the corner office

Exams are over. For how long? We shall see. The textbooks have been cleared off of my desk and back onto the shelves. For how long? We shall see.

Given that it might be a while before I revisit them, there's something I've been itching to do. One of my textbooks is that rare thing, a great big heap of hard-kore knowledge told with wit and made interesting throughout with historical and anecdotal asides. In an appendix to said textbook is the Preface to John Arbuthnot's 'Of the Laws of Chance,' written in 1692, and I am compelled to share the first paragraph of that preface - you might enjoy it as much as I do:

It is thought as necessary to write a Preface before a Book, as it is judg'd civil, when you invite a Friend to Dinner, to proffer him a Glass of Hock beforehand for a Whet: And this being maim'd enough for want of a Dedication, I am resolv'd it shall not want an Epistle to the Reader too. I shall not take upon me to determine, whether it is lawful to play at Dice or not, leaving that to be disputed betwixt the Fanatick Parsons and the Sharpers; I am sure it is lawful to deal with Dice as with other Epidemic Distempers; and I am confident that the writing a Book about it, will contribute as little towards its Encouragement, as Fluxing and Precipitates do to Whoring.

... and after the snow, as sure as the fact that it will thaw and little squirrels come out to play, the country will now descend into a week of recrimination and self-loathing about how shite the country is because it can't cope with the snow.

Sadly for me, the thaw is already well underway and it seems I'll be writing tomorrow's exam after all.

... and we have snow. The BBC weather site was saying 'it's snowing outside' and the window by my desk was saying 'oh no it's not.' It took until about 20 past 7 this evening to start falling. Non-stop since, a bit windy which isn't great since I wouldn't mind if the snow stuck around and kept falling for a bit longer, preferably until after Tuesday when I'm due to write my final exam.

Apparently it's due to keep falling until tomorrow morning. This is coming in from the west, which is a bit weird since all of frozen Europe is east. Anyway, I'm not complaining.

Having an affair is plain wrong, having an affair when your spouse knows about your skeletons is plain stupid.

Yesterday morning Leo and I looked out his bedroom window and there were patches of white on top of the garden walls and in some of the flower pots. Ronwen reckoned it was frost but it looked a little thicker than that to me, I'd take it as snow, meself. We've had a few flurries - first in December for an hour or two, and then earlier this week, but nothing yet in the settled 'winter wonderland' sense.

That might change this coming week. I love the snow, but the death toll in Europe is putting a bit of a damper on any excitement when it comes to the weather.

Never mind last night's crikey, this is crikey:

This included news that Facebook's net income in 2011 rose 65% to $1bn, off revenues of $3.71bn.

Crikey:

It's fair to say that I have the biggest private library in England. There must be 20,000 volumes here.

The M-P household has around 1,000 and even that causes some domestic tension. Then again, we don't have butler's pantries and attics.

My wife is awesome and makes me tea when I am studying.

Friends will be reading the previous post and thinking 'boozing and shagging? ORLY?' I take license, naturally, and even in my day there were people studying themselves into husks trying to get their degrees, people working crazy hours and holding down part time jobs to pay their way, but for the most part, my point stands.

On a serious note, the real issue with online education is credentialling. It's one thing to know postgraduate-level calculus backwards, it's another to get someone reading your CV to know that and believe it. But there's a market for it, this already happens in places, and I have no doubt that more will come.

The other side effect of the widespread availability of knowledge and university-level education online is that the premium on education drops. This ties in with the iPhones in China post from a few days ago: on a planet full of people who've mastered postgraduate calculus, your average graduate just ain't so special anymore. Our kids will have to run a lot further just to stand still.

That's a daunting thought, but I go back to my previous point: the mountains might be higher, but the climbing equipment is a whole lot better. As is the view.

On the one hand: Student outrage as university places are cut by 15,000

On the other hand: Udacity and the future of online universities:

Thrun told the story of his Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class, which ran from October to December last year. It started as a way of putting his Stanford course online - he was going to teach the whole thing, for free, to anybody in the world who wanted it. With quizzes and grades and a final certificate, in parallel with the in-person course he was giving his Stanford undergrad students. He sent out one email to announce the class, and from that one email there was ultimately an enrollment of 160,000 students. Thrun scrambled to put together a website which could scale and support that enrollment, and succeeded spectacularly well.

Just a couple of datapoints from Thrun's talk: there were more students in his course from Lithuania alone than there are students at Stanford altogether. There were students in Afghanistan, exfiltrating war zones to grab an hour of connectivity to finish the homework assignments. There were single mothers keeping the faith and staying with the course even as their families were being hit by tragedy. And when it finished, thousands of students around the world were educated and inspired. Some 248 of them, in total, got a perfect score: they never got a single question wrong, over the entire course of the class. All 248 took the course online; not one was enrolled at Stanford.

I went to university, it was a great experience, and I begrudge it to noone. But let's be honest: even back then, it was one part education and one part middle class rite of passage. I read about Lithuanians and Afghans, hungry and overcoming obstacles and I'm inspired, and I read about whiny Western kids complaining because their lives aren't turning out to be as privileged as their parents', and I'm unmoved.

So good luck to the kids who win the University place lottery, you'll have a ball. But if you don't get in, don't despair. You've lost out on a few years of shagging and boozing at the taxpayers' expense, but you still live in a world where it's easier and cheaper to get an education than ever before.