Act I: Analysis

I’d already mentioned before that Complex Analysis was a crazy roadblock that put me on to the road to proposed and much easier plan requirements. This was clearly because I was insufficiently prepared for the material. Even though the lecture material made sense as we went through it and the textbook was pretty much the same thing, it was determined that I didn’t have the adequate foundational knowledge in analysis and the intuition that comes with solving those sorts of problems.

So, this was for the best, it seemed. After all, dropping one course wouldn’t be too bad.

Act II: First-Order Logic

Now this, this is failure. This is where we learn that the Rudy 08 strategy does not work when applied to coursework. After not having gotten a passing mark on any assignment, I decided to seek the advice of the TA before the midterm. It boiled down to understanding the solutions to the problems, which I felt like I had a pretty good handle on, especially after relearning everything.

As it turns out, it wasn’t good enough and I failed the midterm. I decided that the chances of my passing were very slim at this point and decided to abandon ship.

This course was a very interesting experience for me. Unlike Complex Analysis, where I was insufficiently prepared, this course should have been cake. I did well in my first logic course and I enjoyed computability theory in the CS context. It turns out that that would be my downfall, because it seems that that was some sort of mental block that made it impossible for me to solve the problems in such a way that it would satisfy the subject in a pure mathematical context.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a course baffle me like that before. I’d go do an assignment, feeling confident that I’d solved the problems fairly competently and find that I was doing it wrong. I’d look at the solutions and try and see what went wrong, internalized the mistakes, and took a stab at the next assignment and, again, felt confident. The cycle would repeat all the way to the midterm.

Epilogue

I walked away from this entire debacle understanding just where my interests in mathematics lie. The things that attracted me to pure math wasn’t exactly the purity and the theory. It was exactly the things in math that I found cool (algebra and number theory) and pure math was the only way I could study those things. And as much as I might want to think otherwise, I’m still much more of a computer scientist than any other kind of mathematician.

CS 462: Formal Languages and Parsing (He)

This was one of the courses I was most looking forward to. And then I found out the prof I that I thought was teaching the course (who is a really awesome prof) was going on sabbatical. щ(ﾟДﾟщ)

The actual prof isn’t that great in lecture. His speaking isn’t very good and neither are his board notes. He’s pretty good when emailed though, so I just read the textbook and imagine it’s the author (who was the prof I wanted to get) lecturing instead and I just take notes.

The course itself is pretty cool. It seems to be more CS 360 stuff and in the same order too, going from finite automata and regular languages to context free languages and then to Turing machines. Thank God for Jeffrey Shallit’s book, A Second Course in Formal Languages and Automata Theory. I think I’m going to keep it.

CS 466: Algorithm Design and Analysis (Biedl)

This is another really cool course. In terms of content, it seems like it’s just more CS 341: here’s a problem, now let’s try to solve it and refine the solution. Now, we have a few more techniques that didn’t make it into CS 341.

I really liked the prof for this course when I took CS 360, enough to change my plans and push STAT 231 even later. But, having Timothy Chan guest lecture one class sort of convinced me I probably would’ve been okay if I’d decided to hold off on it until spring. Still, really good prof with really good board notes, although I find her equations and formulas really, really verbose. This preference for verbosity over notation seems to be a thing that’s really common among CS profs, actually.

PMATH 352: Complex Analysis (Spronk)

This was probably the class I was most worried about, since the last time I had anything to do with calculus was in 2A, which was two years ago. And it turns out my fears were completely realized. The class itself seemed pretty interesting, but it became clear that I had no idea what was going on when the time came to do assignments.

The prof was really helpful when I talked with him about it. This eventually lead to me dropping the course on his suggestion and altering my program plan to a more achievable one. He’s also really good in lecture and is one of those profs that proves and notes every detail. He writes really fast though.

PMATH 432: First Order Logic and Computability (Csima)

So I learned too late that I probably should have chosen PMATH 434 (Computational Number Theory) over this one. The course content for this was essentially a more intense version of CS 245 combined with what I believe will end up being the solvability parts from CS 360 and CS 341. Well, the stuff on solvability might make it worth taking this course, so we’ll see. This course is also kind of annoying because there’s always something that I’m missing in a proof that causes me to hemorrhage marks.

The prof is alright and has pretty good board notes, although she does get mixed up a bit sometimes. I don’t blame her, when you’re going on about models of stuff and interpretations of stuff, it’s not easy to keep track of it.

PMATH 442: Fields and Galois Theory (Liu)

Best course of 3B. Remember when I said rings and fields were awesome and groups were kind of meh? Well, Galois theory tells us that groups can be alright. It just takes something interesting like fields to make groups cool, that’s all. So yeah, field theory (and by extension, ring theory) is pretty awesome.

The prof for this course is great. Her accent needs about one class to get used to and then you’re good. Best board notes of the term. The thing that sets her apart, though, is that she cares about the students. She’s always asking us for our opinions on things about the class and tries to make sure that we understand everything and reminds us that if we’re having trouble, we can always ask her for help and stuff.

AHAHAHAHAHAHA. It’s pretty terrible. （　´_ゝ`）

Here, we have the first new one. It’s a huge improvement over the other one. The most obvious criticisms of Unlimited Laser Works were the billions of lines and the billions of colours used. The first is taken care of by focusing on black and gold, the school’s colours. The second is taken care of by the slight tilt and cutting the top a bit. That conveys the dynamism or whatever without having tons of crazy lines flying all over the place.

I wouldn’t mind this one at all, although I think some explanation of the process and what it symbolizes would help make it more interesting. Of course, I’m not going to whine and say it’s too plain, because it’s worlds better than the other extreme.

At first glance, this one is kind of unsettling because of the way the E fits in with the T and R. But if you take a look on the stationary (the letterhead and the business card), those three lines becomes a really clever little motif that is really flexible. I think it’s a lot better than the random curvy lines that they’re using now. It’s also not too hard to change for faculty use, just by swapping the gold for a faculty colour.

I think this one grew on me and became my choice. The problem with the other one is that it doesn’t have any strong elements that could be taken on its own, so the use of the giant W is forced upon you. This one also has the advantage of a fairly distinct wordmark.

PMATH 346: Group Theory (Lawrence)

I was expecting this to be as killer and awesome as PMATH 345. Fortunately, it wasn’t as killer, because the prof was nicer to us on the midterm. Unfortunately, I don’t really like groups as much as rings. Oh well, still pretty fascinating. In theory, groups come before rings, but rings are so much cooler. The prof is pretty good.

PMATH 340: Elementary Number Theory (Ingram)

I was expecting this to be easy and interesting. I was right about the easy. The first half of the course was essentially MATH 135 over again. I didn’t think the prof’s lecturing was terribly interesting, but he had excellent course notes which allowed me to not go to class. I would have loved to have Vanderburgh though.

CS 360: Introduction to the Theory of Computing (Biedl)

This class is pretty awesome and the prof is pretty awesome. One of my favourite classes, this one starts with finite automata and regular languages, moves on to context-free languages and grammars, and ends with Turing machines and solvability. It wasn’t hard to pick up the material and it’s super interesting. The prof is so awesome that I reworked my course sequences so that I could take CS 466 (Algorithm Design and Analysis) with her.

CS 341: Algorithms (Shallit)

This is also another fascinating course. Basically, the course is structured so that in the first part, you go through techniques to design algorithms and examine problems and various algorithms to solve those problems. After that, you move on to looking at lower bounds on problems. Then, you have a look at graph problems: minimum spanning tree and shortest path algorithms. The final part of the course is the most interesting, looking at complexity classes and NP-completeness in particular. The prof is also really awesome. I’m looking forward to having him again for CS 462 (Formal Languages and Parsing).

CS 350: Operating Systems (Aboulnaga)

Operating system theory is kind of interesting, but not enough to keep me concentrated after the other two CS lectures. Oh well.

Anyway, I realized I hadn’t put up any appraisal of what I took for the last few terms (so 2A coop, 2B, and 2B coop, hence 2B hurr hurr hurr), so instead of studying, I will do that now.

ECON 102: Introduction to Macroeconomics (Smith)

I took this during my 2A coop term. Larry Smith is super-duper entertaining. In addition to that, it was nice that he incorporated economic happenings from the real world as they happened. I regret not being in Waterloo for his commentary in Fall 2008 when the financial crisis became too big to ignore and Obama was elected. An excellent introduction to macroeconomics.

LS 101: Introduction to Legal Studies (DE)

I took this during my 2B coop term through distance education. Nothing special here, just a course that goes through the basics of law in Canada. Pretty easy, what with one paper and one final and no effort put into either netting me a very good mark. I guess if you suck at writing, you shouldn’t take it?

CS 240: Data Structures and Data Management (Chinaei)

Not a terrible prof, but I bought CLRS, so I wasn’t missing too much.

CS 246: Software Abstraction and Specification (Davis)

Again, not terrible, but the course was just C++, obscure UML details, memorizing design patterns, and long tedious assignments.

CS 251: Computer Organization and Design (Cowan)

I’m not a fan of low-level stuff and this was pretty much the lowest-level course that CS has. I already took SE 141, so that saved me for the first half of the course, but the second half seemed like obscure architecture details. It didn’t help that the prof liked to go on long tangents, both in lecture and on assignments.

STAT 230: Probability (Chisholm)

I wasn’t in her section, but I went to one class with the prof that I was supposed to have and never went back. I hate statistics, but she was a really good prof and made it bearable.

PMATH 345: Rings, Polynomials, and Finite Fields (McKinnon)

This was my favourite course of the term. Of course, this was also my hardest course, and I pretty much got destroyed. But I loved the course content. And the prof was awesome too. It might be my favourite course I’ve taken so far. Of course, it’d be my lowest mark too. Go figure.

And that’s why I was worried. PDEng represented a different aspect of the program than what I was considering. My decision was largely motivated by my own interests in the field of computer science and mathematics and the fact that software engineering was not where they lay. Another part of my concern was the manner in which engineering has set itself up and the way that it is contrasted to the math way of doing things, which I much prefer.

PDEng was simply brought up as an example of the engineering way. That’s all. Devoting such a large portion of my post to PDEng was probably a mistake in this sense, and I should have separated the problems of PDEng into its own post like this one.

Of course, this is not even considering the sheer stupidity one would have to be steeped in to leave software engineering because of PDEng. Let’s look at this carefully now. Essentially, if someone leaves software engineering to go to computer science because of PDEng, they are an enormous retard.

I wasn’t a stranger to many things about first year engineering at Waterloo. I knew about the murderous PHYS 115 midterm. And I knew about PDEng. I was completely expecting the thing to be awful and it shattered my expectations and was absolutely 10/10 A+++ horrid. But seriously, if you’re hard set on becoming an engineer, PDEng should not deter you from doing so. If I really wanted to become a software engineer, I’d just suck it up and bitch about it like everyone else is doing. It really isn’t worth leaving over.

And it really isn’t worth leaving over when the brain surgeons over at CECS decide to spawn more of their hellish program over the rest of the coop program. Yes, I knew about WatPD too. I don’t just jump from program to program all willy-nilly. I do my goddamn research and know what the hell I’m getting myself into. So, I’d have to be an illiterate monkey if I were switching to CS over PDEng, because I’d be right back where the hell I started: having to take another retarded professionalism course over coop.

In conclusion, no, I did not leave engineering because of PDEng. As I’ve mentioned, I’d have to be a gigantic retard to have done so. Does this mean PDEng isn’t bad? Oh hells no. PDEng is still a gigantic pile of fecal matter and it appears that it’s not going to change very quickly. And now we have five more piles to deal with.

Of course, things are much different this term than in my first year. This has to do with my decision to leave the world of software engineering and fly under the flag of computer science and pure mathematics. Thus far, my classes are indicating that I made a very good decision.

MATH 237 — Calculus 3 for Honours Mathematics: Wolczuk

The interesting thing about switching from engineering to math is the fact that many of the courses you need to continue on taking are in fact courses that cover material you’ve already covered, except they are rife with theorems and proofs that you’ve skimmed over or handwaved over. Such is the case in calculus.

The two course sequence for most ECEs (this includes SE, Nano, and Syde; you’re all in ECE), MATH 117 and 119 covers up to and includes multivariable calculus (partial differentiation, multiple integrals, etc). This same two course sequence is stretched out to three courses in math (MATH 137, 138, 237).

The prof for this course, Wolczuk is the happiest man on earth. No, really. No one can be that happy at 8:30 in the morning — except him. He starts off every class with a little puzzle-y thing and throws in random jokes that you groan at, but is fairly hilarious. He’s a great prof and I’m glad that I decided to not go to my assigned section and that I even took this course this term, dropping CS 251 for it.

MATH 239 — Introduction to Combinatorics: Jao

As far as I understand, combinatorics is very, very relevant to computer science. I expected the course to be fairly interesting and one of the easier courses. Of course, since I’m basically doing easier courses than I expected, this course seems to be surfacing near the top of the difficulty pile. Still, not too bad. I also enjoy this talk about graphs and stuff quite a bit too.

Our prof, Jao, is fairy mediocre. He can speak English and without an accent, which is excellent. But he seems to like explaining how he teaches more than actual teaching. He’s not horrible, but he’s not the best prof in the world either.

MATH 235 — Linear Algebra 2 for Honours Mathematics: Celmins

Linear algebra was one of the things I hoped I’d never have to take again. It seemed fairly dull, and all it was was manipulating blocks of matrices. Of course, it’s slightly more interesting in the math context, what with having to understand various theorems rather than blindly row reduce everything as in engineering. Still, not my favourite class even thought it is ridiculously easy.

Celmins is a fairly interesting prof. He likes to go on tangents and tell us interesting things that he forgets he told us. His way of teaching is very fluid and can be hard to follow at times. Still, I prefer him to mechanical, static profs, since I can extract some interesting bits once in a while.

HIST 278 — The USSR and World War II: The Great Patriotic War: Statiev

This is a class that I chose purely out of interest. It was a huge gamble, since I had no idea how the term was going to turn out or how anything worked in the History department. In the end, it paid off. Here, I got a really interesting class about an influential moment in history that I was actually interested in (no, really, Canadian history is really not the most exciting thing in the world) and one with very little work (midterm, term paper, final) and a very good prof.

Statiev is Russian. This means he has a noticeable accent, but this also means that he knows his crap. He’s pretty interesting and understandable and throws out a few bits of hilarity. He really knows his stuff about Eastern European and military history. I wouldn’t mind taking another one of his classes.

CS 241 — Foundations of Sequential Programs: Becker

CS 241 is a pretty interesting class, especially following the work that I did over the work term. Ultimately, CS 241 is a course about how programs work on the computer. We start off with hardware level programming, with machine and assembly code. We work our way up into introductions to formal languages and language theory and through basic scanning and parsing, and by the end of the course, we write our own mini compiler.

Becker is a really good prof. He teaches really well. I think that’s about it.

CS 251 — Computer Organization and Design: Madavvat

This is a course that I really wish I didn’t have to take, especially after SE 141. Unfortunately, I still have to. I was enrolled at the beginning of the term. That changed when I realized that the prof was not very good and was not relevant to the assignments. I also realized that now that I’m in math, I can take courses in what order I want, when I want. Score.

Madavvat is slow. And has a heavy accent. No, really, ridiculously slow. Slow.

2B (Spring 2008)

CS 240 – Data Structures and Data Management
CS 246 – Software Abstraction and Specification
STAT 230 – Probability
PMATH 345 – Polynomials, Rings, and Fields
CS 251 – Computer Organization and Design

3A (Winter 2009)

CS 341 – Algorithms
CS 360 – Theory of Computation
CS 350 – Operating Systems
PMATH 340 – Elementary Number Theory
PMATH 346 – Group Theory

3B (Fall 2009)

CS 462 – Formal Languages and Parsing
PMATH 352 – Complex Analysis
PMATH 432 – First order Logic and Computability
PMATH 442 – Fields and Galois Theory
STAT 231 – Statistics

4A (Spring 2010)

CS 466 – Algorithm Design and Analysis
CS 486 – Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
PMATH 351 – Real Analysis
PMATH 360 – Geometry

4B (Winter 2011)

CS 444 – Compiler Construction
CS 442 – Principles of Programming Languages
PMATH 467 – Topology
PMATH 440 – Analytic Number Theory

The most important thing to realize is that the only reason I was even in software engineering was because, as always, I was lazy. My former classmates will know what I’m talking about when I say that. I’m well known among my softie friends for ‘doing enough’. I’d heard stories about people working themselves to death in university, but I made it a point not to do that, particularly in the case where five hours of hard, grueling work would net me some marks that I wouldn’t even see in my final grade. Nope, as long as I understood the material well enough, that was fine for me.

But I digress. I’d originally applied for software engineering at Waterloo and McMaster and computer engineering at U of T. In the end, I considered the U of T and Mac choices a mistake, because I knew that what I was interested in wasn’t engineering. Really, the reason I chose software engineering was because, at the time, it seemed like the perfect mix of computer science and engineering.

But something interesting happened in grade 12. Math was starting to make sense. It was starting to come together. It was starting to get interesting. I started poking around the undergraduate calendar while I was bored and stumbled upon some interesting options for mathematics degrees. The thing that caught my eye was the possibility of having two majors; in my world it would have combined computer science with a field in mathematics.

Something else happened about that time. I got accepted to software engineering at the University of Waterloo. In April. And really, that sealed the deal. There was to be no more waffling around; I’d decided to become a software engineer. The whole math thing seemed like a fad. That was not the case.

Yeah, math kind of faded into the sunset over summer. But first year was full of interesting mathie things. There are two courses that really showed me what math is like: MATH 135 and CS 245. These two courses sharply contrast in their abstractness and depth compared to engineering maths, like MATH 117 or MATH 115. Where the math maths focused on understanding, engineering maths tended to degenerate into festivals of memorization.

That’s not to say that 115 and 117 didn’t have anything I liked. I really enjoyed vector spaces and actually learning how to integrate. But, I don’t think I enjoyed it as much as I would have, delving into why these things work. Similarly, CS 133 was of no interest to me. I knew how to program already, it’s actually fairly simple and mechanical to simply spit out code. CS 134 was much more interesting, explaining the various data structures or analysing complexity of functions.

Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that I should have come to in grade 12: that I am far, far more interested by abstract ideas and knowledge and have almost no interest in the application of knowledge. In fact, my marks point this out quite clearly. I’ve been getting much better marks in maths than in CS courses. The only exception is really CS 245: Computation and Logic.

So far, that only explains the pure mathematics portion of my intended degree. Other than the fact that it’s impossible to take any other major or minor with software engineering, why did I switch in CS? Much of my decision to go into CS was influenced by my work term at Sybase.

One particular project that I had to work on was an SQL parser. For that project, my boss, who used to be a CS prof at Waterloo, basically gave me a lecture on how compilers worked before he left for two weeks. During those two weeks, while working on a lexer and parser, I also read some stuff on parsing and languages on Wikipedia. It introduced me to interesting things like formal languages and automata theory. It also introduced me to the various fields in computer science.

As it turns out, computer science has a lot of different areas of interest, such as things like artificial intelligence, computational mathematics, human-computer interaction, and other things. It also turns out that software engineering is a sub-field of computer science. This is a fairly large point in my decision.

Unlike science and engineering, computer science and software engineering are not completely divorced from each other. What I mean by that is the fact that the focus and intent of science and engineering are completely different. However, this is not the case with computer science and software engineering. Software engineering remains as a sub-field of software engineering and is not its own discipline, as it is with civil engineers and physicists.

Why is this? I’d say that it’s because of the nature of the things that we’re dealing with. Whether we’re computer scientists or software engineers, the things we manipulate are abstract. At the lowest level, they’re ones and zeroes. At the highest level, they’re still abstract objects. Other engineers deal with real objects and other scientists deal with theory, but both computer scientists and software engineers work with the same, abstract, theoretical things.

But after you realize that software engineering is only a sub-field in computer science, you also realize that there are other fields. And you will find that it is these other fields that are what you really want to be studying. For me, I’m fairly interested in languages. I mean, syntax is one of the things I love about Python and despise about Java. The SQL parser that I had to work on at Sybase was probably the most fun and exciting thing I’ve done with programming. I guess it’s why I’m on my little witch-hunt against people who don’t indent eight spaces.

Also, languages are abstract enough for me to enjoy, as opposed to more applicable things like graphics or databases. My interest in abstract, theoretical objects or structures is also what led me to pure mathematics.

So much of the decision was made by the fact that I’d realized what I really want to be studying. Of course, there is a bit more to the decision than my own fanciful dreams.

One big thing that is evident in software engineering is how engineering treats its students. Why I say that it’s particularly evident in software is because we have a program that is almost the same as ours that is without the influence of engineering. Unlike what the administration may have you believe, engineering is particularly unforgiving. If you screw up, you’re done for eight months. The rationale behind this is the cohort system: every engineering program has its classes together. That’s supposed to build up some camaraderie, because engineering needs more for some reason.

Engineering is also fairly inflexible. I hadn’t thought of it as a downside before, but university has really shown me how important flexibility is. In engineering, you get zero flexibility, in almost every aspect of your education. Sure, you may have spots for electives, but those are more concessions than trying to seriously add some supporting content to your education.

But one of the biggest things that I think that shows how engineering regards its students is PDEng. I’ve saved this for last, in fear that a PDEng rant might taint the entire post with a suspicion that I left because of PDEng. That is not the case. While I was pissed as hell at PDEng, if I thought software was for me, I would have stuck it out. But, I’d been meaning to write a scathing criticism of PDEng for a while. Ironically (OR CONVENIENTLY?), PDEng prevented that during the work term.

I really tried to give it a chance. PDEng lost that chance in one of the first modules, where it outlined how assignments should be completed. The first point was that there should be “no CRAP (creative rhetoric and posturing).” The first thought that came to my mind was, really, “bullshit“. They’re telling me not to BS on assignments and they have the balls to come up with a forced acronym to force the point? How is that not hypocrisy?

That is the biggest problem with PDEng. That is, PDEng is pure, unequivocal bullshit. I dare anyone who has read the course content to convince me that it is anything but.

The next problem is that the grading system in PDEng defaults to fail. An assignment is given the grade of the lowest grade of any one section on that assignment. So, given an assignment with ten criteria, and nine are excellent and one is weak, the entire assignment is weak. Apparently, this is supposed to be offset by the fact that markers are allegedly lenient and that you have the chance for resubmission.

This is of course defeated by the fact that there is no accountability in PDEng. The only form of contact with the PDEng course staff is e-mail. Apparently, the PDEng personnel realized that facing pissed off students wouldn’t be such a great idea, while deciding to make assignment criteria so vague that any interpretation of it can result in a fail.

Finally, the biggest problem I personally have with PDEng is that the entirety of the course personnel are arrogant. They are arrogant concerning the worth of this program. They are arrogant in their position as a course mentor. According to one alumni who participated in the “alumni mentor forums”, students are, apparently, not allowed to criticise PDEng because we don’t have the hindsight to realize how good it is for us.

That is bull. Please realize, students are intelligent creatures. After all, we are pursuing higher education. My English teacher used to say that his job was to make sure our bullshit detectors worked. Guess what? Students can tell what is bullshit and what is not. We don’t whine because we don’t realize that it’s important. I’d like to see you try and find people who whine about having to take arts electives. That’s right, there are none. PDEng, on the other hand, is a grand waste of time and money.

Before taking PDEng, I’d thought it wasn’t a very well implemented program and that it’d have the hope of getting better. I was wrong. I consider PDEng a shameful blot on the faculty and the school.

Basically, PDEng is a symptom of some very possible and disturbing problems in engineering. These problems are not worth the engineering licensing that I have a shot at, particularly when most of the jobs in this field do not require it. I have friends who try to convince me otherwise. I maintain that since programming is ultimately grounded in math and theory, computer scientists will still have a place in development.

Ultimately, the point of this post is to educate. Software engineering is not superior to computer science as is commonly thought. That thought may get softies through those times of pain and suffering, as it did for me. Unfortunately, that is nothing more than wishful thinking. Software may be a good fit if you’re interested in actual software or computer engineering (like formal methods or computer organization). Otherwise, you may find that there’s an area in computer science that may be more suited for you.

The guest speaker at CCF was talking about social justice, and it was a very good talk. One of the questions that was asked of him was, what do we do? His answer: right now, we can’t do anything, except to work hard through school and get into a position where you can do something.

Something I’ve always tried to do is to connect everything I do back to my faith. Whether it’s design, math, or programming, there will always be some way to connect what we do with God. And why not? After all, he did make it so that ??¬? can never be true and that ?f?df(x)dx=f(x).

And so I’m always trying to find out what God would have me do with the skills and interests he’s placed in me. How does typography further the kingdom? How do web standards advance the kingdom? How do recursive descent parsers expand the kingdom?

So the obvious thing is to use your gifts at church. And obviously, that’s too easy. It’s great for discovering and developing your gifts, but Jesus called us to the ends of the earth. The extent of our talents should not be the church.

So what other ways are there to excercise your skills? Christ called us to go out and serve the weak, the needy, the broken, and in doing so, show them the love of Christ. The problem is that there’s so much to do. The hungry, the sick, the oppressed, it’s impossible to serve all of them especially with our finite skillsets.

I am studying software engineering. Presumably, I’m going to go on to become a software developer and come up with some hot algorithms to parse some hot language. But how does software accomplish the Great Commission? And that’s when I read and listened to Eben Moglen’s “Software and Community in the Early 21st Century”. Afterwards, what I had to do was made much clearer.

Below, is the transcript from the talk; thanks to Geof Glass who transcribed it.

Software and Community in the Early 21st Century

I want to talk about the piece of our common lives that Paul is pointing at – these rules, these methods of living together around software. And I want to try and explain what I think their larger moral and economic meaning is. It is both a moral and an economic analysis: it has to be. It began as a moral question. It remains a moral question. But it becomes along the way also a window into the economic organization of human society in the twenty-first century.

If you think about the twentieth century economy out of which we are passing, its primary underlying commodity was steel. The making of steel was the twentieth century’s root activity, and societies measured themselves substantially by their success in producing steel. It was the first sign of the reawakening of Europe as an economic entity after the devastation of the Second World War. What we now think of as the European Union and we thought of for a while as the European Economic Commission and before that as the Common Market began, as you may recall under Jean Monnet, as the coal and iron union to bring back the European Industrial Economy. The Asian Tigers began to claim for themselves rising importance for themselves in the world economy when they began producing noticeable amounts of steel. And when Mao Zedong tried to imagine an alternative form of economic development for the People’s Republic of China in the Great Leap Forward, his best thought was backyard steel furnaces.

So that was how the twentieth century thought about collaboration in the economy: it made steel. And from steel it made the rest of what the twentieth century possessed for the exploration of the environment and the control of nature for human benefit.

The twenty-first century economy is not undergirded by steel. The twenty-first century economy is undergirded by software. Which is as crucial as the underlying element in economic development in the twenty-first century as the production of steel ingots was in the twentieth. We have moved to a societal structure in this country, are moving elsewhere in the developed world, will continue to move throughout the developing economies, towards economies whose primary underlying commodity of production is software. And the good news is that nobody owns it.

The reason that this is good news requires us to go back to a moment in the past in the development of the economies of the West, before steel. What was, after all, characteristic of the economy before steel was the slow persistent motivated expansion of European societies and European economies out into the larger world – for both much evil and much good – built around the possession of a certain number of basic technological improvements, mostly around naval transportation and armament. All of which was undergirded by a control of mathematics superior to the control of mathematics available in other cultures around the world. There are lots of ways we could conceive the great European expansion which redescribed human beings’ relationship to the globe. But one way to put it is they had the best math. And nobody owned that either.

Imagine if you will for a moment a society in which mathematics has become property, and it’s owned by people. Now every time you want to do anything useful – build a house, make a boat, start a bridge, devise a market, move objects weighing certain numbers of kilos from one place to another – your first stop is at the mathematics store to buy enough mathematics to complete the task which lies before you. You can only use as much arithmetic at a time as you can afford, and it is difficult to build a sufficient inventory of mathematics, given its price, to have any extra on hand. You can predict, of course, that the mathematics sellers will get rich. And you can predict that every other activity in society, whether undertaken for economic benefit or for the common good, will pay taxes in the form of mathematics payments.

The productization of knowledge about computers – the turning of software into a product – was, for a short, crucial period of time at the end of the 20th century, the dominant element in technological progress. Software was owned. You could do what you could afford, and you could accomplish what somebody else’s software made possible. To contain within your own organization a sufficient inventory of adaptable software to be able to meet new circumstances flexibly was more expensive than any but the largest organizations seeking private benefit in the private economy could afford to pay.

We are moving to a world in which in the twenty-first century the most important activities that produce occur not in factories, and not by individual initiative, but in communities held together by software. It is the infra-structural importance of software which is first important in the move to the post-industrial economy. It isn’t that software is itself a thing of value – that’s true. It isn’t that applications produce useful end-point activities, or benefit real people in their real lives. Though that’s true. It is that software provides alternate modes of infrastructure and transportation. That’s crucial in economic history terms, because the driving force in economic development is always improvement in transportation. When things move more easily and more flexibly and with less friction from place to place, economic growth results; welfare improvements occur. They occur most rapidly among those who have previously been unable to transport value into the market. In other words, infrastructure improvement has a tendency to improve matters for the poor more rapidly than most other forms of investment in economic development.

Software is creating roadways that bring people who have been far from the center of human social life to the center of human social life. Software is making people adjacent to one another who have not been adjacent to one another. And with a little bit of work, software can be used to keep software from being owned. In other words, software itself can lift the software tax.

That’s where we now are: at that moment, on that cusp. In this neighborhood, at this moment, the richest and most deeply funded monopoly in the history of the world is beginning to fail. Within another few months, the causes of its failure will be apparent to everybody, as they are now largely apparent to the knowledgeable observers of the industry who expect trouble for Microsoft. The very engineering limits of trying to make software that you own work as well as software that the community produces are becoming apparent. It used to be suggested that eventually software produced without ownership relations might achieve superiority beyond that of software produced by proprietary producers. It used to be argued that that might eventually happen. When those of us who have some theoretical experience in this area said, “why do you only think it’s going to happen eventually – it’s happened already”, people had a tendency to point at the monopoly products and show the ways in which they are still, in one way or another, better. “You see, you can’t do it.”

The browser, as we are all aware, is a pretty crummy piece of software. It’s commodity activity now, these browsers. And Microsoft has written some browsers. And they have been working on the browser they just released for years. And now they have announced what their best browser, at present levels of engineering investment, can be. And on the day of its release, it is less good than the unowned competitor. Produced by who? What? Where? When? On the day of its release. What is being seen this week, next week, the week after about Internet Explorer version 7 will soon be seen about operating system kernels, file systems, desktop and window management, and all the other commoditized parts of a client-side operating system at which we are now operating to produce superior software at infinitely lower price. We are still – only partially of course, but we are still a capitalist society. And when someone entrenched, no matter how deeply, is producing overtly inferior goods at three orders of magnitude higher price or infinitely higher price, the event – or the outcome of the event – is obvious.

Ownership of software as a way of producing software for general consumption is going out, for economic reasons. But as I said, the economic insight that we can get from watching the transition from steel to software is far less important than the moral analysis of the situation. The moral analysis of the situation presents where we are now as, if I may borrow a phrase, a singularity in human affairs.

One of the grave problems of human inequality for everyone who has attempted to ameliorate the problem of human inequality – which is most thinkers about the morality of social life – the gravest problem of human inequality is the extraordinary difficulty in prising wealth away from the rich to give it to the poor, without employing levels of coercion or violence which are themselves utterly corrosive to social progress. And repeatedly in the course of the history of our human societies, well-intentioned, enormously determined and courageous people willing to sacrifice their lives for an improvement in the equality of human life have had to face that problem. We cannot make meaningful redistribution fast enough to retain momentum politically without applying levels of coercion or violence which will destroy what we are attempting. And again and again, as Isaiah Berlin and other late 20th century political theorists pointed out, through hubris, through arrogance, through romanticism, through self-deception, parties seeking permanent human benefit and an increase in the equality of human beings have failed that test and watched as their movements of liberation spiraled downward from the poison of excess coercion.

We do not have to do that anymore.

The gate that has held the movements for equalization of human beings strictly in a dilemma between ineffectiveness and violence has now been opened. The reason is that we have shifted to a zero marginal cost world. As steel is replaced by software, more and more of the value in society becomes non-rivalrous: it can be held by many without costing anybody more than if it is held by a few.

In the English-speaking world (and it was primarily in the English-speaking world: in Scotland, in North America, at the outer edges of the British Empire) we moved towards a system of universal public education in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Protestant North Europe moved over a lengthier period of time in a similar direction, but universal public education still had to be conducted on the basis of knowledge that could not be indefinitely duplicated.

Books are the first mass-produced article in Western society. They are the cheapest method of making large amounts of information available by broad public access available in analog technology. And they are still grossly expensive, difficult to move, cumbersome to keep and catalog and maintain, and very difficult for people to have access to who are not already located in socially central places. They are also vulnerable, as anybody who remembers the burning of the Sarajevo library will recall vividly. It takes a day with contemporary technology to destroy the libraries it takes centuries to build. And in times of great social stress, libraries burn.

Now we live in a different world, for the first time. All the basic knowledge, all the refined physics, all the deep mathematics, everything of beauty in music, in the visual arts, all of literature, all of the video arts of the twentieth century can be given to everybody everywhere at essentially no additional cost beyond the cost it required to make the first copy.

And so we face, in the twenty-first century, a very basic moral question. If you could make as many loaves of bread as it took to feed the world, by baking one loaf and pressing a button, how could you justify charging more for bread than the poorest people could afford to pay? If the marginal cost of bread is zero, then the competitive market price should be zero too. But leaving aside any question of microeconomic theory, the moral question, “What should be the price of what keeps someone else alive if it costs you nothing to provide it to them”, has only one unique answer. There is no moral justification for charging more for bread that costs nothing than the starving can pay. Every death from too little bread under those circumstances is murder. We just don’t know who to charge for the crime.

We live there now. This is both an extraordinary achievement and a very pressing challenge. There were good reasons after 1789 to be a little doubtful about the wisdom of revolution. Because revolution meant coercive redistribution likely to spiral downward in the well-known way. In the economy of steel, people who make steel become workers. They have little individuality. They are reckoned as workers in an industrial army. And as Marx and others like him pointed out in the middle of the nineteenth century, that is largely likely to lead to the model internally of political progress through a clash of armies. We don’t live there anymore.

We find ourselves now in a very different place. You live there, I live there, my other clients live there. It’s a place in which the primary infrastructure is produced by sharing. The primary technology of production is unowned. The effectiveness of that mode of production in the broader society is now established. Plus or minus the couple more years left before Microsoft fails entirely, we have now proven either the adequacy or final superiority in crass economic terms of the way we make things. We have brought forward now the possibility of distributing everything that every public education system uses freely everywhere to everyone: true universal public education for the first time. We have shown how our software, plus commodity hardware, plus electromagnetic spectrum that nobody owns, can build a robust, deep, mesh-structured communications network which can be built out in poor parts of the world far more rapidly than the twentieth century infrastructures of broadcast technology and telephones. We have begun proving the fabric of a twenty-first century society which is egalitarian in its nature, and which is structured to produce for the common benefit more effectively than it can produce for private exclusive proprietary benefit. We are solving epochal problems.

We are introducing new possibilities based upon new technological arrangements to deal with the fundamental political difficulties that we have coped with, and our predecessors in seeking equality and justice have coped with, for generations. We are very lucky. We live at a time when technological progress and the pressure for human justice are coming together in a way which can produce fundamental satisfactions that have eluded us for centuries. But in that luck there comes responsibility. We need to get it done.

There are other people with other views. We are not everybody. The other views assume that this technology too can be shaped to support hierarchy, that it can be shaped to support ownership, that it can be shaped not only to ignore the moral question I have put forward, but to make that moral question invisible to almost everybody. Forever. The folks on the other side are also very powerful. They look way more powerful than we. They are also quite clear-sighted. They also understand that there is an epochal openness here, and they have no more intention of giving up what they claim as theirs now than they ever have had.

The dystopic possibilities of where we live are non-trivial. If you imagine, right now, a flood of billions of dollars of consumer products moving towards you in containers from the East, containing devices that use all this software we have made, but lock it down so no-one may tinker with it, so that if you try and exercise the freedoms that it gives you, your movies don’t play anymore, your music won’t sing, your books will erase themselves, your textbooks will go back to the warehouse unless you pay next semester’s tuition to the textbook publishers, and so on. The magic of this technology is that it can be used for the great ideal of capitalist distribution: never actually give anybody anything. Just as it can be used for our fundamental purpose, which is: always give everybody everything.

And so in fact, we now find ourselves in a more polarized place than usual. Not because Paris is starving. Not even because the lettres de cachet have grown so horrifying to the population. On the contrary, this population has never been less horrified by putting people in jail without charges and keeping them there forever than it ever has been in the past. The reason that we now face a more than usually polarized circumstance is that the sides that have confronted one another over equality and social justice for generations are now more evenly matched than they have ever been before.

You and I, and the people who came before us, have been rolling a very large rock uphill a very long time. We wanted freedom of knowledge in a world that didn’t give it, which burned people for their relegious or scientific beliefs. We wanted democracy, by which we meant originally the rule of the many by the many, and the subjection of today’s rulers to the force of law. And we wanted a world in which distinctions among persons were based not on the color of skin, or even the content of character, but just the choices that people make in their own lives. We wanted the poor to have enough, and the rich to cease to suffer from the diseases of too much. We wanted a world in which everybody had a roof, and everybody had enough to eat, and all the children went to school. And we were told, always, that it was impossible. And our efforts to make it happen turned violent on their side or on ours many more times than we can care to think for[?].

Now we’re in a different spot. Not because our aims have changed. Not because the objectives of what we do have changed. But because the nature of the world in which we inhabit technologically has altered so as to make our ideas functional in new and non-coercive ways.

We have never, in the history of free software, despite everything that has been said by lawyers and flaks and propagandists on the other side – we have never forced anybody to free any code. I have enforced the GPL since 1993. Over most of that time I was the only lawyer in the world enforcing the GPL. I did not sue because the courts were not the place for the rag-tag revolution in its early stage to win pitched battles against the other side. On the contrary, in the world we lived in only ten or fifteen years ago, to have been forceful in the presentation of our legal claims would have meant failure even if we won. Because we would have been torn to pieces by the contending powers of the rich. On the contrary, we played very shrewdly, in my judgment now as I look back on the decisions that my clients made (I never made them). We played very shrewdly.

When I went to work for Richard Stallman in 1993, he said to me at the first instruction over enforcing the GPL, “I have a rule. You must never let a request for damages interfere with a settlement for compliance.” I thought about that for a moment and I decided that that instruction meant that I could begin every telephone conversation with a violator of the GPL with magic words: We don’t want money. When I spoke those words, life got simpler. The next thing I said was, We don’t want publicity. The third thing I said was, We want compliance. We won’t settle for anything less than compliance, and that’s all we want. Now I will show you how to make that ice in the wintertime. And so they gave me compliance. Which had been defined mutually as ice in the wintertime.

But as all of those of us who are about to live with less ice in the wintertime than we used to will soon know, ice in the wintertime can be good if you collect enough of it. And we did. We collected enough of it that people out there who had money to burn said: “Wait a minute. This software is good. We won’t have to burn money over it. And not only is this software good as software, these rules are good. Because they’re not about ambulance chasing. They’re not about a quick score. They’re not about holding up deep pockets. They’re about real cooperation between people who have a lot and the people who have an idea. Why don’t we go in for that.” And within a very short period of time they had gone in for that. And that’s where we live now. In a world in which the resources of the wealthy came to us, not because we coerced them, not because we demanded, not because we taxed, but because we shared. Even with them, sharing worked better than suing or coercing. We were not afraid. We did not put up barbed wire, and so when they came to scoff, they remained to pray. And now, the force of what we are is too strong for a really committed, really adversary, really cornered, really big monopoly to do anything about.

That’s pretty good work, in a short period of time, that you all did. You changed the balance of power in a tiny way. But when you look at it against the long background of the history of who we are and what we want, it was an immense strategic victory, and not a small tactical engagement. Now, as usual, when you win a small tactical engagement that turns out to be a large strategic victory, you have to consolidate the gains, or the other side will take them back. So we are now moving into a period in which what we have to do is to consolidate the gains. We have to strengthen our own understanding about what our community can do.

I want to go back to the thing I said at the beginning. In the twenty-first century economy, production occurs not in factories or by people but in communities. eBay is a pretty decent way of organizing a community to sell and buy stuff and empty garages, and it is doing a pretty fair job of it. MySpace, Friendster – never mind who owns, never mind what’s intended, never mind the pedophiles and all that stuff – it’s a pretty good way of dealing with an extraordinarily deep and important problem that most societies have to cope with, which is how to give old children becoming young adults some way of experiencing their independent identity in the world. How to give them a way to say, “Here I am. This is what I am. This is what I feel. This is what is going on in my life.” It has produced a lot of bad adolescent poetry. It has produced a lot of risqué photography and self-portraits in states of deshabille. But it is also dealing with a thing which has sometimes been known to cause suicide, and which shouldn’t be taken quite so lightly. It is not a small thing if you feel yourself to be a really isolated teenager living and working in a part of the world that doesn’t understand you at all to know that you can have tens of thousands of people all around the world immediately available to you, who know what you’re feeling and who can provide the kind of support that you need. That’s actually social service work of a very deep and important kind.

We are making communities that produce good outputs and other people are looking at them as business models where eyeballs are located. Up to a point that’s acceptable, and when the tipping point is reached it isn’t anymore. And that’s the kind of activity which is now our political challenge. To understand how to manipulate those processes – as we all can because we make the technology – how to manipulate those processes so as to gain the social benefit and reduce the possibility of power discrepancies developing that neutralize the very kinds of social justice outcomes we are looking for. This is possible to do. It is not only work for lawyers.

Mary Lou Jepsen’s inventions in connection with the display of the One Laptop Per Child box will turn out to be of enormous importance to the world. The One Laptop Per Child box (which I’ve spent a lot of time helping with this past year and which everybody in this room ought to be thinking about hard, because it’s a great moment in human technological history), the One Laptop Per Child box has a few requirements that are really important for computers in the twenty-first century. One: a child has to be able to take it apart safely. Two: you have to be able to generate electricity for it by pulling a string. Three: it has to be culturally accessible to people who live in a whole lot of different places around the world, speak different languages, have different world views, have different understandings of what a computer is or might be or could be or what this thing is that their children are holding. It has to be discoverable. It has to be a place for a child to explore indefinitely and learn new things in all the time.

I just want to concentrate on the first parts: it has to be something you can pull a string to power, and it has to be something a child can take apart safely. No existing LCD panel meets those needs, because every existing LCD panel in the world uses a mercury back-light which runs on high voltage which is dangerous and which contains toxic chemicals (the mercury itself of course). So how about a display which gives you transmissive color – beautiful color – indoors, and high-contrast black and white in full sunlight, so that it can be used in every natural environment, and which consumes per unit area one tenth of the electricity used by standard current LCD panel displays. How about that it doesn’t have any harmful substances in it, can be safely disassembled and reassembled by a child down to its components so that field replacement of almost anything can occur, and is in addition cheap to manufacture. So we’re going to give an enormous gift to all the cell phone and gadget manufacturers of the world out of OLPC – which is why Quanta, the largest manufacturer of laptops in the world, and the display manufacturers throughout the Pacific Rim are screaming to be first or second sources of the OLPC display. Because the patents in there are worth sharing.

In other words, the free world now produces technology whose ability to reorient power in the larger traditional economy is very great. We have magnets; we can move the iron filings around. We can also change the infrastructure of social life. That OLPC has every textbook on earth. That OLPC is a free MIT education. That OLPC is a hand-powered thick-mesh router. When you close the lid as a kid and put it in the shelf at night, the main CPU shuts down – but the 802.11 gear stays running all night long on the last few pulls of the string. And it routes packets all night long and it keeps the mesh. The village is a mesh when the kids have green or purple or orange boxes. And all you need’s a downspout somewhere, and the village is on the Net. And when the village is on the Net, everybody in the village is a producer of something: services, knowledge, culture, art, YouTube TV.

The week that Rodney King was beaten in Los Angeles, I was on the telephone with a friend of mine who does police brutality cases in Dallas, Texas. And he said to me, “You know what the difference is between Dallas and Los Angeles?” And I said, “I don’t know.” He said, “Fewer video cameras.” That was a long time ago. There’s no place on earth with too few video cameras anymore. The gadget makers took care of that. Now what is journalism like when every village has a video camera and is on the Net? What is diplomacy like? What does it mean if the next time somebody starts some nasty little genocide in some little corner of the Earth the United States Government would prefer to ignore, that there’s video all over the place all the time in every living room. What’s it mean when children around the world are networking with one other over the issues that concern them directly without intermediation, everybody to everybody, saying, “Do you have what we need? How come you have what we need? How come we can’t do what you can do? Because your father’s rich? Because we’re dark? Because we live down here?”

Globalization has been treated up ‘till now as a force which primarily puts ownership in the saddle. Maybe. Maybe. But the One Laptop Per Child seems to me to consolidate some of our strategic gains, which is why I’m in favor of pressing hard for it and things like it.

Now let me come back to the stuff we have in common in this room. Community, I have said – not an original thought – is powerful. The network makes community out of software. But some software is better at producing community than other software. GCC is a really useful thing. But it doesn’t produce community. If anything, GCC has been known to produce the opposite to community. This is not a joke about compiler guys either. The Perl interpreter, which is a fine thing, produces rather little community too, and the community it produces is, shall we say, a little inward-looking. There are other kinds of software which produce community in a very different way – and you know what that’s like because you work on one of those corners. The problem that I have with content management systems is that they’re systems for managing content, which is not very important. Community-building software, however, is very important.

I’m trying to do a little thing this year called making GPL 3, which is actually more about having a lot of discussions with a lot of very different people around the world about what they think free software licensing ought to be like and why they don’t like Stallman. The latter is not the subject I go out to talk about, it’s just what they talk about no matter what I do about it. It’s an attempt to create a kind of broad global community of people who care about a thing they all take very seriously. And they do take it very seriously: you understand when guys fly from Germany to India to participate in their second international conference on GPL 3, you know they really care.

So I’ve been talking to a lot of different people in a lot of different forms, some of them like IRC, some of them produce formal documents, some of them are telephone types. That’s all held together by Plone. That’s many different overlapping communities held together by software for making communities. It’s related to voice over IP through Asterisk, which changes my life as a lawyer completely. Those of you who haven’t discovered what free software can do to IP telephony, you have a great discovery headed your way. And we made a little bit of software of our own for dealing with a thing it turned out there was no existing tool for that we really liked – namely some austere simple interface for marking up one document in a very very very multiplicitous way with tens of thousands of possible commentators, so that everybody participating can see what everybody else has done in some manageable way, and can intervene in the process in a thoughtful fashion tied to some particular word or phrase or piece of a document that concerns them.

Before we started this activity I read lots and lots of commentary that said, as soon as FSF tries to do this it’s going to dissolve into a flame war. As soon as anybody attempts to do this it’s just going to become Slashdot all of the time. It wasn’t like that. It hasn’t been like that. Even Slashdot hasn’t been like that. That’s not the way it went. Of course there was lots of stuff said that I regret; some of it was said by very big people; much of it was said by Forbes[?]. But that wasn’t the problem. The coherence of the community – a community which includes Ubuntu users in Soweto as well as IBM, includes developers in Kazakhstan as well as Hewlett-Packard, includes people who have thousands of patents as well as people who don’t know what a patent is – that conversation has gone, I think, remarkably peaceably and quite constructively for a period now of about ten months.

Twenty years from now the scale of our consultation over GPL is going to seem tiny. The tools we use are going to seem primitive. The community we built to discuss the license is going to seem like a thing a six year-old could put together without taking more than a couple of breathers around it. And yet, that’s only going to be because our sophistication in global coordination of massive social movements is going to be so good. You do not see Microsoft out conducting a global negotiation over what the EULA for Vista should say. And even if they were minded to do it, they couldn’t. Because they’re not organized for community, they’re organized for hierarchical production and selling. I have heard a lot of stuff from people who thought that Richard Stallman was a problem. But ask yourself this: if the GPL process had been run by Steve Ballmer.

So we are learning in very primitive ways within our community how to build large globe-girdling organizations for a special purpose for a short period of time to engage people constructively in deliberation, and we are learning how to do that despite vast cultural and economic discrepancies in the assets of the participants. That’s twenty-first century politics. Plone makes it.

But it isn’t what you have. It’s what you do with it. So we have some remarkable opportunities, all of us. We have a very special place in the history of the campaign for social justice. We have some very special infrastructure. We have new means of economic development available to us. We have got proof-of-concept. We have got running code. That’s all we ever need. But we need prudence. We need good judgment. We need the willingness to take risks at the right places at the right time. We need to be uncompromising about principle even as we are very flexible about modes of communication. We need to be very good about making deals. And we need to be very clear, absolutely clear, without any variance at the bottom line about what the deals are for, where we are going, what the objective is. If we know that what we are trying to accomplish is the spread of justice and social equality through the universalization of access to knowledge; if we know that what we are trying to do is to build an economy of sharing which will rival the economies of ownership at every point where they directly compete; if we know that we are doing this as an alternative to coercive redistribution, that we have a third way in our hands for dealing with long and deep and painful problems of human injustice; if we are conscious of what we have and know what we are trying to accomplish, this is the moment when, for the first time in lifetimes, we can get it done.

We do not need revolutions in which the have-nots dispossess the haves right now. But we’re under pressure. There are a lot of people in the world. There is not a lot extra to eat. There is not a lot of excess clean water to drink. Minds are being thrown away by hundreds of millions in a world where people are trapped in a subsistence crisis that is now avoidable, and their ability to think and create and be is stunted forever. The climate is changing beneath our feet, the air is changing above our heads, and as the fossil fuel system decays, the inequalities and power discrepancies and authoritarianisms that grew up around the oil business in the twentieth century are going to do us real harm. So we have great opportunities, we have great challenges. The upside is the highest it has been in generations and the downside is not too pleasant. That means there’s a great deal of work to be done. Oddly enough, it’s not painful. It consists of doing neat stuff and sharing it. You’ve been successful at it already beyond anybody’s expectations and beyond most people’s dreams. More of the same is a good prescription here. But a little more political consciousness about it and a little more attempt to get other people to understand not just “what” but “why” would help a lot. Because people are getting used to the “what”.

“Oh yeah, Firefox, I use it all the time.”

“Why?”

“Why, cuz Internet…”

“No no no no no. Not why do you use it, why does it exist?”

“Oh I dunno, some people did it.”

That’s the moment, all right, that’s the moment, that’s the one where that annoying Stallman voice should enter the mind, okay. Free As In Freedom, Free As In Freedom. Tell people it’s free as in freedom. Tell them that if you don’t tell them anything else. Because they need to know.

We’ve spent a long time hunting for freedom. Many of us lost our lives trying to get it more than once. We have sacrificed a great deal for generations, and the people who have sacrificed most we honor most when we can remember them. And some of them have been entirely forgotten. Some of us are likely to be forgotten too. And the sacrifices that we make aren’t all going to go with monuments and honors. But they’re all going to contribute to the end. The end is a good end if we do it right. We have been looking for freedom for a very long time. The difference is, this time, we win.

Thank you very much.

Long ago, in OAC, there were three ultra math courses: Algebra and Geometry, Calculus, and Finite Mathematics. All three were the pinnacle of math in high school. Then, a few years ago, the government obliterated OAC and redid the entire school system, and the three math courses we ended up did not strike fear into hearts as the ones before them did. We now had Advanced Functions and Introductory Calculus, Data Management, and Geometry and Discrete Mathematics.

With this setup, we got vectors, differential calculus, and combinatorics, which was pretty cool. We also got profs crying for the first three months because we couldn’t integrate until then.

Now, the new setup is as follows: Advanced Functions, Calculus and Vectors, Data Management. Advanced Functions seems to be the part of calc that wasn’t differential calculus. Data looks relatively unchanged. And we have calc and vectors.

The biggest changes are with calc. Essentially, they’ve destroyed the most interesting math course in high school by taking out combinatorics. After they did that, they realized they had enough room to stretch out half a course into its own course. And then, they took differential calc and stuck it with vectors.

I’ll admit that vectors and combinatorics really have nothing to do with each other and really the only reason why they were together before was that they were both sufficiently interesting and really, only math and engineering majors would need vectors and combinatorics. That and those two topics seemed to tie in proofs quite nicely.

But calc and vectors? I honestly don’t see how this will help the situation if the government is after lower failure rates, which it clearly is all its concerned about in light of these changes. Considering that most science and business people will likely need calc at least for analysis, throwing vectors in there essentially screws them over. And if the vectors weren’t deadly enough, the proofing will finish the job.

That is unless I am mistaken and the math courses really got owned and they took out proofs, which will crush any future prospective math majors.

So, ultimately, who will get destroyed by this turn of events?

• Non-semestered students – they have the privilege of taking a prerequisite course at the same time as their introductory calculus course! Because differentiating exponential functions while you’re being introduced to them is the best way to learn!
• Arts majors – have fun watching your average plummet.
• Science majors – you’ll be ahead of the artsies in vectors, but proofing will still crush you.
• Math majors – have fun trying to abstract things when all the math you’ve done in your life has been algebra.
• Engineers – have fun when you realize that the prof just went through three courses in two weeks.

I know, it may be a little preemptive to call it Death Week as we all know that the craftiness of the administration knows no bounds and they may decide that having one Death Week is not nearly enough to satiate their sadistic thirst for our failures, but I believe that their announcement is quite accurate.

The agenda for Death Week 2007 festivities is as follows:

• Monday April 9 – CHE 102
• Tuesday April 10 – SE 112
• Wednesday April 11 – MATH 119
• Thursday April 12 – SE 141
• Friday April 13 – MSCI 261

Only mirth and laughter abound on Death Week. We hope you will be attending. It might be our last one ;_;

MSCI 261 Engineering Economics — Fuller

MSCI is the most boring and useless class you’ll be taking. That and 8:30 means much sleep. Contrary to what the title may suggest, this has little to do with real economics, which can be interesting, but is actually accounting and crap.

SE 141 Logic and Computation — Malton

Logic is easily the most interesting of the courses in 1B. Unfortunately, it’s also impossible to do. Another thing to note is that this course is actually CS 245, which for the CSers is in 2B. Yes, they took a 2B course and made the first year softies take it.

The basic premise of the course is to look at the nature of thinking and be able to prove things that are true. I’d heard bad things about the prof, but for this class, he’s actually really good.

SE 141 Digital Circuits and Systems — Thistle

This class is fairly easy, dealing with circuits at gate-level. The labs are annoying as hell, though, and the prof is not the most interesting lecturer in the world. Rumours are that this will ramp up after the midterm. This is also another one of those second year courses they make us take. This one is ECE 223, taken by 2A Electricals.

CHE 102 Chemistry for Engineers — Grove

Starting with our year, all softies must take this course. This used to be a science elective, until the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board decided to threaten us with the banhammer unless we took chem, so we’re forced into it now.

There’s really nothing that’ll be very helpful to us in the future, so this is another one of those annoying courses. It’s basic chemistry, all calculations. Luckily, our prof is pretty good.

MATH 119 Calculus II — Allison

The continuation of MATH 117, it starts off in something new with approximation and series. While it could’ve been kind of interesting, this is calculus for engineers which means that the mathematics will be stripped out of it and we’ll be left to memorize the assignment solutions for our tests.

Our prof is acceptable, but not particularly interesting. This isn’t really good after four hours of lectures beforehand.

CS 134 Principles of Computer Science — Case

Thankfully, this CS course is slightly more interesting than CS 133. We’re actually learning some theory now, with basic data structures, instead of just learning how to program. Of course, this class is also just kind of meh, instead of really good. Same for the prof.

Conclusion

1B is a pain. Most of the courses are either annoying or just passably interesting. Add that to the fact that there are six of them and that we’re looking for our first coop jobs and 1B becomes an incredibly annoying term filled with an immense number of inconveniences.

CCF Winter Retreat

CCF Winter Retreat was fun and cold. Fun because it’s the first retreat I’ve been at with my new fellowship and cold because the heat was broken. It was also fun because UWCCF alumni know how to cook and it was tasty. It was also cold because every last person got snowjobbed.

It was also my first time serving at Waterloo. I was asked if I wanted to help out with A/V and I decided I’d might as well start and see what happens. As it so happened, the place had nothing so we had to rent everything. By we, I meant that me and my friend had to learn how to rent everything too. No more just having everything magically appear and fiddle with knobs.

Housing

Looking for housing was an interesting experience, particularly in the final stages. Let’s just say that it was very trying to work with some people and I’m kind of disappointed in the way things turned out. But, I did end up scoring with a good house, with a good location, at a good price, with a good bunch of roommates.

Coop

So as we all know, Jobmine was kidnapped by ninjas, and for four days, no one was a bad enough dude to rescue Jobmine. Once it came back up, I applied for a total of twenty jobs, mostly web design and testing. There are some development jobs, but I think I’m still way too noob to actually develop. As for location, I thought I really wanted to come back to Toronto for the summer, but as it turns out, a lot of the interesting jobs are in Waterloo. We’ll see how this plays out.

I may spit out a few more posts later on about various things like things from Jesse’s messages at Winter Retreat or WoW.

I think some of the best times was with the CCFers studying away in the third floor of SLC. Studying together, being stupid together, eating, and praying together for twelve hours a day really helps for getting to know each other.

Of course, being in Waterloo means that we’ll never ever see the coops again next term. That makes about half the people I met this term. Bye guys.

It’s a good thing I’ve learned to just accept that I’ve done a good job and not obesess over half a percent, because if I wasn’t me, I probably would have been frantic in those last two minutes. It turns out that I almost, but didn’t quite get, the complex number trig integral question, but meh.

Complex numbers are like a double shotgun.

As one of my friends put it, “That’s a great metaphor to remember. Wait, no it’s not.” Oh, that crazy Chang.

And then luckily, it was decided for me. Turns out CCF Winter Retreat is on the 19th to 21st. I love it when everything works out. So it looks like no Montreal and no CUSEC for me.

MATH 135

This is definitely one of the more interesting and easier courses. Integers, complex numbers, polynomials, fields, very nice.

MATH 117

Calculus can be interesting, and I didn’t really want to believe it, but once you hit integration, you’ll realize that they really intend for you to memorize every trig identity that ever existed for the final. I kid you not, you’d better know that the derivative of arcsin is one over the square root of one plus x squared and you’d better be able to spot it, buried inside a polynomial. If not, God help you.

MATH 115

This could’ve been an interesting course, and from what I’ve heard from upper years, an easy one, but we got owned with our prof. The entire course is about matrices up until you get to vector spaces, which are abstract and difficult to grasp. Luckily, they sort of cover vector spaces twice: the first time you encounter spaces is real vector spaces, then the go into abstract vector spaces, which are “any” vector space but they have the same properties anyway, so it’s like review.

PHYS 115

It’s physics. It will own you. Some interesting things, but your progress in the course is probably entirely due to the final because you probably got destroyed on the midterm.

CS 133

This course is a joke up until the stuff you haven’t learned. Most of it is straightforward if you haven’t learned it. The only thing I don’t like is graphics. It seems like they threw it on to the end just so you can do graphics without properly explaining many concepts that would’ve been very helpful.

SE 101

This course was interesting and easy but now it’s just annoying. The design case studies really brought on the annoying, with the ten minute flash videos and retarded questions. Absolutely awful.

At this point, he raised his arm with his fist in the air and said,