Keith's Blog

Align yourself along the axis of rotation.  That’s the first step.  That’s the key.  Along these planetary rings there are thousands upon thousands of rocks, bouncing off one another like croquette balls, spinning in slow motion in the vacuum.  That spin, you see, that’s the problem.  You can’t keep a bead on the same spot for long, the limpet drones get confused and clang into each other, or they smash into the rock as it spins into them, it’s a mess.  

The good news is, that mess is really just a delay.  It’s a temporary slowdown in the profitability of your deep space mining expedition.  The stakes aren’t that high.  You’ll live. Still, if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right, yeah?  So, just picture the asteroid as a spinning top, park your ship right on top of it, and then get to work.  

So, that’s what I’m doing.  I find an asteroid that the spectral scanner reports as having high metal content.  It’s spinning, like all of them.  I align myself along the axis of rotation.  Now the spot in front of me is barely moving at all, and glints with the promise of treasure.  I deploy my mining laser, and it pops out of my hull just beside my cockpit.  I gently squeeze the trigger, and a violet beam of focused light is instantly lancing into the rock…  

It lances in…

It lances in, the thermal beam lances into the Titan’s flesh, dumping waste heat into this vile leviathan making me invisible to its hundreds of roving guards, stay low, stay cool, skim along the surface and my wingman cries out and his thermal beam blinks off malfunction oh shit oh shit he screams, I tell him don’t boost whatever you do don’t boost stay still but he already panicked and slammed his thrusters, his ship lights up and accelerates away and he doesn’t even make it ten seconds before he’s ripped to shreds by Thargon missiles don’t look don’t cry stay cool stay cool don’t let them see you

No.

I’m not there.  I’m here.  It’s just an asteroid, a hunk of minerals in a ring around an empty world.  It’s not a city-sized alien super station sitting in a cloud of caustic fog.  It’s just a damned rock.  I release my grip on the trigger and the mining laser fades away.  It hurts to do so.  I look down and realize I was gripping the flight stick so hard, my hand has seized in place.

I flex my gloved fingers open, closed, open, closed.  I look up and notice, annoyed, that I had drifted and need to reposition myself.  I align myself along the axis of rotation.  I can scan it at this range, and get a nice clean picture of what’s inside from this angle.  Paydirt!  Multiple platinum deposits just below the surface, and a core of raw painite.  A small fortune.  

Okay, the platinum first.  I spool up the subsurface displacement missile rack and position my ship in a synchronous orbit, matching exactly the spin of the rock so that it looks stock still and the rest of the galaxy is spinning around us.  I hold down the trigger and a drill-tipped missile soars out, straight into the rock, and begins boring into the rock.  At the exact depth of the deposit, I release the trigger, signaling the shaped explosives in the missile to detonate.  The small hole the missile had just created explodes out and metal chunks fly into space…

They fly out into space…

They fly into space the missile bursts under the surface of the Titan and they fly out into space, fifteen human beings trapped in Thargoid pods now free, go go go send out the drones retrieve them all quickly quickly before they notice I’m here, four saved, eight saved, twelve saved, a sickening thrum fills cloud oh god they see me eject heatsink shut thermal vents turn away no damnit I missed three of them, no don’t look back, they were people, sons, daughters, who do you suppose they were the ones I didn’t pluck out in time, don’t look back just get to safety Basilisk inbound can’t outrun it if they see me cover somebody give me some cover is anybody out there somebody help me

No.

I’m not there.  I’m here.  I know we did our best, we rescued thousands of abducted humans from their alien cells.  The Titans are all dead, that’s behind us now.  Get a grip.  We’ve got a job to do here.  Compared to everything we’ve done, everything we’ve seen, this is a milk run.  Just align yourself to the axis of rotation, inspect the stone, get the goods, get home.  It’s that easy. 

I finish up the platinum and start looking at the core.  I arm the charge launcher.  The scanner points out the five spots I need to hit to fracture this rock and expose the precious gems inside.  I form the map in my head, the course I’ll take as I thrust laterally around the perimeter of the asteroid.  Calculate carefully, then move swiftly.  I’m circling sideways around the rock and when my nose passes the designated points, I flick the trigger.  One charge, two charges, three four five down in one pass.  I smile, allowing myself to acknowledge that yes, I’m good at this.  Reverse now, just get to a minimum safe distance.  Without a second’s hesitation, I push the small red button to trigger the charges.  All five explode in unison, ripping shockwaves through the asteroid and causing it to fracture into about a dozen significant pieces and a spray of fine particulates.  The halo of dust expands out, carrying the momentum of the blast.  The wave reaches my hull and pushes my ship back.

The blast wave pushes my ship back…

It pushes my ship back…

It pushes my ship back, a blast larger than life flinging our entire squadron, hundreds of ships, away from the dying Titan, faster, faster, faster as my Frame Shift Drive struggles to compensate and keep me from being rendered into paste with the acceleration, faster, faster, faster and twisting and turning as we’re catapulted through the caustic cloud too fast too fast we’re not going to make it, Cojico is dying, I don’t care, Earth is saved, I don’t care, Sol is safe again and I don’t fucking care because I’M NEVER LEAVING THIS CLOUD ALIVE AM I, which way is forwards which way is backwards almost out almost

No.

I’m not there.   I’m here.  I’m floating in my cockpit, as I seem to have freed myself from my harness.  I’m curled in a fetal ball, floating in zero G.  Tears are suspended in front of my face, drifting in the thin cockpit air like a constellation in the night sky.  

No.

Cocijo is dead.  We won the war.  Some of us even survived to tell the tale.  Now we’re here,  back home, back to work, back to the lives we left behind before we took up the call to save humankind.  So, that what I’m doing.  How long was I out?  No matter, minor setback, another temporary slowdown in the profitability of this deep space mining expedition. I pick out another rock in the endless field before me.

I align myself along the axis of rotation.  

The stakes aren’t that high.

I’ll live.

In 2016, during the run-up to the US Presidential election, a story went viral on Facebook.  It spread like wild fire, eventually accumulating over 900,000 shares.  It became one of the most shared political news story of the year.  The story was the news that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump for president.  

The problem with this story was that it was false.  Fake.  Incorrect.  A lie.  But this disconnection from the truth did not stop it from getting more social media uptake, by an order of magnitude, than any story posted by the New York Times in the same year.  

Trump went on to win the 2016 election by a margin of about 70,000 votes across three swing states.  Now ask, how many people were both exposed to this story and lived in those three states?

A 2017 study by Buzzfeed News found that, during the last months of the election, the total Facebook engagement for the top 20 fake news stories was higher than the total engagement for verified news, weighing in a 8.7 million shares, reactions, and comments.

How did we get here?  Let’s take a trip down memory lane.  

Stalkerbook

I remember where I was when the world changed.  I was a senior at Boston University.  As a Boston area school, we were one of the first communities able to make an account on this up and coming social network.  I walked down into the basement of the IT building to sit at my desk in the Personal Computing Support Center, and the place was abuzz about “new Facebook.”  Up until that day, getting information from Facebook was a “pull” process; to see what your friend was up to, you visited their profile and looked.  But that day, we logged in to find this strange new landing page called “the Feed.”  Now, browsing Facebook was a “push” process; its algorithm would see your friends’ activity and actively tell you what was new.  Steve liked a post.  Tom uploaded a picture.  Jenny is no longer in a relationship.  

“Stalkerbook,” they called it derisively.  It seemed to foreign and off-putting to be fed this distillation of our social network’s activity via software construct.  This simple distinction is what allowed the current misinformation miasma to spread; an algorithm is putting data in front of its users, curating the experience for them.  This same architectural model would be employed by Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and pretty much every new social media platform to show up after 2010; the user experience is directed by the algorithm, not by the user.

Let us dispel the framing that social media platforms are passive observers here.  It is vital for their business model that we accept this framing, but we can just as easily not.  These platforms are for-profit companies, and they are making a choice.  

The profitability of any surveillance-based advertising platform is proportional to its users’ “engagement.”  The longer users stare at the screen, the more attractive that platform becomes for somebody looking to sell an ad.  Outrage and shock drive engagement; reason and veracity do not. If the only obligation is to maximize shareholder value, this is the result you get.

We deserve, and require, better.

Causality

The manifesto of the digital age was founded in the power of connectivity.  In my youth, I believed this with every fibre of my being; if humans are readily connected to one another, information can flow freely.  

1. Information becomes knowledge
2. Knowledge becomes understanding
3. Understanding becomes compassion
4. Compassion begets harmony. 

Apparently a large number of Silicon Valley billionaires used to feel the same way.  It looks nice on paper, I’ll give it that.  But here’s the rub: what happens when you start not with information, but with misinformation?  

1. Misinformation becomes lies
2. Lies become conspiracies
3. Conspiracies become hate
4. Hate begets violence.  

If one chain is true, so is the other.  If humans are readily connected to one another by bad-faith networks, misinformation propagates faster than truth.  We’re verifying this hypothesis in real time, with quantifiable data.  

GIGO

Information science has a rather tautological, yet still useful adage: Garbage In, Garbage Out.  The implication is simply that no system, no matter how robust, no matter how well-designed, can take corrupt input and generate valid output.  You can prepare for it, create redundancy to survive it and discard it, but you cannot create gold from lead.

Charles Babbage summed it up better:  “On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ … I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”

Pew Research determined that in 2024, 54% of Americans use social media as their primary news source. These platforms are, without exception, being actively exploited to propagate misinformation at an industrial scale. Hell, the richest man in the world spent more money than a thousand Americans will see in their entire lifetimes combined, personally, to buy one of the worlds most prolific misinformation engines.  How many people are going to the polls and filling out ballots having been affected by it?  At what point is democracy just drinking from a poisoned well, and wondering why it is dying? We have, with this advanced technology, created a public that can be more quickly and fully misinformed than any society in human history.

Democracy is, first and foremost, a system.  An increasingly significant input to this system is our media environment, comprised of all of our aggregate news sources and communication platforms. Misinformation is garbage going in.  What we are seeing right now is the garbage coming out.

Far too much ink has been spilled over the significance of Trump winning the popular vote for the first time. I reject this premise. This moment is not a mandate.  When a polity has been sufficiently divorced from reality, democracy is being driven by invalid input, and will generate invalid output.  I am becoming increasingly convinced that we can’t get better results until we find a way to collectively rectify this situation. We can blame people for hating people who are different from them, or we can ask ourselves how they were led to believe that voting based on hate would improve their lives. We can scratch our heads when we see approval numbers for corrupt politician stay above water, or we can ask why so few people know about the corruption to begin with. We can watch in horror as we see our friends and loved ones fall down conspiracy theory rabbit holes, or we can ask who stands to gain from them doing so.

Henry David Thoreau once said, “there are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” I am starting to believe this is the root our our present crisis: the procedural propagation of malicious lies across the internet. How we strike at it, I’m still working out.

The easiest battle to win is one that you’ve already won before. The hardest war to finish is one that is never meant to end.

In 2017, the Department of Homeland Security made a policy change.  It mandated that any child found crossing the border with their family, requesting asylum, would be classified an “unaccompanied minor.”  This relatively innocuous-sounding change means that these children were moved from DHS to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement.  The database for the ORR does not track the parents of “unaccompanied minors.”  Transferring them thusly severed their connections to their parents.

This program was commonly referred to as “Family Separation,” and it was child torture.  It was an act of unrepentant, unforgivable barbarism.  It was the a domestic humanitarian crisis, the worst that had ever been intentionally induced in our lifetimes.   

Although it did ruin lives, traumatized scores of children, this program was quickly ended.  It was undermined by the right people in the right place.  It was exposed by people with a platform and a voice.  It was resisted by a public that was disgusted.  It was reversed and, to the extent possible, the children reunited when a better man was given the power to do so.

Not satisfied with terrorizing immigrant children, the fledgling Trump administration later turned its ire against American foster children.  The original iteration of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (which successfully passed the House) repealed the Adoption Tax Credit, a rebate for the parents who adopt children from foster care, thus increasing the barriers to permanent placements in an already struggling system.

My fellow adoptive parents got loud.  The Senate threw the provision out.  Resistance worked then.  It will work again.

We know how to fight this, because we’ve done it before.  We’ve won it before.  We have been vaccinated against cruelty, inoculated with empathy.  We have practice putting ourselves between vulnerable people and the monsters who would harm them for material gain and prejudicial gratification.  

Sadly, we will have to do so.  Days back in power, Trump filed an executive order freezing all federal grants.  This grant money includes Medicaid payments that fund the state-provided health care that foster and adopted children in Massachusetts depend on.  Across the state, foster and adoptive parents had to scramble to find out if their children had just lost their health care.  Again, vulnerable children found themselves at the at the front lines of somebody else’s war.

Marginalized groups are easy targets for a reason.  Orphans and trans teens don’t have a lobbying arm.  Adoptive parents struggling to get through the day aren’t looking to mount a primary challenge.  Refugees and immigrant children aren’t contributing to a SuperPAC.  There is a very good reason the waters are being tested this way.  Fascism requires the establishment and violent enforcement of hierarchy, and cruelty trickles up.

We can have a long conversation about overreach, the Overton window, whether or not this moment constitutes a mandate, and how political calculus must be used to move forward.  We will, in fact, have some of those conversations here on this blog over the course of this year.  What I won’t entertain is a conversation about turning our backs on innocents human being, just because of the way the winds are blowing on fateful day last November.  Yes, we’re going to have to stand up for people who are unpopular and unheard, not because it is the most politically expedient thing to do right now, but because it is right.

I hate that we’re back here.  We all hate that we’re doing this again.  It’s problematic to call this chapter a war; wars are meant to end, but democracy is not.  Democratic society is a treasure that we seek to hand down for another seven generations.  Occasional regression is the cost of keeping an unstable, unpredictable, and vulnerable system like ours operational.  Each of us can lock arms to become the shield we need to outlast the storm.  Let’s get to work.

The worst vacations are the ones you had no choice but to take.

It started out as a simple project.  We just wanted new windows.

OK, well, maybe that isn’t so simple in terms of homeowner projects.  Windows are complicated and expensive.  But getting new windows shouldn’t end with being displaced from your home on a forced vacation.  Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself.  My point is, something else clearly had to go wrong to kick off the comedy of errors.  That “something” was the discovery of mold on the windows, a result of living for years with blown seals effectively erasing their insulating properties. Cold outside air meeting hot inside air means condensation, which means persistent warm moisture, which means mold.  

What do you do when you have mold?  Well, you call a mold inspector to see what you’re dealing with.  The mold inspector will help you find out what type of mold you’re dealing with and how alarmed you should be.  He or she will also look everywhere else to see where you might have additional problems.  In this case, we had “additional problems” in the attic and in the basement. Oh dear, the problems are multiplying.

For those fortunate enough to not know, the next step is remediation.  That’s when you call a specialized contractor to kill, clean, and otherwise decontaminate the mold on the surfaces and in the air.  They use a combination of tools and chemicals to do this, all of which are billed as safe for humans and pets. As such, we felt no need to move out of the house while this work was taking place.

“Sometimes you just gotta know when to bail.”

In the morning two days into the remediation project, three things happened in rapid succession.

1. Most of the members of the household developed slight headaches. 

2. We received a phone call from our dog’s daycare that she had developed a cough.  They feared it might be bordetella (aka “kennel cough,” a highly contagious canine illness) and asked us to pick her up.  She would not be able to return to doggie-daycare or boarding until 10 days cough-free.  Put a pin in that.

3. The cat, while at a routine vet appointment, started bleeding profusely from his nose.  He kept bleeding actively for about 20 minutes.

Any of these in isolation would be alarming, but all three happening within an hour of each other put us into Red Alert.  It became immediately clear that none of us, human or pet, could stay in this house while the work was taking place.  In fact, the veterinarian from #3 above recommended three days to let the house vent of potential toxins. 

That same vet clued us into a hotel in nearby Devens that accepts both cats and dogs (remember that pin I said to place above, we can’t send the dog to boarding because they think she might have kennel-cough, so she’s stuck in the hotel with us).  Within an hour, I had made a three day reservation and filed a short notice time off for myself at work.  While I scrambled to pack clothes and pet supplies, Stephanie bought a new medium-size dog crate to house our poor bloody-nosed cat during our stay.  Despite having two kids still in school and contractors still actively working in our home, the Morse family was officially going on vacation.  

Stephanie coined the excellent portmanteau “stayvacuation,” and it stuck.

Welcome to Devens, a place that definitely exists.

So, Devens, MA is a strange town, in that it’s not really a town at all.  It is the repurposed remains of a massive decommissioned military base, with some still-active National Guard grounds at its center.  Lots of fencing now dressed as decoration, unorthodox signage, and massive open fields.  It’s also a Superfund site due to some unfortunate groundwater contamination, which prevents any significant development from taking place.

Fortunately, it has a hotel.  Specifically, a pet-friendly Hilton Garden.  We checked in on Thursday knowing that the Devens Commons would be the sight we’d wake up to for the next four days, two of which would be school days. 

Poor Simba was not a fan of these accommodations, finding himself locked in a small crate with a litter pan.  Anti-anxiety medications took the edge off.  Ultimately, he’s an old cat, and while confinement was far from ideal, he could be left alone. 

The dog was a different story.  She would lose her fucking mind two seconds after being left alone in a strange room, even if we had room for a second crate, which we really didn’t.  Dog-owning parents know this dance, but turn up a difficulty with the hurdles of having to eat every meal out and still managing the school shuffle and work.  Either the dog had to be out and about with us, or one adult had to stay behind.  

To be honest, the next four days were a blur.  Breakfast diners, walking paths, a well-utilized hotel pool all featured prominently.  The highlight was a pool party hosted by family friends, which provided an entire half a day distracting us from the fact that we could not go home.  Unfortunately, I had to go with the kids myself.  We couldn’t leave the dog, remember?

Thus it was that Stephanie and I spent our 10 year anniversary living out of a hotel room, barely seeing each other.  

This was a moment, but all moments pass.  We stayed safe.  The kids played in a pool, Simba stopped bleeding, and Chocolate found her way back to good health.  A long weekend in small room didn’t break us.  Over the course of those days in a hotel room, the house ventilated and we came home Monday afternoon to a safe, mold-free home.

Or so we thought.

TO BE CONTINUED.

Shortly after graduating, I had a lot of thoughts on my educational experience.  Specifically, as I began to start working in an actual engineering job, I had thoughts about the ways I was prepared for the real world and the ways I wasn’t.

I came in with useful tools, like knowing how to generate a truth table for a logic function or how to work in a small group.  I also came in with an encyclopedia of useless knowledge, like how to calculate the cross product of two matrices, determine the Thevenin Equivalent of a resistor circuit, and calculate a Fourier transform by hand.  It made me wonder how many people had to switch majors because they weren’t able to grasp those latter concepts. How many would-be engineers switched their career trajectories because they failed to master unhelpful skills?

Engineering school should not just be boot camp for smart people.  The focus should and can be on teaching a trade, instead of layering theory on top of theory in an effort to induce a third of the student body to wash out.

The question that nobody asked, yet I feel compelled to try to answer, is “what would you do, Dean Emperor Keith, if you could design the course plan yourself?”

My awesome former classmate Kyle was able to find a course plan for BU Electrical Engineers in the class of 2008.  This was the year after mine, and I was in Computer Systems Engineering, so a bit of it was unfamiliar to me. But most of it was recognizable.  Also, it was bright pink; I’ve taken mercy on you, dear reader, and rendered it in grey scale. Here’s the starting point.

I posit that we can make it better, mostly by removing a lot of content.  I’ll try to justify each of my picks below, both in terms of why classes were cut, or they were not.  In some cases, I combined classes together.

To make life easier, here’s the finished product, which I’ll also post down below.

Non-Engineering Classes Kept or Merged

English Composition – Communication is a part of basic engineering competency.

Calculus (Merged) – I agonized over this a bit.  I think cramming Calc I and Calc II into a single semester might be aggressive, but if you simply focus on the essentials (basics rules of derivatives and integrals) you can create enough of a foundation for future calculus-based classes like Physics and Mechanics.

Differential Equations – Probably the most applicable topic to most engineering work in terms of higher level math courses.

Chemistry – This one’s on the bubble.  It’s not directly applicable to most forms of engineering unless you’re really looking to focus on material sciences.  But the Periodic Table is too important to skip.

Physics (Merged) – Cover mechanics (Physics I) and electromagnetics (Physics II) in one course.  There are future courses that go deeper into these topics, so keeping the material cursory.

Waves and Modern Physics – Way too important and interesting to skip.  I might be biased.

Non-Engineering Classes Scrapped

Multivariate Calculus – The most interesting portions of this class, partial derivatives and multidimensional integrals, are better covered elsewhere and aren’t even that interesting.  Plus I really hated this class. Again, I might be biased.

Introduction to Linear Algebra – I don’t know why this class exists.

Elementary Probability – This topic is interesting but had very little direct applicability to working in the industry.

All Non-technical Electives – This might seem controversial but I have a very specific idea in mind here for what this program can accomplish, and liberal arts electives get in the way of it.  If you really are curious about Eastern Religions, read a book. Read lots of books! But don’t make us spend our tuition money on it.

Preamble: Theory vs. Practical

Before I move on to changes to the core engineering courses, I wanted to address a fundamental question.  What amount of theory is necessary and sufficient? My gut wants to say “almost zero, stop worrying and learn to love abstraction.”  But I’m going to try to be balanced here.

Take Electric Circuit Theory as a case example.  The class is meant to introduce the fundamentals of circuit analysis and design.  It is incredibly important, but spending an entire semester studying only three passive circuit components (resistors, capacitors, and inductors) is a waste.  Spending most of that time doing hand-analysis of complicated circuits means you have less time to learn how to use the simulation tools that actual engineers rely on.  The goal with this, and all, courses should be to stay in theory for just long enough to build a fundamental sense of the physical and mathematical mechanisms at play, and pivot as quickly as possible to the next level of abstraction and automation.

ECT, as it is currently taught, makes this pivot far too late.  Making it earlier allows the course to be merged with Electronics, to introduce active components (diodes and transistors) into the mix.  Again, this can only be accomplished if the Electronics syllabus is stripped of the months spent doing pen-and-paper analyses of rectifiers and inverters.

Engineering Classes Kept or Merged

Engineering Computation – This is intro programming for engineers.  Essential.

Engineering Mechanics – Deeper dive into the mechanics side of physics.  This is what allowed us to merge Physics I and II. Add more design projects, though.

Intro Electromagnetics – The same as above but for the electromagnetics portion of physics.  I did not take this class so I can’t speak to its merits.

Signals and Systems – This class is beneficial because, at the end of the day, many fields of engineering can be abstractly thought of as “systems” to the point where Systems Engineering is a thing people can get a Masters in.

Senior Design Project –  A long-term capstone project is valuable and provides the closest approximation to what working in the industry actually looks like.  The name might need to change, for reasons to be made clear shortly.

Electronics and Computer Electives – I see these as the part where students begin to specialize in higher level topics of interest, some of which are graduate level classes, and many of which are project-focused. For example, during my time at BU the most relevant course to my actual career was a chip design project course, VLSI II.  At the conclusion of the semester, the professor told me that I was the first undergraduate to take it. I used to be proud of that, but now I just think it’s a shame.

Engineering Classes Scrapped

Engineering Seminar – This was a fluff class.  It wasn’t worth any credits anyways.

Introduction to Engineering – Same as above, this was a semester-long rotating tour of several electives and I’m not sure why it was necessary.

Systems Elective – As justified above, useful content should have already been covered in Signals and Systems

Technical Electives – There are already enough “technical” electives captured above.  This many is excessive.

Engineering Classes Added

Unfortunately, we can’t just fix the inadequacies present here by removal alone.  We also need to add some content.

Almost half a dozen of these classes have a strong coding requirement inherent in them, but none of them spend any time teaching you how to use a decent text editor.  This is the intellectual equivalent of giving carpentry apprentices a year of training on the metallurgical makeup of nails but forgetting to teach them how to swing a fucking hammer.  What’s more, you can’t be an electrical engineer in the 21st Century without having a firm grasp of build automation (“Make,” for example) and version control systems, but this topic is left to TAs to explain to bewildered students just to allow them to get through their homework assignments.  So I’ve added a course I called “How to program.”

I went through my four years at BU without using a higher level interpreted scripting language like Perl or Python to perform simple functions.  These are the power tools of the tech industry and every graduate from an engineering program should have some experience with them. So I’ve added a course called “Scripting languages.”

So, after all that, I’ll visualize the changes again.

Now, let’s condense.

Even after adding two courses, look at what we’ve got here.  You can fit this program into two and a half years.

This isn’t enough credits, of course, to net you a Bachelor’s Degree.  I’d love to live in a world where this is no longer important, that even electrical and electronics engineering education can be treated as a trade program.  A more compact and focused program could be utilized for either a lower-cost secondary education or a quick worker retraining program, both of which are desperately needed right now.

This is, of course, all just fun and games.  I’m not actual Dean Emperor Keith. I have no authority to make any of this a reality, and nobody who does really pays much mind to what I think.  But as far as thought experiments go, this was a fun ride. Thanks for taking it with me.

It’s blase and unoriginal for parents to complain about Disney movies constantly killing off parents.  But I’ve been seeing all these old films in a new light, watching them again as an adoptive parent with my children.  There’s a new flavor coming through, always present but previously imperceptible to me. The themes and messages present in many of these child-oriented films have a different impact on an adopted child, different both in scale and in kind.  Sometimes it’s makes a positive message more meaningful, and other times it makes the low notes more distressing.

The key point I want to emphasize is that a “negative adoption theme” and a “sad moment” in a movie are not necessarily the same thing.

I’m walking through the Disney movies I have personal familiarity with and re-evaluating them as an adoptive parent.  Some of these I watched as a child, and some of them I’ve watched recently. Obviously others are going to be missing, as my experience is not all-encompassing.  Did I leave out any big ones in your experience? Let me know comments!

Spoilers ahead if you care.

Cinderella

A loving single father dies in the exposition.  Our soon-to-be princess is left in the care of a verbally abusive and neglectful stepmother.  She lives in a house with two bullying step-siblings.

This is all sad in its own right.  But there’s a subversive theme here for adoptive children that you’ll see crop up a few places in this list.  It boils down to “man, Protagonist, your birth family was much better, doesn’t it suck that you lost them?” This is, to put it mildly, not the best message you want to put out there when you’re struggling every day to build attachment.

The distinction between “step child” and “adopted child” is blurry enough that we can trust kids to make the link.  Cinderella is consistently treated like a second class citizen in her new family, and winds up befriending animals to combat her loneliness.

The Little Mermaid

I’m sure if I were bothered to search for it, I could dig up an explanation for what happened to Ariel’s mother.  She is neither seen nor mentioned. But we see plenty of her father. Upon being defied, he turns violent, prompting her to run away from home.

And running away?  That totally works out for her in the end.  I want to drill in on this, because it comes up more tha once.  Foster children are particularly at risk for running away from home.  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019074091730720X

So, I get a little twitchy when I see “running away” as the solution to the character’s problems.  And once you see it, it keeps rearing its head as a recurring theme.

Beauty and the Beast

Everybody’s favorite film about Stockholm Syndrome, it turns out, doesn’t have a lot to say about the subject of family.

Addendum: the live-action remake did find it necessary to tack on tragic parental loss backstories for both Belle and the Beast, so knock that version down a couple pegs.

Aladdin

What’s most striking about his parents is their absence.  There’s only one brief mention of the fact that he is an orphan.  The movie doesn’t touch on familial themes at all. I mean, the Sultan seems like a decent enough guy?

Given how the rest of this list goes, a complete lack of adoption themes is not the worst possible outcome.  No news is good news if the rest of the news is fucking tragic.

The Lion King

Simba watches his own father die violently, and then is made to feel like it’s his fault by his murderous uncle.  He copes with this loss by running away from home, which (again!) turns out just fine for him in the end.

No to all of this.  And I say this knowing that it’s still my favorite Disney movie.  Sometimes the truth hurts.

Frozen

Good lord, Disney.  Both parents killed off, on-screen, before we even make it out of the exposition.  Is that a record? It’s a shame, because eventually the story drives home the immense value that sisterhood can have.  And again, the protagonist runs away from home in a state of emotional distress, which turns out fine.

Tangled

The protagonist is kidnapped from her birth family as a baby.   Her kidnapper assumes the role of her mother, yet is verbally abusive and neglectful.  The story revolves around reuniting Rapunzel with her birth family, but in the process she has to kill her aforementioned surrogate mother.  Oh, and she ran away from home to do it.

Read the above paragraph from the point of view of an adoptive parent and try not to cringe.  This would be one of the movies that falls into Venn diagram region of Not Overtly Tragic and Negative Adoption Themes.  It’s far from the saddest Disney movie out there, but I can’t think of a worse one for a foster child.

The Princess and the Frog

Tiana’s father dies off-screen after a time-skip from the exposition.  However, everybody seems to be coping healthily with it. The movie focuses primarily on internal development of the two protagonists.

This movie provides an illustrative example of how to handle loss, and family, just right.  The story uses family as a motivation for self-improvement, not as a plot device to build tragedy.

Inside Out

This film is actually founded in some pretty real cognitive science behind emotional development, which is probably why it’s actually used as a resource in some forms of cognitive behavioral therapy.  https://psmag.com/social-justice/a-conversation-with-psychologist-behind-inside-out

What I absolutely love is that, in this movie, running away is not the solution to the protagonist’s problems.  It’s seen as a catastrophic failure.  Something to avoid at all costs.

I give this one top marks even though ostensibly it isn’t even a movie about adoption, just for how gracefully it handles the theme of family and coping with loss.

Moana

Everything was going great.  Both parents make it through to the end of the movie intact.  A grandparent dies offscreen, but it is presented less as tragedy and more as part of a cycle using a reincarnation gimmick.  So far so good.

But then, we get Maui opening up about his past, telling the story of how his parents didn’t want him, and so they threw him into the ocean.

So close, yet so far, Disney.  Seriously, the one movie where both parents survive and you have to throw attempted infanticide out of left field.

Conclusions

I had to stop here because I realize I’ve embarked on a bit of a fool’s errand in that I haven’t seen every Disney movie ever made and don’t remember all of the ones I’ve seen well enough to comment on them.  I will note that it’s interesting that what’s probably the saddest movie in the collection I’ve reviewed, The Lion King, isn’t the one with the worst adoption themes; that distinction goes to Tangled. Likewise, the most uplifting movie about familial bonds, Frozen, doesn’t have the best themes for adoption; that prize goes to Inside Out, which oddly enough isn’t a movie that even touches the idea of parental loss.

As always I’m curious what you, dear reader, think about the topic.  Let me know in the comments.

This Make Magazine article is now two and a half years old, but I’m just getting around to really digging into it.  I put a pin in it because I was amazed at the ingenuity and innovation on display. Here we have brilliant engineers advancing a common goal with simple materials.  And I became a bit crestfallen when I realized this level of reuse would not find traction in the US.

I’m starting to wonder if the true enemy of efficiency is plenty.  Moore’s Law and automation keep pushing prices downward, while we continue to externalize the negative impacts of nonrenewable resource consumption, waste disposal, and pollution.

My local Makerspace had been hosting a Repair Cafe style event on a monthly basis.  I’ve noticed we’ve had a challenge getting traction on the concept. Could this be a symptom?  Why bother taking the valuable time to repair a plastic toy, broken tool, or damaged electronic device when a small sum of money can make the problem just disappear?

A disposable culture only works if you have the resources to support replenishing discarded goods.  Those living in poverty don’t have that luxury. But, neither does this planet. Interest in electric vehicles wane when gas is $2.00/gal, but every gallon burned still incurs an unseen cost.

My lament here is due to the fact that efficiency gains should never be so easily dismissed when we live in a world with limited resources, even if we’ve temporarily obfuscated that scarcity via low prices.  No matter how cheap goods may become, our time is finite.

If I want to replace the battery on my current smartphone, I have to remove the damned screen.  And to be honest, I don’t see this as some sort of underhanded conspiracy by tech moguls to push us to buy more disposable goods.  The market wants devices that are small, thin, light, and well-integrated. The market didn’t want devices that are modular and easy to replace.  In the end, we got what we asked for.

All this talk about “Families Belong Together” raises complicated feelings for me.

It’s not because I lack outrage at the humanitarian crisis that has taken hold at our border.  I’m not conflicted about that at all. No, I’m wary because the simple fact of the matter is, if all families were kept together, mine would not exist.

So, I had to do some serious thinking.  I want to be able to tell the activists marching in the street that I do agree that family separation as an immigration policy is abhorrent, without following a toxic self-reflective whataboutism back to myself.  How do I square my place in this debate with my place in a system that separates children as part of its mission.

To satisfy this contradiction, I had to think back to my training.  Yes, training. All foster-adoptive parents in Massachusetts have to attend a MAPP training course.  Stephanie and I did, and it is not an exaggeration to say that this program changed our lives forever.  Their mission is simple.

“DCF trains foster parents so they have the skills needed to nurture children who have experienced trauma and to work in partnership with birth families.”

This is a 30-hour series of small-group classes in which experienced social workers break it all down.  We learned about the legal complexities of the foster system. We learned coping skills, for yourself and your future children.  We learned about the wide variety of potential medical, education, and emotional complications we may face. We learned how to move forward as a family, together.  Throughout the process, one crucial fact was drilled into us: separation is deeply  traumatic.  As adoptive parents it becomes our mission to help our children navigate this trauma, and try as best as we can to pave the road towards attachment and permanence.

But, if we know the process is deeply traumatic, and we know the scars from that trauma will last forever, why does it happen?  The sole reason any child protective service intervenes so severely is to protect the well-being of children.  To save lives.  That’s the bar that must be cleared.  Otherwise we’re inducing lifelong suffering without cause.

The children who were separated at the border during this shameful episode?  They weren’t separated because their lives were in danger. They weren’t separated to shield them from abuse or neglect.  Depending on who you ask, they were separated to reduce the flight risk of asylum-seekers, to send a deterring message across the globe, or just to piss off the libs.  None of those justifications, not a single fucking one of them, clears the bar.

Children are separated in this country, by decree of the government, every day.  But the difference between a humane system and a cruel one is that the former does so when it must, while the latter does so when it can.