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| The Return of White Lightning | |||
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| A decade ago, Casey Combest was running down Tyson Gay as one of the fastest high school sprinters in the world. Today, he's running down the dream of a comeback. | |||
| AJ says: A 5'7" white dude from the sticks. Pretty awesome. Videos, too. | |||
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| How renters work the system to live for free in one of America's most expensive cities | |||
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| As it turned out, Getzow was not a licensed doctor in California, although he did work sporadically as a medical software consultant. He also was not as integral to the political campaigns he had volunteered for. In fact, he was one of the most successful "serial evictees" in San Francisco, a select group of tenants who take advantage of the city's lenient courts and tenant-support nonprofits to tie up landlords in court for months while they live practically rent-free in one of the most expensive cities in the country. Depending on the vigilance of the landlord, a seasoned serial evictee like Getzow can get away with a minimum of 45 days and sometimes up to a year of free rent. The actual number of serial evictees operating in San Francisco is difficult to track, but some attorneys who specialize in representing landlords estimate there are between 20 and 100. |
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| In the Basement of an Ivory Tower | |||
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| Fascinating look, from an adjunct professor's perspective, at the morality of higher education. Should schools limit someone's access to college education after they've proven incompetency (over and over again)? Or keep soaking them for tuition in the theory that everyone with enough money and time has the right to a degree, eventually? And are degrees truly useful to all vocations? | |||
| One of the things I try to do on the first night of English 102 is relate the literary techniques we will study to novels that the students have already read. I try to find books familiar to everyone. This has so far proven impossible. My students don’t read much, as a rule, and though I think of them monolithically, they don’t really share a culture. To Kill a Mockingbird? Nope. (And I thought everyone had read that!) Animal Farm? No. If they have read it, they don’t remember it. The Outsiders? The Chocolate War? No and no. Charlotte’s Web? You’d think so, but no. So then I expand the exercise to general works of narrative art, meaning movies, but that doesn’t work much better. Oddly, there are no movies that they all have seen—well, except for one. They’ve all seen The Wizard of Oz. Some have caught it multiple times. So we work with the old warhorse of a quest narrative. The farmhands’ early conversation illustrates foreshadowing. The witch melts at the climax. Theme? Hands fly up. Everybody knows that one—perhaps all too well. Dorothy learns that she can do anything she puts her mind to and that all the tools she needs to succeed are already within her. I skip the denouement: the intellectually ambitious scarecrow proudly mangles the Pythagorean theorem and is awarded a questionable diploma in a dreamland far removed from reality. That’s art holding up a mirror all too closely to our own poignant scholarly endeavors. | |||
| mmc says: I think Professor X is totally wrong about science being an easier subject to teach meaningfully than English, but this is a great essay nonetheless. | |||
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| Here's Another Olympic Sport: Skewering the Mascots | |||
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| If the Beijing Olympics' five cuddly mascots go down in history as a dud, their creator wants no part of the blame. | |||
| After China's Olympics organizers gave him the assignment, folk artist Han Meilin initially sketched out five children representing the traditional Chinese elements of fire, wood, water, gold and earth. Then the bureaucrats got involved. "There had to be a panda, even though you'd think the public would have had enough of them," says the 72-year-old artist. | |||
| Jonathan says: Great example of what happens when you mix artists, officials, and the public. | |||
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| The Pit of Life and Death | |||
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| By 1983, the hill was so exhausted that the Anaconda Mining Company was no longer able to extract minerals in profitable amounts. They packed up all the equipment that they could move, shut down the water pumps, and moved on to more lucrative scraps of Earth. Without the pumps, rain and groundwater gradually began to collect in the pit, leaching out the metals and minerals in the surrounding rock. The water became as acidic as lemon juice, creating a toxic brew of heavy metal poisons including arsenic, lead, and zinc. No fish live there, and no plants line the shores. There aren’t even any insects buzzing about. The Berkeley Pit had become one of the deadliest places on earth, too toxic even for microorganisms. Or so it was thought. In 1995, an analytic chemist named William Chatham saw something unusual in the allegedly lifeless lake: a small clump of green slime floating on the water's surface. |
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| AJ says: Cures for cancer? | |||
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| Army Overseer Tells of Ouster Over KBR Stir | |||
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| The Army official who managed the Pentagon’s largest contract in Iraq says he was ousted from his job when he refused to approve paying more than $1 billion in questionable charges to KBR, the Houston-based company that has provided food, housing and other services to American troops. | |||
| Army auditors had determined that KBR lacked credible data or records for more than $1 billion in spending, so Mr. Smith refused to sign off on the payments to the company. “They had a gigantic amount of costs they couldn’t justify,” he said in an interview. “Ultimately, the money that was going to KBR was money being taken away from the troops, and I wasn’t going to do that.” But he was suddenly replaced, he said, and his successors — after taking the unusual step of hiring an outside contractor to consider KBR’s claims — approved most of the payments he had tried to block. |
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| AJ says: Ah, KBR. | |||
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| A Tiny Fruit That Tricks the Tongue | |||
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| CARRIE DASHOW dropped a large dollop of lemon sorbet into a glass of Guinness, stirred, drank and proclaimed that it tasted like a “chocolate shake.” Those who attended sampled the red berries then tasted foods, including cheese, beer and brussels sprouts, finding the flavors transformed. Beer can taste like chocolate, lemons like candy. Mr. Aliquo says he holds the parties to “turn on a bunch of people’s taste buds.” Nearby, Yuka Yoneda tilted her head back as her boyfriend, Albert Yuen, drizzled Tabasco sauce onto her tongue. She swallowed and considered the flavor: “Doughnut glaze, hot doughnut glaze!” They were among 40 or so people who were tasting under the influence of a small red berry called miracle fruit at a rooftop party in Long Island City, Queens, last Friday night. The berry rewires the way the palate perceives sour flavors for an hour or so, rendering lemons as sweet as candy. |
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| AJ says: Pretty sweet. | |||
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| Lots of Animals Learn, but Smarter Isn’t Better | |||
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| But the flies pay a price for fast learning. Dr. Kawecki and his colleagues pitted smart fly larvae against a different strain of flies, mixing the insects and giving them a meager supply of yeast to see who would survive. The scientists then ran the same experiment, but with the ordinary relatives of the smart flies competing against the new strain. About half the smart flies survived; 80 percent of the ordinary flies did. ... One clue comes from another experiment, in which he and his colleagues found that the very act of learning takes a toll. The scientists trained some fast-learning flies to associate an odor with powerful vibrations. “These flies died about 20 percent faster than flies with the same genes, but which were not forced to learn,” he said. |
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| AJ says: Animals could be smarter than they are, at a cost to survival. | |||
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| Numbers Racket | |||
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| How the U.S. government "jukes the stats" for unemployment, inflation, and other economic indicators. | |||
| The real numbers, to most economically minded Americans, would be a face full of cold water. Based on the criteria in place a quarter century ago, today's U.S. unemployment rate is somewhere between 9 percent and 12 percent; the inflation rate is as high as 7 or even 10 percent; economic growth since the recession of 2001 has been mediocre, despite a huge surge in the wealth and incomes of the superrich, and we are falling back into recession. | |||
| manu_s says: If someone finds a regular web page link for the article, let me know or post a comment. | |||
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| Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm | |||
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| SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you've learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you've forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you're about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they? Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It's too complex for us to employ with our naked brains. |
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| AJ says: Okay, I don't know if this actually works, but (a) it seems extremely plausible and (b) it's totally fascinating. I'm thinking of checking out the program. Also cool is how doggedly this guy scientifically self-analyzes. | |||
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| Maybe Money Does Buy Happiness After All | |||
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| In 1974, Richard Easterlin, then an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, published a study in which he argued that economic growth didn’t necessarily lead to more satisfaction. People in poor countries, not surprisingly, did become happier once they could afford basic necessities. But beyond that, further gains simply seemed to reset the bar. . . . Relative income — how much you make compared with others around you — mattered far more than absolute income, Mr. Easterlin wrote. The paradox quickly became a social science classic, cited in academic journals and the popular media. . . . But now the Easterlin paradox is under attack. |
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| Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (Review in the NYTimes) | |||
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| User comments on the review: - Darwin's Theory is still just a Theory I think it is fascinating how anyone can be so quick to discount this as pure propaganda, when in fact, the same can be said about Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Let's not forget it is only a Theory. There is not one shred of evidence that scientists can bring forth to prove this Theory, otherwise it would be Darwin's Law of Evolution. I am amazed though at how many readers can have so much more faith than the Christians who believe in Intelligent Design, because it takes an enormous amount of faith to believe that nothing took nothing and made everything. - Good movie as long as your not liberal -Can 90% be wrong? And so many more... |
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| AJ says: I assume everyone's heard about this movie. I only post this because of the reader comments. Of course, it's the internet, people are dumb, yadda yadda, but somehow I was surprised to see this kind of stuff in the New York Times -- are those people really NYT readers? (Or was the review linked from somewhere else with some encouragement to write comments?) One of my favorites notes that Newton was a creationist. Haha... | |||
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| view previous 12 articles |
--
http://laboratorium.net/archive/2008/05/22/shorter_atlantic_magazine
Shorter Atlantic Magazine
Professor X, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower:
My students don’t learn anything in my classes.
It’s their fault. Or maybe society’s, for insisting
that college is for everyone. But definitely not mine.
--
I got the sense that he's arguing that it's easier to teach science poorly than it is to teach English poorly, because it's easier to ignore student's failures in science. I think this may be so, since I have to believe that grading bad essays is a pretty wrenching experience.
Also, regarding the importance of English, I thought Professor X's essay was, ironically, a little muddled. I think it's very important for people to be coherent writers. On the other hand, having read The Pickwick Papers or being able to do scholarly research seems pretty useless unless you're an academic. I think Prof. X should have dealt separately with these two issues, since he really weakens his own argument by mixing them up. I wonder if there would be so many F grades if he just taught remedial writing for two semesters. Maybe Mrs. L would have improved more if she didn't have to spend time learning the internets and researching a topic like the MacArthur/Truman example.
On the same track, people always argue that college is supposed to "teach you how to think." I learned how to think by arguing with annoying, belligerent academia-types and to a lesser extent by understanding some basic mathematical logic. I think law school is structured to teach people this way, but most other disciplines just seem to assume that reading excerpts from Plato (or Dickens) is enough. Does this actually work?
Of course that's a bit hard to justify. I could think of several other more pertinent things one could learn in college.
http://www.theonion.com/content/amvo/dean_one_candidate_must_quit?utm_source=onion_rss_daily
Related is Richard Dawkins's review of the film and the incident (he was present during the debacle). Hilarious and sarcastic.
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