and C) then the news media reminded everybody that Trump hasn't gotten around to hiring a new Federal Aviation Administration commissioner, whose job it would be to help prevent things like a particular type of passenger jet repeatedly crashing. So: not a great week for them.

Still, although the crashes were terrible and stories about entire families dying are always depressing, this is only a particularly dramatic example of entire classes of jetliners being grounded. It happens every once in a while (the last one was in 2013 when there were some battery issues on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner) and most of the time it doesn't get major headlines because there are only really four passenger jet manufacturers left in the world - Boeing, Airbus, Bombardier and Embraer - and nobody wants to lose market share by being dubbed "the unreliable one" so traditionally they're very vigilant about safety.

Of course, the problem is that over the past twenty years Boeing and Airbus have gradually become the only real options for many airlines, because Bombardier and Embraer are only competitive in the (profitable but smaller) narrow-body-jets market segment - and Boeing appears to be gradually absorbing Embraer's airline business and Airbus is doing the same with Bombardier's. So instead of four companies, you have two companies - in an industry in which nobody else is ever seriously going to be able to compete because of the massive need for industry experience and the extremely delayed sales timelines. (Comac, the Chinese government's airline manufacturer, is probably the best bet for competing with Airbus and Boeing. The Chinese government has put an insane amount of money into it - we're talking over a hundred billion American dollars over the past decade - and it will be lucky to have delivered its first narrow-body-jets within three years and its first wide-body jets by 2030.)

Airbus has probably moved more product overall, but Boeing's jets - particularly the 787 Dreamliner series - are more fuel-efficient, and fuel costs are king in the airlines industry right now. (Which is why Airbus has cancelled all future production of A380s, the massive double-decker jets which use half of all their fuel just taking off.)

What this creates is an atmosphere that is ripe for regulatory capture: a market where only two companies can do the thing (make planes) that the global economy desperately needs, and where they are each heavily subsidized by a powerful government (the USA for Boeing and the EU for Airbus) which is incentivized to make sure the company is successful. This doesn't mean that either of these companies are just going to start dancing around a bowl of money chanting "ha ha people are going to die" because they're not cartoon villains, but it generally does mean that people get just that little extra oomph they need to think that maybe this thing that might be a problem isn't that big a problem, you know? Maybe just sit back and keep an eye on it. And they do, until something bad happens, and then we all ask "wha happen" like we don't know.

This was always a recipe for potential disaster, and now we've got the disaster.

WE GET RESULTS HERE AT BIRD ON SUNDAY

So literally less than a day after I wrote a thousand or so words about protests against the corrupt and infirm President of Algeria, the Algerian government announced that in fact he would not run again for President, and that their primary legislative body was going to work on drafting government reforms (what type of reforms are not entirely specified as of yet).

The protestors are not appeased, though, mostly because they (probably correctly) consider President Bouteflika to be a sacrificial butt being flicked away whilst the actual power brokers in the country just do whatever they want and try to sell it to the people as change. The new Prime Minister's comment that he wants to form a "technocratic government" is itself sort of concerning, because in order to have a technocratic government you first need to have technocrats and although Algeria has sort of a nascent tech manufacturing sector, it's still very much in the early stages and mostly privately owned and the people do not seem interested in just giving the reigns of power to Algerian Google (or plain old Regular Google) what have you. (Also, the new Prime Minister used to be the interior minister, who was responsible for enforcing the protest bans in Algeria for years, so the protestors are understandably distrustful of him.)

Still! So much can happen in a week!

THE NEW EDUCATION PLAN (AND THE NEW MATH)

The Ontario Tories' education announcement on Friday was... not as bad as it could have been, I suppose, but there is really nothing in it that is positive. The image of Education Minister Lisa Thompson (a person who has literally never interacted with the public school system in any respect at all, not as a student or teacher or parent, before she was put in charge of all of it) flanked by her assistant, MPP Sam Oosterhoff (exactly the same situation as Thompson, except much younger and dumber) bragging about "back to basics" math education is probably the ideal metaphor for the entire announcement as a whole: a bunch of vaguely-well-intended know-nothings boasting about doing the wrong thing.

"Back to basics" math education is, essentially, a demand that math education return to times tables and that "new math" education - AKA Common Core - be scrapped. This is stupid, because Common Core was invented by people who spent ages and ages studying math pedagogy to find a way to teach math skills to children more effectively. Now, I know that there are a lot of people reading this who saw, like, that meme with the person who wrote a cheque using Common Core principles and think the experts are full of bunk.

My response to that is this: I am going to randomly generate five digits. Oh, look, I got a 2, and a 6, and a 5, and an 8, and a 3. So let's say the math problem is a simple multiplication problem: 26 times 583. "No problem," you say, "I can just get out a piece of paper and a pencil and bam, it's done." And that's great!

But before you do that, here is what I want you to do. I want you to do it entirely in your head first.

...still with me? Okay, good. Most of you reading this, statistically speaking, cannot do that. I, as it turns out, can. It took me about twenty seconds to do it, mind you - I am not pretending I am Stephen Hawking or anything, and as party tricks go it's not an especially good one to have me standing there silently for about half a minute thinking silently and then saying a number. But I can at least manage it. Most people can't, so there.

The reason I can do it and most people can't isn't because of any special ability or smartness. I mean, I am literally not a rocket scientist, or indeed a scientist or mathematician of any type. But, when I was being taught math as a little kid, I did what about one person in twenty (according to expert estimates) does: I internalized the ability to multiply in a conceptual way. When I multiply large numbers in my head, I am basically doing what Common Core teaches kids to do: I'm taking apart the numbers and multiplying them in easier groups and then adding them back together. (When I mentally divide numbers I do the same thing except the opposite direction, and I note that I'm less good at mental division than I am at multiplication. Probably because I'm self-taught.)

Times tables and the "classic" method of arithmetical multiplication are, respectively, a memorization exercise and a simple algorithm. Neither are bad in and of themselves, but the problem is that when these are your methods for teaching kids math, you're only teaching them a set of tricks which give them end results. The reason so many kids have serious trouble when they move on to algebra, or trig, or calculus is because if you only teach kids the set of tricks, you're not giving them what researchers call "number sense" - IE, a set of instincts about numbers and how they're related to other numbers, which in turn makes all higher-level mathematical thought much easier. (Or to put it another way: when the trick you learned to do multiplication doesn't apply to everything else that is math, everything else gets harder.)

And it turns out that if you want kids to develop the skills necessary to become, say, computer programmers or engineers or the like, these are skills you want those kids to have, or else they will drop out of the sciences and become lawyers instead. Going to a "back to basics" mathematical education model because parents (and even some teachers) get frustrated with it because they don't know it is a bad idea, because just becasuse you grew up being taught math a certain way doesn't make it good, much in the same way that leaded gasoline was a 100% bad idea but people used that once upon a time as well.

The rest of the announcement is the same sort of thing: bad ideas, but not dramatically bad ideas. Just policies that are clearly sub-optimal choices. The weirdest part is a plan to require high school students earn at least one credit via online classes, which seems like an answer to a problem nobody was posing, and then it gets moderately worse. Increasing class sizes, but not hugely, just enough that high school will get slightly worse for kids; moving gender identity discussion in the sex-ed curriculum to Grade 8 because some parents were squicked, but at least not removing it entirely; planning to remove teachers via attrition rather than outright cuts, although I suspect given their planned funding models "attrition" is going to end up feeling a lot like code for "make local school boards fire people themselves via funding cuts, rather than demanding job cuts directly." And given that the Toronto District School Board says they're going to end up firing over a thousand teachers because of this plan, I probably suspect correctly.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched/rewatched this week:

The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part (2019, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, theatre) - 3.5/5

The Quiet Man (1952, John Ford, TCM) - 2.5/5

Also finished Dishonored 2, which like the first one is the best possible game about murdering people with teleportation powers, or if you are nice like me, just choking them unconscious.

See you in seven.