April 08, 2004
Eye Surgery -- Slippery Slope to Hell.
See. First you allow therapeutic cornea surgery, then people start getting little hinges implanted in themselves because they hate wearing glasses, and now THIS. Go look -- there's a nasty picture.
April 06, 2004
Who's Keeping Who in Business?
Uhhh - the body. Found after 14 years. That was in Syracuse.
Read this:
"I don't think there's anybody in law enforcement who would think a defendant would be that stupid to keep a dead body in a storage shed rented under his own name," District Attorney William Fitzpatrick said. "Luckily, people like this keep us in business."
Then go read the article and find out how long it took "us" to go look in the locker. Who's keeping who in business here? Tone of self-congratulation definitely not warranted.
April 04, 2004
Music Downloads and Me
The music industry must not think people like me are typical.
You see, I just bought another CD, moved the music to iTunes, and deleted the two songs that I'd downloaded for free from somewhere (and which caused me to want the CD).
All I can say is that Shemekia Copeland deserves the whole $14.95. "It's 2 a.m." was worth the price of admission all on its own.
April 03, 2004
Linux. Windows. Macs. Printing.
Ouch. Linux usability issues defined by John Gruber at his Daring Fireball -- why software you pay for -- uhh -- let's you tell it what to do. Not so much "works" as "works with you." Go read it -- he explains how the libertarians-of-the-computer-world condescend to any possible audience other than themselves but are surprised the rest of us don't want to join them on the wild frontier.
Signs of Spring
I live in seasonally lovely Geneva, NY (the link shows you a fountain and houses visible from my front windows). This is not one of those seasons. I believe the natives refer to this one as "Mud," soon to be followed by "Construction."
On the other hand, there have been snow-drops and crocuses blooming for a few weeks; there are lots of daffodil buds visible now; tulips are well up, though not budded. One-side-of-the-street-parking (the better to snowplow) ended Thursday.
From a beauty p.o.v. the most important sign of spring is that the City has run the high-power street sweeper for all the gutters. For those of my readers who don't live a world of clattering snowplows, that means that most of the black grit that accumlated against the curbs is now gone! Spring has sprung!
Update: That's not snow on the ground -- that's just really heavy pollen deposits. I swear.
April 01, 2004
College Admissions Envelope Season
All over America people are feeling to see if the envelope is thin or thick.
Jay Matthews in the Washington Post has 12 reasons for parents to calm down. Comic tone, but apt.
I find #11 especially useful to remember -- starting at a college is a non-binding agreement. Don't like it? Transfer. I haven't had an advisee transfer yet (I'm only in my third year of advising, after all, and was off campus for one semester of those three years). There's an excellent reason to transfer from colleges like ours, after all: we're a small liberal arts college and don't offer all kinds of things people might be interested in. So if you discover that you can't live without a certain field of study, you should transfer. Are you utterly and irremediably unhappy living in a community of 2,000 in a town of 10,000 an hour away from the nearest city which fiddles statistics to make itself look like it has a million people (by, among other things, including OUR 10,000)? Then transfer to a school in an urban setting.
There's some stigma about transferring, as though it implies academic and personal failure. That's too bad. I think the college admissions process produces lots of mismatches bad enough to be worth solving by finding a better match rather than sucking it up and suffering for three more years.
March 30, 2004
Omigosh. VERMEERS for sale?
disclaimer: I have no professional expertise in things as late as Vermeer's work; I love it, but I'm a medievalist; I have no useful opinion about whether this painting is real. The description of the attribution process sounds pretty thorough, but these things are controversial at best. Here's an article in the Art Newspaper that lets experts compete.
If it is real this ought to be a high-priced sale -- and the $5.4 million estimate sounds low. The last Vermeer to appear at auction did so in 1921.
There is something amazingly calm about Vermeer's paintings (which is one reason I don't like The Allegory of Faith, because the emotion doesn't work). The light alone is worth looking at -- but I especially like the paintings involving women reading letters. The Art of Painting almost reconciles me to the early modern and modern attempt to create an illusion of depth.
I'll be interested to see where the painting ends up.
This is a good place to start looking at all the paintings. There are 34 (unless this is real, which would make 35).
I Don't Think I Knew This Was Still Closed
The Statue of Liberty will probably reopen this summer. I didn't realize it was still closed.
THIS is why comparison is invidious
You should never talk about how wonderful it is that America is going to see The Passion of the Christ based on box office -- because then this headline comes along: 'Scooby-Doo 2' Leads Box Office.
Eye Surgery
You want a categorical statement? I'm never having elective eye surgery. If I get a cataract (if family history has anything to do with it, the chances are mixed), sure. Implanting lenses just because glasses are "driving me crazy" -- hell no. The subject of the linked story was more or less one-eyed already!
If you gave me a choice tomorrow I'd happily go deaf (just imagine having an excuse for not having to take ill-formed, spur-of-the-moment questions in class but being able to demand them in writing! I'd cheerfully supply 3x5 cards!) if you could promise me that I'd never lose my vision. I'm not just an art historian -- I like to look at things.
Half of the people I know personally who have had the various vision-improving surgeries have complications -- haloes at night, that kind of thing. Anecdotal? Sure. Still, enough to make me wonder how they'll see in 40 years.
March 29, 2004
Oxford Gives Up
Oxford gives up and begins to reinstitute entrance exams. The examination boards only release raw scores and the admissions people can't see how to sort them out without a reading comprehension test.
(Via Dr. Kim Swygert, Queen of All Testing)
March 28, 2004
On the Other Hand, There's THIS News from the Arab World
The New York Times reports:
TUNIS, Tunisia, March 27 — The summit meeting of Arab leaders billed as the first serious effort to make a collective commitment to democratic reforms ended Saturday before it began, with the host nation, Tunisia, insisting that it be postponed indefinitely.Hosni Mubarak has offered to host a rescheduled event, but lots of people think his top domestic priority is the succession -- so his might be one of the foreign ministers mentioned in this sentence from the story:"Some foreign ministers had refused to include certain words like "democracy" and "parliament" and "civil society," said Oussama Romdhani, an official spokesman for the Tunisian government."In a statement, the Tunisian government said it felt that the commitment of Arab states toward reforms — from human rights to a greater role for women — was insufficient for the 22 foreign ministers gathered here to hammer out an agreement on common goals that the heads of state would endorse
....
Even by the erratic standards of Arab summit meetings, long marked by very public displays of anger and mutual insults, the sudden cancellation of the such an important gathering just before it was to begin seemed to come as a surprise.
This is Encouraging.
The call for Palestinians "to repress their rage and rise once again in a peaceful and widespread popular uprising with clear goals and sound rhetoric" by 60 prominent Palestinians is encouraging. We'll see who draws more support -- these people or Rantisi. I'm a pessimist about the influence of Palestinian intellectuals, but there's always hope.
In terms of "sound rhetoric," though, I hope they aren't referring to the elected government of Israel when they mention "criminal occupation gang" earlier in the sentence. That doesn't seem like constructive engagement through non-violent means. By "criminal," do they mean the fact that in Israel it is possible to investigate public officials and to discuss indicting them for corrupt behavior? Probably not. Perhaps they mean Hamas, and it's a Fatah-on-Hamas exercise of "sound rhetoric?"
(via Prof. Drezner's blog)
Exploitation
A star athlete shot on school grounds -- but he's in 9th grade for the third time - with one credit instead of the 10 or 11 his peers had accumulated. Most everyone's at fault here -- including the father who "did not realize Richardson [his son] was still in ninth grade." Someone will have to take the blame, though, and it probably ought to be the principal.
International Students--but in Japan
This is an interesting article on Chinese students in Japan in the New York Times. Japan has succeeded in attracting 100,000 international students (and it looks like their goal was "degree-seekers," so it's even more impressive), but the situation isn't entirely positive. Most of what they're talking about in Japan have parallels in America -- the difficulty of financing the education, and still more, the difficulty of supporting everyday life; the desire to go home and he desire to stay; instances of discrimination against foreign students.
There's an interesting note on the Japanese demographic situation -- the article claims that some colleges admit students without adequate financial support because of falling enrollments of Japanese students.
Aside: the picture associated with the story is a poster warning Japanese employers against hiring illegal foreigners -- represented by a cute little redheaded doll wearing a most unappealing plaid pinafore. I wouldn't hire him on aesthetic grounds, myself.
March 27, 2004
That must've been a fun committee to serve on
And the winner in Transparency International's Most Corrupt World Leader of the Last 20 Years contest is . . . Mohamed Suharto! (crowd erupts)
T.I. estimates his take at between 15 and 35 billion, beating out even Ferdinand Marcos and Sani Abacha.
Hee!
Dell at UBuff. Or not. Thirteen million dollars later the lead researcher is buying IBM equipment and the university is smoothing things over.
Apple at VaTech. Lead researcher upgrades to dual-processor Macs. The original configuration was something in the $5 million range.