Politics, Economics and other Stuff

Museum Questions

Inspired by the family's trek through Boston area museums -- the MFA, JFK Library, Peabody Essex Museum, ICA, visited in order of increasing child acceptance, tomorrow they get to go to a puppet theater -- some questions:

1. Did ancient Egyptian peasants expect an afterlife?  When did commoners start expecting an afterlife?  I know, what any of this means needs elaboration...
2. What's the deal with Jacqueline Kennedy's voice/accent?  She is pretty much a beauty ideal, but that voice would drive me crazy.  What is the cultural history of this kind of voice?  How was her voice perceived at the time?  How much was this her public voice only? 
3. What did Americans sell to China in the pre-1840s China trade?  When did opium and tea get going and how did America fit into that trade?  In general, what commodities were important by value, as opposed to their historical memorability?  How did the economics of long-distance trade come out in terms of covering ship construction costs?  There must be lots of data on family finances of trading families. 
4. How could the NYC-Albany passenger only steamship lines coexist with the railways?  What were the relative traffic volumes for passengers and freight?  Why take a steam ship if you could take a (faster?) train?  Where trains that awful?  I've always thought of passenger steamships as a Mississippi or Ohio river phenomena, but the Hudson was also important (see Vanderbilt). 
5. How does basic C-print technology work?  I.e. how did the world work before ink jet printers? I know the high school level explanation, but that doesn't really answer the question...like why didn't C-prints exist before the mid-1940s? 

Annual MFA Visit

We did our annual MFA visit today.  As usual, a bit tough on the kids and we had lots of fighting.  Still, some good moments, and the Secrets of Tomb 10A exhibit went over well. 

Below the statue of Lady Sennuwy from the regular collection, still pretty impressive just as a beauty ideal.  Class and the afterlife looks like an important issue in Egypt...

Also, being at my MIL reminds me that getting a higher quality monitor may be the next step on my photography expansion path.  There are lots of crappy monitors out there and my home monitor is not much better than most. Adjusting colors with monitors that don't display color correctly is a loosing game...and a good reminder that most people don't see photos with their 'true' colors. My MIL's two monitors both get skin tones wrong, which is bad color rendition but getting tonal gradients off as well as some sharpness issue. It's a Dell 1704 FPT. 

Final shot by kid #2...camera control was with kids #2 and #3 during most of the Tomb 10A exhibit. 

NCIS is now the most watched TV show

via the WSJ.  That sort of crept up on me. 

This means Mark Harmon is doing well.  Who says experienced gained on Emergency! -- one of my favorite shows in 1972 -- doesn't go anywhere. 

Edward Burtynsky: Oil at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

via Fallows: Edward Burtynsky: Oil at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.  Should be good, if you can ignore the art world marketing talk. 

Edward Burtynsky: Oil from Corcoran Gallery of Art on Vimeo.

'The Decade's 50 Most Important Recordings' according to NPR

Radiohead is the only act to get on the list twice.  I was wondering about this recently...the list is, no surprise, closer to my music exposure than I would have naively thought.  The Postal Service isn't obscure, nor is Wilco.  Not that I listen to either much, but I do listen to their influences, or at least similar acts, which is what the list is about. 

South Park does Glenn Beck

Pretty good, but not quite so strong on the finish.  Wait a bit for the episode to load. 

Reason Again

via Lee Sigelman:

If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.

—Samuel Butler (apparently not an advocate of the rational choice perspective)

Which just calls for more reason and some only partially strategic inattention and forgetfulness.

If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.

—Samuel Butler (apparently not an advocate of the rational choice perspective)

Which just calls for more reason and some only partially strategic inattention and forgetfulness.

Frederick Wiseman

Frederick Wiseman appears to have a new film out, the NYT reports:

In “La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet,” his 36th documentary in more than 40 years, Frederick Wiseman takes his camera into the stately and elegant Palais Garnier in Paris, observing rehearsals, staff meetings and, finally, performances of seven dances, including classics like “The Nutcracker” and spiky new work by younger choreographers. To say that the film, sumptuous in its length and graceful in its rhythm, is a feast for ballet lovers is to state the obvious and also to sell Mr. Wiseman’s achievement a bit short. Yes, this is one of the finest dance films ever made, but there’s more to it than that.

Wiseman hasn't been on my radar screen, though his first film, the 1967 Titicut Follies does ring a vague bell.  Statehouse (2006, 217 minutes) seem like something I'd like to see.  Not that you can get it on Netflix -- it's buy or rent at one of a few independent video stores. 

Here's the trailer for La Danse.  Doesn't look too exciting, Statehouse is probably more my thing. 

Since when do historians (or anybody) think 486 pages is a big book?

Bernard Bailyn reviews Steve Pincus' 1688: The First Modern Revolution in the NYRB.  (electronic subscription only link, so I cannot cut and paste)  There are several remarks along these lines:

It is a big book, and Pincus offers some friendly advice.  Anticipating some readers' frailty in tackling his text of 486 pages...A reduced version of Pincus's book -- like the abridgment of Lawrence Stone's eight-hundred-page Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 -- would be an academic best seller.  

In general I hate abridged historical monographs that leave out the supporting evidence and make even less possible to evaluate the sort of evidence used to come up with the perspective of the book.  I know, often the evidence is extremely skimpy, unrepresentative, partisan and 2nd hand, but that's something I want to know about.    486 pages on the Glorious Revolution sounds more like a historiographical essay than a overarching monograph to me.  Still sounds like it could be good, but I'm a bit leary of what sounds like Pincus overselling rhetorical contrasts as real changes in knowledge (i.e. the same event can both be meaningfully peaceful and violent, depending on one's perspective and expectations). 

It's 664 page with end notes and index, but still, that's not long. 

Visuals

From reading the press I'm picking up a lot of discomfort with the new Merkel government -- a sense that people don't know what she's up to.  At some level may just be giving people what they want and muddling through.  Still, what does that actually turn out to mean?  I'm too out of touch to know. And not that it matters, but I still like the idea that the Chancellor has decent math skills. (Photos via FAZ)

2009:

1991:

Why is 'hipster' on the rise?

I've run across the term 'hipster' several times in the last month in different contexts, after not hearing it for who knows how long. Google confirms that hipster is a more common search term now than in the recent past. What's going on?

hipster  1.00

“When brute force fails, you’re not using enough.”

Supposed engineering saying.  I'd not heard it before.   I like it. 

Nobel Prize Watch

D-square writes, still on the Peace Prize:

Ross Douthat of the New York Times writes on the subject of Obama's Nobel Peace Prize. I cannot help noticing that when the New York Times came and offered him a column, he did not turn it down saying "no, I clearly do not deserve this honour, others are far more qualified for it that me".

The Ostrom and Williamson Nobel Prizes for economics seem fine to me, though Williamson was a far greater influence on me than Ostrom...I've been exposed to some of her work, but by the time I got to it it was pretty much stuff I already knew.  Williamson, on the other hand, made me think, in part though on how to move from his sort of speculative theory to both model based theory and serious empirical work.  Both hard questions and see how far I got with that. I've had Williamson on my list of potential Nobel Prize winners since the 1980s, though less far up on the list recently as the influence of his work as faded from what I see people around me doing.   I don't even know if the FTC still uses his work...the next generation of IO researchers has a much bigger presence in applied work. 

A friend who took Williamson's IO grad course a long long time ago says he's a nice guy but the most excruciatingly boring lecturer he's every had in is whole college and grad school career.  I've had no contact with him, he left Yale shortly before I showed up there.  Five kids. 

“DNA has freed more black men than Abraham Lincoln”

From a editorial by Henry Louis Gates about Michelle Obama's white ancestors and the white ancestors of many black Americans.  I don't think I get the claim. 

A Harvard colleague of mine likes to say, “DNA don’t lie.” And the Reverend Eugene Rivers likes to say that “DNA has freed more black men than Abraham Lincoln.”

A google search turns up no uses of this phrase besides this editorial. I don't think this is the view that the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln's support for the 13th Amendment, and Lincoln's part in the Civil War were completely futile, though things clearly didn't come out that well. 

Also see Paul Finkelman's recent article on the Emancipation Proclamation. 

Update #1: also weird is the seeming surprise that Michelle Obama would have white ancestors seems to occasion.  I thought the prevalence of significant white ancestry for black Americans was well known even in the general public. It's not like you have to read up on it -- just looking at people is highly suggestive.  My ballpark guess is that white ancestry for American blacks is somewhere around 1/3.  It may depend a bit on where you draw the line, for instance that guess excludes recent African immigrants. I ought to look it up (and more: what fraction of African DNA isn't in 'blacks' anymore? -- probably more African DNA in non-blacks than in blacks in the US).  Interestingly, Gate's editorial suggests blacks also underestimate their white ancestry, at least to the extent that people who have figured it out try to protect their kids from exposure to this fact. 

Finally, 1/3rd white ancestry doesn't require much interracial sex -- that's what 15 generations of immigrants in the Americas get you.  

Ah, that's it, took me a while: “DNA has freed more black men than Abraham Lincoln.”  African DNA in non-blacks. Yes, that is ten(s?) of million(s?) of people (adding up fractional decent correctly, i.e. not using a one drop theory). 

Update #2: there is, as I remember it, a great article in either the YLJ or HLR on the legal history of passing in America, especially before 1930.  The implication was that a) that there was a lot of passing, b) the legal system accommodated and protected quite a bit of it, despite pretenses to the opposite.  Can't find it now though. Ah, it's, I think, Ariela Gross, "Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the Nineteenth-Century South," 108 Yale Law Journal 109 (1998).  She's also turned the topic into a recent book, What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (2008, HUP). I cannot find the paper online, but here is the main thesis:

I argue that law became part of the definition of race in two related ways. First, among the variety of kinds of evidence litigants might present at trial, law made the "performance" of whiteness especially important. Doing the things a white man or woman did became the law's working definition of what it meant to be white. This definition of race as performance operated in a law-like fashion, prescribing certain rules of behavior for people of different races. Furthermore, one of the most important ways in which men in particular could perform whiteness was, paradoxically, through the exercise of legal rights. Witnesses at trial frequently proved a person's whiteness by reporting on his performance of acts of citizenship; voting, mustering for the militia, sitting on a jury which made rightsholding part of the definition of whiteness. The trials thus reveal the implications of a racial ideology which decreed that "negro blood" made a person inferior in virtue, competency, and behavior and that "blood" made a person act in certain ways. The "laws" of race could be subverted by people who followed all the rules of whiteness but "hid" their intrinsic blackness. Law, which provided the forum for these challenges, made a discourse of race as performance especially salient.

Update #3: David comments:

I think that a better point to make is that "black" and "white" are fairly meaningless categories, biologically speaking. They are convenient social categories, but (I believe) much science has emerged recently to confirm that defining "races" is pretty much impossible biologically and that skin color is one of the least clear methods of separating human populations. Lactose tolerance or blood typing make a lot more sense as dividing methods; but, alas, is less fun to talk about since people enjoy looking at other people's physical appearance. One of my pet peeves, BTW, is when physicians open a patient history with the phrase, "This is a 65 year old Caucasian man....". They do this very frequently. How is this helpful medically? Is it going to influence the differential diagnosis or treatment plan to know that the patient is "Caucasian"? And what, exactly, does "Caucasian" mean? Ugh.

I'd argue with "'black' and 'white' are fairly meaningless categories, biologically speaking," though using the weasel word 'fairly' may allow you to stretch enough to escape.  I think you can arrive at this view only by applying a essentialist standard to racial categories that they will naturally fail, even for biological meaningfulness.  But that doesn't mean the terms don't have meaningful referents, just that the standard for meaning is set unrealistically high.  This is not to argue that 'black' and 'white' have self-explicating obvious biological meaning.  But that's biology, not the fact that they don't refer to some biological reality.  But I'm up for using better terminology, haplogroups and all that...but those do line up broadly with classic racial groups.  Finally, in part, the declaration that 'defining races is pretty much impossible' strikes me at times as an evasion of the history of who had kids who lived and who didn't.  Which isn't 'fairly meaningless' to the people involved.  But it's time for me to go to sleep...

The Decline of Jewish Delis

From a thread on the topic at Volokh:

I attribute the decline of the Jewish deli in part to Jews becoming much more cosmopolitan, but also to the growing stringency among the Orthodox regarding Kashrut. The best Jewish delis, IMHO, were kosher. But now few non-Orthodox Jews care about kashrut, and the Orthodox, who could be a core customer group, insist that the place be closed on the Sabbath, Jewish holidays, and have a full-time kashrut supervisor (mashgiach), all of which drastically raise the cost of doing business, and indeed make it impossible to remotely compete price-wise with non-kosher businesses.

Parade

China's 60th Anniversary national day - timelapse and slow motion - 7D and 5DmkII from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

Etymology of Scientist

I'd not known this until I recently heard about it on the radio.  From wiki:

Social roles that partly correspond with the modern scientist can be identified going back at least until 17th century natural philosophy, but the term scientist is much more recent. Until the late 19th or early 20th century, those who pursued science were called "natural philosophers" or "men of science".^[3][4][5][6]

Philosopher and historian of science William Whewell coined the term scientist in 1833, and it was first published in Whewell's anonymous 1834 review of Mary Somerville's On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences published in the Quarterly Review. Whewell's suggestion of the term was partly satirical, a response changing conceptions of science itself in which natural knowledge was increasingly seen as distinct from other forms of knowledge. Whewell wrote of "an increasing proclivity of separation and dismemberment" in the sciences; while highly specific terms proliferated—chemist, mathematician, naturalist—the broad term "philosopher" was no longer satisfactory to group together those who pursued science, without the caveats of "natural" or "experimental" philosopher. Members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science had been complaining about the lack of a good term at recent meetings, Whewell reported in his review; alluding to himself, he noted that "some ingenious gentleman proposed that, by analogy with artist, they might form [the word] scientist, and added that there could be no scruple in making free with this termination when we have such words as sciolist, economist, and atheist—but this was not generally palatable".^[7]

Whewell proposed the word again more seriously (and not anonymously) in his 1840 The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences:

We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a Scientist. Thus we might say, that as an Artist is a Musician, Painter, or Poet, a Scientist is a Mathematician, Physicist, or Naturalist.

He also proposed the term physicist at the same time, as a counterpart to the French word physicien. Neither term gained wide acceptance until decades later; scientist became a common term in the late 19th century in the United States and around the turn of the 20th century in Great Britain

Julia Child in France

On the occasion of Julia & Julia being released in France, the NYT reports

Ms. Child’s book — beloved by American cooks for almost 50 years and now a best-seller because of the film — has never been translated into French, said Anne Perrier, a manager at Galignani, an English-language bookshop here. “It’s the vision of a revisited France, adapted to the American taste, at a time when tastes were lifeless,” she said.

Identity Rage?

Sullivan writes:

For the first time in 16 years, the South does not have a native president in the White House. For the first time in 45 years, we have a Democrat not from the South in the White House. In trying to understand the passion and hysteria and anger out there, this may be worth taking into account.

Does this matter?  And how much?  Obama is able to drive some people to rage for reasons that appear to be non-reality based.  Indeed, my wife learned last week that one of our CT neighbors believes Obama is a socialist radical leading the country to ruin.  My wife couldn't figure out where this was coming from, while at the same time trying to escape the conversation. 

Imogen Heap's latest album is out

See NPR. I like her in general, but I've not heard much of this album yet.  I know, Heap isn't obscure:

Ellipse was released in the United Kingdom on 24 August, and in the United States on 25 August. The album debuted at the number 5 position on the Billboard Top 200 album chart. It debuted at number 1 on the digital/electronic chart, number 3 on the Alternative and number 4 on the rock chart. In addition the album debuted at number 4 in Canada and number 39 in the United Kingdom.

Ah, the whole album is up for streaming on Heap's web site:

If you tell a lie

More Blame Sally

Mostly just testing this posting format...I have been wondering about how to post music.

Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism

I was reminded of the role of ancient Crete in the modern mind recently when I was trying to read a children's book about natural catastrophes to the kids.  The peaceful, matriarchal and prosperous Minoans were contrasted with our ancestors, the violent, patriarchal and backward people of Mycenaean Greece.  Which sort of seems like it can't be the whole story...kid #1 in particular called the whole thing 'boring.'

From the reviews I've skimmed so far Cathy Gere's Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism seems like it could be a good read, the sort of book I enjoy if it manages to stay nuanced and avoid its own version of essentialism.  Just good descriptions of what actually happened in the construction of the image of ancient Minoan civilization would be what I want, that's the interesting part we can actually find out about. 

From the start of the NYRB's review:

The masterpieces of Minoan art are not what they seem. The vivid frescoes that once decorated the walls of the prehistoric palace at Knossos in Crete are now the main attraction of the Archaeological Museum in the modern city of Heraklion, a few miles from the site of Knossos. Dating from the early or mid-second millennium BC, they are some of the most famous icons of ancient European culture, reproduced on countless postcards and posters, T-shirts and refrigerator magnets: the magnificent young "prince" with his floral crown, walking through a field of lilies; the five blue dolphins patrolling their underwater world between minnows and sea urchins; the three "ladies in blue" (a favorite Minoan color) with their curling black hair, low-cut dresses, and gesticulating hands, as if they have been caught in mid-conversation. The prehistoric world they evoke seems in some ways distant and strange—yet, at the same time, reassuringly recognizable and almost modern.

The truth is that these famous icons are largely modern. As any sharp-eyed visitor to the Heraklion museum can spot, what survives of the original paintings amounts in most cases to no more than a few square inches. The rest is more or less imaginative reconstruction, commissioned in the first half of the twentieth century by Sir Arthur Evans, the British excavator of the palace of Knossos (and the man who coined the term "Minoan" for this prehistoric Cretan civilization, after the mythical King Minos who is said to have held the throne there). As a general rule of thumb, the more famous the image now is, the less of it is actually ancient.

From the end:

The final act in this drama, however, has seen a strange reversal. Soon after the 1960s, when the Minoans had been conscripted into the popular imagination as a prehistoric version of hippie culture (lilies pointing to the ancient equivalent of flower power), the archaeological mood changed. Some controversial discoveries close to Knossos of children's bones (carrying suspicious marks of butchery) raised the nasty possibility that the peace-loving Minoans had actually been human sacrificers. New research projects in the 1970s and 1980s focused on the networks of roads and fortifications with which the prehistoric elite of the palace of Knossos had strictly controlled their home territory—while scholarly attention also turned to the high- quality state-of-the-art weaponry that had generally been ignored in favor of Evans's "lustral areas," "bull dancers," "saffron gatherers," and lilies. So much for the pax Minoica.

Finally, I have always wondered about the cultural context in which Bachofen's 1861 Mutterrecht, matriarchal ancient Crete got a whole chapter, could become a path breaking work with wide influence.  It would be good to know more. 

My iTunes Playlist

How did Blame Sally's If you Tell a Lie [oops, that is a live version I don't like (yet) -- ah, here is the version I like] end up on my iTunes playlist? BTW, seems Blame Sally puts all their albums up on the web and they will play through without any annoyances. 

Transportation Safety Museum

The rest of my family went to the National Air & Space Museum on the Mall yesterday and we all went to the National Air & Space Museum in Chantilly, VA this afternoon.  One thought my wife came up with is that there ought to be a Transportation Safety Museum that concentrates on land transport and aircraft crashes.  If well done it could be a great museum.  Auto, truck, train and aircraft wreckage.  Are there collectors for this?  What happens to this wreckage now? 

Harrison Ford's Family

via Sullivan

A Book

via Cowen, from a review of Vollman's Imperial (which is about California's Imperial County):

Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange.

Who do you work for?

Ezra Klein writes:

Time's Justin Fox on Goldman Sachs:

So yes, it's fair (if unpleasant) to liken Goldman, as Taibbi does, to a "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money," but that's true of all investment banks and a lot of hedge funds too. Goldman's just better at it.

Definitely something your parents would be proud of.

Well, a few years ago my mother did stop telling her social circle who I worked for.  And my new employer looks like it is also one of the more hated entities in the world, though no Goldman or AIG.  And thinking about it, I don't think I've ever been employed by an institution that isn't regarded by quite a few people as too arrogant and too wealthy.  Who knows, maybe I'll still end up at Goldman or the IMF at some point...

No Candid Shots

Runner's World does a spread with Sarah Palin. (via -- who else? -- Sullivan.)

Update #1: not quite Jeff Koons, but getting there.   Any more appropriate comparisons?  This is art. 

Bing Crosby

The WSJ writes in a review of Perfecting Sound Forever:

[By] the 1960s the record business was engaged in the wholesale manipulation of sound, an advance made possible by the Nazi invention of magnetic tape. The Magnetophon machine that enabled sound to be cut, spliced and edited without loss of verisimilitude was stolen at the end of World War II from a German radio studio by a G.I. named Jack Mullin. Shipped home to California, Mullin persuaded Bing Crosby, who suffered stage fright on live radio, that he could pre-record his show and put it out undiminished on air.

Wiki has a longer version of the story.  Crosby's importance seems to be that he was a high visibility beta tester and an investor in the technology.  What seems puzzling to me is the long lag between AEG bringing out the first machine in Germany in 1935 and the US use in 1947. 

Market Declines on Michael Jackson Death

My wife commenting on the stock market opening just now. 

Proof

Watched Proof with my wife -- I mostly enjoyed seeing the U of Chicago on the big screen -- and took high iso photos of the TV room/play room landscape.   

Harvard eliminates the hot breakfast

The Crimson summarizes the cost cutting:

Noting that about a third of undergraduates eat breakfast and the University would save $900,000 as a result of the cut, the administration decided to keep only Annenberg open for hot breakfast during weekdays next year.

I thought this was a joke when I first heard about it earlier this week.  I'm with the student The Crimson quotes in the same story:

Brianne M. Farrar ’10, a resident of Lowell House, says she was “personally mad” about the reductions to hot breakfast because she usually looks “forward to eating eggs every morning.”

As far as I recall I ate a warm breakfast most days at Harvard and I'd would feel deprived if I couldn't do so.  Stomping down to Annenberg -- what Memorial Hall is now called -- just isn't quite what you want to do on a normal morning.  Who has the time? 

Update #1: as cost savings go, this is about $150 per student, or $1 per weekday in the term, or $3 per student who eats breakfast.  I'd hazard that most Harvard students who eat breakfast would be up for paying $3 per meal to eat a hot breakfast.  So this seems like a crazy cut.  Time to get paranoid about the administration...

Do any other first or second tier private colleges do this?  Hm, Yale seems to now follow this model, with one central hot breakfast and cold breakfast in most dorms.  But the Yale Campus is more compact.  Still, pretty shocking to me.  This has to lead to more microwaves in student rooms.   

Update #2: David comments:

I don't know, but I think there are bigger things to get upset about. Hot breakfast is nice, but it's not that big a deal, is it? I'm in too much of a hurry to eat much in the morning. Just something cold in the car with coffee most of the time. I think most people do that. The kids are happy with cereal or oatmeal. I always thought the hot breakfast thing was extravagant. Do you really need sausages and french toast on weekdays?

I don't know, is 'need' the right criteria here?  You don't need a warm dinner either, you could just do bread and cold cuts most days.  Meat isn't needed either.  So lots of adults commute and eat in the car --- why impose that associated food habits on college students?  I can see consolidating hot breakfast by eliminating it in half the dining halls, but I don't see going beyond that. 

Update #3: Doug comments:

Given the distance from, say, Leverett or Mather House to Mem Hall, this seems essentially to put hot breakfast off the menu, so to speak, for about 70 percent of the undergraduate population.

And while I don't typically cook a hot breakfast at home, this is a bit of a slippery slope argument. I also frequently eat a cold lunch -- just a sandwich or some bread and cheese -- but I would be reluctant to use that as an argument for eliminating hot meals at lunch in the dining halls. Don't forget that 20-year-olds have fairly different appetites and food needs from middle-aged geeks... And I agree that it's hard to understand why you wouldn't leave this as another option in the meal plans.

If the solvency of the university depends on cost-cutting measures like this, surely something is badly wrong??

Christian Bale destroys Terminator: Salvation

How does this sort of thing happen?  Aren't there enough male actors who can carry this role?  Do they really need Bale or someone like him to raise the money to make this film?  This is a Terminator sequel, it ought to raise money pretty much just by existing. 

Christopher Orr writes:

Why was Terminator: Salvation so dull? And why, in particular, was Christian Bale's John Connor so emphatically uninteresting? Chud.com explains:

Like in the franchise itself, history has been changed, and the original script for Terminator: Salvation ended up getting gutted.... The biggest change came when [director] McG flew to the UK to talk to Christian Bale about starring in the fourth Terminator movie. The director wanted the Batman star to play Marcus Wright, the cyborg protagonist of the script. But Bale focused on another part: John Connor. The only problem is that John Connor had about three minutes of screen time in the entire film; most of Connor's moments were played offscreen. In the original script John Connor was the secretive leader of the Resistance. He lived on the HQ sub, and almost no one saw his face, so as to keep him hidden from the robots. Connor made radio addresses and existed as a legend for the fighting men and women of the Resistance, but in the original script Connor didn't show up onscreen until the last minutes of the movie.... [Bale] had something else up his sleeve: massive rewrites to beef up the John Connor role....

The script that ended up getting shot never quite finds anything for John Connor to do. If you were to remove Connor from the film, relegating him once again to radio voice over, almost none of the film's plot would be changed. It's likely that the new Connor scenes were the work of Jonathan Nolan, who did do a lot of writing on the film, but who was denied credit by the WGA. The reason would be that all of the work Nolan did was cosmetic - adding Connor scenes that had no bearing on the film's structure or plot.

There's a good deal more for any readers interested, including the considerably bolder (though highly problematic) ending that also wound up getting scrapped.

Not sure this is the whole story....

Video recommendations?

I may have 300 DVDs in my Netflix que, but there is no DVD I really want to see, except for German videos that don't seem to be available (and I'm not sure I'd like to see those if I could get my hands on them).  Any suggestions?   Somehow the entertainment industry seems to be failing me.  Okay, I would be happy with some nature videos, if good, that I probably could find.  Anything beside that?  I've tried looking in the obvious places like on Metacritic, but it hasn't helped much. 

The kids got to watch Ella Enchanted and the first Spy Kids this weekend, making it a pretty DVD heavy week so far. 

Update #1: David comments

We got into a Netflix documentary phase. There are lots of good ones. I presume you've seen Spellbound and 49 Up (and the whole Up series). My Flesh and Blood was good. Born into Brothels was great. The Planet Earth and Galapagos nature flix were good. The Boys of Baraka was good. Hearts and Minds was a classic.

Ascension Thursday

One of the great days of the Christian calendar.  And a work day right here...

Script Writing

via Conor Friedersdorf, Chuck Klosterman reports on Val Kilmer who is thinking about running for governor of New Mexico:

He's weird in ways that are expected, and he's weird in ways that are not. I anticipated that he might seem a little odd when we talked about acting, mostly because a) Kilmer is a Method actor, and b) all Method actors are insane. However, I did not realize how much insanity this process truly required. That started to become clear when I asked him about The Doors and Wonderland, two movies in which Kilmer portrays acutely self-destructive drug addicts. Late in Wonderland, he wordlessly (and desperately) waits for someone to offer him cocaine in a manner that seems excruciatingly authentic. I ask if he ever went through a drug phase for real. He says no. He says he's never freebased cocaine in his life but that he understands the mind-set of addiction. The conversation evolves into a meditation on the emotional toll that acting takes on the artist. I ask him about the "toll" that he felt while making the 1993 western Tombstone. He starts talking about things that happened to Doc Holliday. I say, "No, no, you must have misunderstood me. I want to know about the toll it took on you." He says, "I know, I'm talking about those feelings." And this is the conversation that follows:

Me: You mean you think you literally had the same experience as Doc Holliday?

Kilmer: Oh, sure. It's not like I believed that I shot somebody, but I absolutely know what it feels like to pull the trigger and take someone's life.

You understand how it feels to shoot someone as much as a person who has actually committed a murder?

I understand it more. It's an actor's job. A guy who's lived through the horror of Vietnam has not spent his life preparing his mind for it. He's some punk. Most guys were borderline criminal or poor, and that's why they got sent to Vietnam. It was all the poor, wretched kids who got beat up by their dads, guys who didn't get on the football team, couldn't finagle a scholarship. They didn't have the emotional equipment to handle that experience. But this is what an actor trains to do. I can more effectively represent that kid in Vietnam than a guy who was there.

I don't question that you can more effectively represent it, but that's not the same thing. If you were talking to someone who's in prison for murder and the guy said, "Man, it really fucks you up to kill another person," do you think you could reasonably say, "I completely know what you're talking about"?

Oh yeah. I'd know what he's talking about.

Let's say someone made a movie about you--Val Kilmer--and they cast Jude Law in the lead role. By your logic, wouldn't this mean that Jude Law--if he succeeded in the role--would therefore understand what it means to be Val Kilmer more than you do?

No, because I'm an actor. The people in those other circumstances don't have the self-knowledge.

Well, what if it were a movie about your young life, before you became an actor?

I guess I'd have to say yes.

Okay, so let's assume you had been given the lead role in The Passion of the Christ. Would you understand the feeling of being crucified as much as Jesus?

Well, I just played Moses [in a theatrical version of TheTen Commandments]. Of course.

So you understand the experience of being Moses? Maybe I'm just taking your words too literally.

No, I don't think so. That's what acting is.

I keep asking Kilmer if he is joking, and he swears he is not. However, claiming that he's not joking might be part of the joke. A few weeks later, I paraphrased the preceding conversation to Academy Award--winning conspiracy theorist Oliver Stone, the man who directed Kilmer in 1991's The Doors and 2004's Alexander. He did not find our exchange surprising. "This has always been the issue with Val," Stone said via cell phone as his son drove him around Los Angeles. "He speaks in a way that is propelled from deep inside, and he doesn't always realize how the things he says will sound to other people. But there is a carryover effect from acting. You can never really separate yourself from what you do, and Val is ultrasensitive to that process."

via Fallows:

Canon is at the 10 million mark for its Digital SLR camera production, having started in 2003.  Which should put total world production for all brands at about 25 million.  Canon may now be behind Nikon in product quality...still, 25 million DSLRs or even 30 million worldwide isn't that much for an essential gadget, especially with many consumers owning more than one and upgrading every 2-3 years. 

Both a large and a small user base, depending on how one looks at it. 

Impressive protests in Strasbourg.  (updating Spring and Obama come to Germany)  Well, we'll see how well the joint German-French planning works. It will also be interesting to see how the criminal justice system deals with this.  So far the reports were that protest turn out was low and mostly unmotivated (which these photos may reflect), at least on the German side. Probably not the sort of images that will hurt Sarkozy or Merkel electorally. 

Sarah Palin's family continues to deliver the gossip.  via TPM. 

From Zaz Hollander in Wasilla:

Todd Palin’s half-sister was arrested Thursday after police say she broke into a Wasilla home for the second time this week to steal money.

Palin is the husband of Gov. Sarah Palin. He declined comment.

Diana Palin, 35, entered a home near Wasilla’s Multi-Use Sports Complex and attempted to steal cash from the owner’s bedroom, police said.

She also broke into the same house on Tuesday and stole $400, they said.

She was arrested Thursday morning on felony charges of first-degree burglary and misdemeanor charges of criminal trespass and theft, police said. Friday morning, she remained jailed at Mat-Su Pretrial Facility in Palmer in lieu of $10,000 bail and court-approved third party custodian.

Meanwhile, Levi Johnson, ex-fiance of Bristol Palin and father of Sarah Palin's grandchild, is doing the talk show circuit. 

Palin family spokeswoman Meghan Stapleton said Bristol Palin was unaware Johnston would be appearing on "The Tyra Banks Show," along with his mother, Sherry, and sister, Mercede.

"We're disappointed that Levi and his family, in a quest for fame, attention and fortune, are engaging in flat-out lies, gross exaggeration, and even distortion of their relationship," Stapleton said in a statement Friday.

Stapleton has said Bristol Palin isn't preventing anyone from seeing the baby, and that Johnston sees his son "whenever he wants, the family sees the baby whenever they want."

A paean to modern German boardgames in Wired.  Maybe something to look into to play with the kids, something less wearisome for adults than many traditional boardgames.  So far only memory and mancala are board-like games the kids and I all enjoy. 

Very funny.
Also the full episode. 

Method Acting Or Val Kilmer is running for Governor

via Conor Friedersdorf, Chuck Klosterman reports on Val Kilmer who is thinking about running for governor of New Mexico:

He's weird in ways that are expected, and he's weird in ways that are not. I anticipated that he might seem a little odd when we talked about acting, mostly because a) Kilmer is a Method actor, and b) all Method actors are insane. However, I did not realize how much insanity this process truly required. That started to become clear when I asked him about The Doors and Wonderland, two movies in which Kilmer portrays acutely self-destructive drug addicts. Late in Wonderland, he wordlessly (and desperately) waits for someone to offer him cocaine in a manner that seems excruciatingly authentic. I ask if he ever went through a drug phase for real. He says no. He says he's never freebased cocaine in his life but that he understands the mind-set of addiction. The conversation evolves into a meditation on the emotional toll that acting takes on the artist. I ask him about the "toll" that he felt while making the 1993 western Tombstone. He starts talking about things that happened to Doc Holliday. I say, "No, no, you must have misunderstood me. I want to know about the toll it took on you." He says, "I know, I'm talking about those feelings." And this is the conversation that follows:

Me: You mean you think you literally had the same experience as Doc Holliday?

Kilmer: Oh, sure. It's not like I believed that I shot somebody, but I absolutely know what it feels like to pull the trigger and take someone's life.

You understand how it feels to shoot someone as much as a person who has actually committed a murder?

I understand it more. It's an actor's job. A guy who's lived through the horror of Vietnam has not spent his life preparing his mind for it. He's some punk. Most guys were borderline criminal or poor, and that's why they got sent to Vietnam. It was all the poor, wretched kids who got beat up by their dads, guys who didn't get on the football team, couldn't finagle a scholarship. They didn't have the emotional equipment to handle that experience. But this is what an actor trains to do. I can more effectively represent that kid in Vietnam than a guy who was there.

I don't question that you can more effectively represent it, but that's not the same thing. If you were talking to someone who's in prison for murder and the guy said, "Man, it really fucks you up to kill another person," do you think you could reasonably say, "I completely know what you're talking about"?

Oh yeah. I'd know what he's talking about.

Let's say someone made a movie about you--Val Kilmer--and they cast Jude Law in the lead role. By your logic, wouldn't this mean that Jude Law--if he succeeded in the role--would therefore understand what it means to be Val Kilmer more than you do?

No, because I'm an actor. The people in those other circumstances don't have the self-knowledge.

Well, what if it were a movie about your young life, before you became an actor?

I guess I'd have to say yes.

Okay, so let's assume you had been given the lead role in The Passion of the Christ. Would you understand the feeling of being crucified as much as Jesus?

Well, I just played Moses [in a theatrical version of TheTen Commandments]. Of course.

So you understand the experience of being Moses? Maybe I'm just taking your words too literally.

No, I don't think so. That's what acting is.

I keep asking Kilmer if he is joking, and he swears he is not. However, claiming that he's not joking might be part of the joke. A few weeks later, I paraphrased the preceding conversation to Academy Award--winning conspiracy theorist Oliver Stone, the man who directed Kilmer in 1991's The Doors and 2004's Alexander. He did not find our exchange surprising. "This has always been the issue with Val," Stone said via cell phone as his son drove him around Los Angeles. "He speaks in a way that is propelled from deep inside, and he doesn't always realize how the things he says will sound to other people. But there is a carryover effect from acting. You can never really separate yourself from what you do, and Val is ultrasensitive to that process."

Obama Photography

via Fallows:

Canon produces its 10millionth DSLR

Canon is at the 10 million mark for its Digital SLR camera production, having started in 2003.  Which should put total world production for all brands at about 25 million.  Canon may now be behind Nikon in product quality...still, 25 million DSLRs or even 30 million worldwide isn't that much for an essential gadget, especially with many consumers owning more than one and upgrading every 2-3 years. 

Both a large and a small user base, depending on how one looks at it. 

Over the River in France

Impressive protests in Strasbourg.  (updating Spring and Obama come to Germany)  Well, we'll see how well the joint German-French planning works. It will also be interesting to see how the criminal justice system deals with this.  So far the reports were that protest turn out was low and mostly unmotivated (which these photos may reflect), at least on the German side. Probably not the sort of images that will hurt Sarkozy or Merkel electorally. 

'Todd Palin's half-sister arrested for burglary'

Sarah Palin's family continues to deliver the gossip.  via TPM. 

From Zaz Hollander in Wasilla:

Todd Palin’s half-sister was arrested Thursday after police say she broke into a Wasilla home for the second time this week to steal money.

Palin is the husband of Gov. Sarah Palin. He declined comment.

Diana Palin, 35, entered a home near Wasilla’s Multi-Use Sports Complex and attempted to steal cash from the owner’s bedroom, police said.

She also broke into the same house on Tuesday and stole $400, they said.

She was arrested Thursday morning on felony charges of first-degree burglary and misdemeanor charges of criminal trespass and theft, police said. Friday morning, she remained jailed at Mat-Su Pretrial Facility in Palmer in lieu of $10,000 bail and court-approved third party custodian.

Meanwhile, Levi Johnson, ex-fiance of Bristol Palin and father of Sarah Palin's grandchild, is doing the talk show circuit. 

Palin family spokeswoman Meghan Stapleton said Bristol Palin was unaware Johnston would be appearing on "The Tyra Banks Show," along with his mother, Sherry, and sister, Mercede.

"We're disappointed that Levi and his family, in a quest for fame, attention and fortune, are engaging in flat-out lies, gross exaggeration, and even distortion of their relationship," Stapleton said in a statement Friday.

Stapleton has said Bristol Palin isn't preventing anyone from seeing the baby, and that Johnston sees his son "whenever he wants, the family sees the baby whenever they want."

Boardgames

A paean to modern German boardgames in Wired.  Maybe something to look into to play with the kids, something less wearisome for adults than many traditional boardgames.  So far only memory and mancala are board-like games the kids and I all enjoy. 

Popular Culture

Very funny.
Also the full episode.