I went to UT. Party and Paychecks.
A Picture of Language 
The curious art of diagramming sentences was invented 165 years ago by S.W. Clark, a schoolmaster in Homer, N.Y. [1] His book, published in 1847, was called “A Practical Grammar: In which Words, Phrases, and Sentences Are Classified According to Their Offices and Their Various Relations to One Another.” His goal was to simplify the teaching of English grammar. It was more than 300 pages long, contained information on such things as unipersonal verbs and “rhetorico-grammatical figures,” and provided a long section on Prosody, which he defined as “that part of the Science of Language which treats of utterance.”
It may have been unwieldy, but this formidable tome was also quite revolutionary: out of the general murk of its tiny print, incessant repetitions, maze of definitions and uplifting examples emerged the profoundly innovative, dazzlingly ingenious and rather whimsical idea of analyzing sentences by turning them into pictures. “A Practical Grammar” was a reaction against the way the subject had been taught in America since it began to be taught at all.
Before diagramming, grammar was taught by means of its drabber older sibling, parsing. Parsing is a venerable method for teaching inflected languages like Latin; the word itself is schoolboy slang derived from pars orationis, Latin for “a part of speech.” Sometime in the 18th century, teachers began to realize that practical skills were more useful to young people than classical languages, and that the ability to speak English didn’t necessarily mean that a student spoke it well, wrote it correctly or understood its structure. To teach it, they borrowed the concept of parsing from the classical tradition in which they themselves had been trained.
Put simply, parsing requires the student to break down a sentence into its component words, classifying each in terms of its part of speech, as well as its tense, number and function in the sentence.
Let’s say a teacher assigns a student the sentence “Virtue secures happiness”—a likely specimen in 1847. The youth stands up, spouts something like, “Virtue is a singular noun and the subject of the sentence; secures is a regular verb, indicative mode, active voice, present tense, third person singular; happiness is a singular noun, object of the sentence,” and sits back down with a sigh of relief.
Parsing was almost insufferably tedious. It was also very difficult. And both these deficiencies were intensified by the way grammar was taught. Typically, students were first made to memorize definitions and rules, and only when they could recite them accurately by rote were they expected to apply them to sentences.
“A Practical Grammar” went into several editions (my own copy, from 1860, is the 15th), but in the history of diagramming, the reign of the balloons was relatively brief. In 1877 two teachers — Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg — left them deflated on the classroom floor. Their book “Higher Lessons in English” finessed Mr. Clark’s bulky blobs into a system of lines and angles that were a snap to draw and took up less space.
The book was enormously popular, and Mr. Reed and Mr. Brainerd’s diagramming swept through American schools like a refreshing breeze. By the latter half of the 19th century, chalkboards had become increasingly common in classrooms; for students, the impact of watching a sentence take shape on that large surface as a comprehensible, often elegant, and sometimes downright ingenious drawing must have been significant. It’s hard to believe anyone but the most dedicated pedant could have actually enjoyed parsing, but plenty of students — including me — loved diagramming.
A century and a half later, diagramming sentences is even more out of date than writing lessons on a piece of slate. When the book I wrote about it was published in 2006, a couple of hundred people sent me e-mails. One writer accused me of succumbing to Stockholm syndrome because I wrote so benignly about the nun who brainwashed me into thinking diagramming was fun. Another asked me for a date. Two objected to my political attitudes, as they deduced them between the lines. A dozen or so either faulted some of the diagrams or challenged me with a particularly tricky sentence.
The rest of the responses were eloquent, nostalgic and not unpersuasive laments for the lost art of diagramming, from people who blame everything from the death of whom to the end of civilization as we know it for its demise.
The question remains: Does diagramming sentences teach us anything except how to diagram sentences?
A Chart that Reveals How Science Fiction Futures Changed Over Time
The future may seem to be closer or farther off, depending on the era you’re living in. That’s one of the possible conclusions you can draw from this chart, created by Stephanie Fox for io9, based on research we’ve done over the past month. We wanted to know whether there are historical trends in how far in the future we set our science fiction — and there definitely are. Here we present our data, as well as some preliminary conclusions about why the future changed so much from decade to decade over the past 130 years.
The Dataset
To get our data, we worked with intrepid researchers Ben Vrignon and Gordon Jackson, who helped track down when “the future” was in a random sampling of over 250 works of science fiction (books, movies, TV, and some comics) created between 1880 and 2010. Purely for sanity purposes, we narrowed our search to pieces of science fiction widely available in English, in America, though the works sampled include several pieces of European and Japanese SF.
The Methods
Once we had our data, we divided it up into works set in the Near Future (0-50 years from the time the work came out), Middle Future (51-500 years from the time the work came out) and Far Future (501+ years from the time the work came out).
Why did we pick these boundaries? In part they were just necessary (and slightly arbitrary) cutoffs for categories that are arguably much softer than such rigid demarkations can capture. Still, they are justified for a few reasons. First of all, I wanted to reflect an idea of “near future” SF that encompasses works that are set just barely into the future, works that are generally intended to be about how the present day is already science fictional. George Orwell’s 1984 was probably the first work of SF to popularize this notion of the near future, while William Gibson and Ken MacLeod’s recent works also take it up.
I picked 51-500 as the “mid future” because, frankly, it includes the Star Trek universe, which I consider to be a kind of model of mid-future SF because it includes radically new technologies and social structures, but the world is still recognizably our own. There is a ton of science fiction set in this mid-future which functions similarly - we’re still the same old humans, just in space. And finally, works set 500+ years in the future are often of a markedly different character than mid-future ones. We see a humanity that’s radically altered, like the one in The Time Machine or Alasdair Reynolds’ series. The Earth is unrecognizable or long gone. This is Deep Time territory, when anything goes.
Some caveats: I thought about making Near Future 0-100 years in the future, but decided that generally once you get beyond 50 years you start seeing SF that includes really radical changes and isn’t intended to be “five minutes into the future” like recent William Gibson novels or George Orwell’s 1984. I also thought about adding another “mid future” category between 51-200 years, since that’s such a popular time period. If we had more data, I think that would have been reasonable.
The Analysis and Conclusions
I would like to say at the outset that these conclusions are preliminary, as we’ll need a lot more data before we’re on solid ground — and I would also like to see some cross-cultural comparisons, too. There are, however, a few things we observe right off the bat.
There are a few moments in history when all futures are almost equally represented, notably in the 1920s and the 1960s. Those are both periods of liberalization in the United States, when social roles were changing rapidly and the economy was booming. Perhaps these eras of rapid change turned people’s eyes to both the near and far future. Interestingly, both eras were followed by periods of economic downturn that led to opposite effects: In the 1930s, we saw a spike in far future stories (indeed, the most of any era in our data); and in the 1970s we saw a spike in near future stories.
At other times, the future seems right around the corner. In the 1900s and the 1980s, there were huge spikes in near-future science fiction. What do these eras have in common? Both were times of rapid technological change. In the 1900s you begin to see the widespread use of telephones, cameras, automobiles (the Model T came out in 1908), motion pictures, and home electricity. In the 1980s, the personal computer transformed people’s lives.
In general, the future got closer at the end of the twentieth century. You can see a gradual trend in this chart where after the 1940s, near-future SF grows in popularity. Again, this might reflect rapid technological change and the fact that SF entered mainstream popular culture.
The future is getting farther away from us right now. One of the only far-future narratives of the 1990s was Futurama. Then suddenly, in the 2000s, we saw a spike in far-future stories, many of them about posthuman, postsingular futures. It’s possible that during periods of extreme uncertainty about the future, as the 00s were in the wake of massive economic upheavals and 9/11, creators and audiences turn their eyes to the far future as a balm.
Again, these are all speculative comments. More data and analysis are needed.
How New Ideas Almost Killed Our Startup
The gist is that when you have a new exciting idea, you are in a state of “uninformed optimism”. As you spend more time on the idea and start learning about all of the issues, you get into a state of “informed pessimism”. This is a bad state that eventually leads you to a “crisis of meaning” where you either turn the corner into “informed optimism” or crash and burn.
Most startups are in “informed pessimism” and heading to a “crisis of meaning”. And, that’s when the Sirens start calling with new exciting and unrelated ideas. Those new ideas are tempting because they are still in the “uninformed optimism” stage and seem so much better than your current idea. I fell for it several times.
The Danger
Your ability to become a successful entrepreneur is about taking your current “informed pessimism” idea and turning the corner into “informed optimism”. If every time you get to the disappointing “informed pessimism” stage, you impatiently hop back to a new idea at “uninformed optimism”, you’ll get caught in a never ending cycle. You have to be patient long enough with your idea to see if you are able to turn the corner.
The Solution
I finally learned to resist these new ideas after reading Tim Ferriss’s post. I now see those ideas for what they really are, “uninformed optimism” ideas. They may seem amazing but you just don’t know about all the issues associated with them.
So, if you are in the “informed pessimism” stage, either plug your ears or tie yourself to the masthead like Odysseus and keep working on your current idea. Don’t be seduced by the Siren call of that exciting but shallow unrelated idea.
I Love Charts is now a book!
Those who follow the hobo code: An ethical code was created by Tourist Union #63 during its 1889 National Hobo Convention in St. Louis Missouri. This code was voted upon as a concrete set of laws to govern the Nation-wide Hobo Body, it reads this way;
![Want a Job? Go to College, and Don’t Major in Architecture
Unemployment for new graduates is around 8.9 percent; the rate for workers with only a high school diploma is nearly three times as high, at 22.9 percent.
That’s according to a new report [PDF] from Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce.
The chart above shows unemployment rates sorted by major, based on 2009-10 census data. You can also see jobless rates for graduates of a given undergraduate major who went on to receive further education (not necessarily related to their college major). In the chart, “recent college graduate” refers to workers who are 22 to 26 years old; “experienced college graduate” covers those 30 to 54; and “graduate degree holder” is limited to workers 30 to 54 years old.
Some majors even produced college graduates who, at mid-career, earned more than workers from other fields who went on to received a tertiary degree. For example, experienced workers whose highest degree was a bachelor’s in health care are more likely to be employed than people with graduate degrees who majored in most other fields.
Those who majored in less technical subjects, like humanities, arts and social science, had higher unemployment rates.
The unemployment rate for recent graduates was highest in architecture, at 13.9 percent, probably at least partly because of the housing market collapse. Even architecture majors who went on to receive graduate degrees, which usually safeguard workers from unemployment, are doing poorly in the job market. With a jobless rate of 7.7 percent, architecture majors who hold graduate degrees are still more likely to be unemployed than newly minted college grads who studied journalism (!).
Those lucky architecture majors with postgraduate degrees who do have jobs are doing O.K., though. Among full-time, full-year workers in this group, median earnings are $71,000:
As you can see in this second chart, many of the majors that produced low unemployment rates also pay pretty well. That makes sense, when you consider that graduates of some fields are in high demand, which forces employers to offer them higher salaries.
That’s not true across the board, however.
People who majored in education, psychology and social work, for example, have low unemployment rates, but don’t make much money. Their earnings also don’t improve a lot when they gain more experience or postgraduate schooling.
“Some majors offer both high security and high earnings, while other majors trade off earnings for job security,” the report says.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxe6nxsbgd1qzu6nxo1_500.jpg)
Want a Job? Go to College, and Don’t Major in Architecture
Unemployment for new graduates is around 8.9 percent; the rate for workers with only a high school diploma is nearly three times as high, at 22.9 percent.
That’s according to a new report [PDF] from Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce.
The chart above shows unemployment rates sorted by major, based on 2009-10 census data. You can also see jobless rates for graduates of a given undergraduate major who went on to receive further education (not necessarily related to their college major). In the chart, “recent college graduate” refers to workers who are 22 to 26 years old; “experienced college graduate” covers those 30 to 54; and “graduate degree holder” is limited to workers 30 to 54 years old.
Some majors even produced college graduates who, at mid-career, earned more than workers from other fields who went on to received a tertiary degree. For example, experienced workers whose highest degree was a bachelor’s in health care are more likely to be employed than people with graduate degrees who majored in most other fields.
Those who majored in less technical subjects, like humanities, arts and social science, had higher unemployment rates.
The unemployment rate for recent graduates was highest in architecture, at 13.9 percent, probably at least partly because of the housing market collapse. Even architecture majors who went on to receive graduate degrees, which usually safeguard workers from unemployment, are doing poorly in the job market. With a jobless rate of 7.7 percent, architecture majors who hold graduate degrees are still more likely to be unemployed than newly minted college grads who studied journalism (!).
Those lucky architecture majors with postgraduate degrees who do have jobs are doing O.K., though. Among full-time, full-year workers in this group, median earnings are $71,000:
As you can see in this second chart, many of the majors that produced low unemployment rates also pay pretty well. That makes sense, when you consider that graduates of some fields are in high demand, which forces employers to offer them higher salaries.
That’s not true across the board, however.
People who majored in education, psychology and social work, for example, have low unemployment rates, but don’t make much money. Their earnings also don’t improve a lot when they gain more experience or postgraduate schooling.
“Some majors offer both high security and high earnings, while other majors trade off earnings for job security,” the report says.
