The Royal Society has put 60 historic papers on line for free public access. It is available here.
Franklin's paper about his experiments with lightning and Newton's with color components in white light appear to be well worth a visit.
Check out the new PHD Comics offering: Buzzwords!
This clearly shows the evolving importance of various research topics. By the way, a big part of the "Carbon" peak would be due to the "nano" peak: Carbon Nanotubes.
Also, anyone from my generation has to be amused to see "blog" passing "postmodern" in the post-postmodern era.
The Prisoner returns on Sunday on AMC.
Can it match what Patrick McGoohan created (all of the old episodes are available) back in 1967?
Only time will tell, but I rather like the updated version of The Village, with what look like the twin towers in the background. It has that ticky-tacky ersatz village feel one can see in the real town of Seaside, where "The Truman Show" was filmed.
It might also help that they pulled it into just 6 episodes. The original was a bit much for the casual viewer!
Time to post something amusing about educational outcomes and testing.
The british are complaining that math exams are getting easier while a separate article looked at how science exams were being dumbed down. The latter is particularly interesting because they slipped some 50 year old questions in among contemporary ones on a chemistry exam. This classic bit of exam norming was a real wakeup call.
But the best part?
Both articles contain links to old exam questions!
One of the conclusions in the article was not too surprising to me. "Experts who have been looking at the results concluded that students today are required to do fewer complex calculations." Less critical thinking has been the norm, but I think that statement is true even for my exams today compared to some I still have from the past. I am more likely to ask easily graded pieces of a problem rather than a complex problem where a class of 50 students might come up with 35 different answers resulting from 20 different mistakes. However, my exams today are getting harder as I find ways to challenge them while still being able to grade the problems in a reasonable time.
The lead in this article says "unemployment could crack 10%. I have little doubt of that, because passing an inflection point in unemployment only means we are on our way to a turn around, not that we are there already. I'd be surprised if monthly unemployment numbers for this depression fail to reach 10%, and not too surprised if they surpass those for the worst recession in my memory -- which was 10.8% (quarterly average of 10.7%) in late 1982.
Why?
The change in the slope seen between my first post on the subject in June and my most recent post in October is indicative of a turnover, but there are indicators that it will coast upward for a few more months.
As another recent article put it, the pace of layoffs is slowing ... which means there are still layoffs and that means unemployment is still growing. The weekly claims are falling -- but are still high at 500,000. As currently shown on this page, where the employment and unemployment numbers will appear on Friday, job cuts peaked in January (the inflection point?) but we are still losing jobs.
Except for changes as people drop off of the unemployment rolls, which becomes less likely as Congress again funds an extension of unemployment benefits, we need to see job growth -- not just jobs saved -- before the unemployment rate turns around.
That is bad news for the new Republican governor of NJ, who is clearly hoping that an Obama recovery will make it possible for him to cut taxes, eliminate an 8 billion dollar deficit, and balance his budget without draconian cuts in education, medical care for elderly in nursing homes, and public safety.
Today is the ninth anniversary of 10/12.
Lots of people commented on 9/11, including myself and some other bloggers I follow, echoing the media emphasis on that important and memorable event. But the media gets it wrong when they assert that it was Al Qaeda's second attack on US territory. It was the fourth. And it says something sad about us as a nation that we give more importance to an attack on a civilian office building than one that left dozens of our servicemen either killed or wounded.
I am, of course, talking primarily about the attack on the USS Cole on 10/12/2000, which killed 17 sailors and left 39 others wounded. (The other event I allude to was "8/7", the attack on two US embassies on 8/7/1998. Embassies, like US flagged military vessels, are considered sovereign US territory.) Al Qaeda's first attack on the World Trade Center was not viewed as an act of war. Oddly, even their attack on a US naval warship was not viewed as an act of war. Even more oddly, it was their second attack on the World Trade Center -- not the simultaneous attack on the Pentagon and/or the White House and probably the Capitol -- that got recognized as an act of war.
This attack on our warship is so far off of our cultural radar that, when I alluded to this event on Dean Dad's blog last week, even my reference to "naval warships" left him scratching his head about 10/12, thinking I was talking about Hitler rather than Japan. No, I was not talking about Japan invading China or Germany invading Poland or France. I was talking about Japan attacking US Navy ships while in port at what was then US colonial territory (Hawaii) as well as on the seas in and around another US colony (the Philippines). Al Qaeda attacked a US Navy warship visiting a port in Yemen, almost a full year before it attacked the Pentagon. Both attacks on naval vessels provided an abundantly clear indication that they were at war with us, whether we liked it or not. Some might argue that both were wars of "choice", we could have chosen to let Japan control the Pacific as its own private lake and we could have disengaged completely from the middle east (including Saudi Arabia and Israel), but neither were likely choices for us to make.
Al Qaeda's timing was perfectly bad, by the way.
They hit a pair of embassies in the summer of 1998, when the US was totally preoccupied with a sex scandal and the subsequent impeachment of the President. The Clinton administration, weakened as it was by those events, seemed to view it as an isolated act of terror rather than part of a growing campaign against the US. That view seemed to be shared by the professionals in the DoD and CIA, as reflected in the refusal to attack bin Laden when we had him in our sights.
They hit the USS Cole in the late stages of the 2000 Presidential campaign, and the information about the connections to Al Qaeda were developed during the interregnum period that included a delayed handover because of the contentious recount in Florida. The report of the 9/11 Commission makes it pretty clear that the Clinton administration, having been unable to get the CIA and DoD to attack bin Laden himself for previous acts of war, did not even try to push that point during its last weeks in office. It also makes it very clear that the Bush administration seemed to think that those were attacks on the Clinton administration rather than on the United States, blowing off the new information developed in December and January by the FBI and others.
Forgetting the USS Cole seems typical of the way we have, as a nation, downplayed the significance of the war against Al Qaeda in response to its war against us. We had 8 years of the Bush administration talking about how much it cares about US servicemen, yet they did nothing when 17 of them were killed by Al Qaeda and continued to do nothing when reports surfaced that the same people were planning more of the same. When they complained that Oh, we didn't think they would attack the US, all I could think was What do you think a ship flying the US flag is, if not part of the US? Did Bush and Cheney really think it would be no big deal if Al Qaeda sunk more ships?
The people questioning the war in Afghanistan need to remember that there is at least one target on their list that they haven't hit yet, the Capitol, and that past history says they will not rest until they carry out their plans ... unless we stop them first. We need to remember 10/12, or 9/11 won't be the last we hear from Al Qaeda.
Two recent articles got me wondering about college economics when facing tight budget years, a news story in IHE about San Joaquin Delta College, pointed to by Dean Dad, and an off-hand comment by Dean Dad claiming "My cc loses money on every student."
This, and much of the discussion about Delta, made no sense to me at first.
How can you lose money by enrolling more students?
Then I discovered that Delta College only gets $26 per credit hour in tuition (in a semester system)! Mind bogglingly low. Almost free! Based on that, I could begin to believe statements like the one Dean Dad made. Nonetheless, that funding system is so alien to me that it is no wonder that people can make blanket comments that look like total nonsense to educators in one state while seeming quite reasonable to those in another state or region. At my CC, we profit from extra students and take a serious private-college-like approach to attracting and retaining those extra students.
Why the difference between Dean Dad's school and ours?
Well, I don't actually know if there is a difference - because Dean Dad has never produced even a crude outline of his college's income structure within something like the normalized college budget I suggested and then modeled with a sample budget for my CC. However, I do know what is going on at Delta College:
Out of every 10.0 million dollars in the budget, they get 5.9 million from the state, 2.7 from local property taxes, 0.5 from tuition, and the other 0.9 from a variety of sources that includes 0.5 from the federal government. Compare that to our budget: 5.9 from the state, 3.9 from tuition, and 0.2 from other sources.
That explains quite a lot!
I won't give our specific tuition level, but suffice it to say that it is more than twice what Delta students pay. Based on what I can discern from obscure collective bargaining documents, their full-time faculty are paid quite a bit more than ours are (but not enough to make up for the housing differences) while their adjuncts make somewhat more (but not much more) than ours do. The faculty salaries explain the very high classroom body counts, but those are sunk costs that are (like ours) covered by state funds. They don't impact the cost of adding an extra 100 students to the college's enrollment.
What does matter is the ratio between adjunct pay and tuition. If we have to add a section, our tuition appears to more than pay for the adjunct's salary once we get 12 to 15 students enrolled. (I don't know what other per-class costs, such as copying exams and the like, add up to. I do know that FICA and Medicare adds almost 10% to it, however.) My guess is that Delta needs more than 32, getting close to their normal load of 39, to break even on salary for a typical adjunct. But that is just salary! Add in FICA and other direct costs, and they lose money even with a full class. Working on the margin, when you might open a class with only 20 students during the last week of registration, they lose money and we profit.
Worse, their state income is set by enrollment but capped at a fixed value. That means they can get less but can never get more. Our state funds are based on a far more predictable formula.
PS -
If you are interested in some data related to the rising cost of tuition vis-a-vis state funding, you might look at this old article based on actual data for an R1 university. It is only one story of many, but it shows that very little of the growth in tuition (only $1500 of the $7000 increase) is due to reduced state funding (in constant current dollars).
The September unemployment data bring to a close another "quarter", so we now have an additional data point to compare to the naive projections made back when the incoming administration was hoping this was going to be a recession rather than the depression (four quarters of negative GDP growth) it turned out to be. [I figure "The Mortgage Panic of 2008" will make a good name for the triggering event.]
With that point, the inflection point is much clearer: 
Click on the image to enlarge it significantly.
I emphasize the quarterly average because that was what was used in the original predictions, but also because it smooths out the noise in the monthly data.
The monthly data are still very noisy, but the break away from the rapid and accelerating ascent that had started a year earlier is much clearer now than it was just three months ago. The green and pink lines are explained below. [*] The noise is probably a result of the unseasonable timing of various things, whether it is the stimulus of car sales in what is normally an off season for car sales or the layoffs of teachers in the fall when they would normally be hired.
Unemployment is still going up, just not as fast as it had been. It is starting to turn over, but it doesn't look like it has turned over. It will go up a lot more when people re-enter the work force once they see jobs appear.
But the good news from this end is that I have finally seen an actual stimulus-funded construction project putting people to work. (I saw a lot more in another state, one that must have had a lot of projects ready to go, while traveling recently.) It just got started, so the stimulus effects are running about 8 months behind the starting point for that program.
Time will tell if it is enough.
As to which prediction curve applies, well, that would require correcting them so they follow the Q1 2009 data point rather than the optimistic estimate used back in late December of 2008.
[*]
The green and pink lines were described in detail elsewhere in the "Predictions" section.
The green line is a straight-line extrapolation (zero curvature) based on Q3 2008 and Q4 2008. It shows that the original blue predictions of the transition team assumed a recovery was already in progress by Q1 2009.
The pink lines are a pair of extrapolations from the actual Q1 2009 data point and the Q4 2008 point. The lower line is a straight line extrapolation (zero curvature), while the higher one assumes a continuation of the acceleration of job loss (positive curvature) that took place in the previous quarters of 2008.
Tagging this as "music" is a bit of a stretch, but ...
... this morning the folks on Squawk Box on MSNBC used a mashup of the now legendary Animal Orchesra with "We're All Water" by the Plastic Ono Band to lead in their "stocks to watch" segment at 7:55 AM today.
It was done so the Animal Orchestra clip led into Yoko Ono screaming. This was genius, because it was quite clear that a trio of beluga whales accompanied by a pair of walruses playing horns was more melodious than Yoko's truly avant-garde sound.
Today is the Autumnal (fall) Equinox, one of two days when you can tell for sure if a street you drive in the morning or evening runs due East or West! The sun is aligned with the equator today, so it truly rises in the East and sets in the West. From now on the sun will be heading south for the winter.
The equinox also has another little appreciated property: it marks the end of the day at the North pole and the dawn of a new (year-long) day at the south pole. The sun only rises and sets once a year at the poles.
It is also a day when it is easy to tell just how far off your current time (daylight savings here) is off from local "sun" time. The day is exactly 12 hours long, so sunrise and sunset should be at 6 AM and 6 PM (plus or minus some minor corrections because the Earth's orbit is elliptical rather than circular, causing the sun to appear to run fast or slow at various times of the year). If they aren't (and ours isn't even close), you can see how far your daylight has been shifted by the offset of most time zones plus daylight "savings" time.
In other news, today was also the first time I heard a Christmas Tune in a TV ad. The offender was Royal Caribbean. Definitely a sign of hard times if they are pushing holiday tours right now. On the other hand, I have seen two major signs of commercial improvement: the return of catalogs in the mail (although none of them are of the Christmas or Holiday variety), and the return of multiple pages of ads between the cover of The New Yorker and the table of contents. That mag was getting to be as thin as a local newspaper.
Looking back at 11 September 2001.
What stands out in my mind was the first anomaly that hinted that something was going on. We had not had the TV on, so I had no idea anything had happened as I headed into campus just before 9 (between the two attacks on the World Trade Center). As usual, I turned on the computer ... but it simply would not boot up properly. It was taking forever to load various shared applications off of a network server. Forever, meaning something like 15 minutes to do something that normally took less than 1 minute.
Was something wrong with the network? Yeah, people all over campus (and one just down the hall) were hammering it trying to get an update from CNN, or other news sites. When I saw what an office neighbor was trying to understand better, I also went to CNN once my machine was up.
Futility.
Just before I had to leave to teach my 10:00 class, I got lucky. I killed a page load to shortcut its failed attempts to load all the advertising crap from akamai, and managed to 2nd click to just load a single news image. Its name actually said all I needed to know: "second plane". You know what it showed.
We were under attack.
So I went and taught my morning class, which was probably a lecture about electrostatic potentials and fields. I don't recall anything about that part of the day, except that most of the students had no idea that anything had happened. (And the studies of 9-11 indicate the government was in a similar state at 10 AM.) When I got back to my office, it was clear we were likely at war. In truth, of course, we had been at war with Al Qaeda for almost a decade but only Al Qaeda was taking it seriously until that day.
The indecision on campus was amazing to see. Are classes cancelled? No. OK. And it was soon time to teach my afternoon class on classical mechanics. That was the hardest class I ever taught. But before getting down to doing physics, I told the class what was on my mind: That I had a much better idea of how my parents felt when they learned about Pearl Harbor.
Wow, did that turn out to be insightful! But it was just a good guess based on the odds that we had too much excellent data to be able recognize a totally novel method of attack as a real possibility. Novel military tactics have a long history of working really well the first time.
And I told them that saying that made me wonder if we would learn the same things about this attack that we now knew about Pearl Harbor -- that we had plenty of evidence that it was coming, and missing it was a failure of intelligence rather than of Intelligence. (I knew all of the details of our code breaking and what had been done with it in late 1942, how our code breakers knew the Japanese were breaking off negotiations before their diplomats did, but that information was so secret that the military could not be told about imminent war and be put on alert.)
By the time that class was over, it was announced that the rest of that day's classes were canceled. No labs that afternoon. Time to adjust schedules and make it work for the rest of the semester. (One of several cases that tell me I could figure out how to accommodate the disruption of H1N1 if it only led to the closing of campus for a week.) But we were back to normal only in the most limited sense.
The class that started the first semester of physics that Fall of 2001 was different from any of the others I have had. It took quite a while for them to get back in focus, and quite a few lost focus and quit. But the ones that stuck it out were serious about being ready to win that fight as engineers. That was a hard working bunch of students that year.
Ah, that was a nice vacation, getting recharged for the fall while limiting myself to commentary on other blogs. Now it is time to post this, my 400th article, before getting back to some old and new topics.
What I thought I should do is post links to some "feature" articles from the past that I think are fairly timeless in their relevance to the business and pleasure of teaching science (in my case physics) at the college level. Although I might be at a mere CC, the calculus-based physics class I teach to future engineering majors -- with a few physics majors and others wandering in at times -- is the same as it is anywhere except for some elite programs. (I use the level of the class at the top-quartile R1 where I grew up as my reference point, and that seems more than enough for the kids that transfer to Wannabe Flagship.) So here goes ...
I didn't mention telling them that they had been lied to when they were told that they were graduating with a high school knowledge of math, a detail touched on in an article about math remediation, but I should have. I actually jumped for joy when Arne Duncan said this weekend (midway down page 6 of the pdf transcript from Sunday, Sept. 6) that "In too many places I think, Bob, we are, honestly, we're lying to children. ... If a child hears they're quote-unquote 'meeting the state standard', that child, that parent, the logical assumption is, they're going to be on track to be successful. But in way too many places around the country ... they are totally inadequately prepared to be successful in higher education. That has to change. We have to stop lying to children." Too bad that did not make the talking-points sound-bite list for newspaper headlines. It got swamped by "The Hinny" (H1N1) and people who don't want other folk's children to be told to study hard, or don't want their own kids to see that the President is Black.
I'll also link to this article (because it points to a nice series by Unbalanced Reaction about taking a Visiting position) and this one (because it points to a great blog by Dr. Crazy about teaching intensive jobs from the 4-year regional university viewpoint).
There is probably more I should mention, but that will do for post number 400. OK, maybe I should stick this here at the end:
Dr. Crazy recently blogged about her impending birthday, so it is worth noting an interesting article about a study that shows that people get happier as they age.
The main lesson was summed up as follows: They found older adults generally make the best of the time they have left and have learned to avoid situations that make them feel sad or stressed.
Now there is a good principle to hold in mind as we start a new semester! It also seems to summarize my parent's approach to a long and happy retirement. Some of it certainly results from living through the death of many old and dear friends and family. The start is to spend your time like the valuable capital it is. Don't let someone else spend it for you.
So .... is there someone out there whose goal in life is to annoy you until he gets what he wants (often an unearned grade)? Refuse to play the game. Demanding e-mail? Answer it on a set schedule - your schedule. We can choose to enjoy what we do and make 09-10 a good school year.
I'm ready. Literally and figuratively. I even have my first-week concept picked out, evolved from the old "critical reading" discussions, to see if I can repair the weak foundations they have with setting up problems (starting with reading them, before they show up as problems with actual physics problems. Should be fun for everyone.
If all politics is local, so is much of economics. This picture is worth 1000 words.
Thanks to the $8,000 first-time buyer tax credit, the house across the street has sold after being vacant for more than a year. Better yet, the house next to it has also sold after also sitting vacant for more than a year. Both were sold to young, first-time home buyers who could use help with a downpayment but could move quickly because they did not have to sell a house to make the move.
Even better, my parents home finally sold after being empty for about 18 months. It also was bought by a first-time buyer. Like the two cases on our street, the seller cut the price significantly to get rid of the property, having long since moved to another place with its own expenses, so this does not signify any recovery in the price part of the market - but it has meant work for roofers, maintenance people, surveyors, and actual real income for realtors.
Along with one other sale about a block away, all of the properties up for sale in our immediate neighborhood are "gone" - and none of them were converted to rentals. That last part is a double bonus of the stimulus plan. With prices down, people with cash can pick up potential rental properties at a song. (One house on my drive to work went from "sold" to "for rent" in one day, but it is closer to the colleges.) This plan puts an owner in the house, which is a big plus for everyone around us.
So this part of the stimulus bill is working well. The only difference between it and the "cash for clunkers" program is that it isn't using appropriated dollars so there is nothing for the Republicans to complain about yet. It remains to be seen if they will complain about having to subsidize a TAX CUT for new homebuyers in the same way they criticize a rebate for people replacing a 14 mpg truck (SUV) with a 28 mpg car that will cut each individual's demand for foreign oil in half!
Any bets?
There was a very interesting column from BBC World News today. Their American Correspondent is ending an 8-year stay in this country, and writes his thoughts about America, from how we approach buying a home to a rural road in South Carolina to his view that our "anyone can get ahead" worldview is closely tied to our "carelessness" (i.e. lack of a Nanny State). Liberty is, after all, necessary for someone from the lower classes to move into the upper classes even if it also lets parents refuse to treat their child's disease.
I thought the one thing he missed was that the sub-prime mortgage crisis only brought down the rest of the world's economies because they were as greedy as we were (the exception being China, who only buys government paper), and that the housing bubble was not much different from other scams that helped create this country, including ones that brought the first settlers here.
In what is actually a related story, Raul Castro says he is not going to "reform" Cuba into a capitalist country. That's OK, it will become one as soon as the South Florida Cubans get over the fall of THEIR dictator and realize that the fastest way to bring down the Castro system is to let people visit there and spend money. That won't prop up the government, it will destroy it, one iPod at a time.
As Fareed Zakaria puts it in his book on illiberal "democracies", first security, then middle-class incomes, then democracy. China is well on its way down this path, whereas Russia (and the many failed democracies of the post-colonial era of my youth) failed because the people were too poor. That was the most fascinating bit of statistical politics in the entire book. Our isolation of Cuba, originally at the behest of former Batista allies, is keeping the Castro family in power!
The problem is not that of a standard inelastic collision, yet that is the essence of the problem: how to dissipate energy while conserving momentum, and how to reduce the acceleration of the head inside the helmet when the impulse being applied is not under your control. Complicating this is the need to keep the weight of the helmet down so that the helmet itself does not cause injury by increasing the forces on the neck in a crash (the problem that the HANS device helps solve as part of a coordinated systems approach to safety). More on the physics at the bottom of this article.
There is an excellent story on the Formula 1 website about the evolution of racing helmets, driven by the amazing survival of Felipe Massa after being hit in the helmet by a 1 kg spring that came off of Barrichello's car (at a closing speed of about 160 mph), although it doesn't give much credit where it is really due over the history of motorsport. The helmet they show Fangio wearing, which originated for use when playing polo, was similar to the one worn in a key death in the US that started the move toward today's safer helmets.
It was the Sports Car Club of America that was the first to require seat belts in automobile competition (1954), and it was an SCCA member who started the Snell Memorial Foundation in 1957 to provide testing for helmets used for automobile racing after the death of Pete Snell in a racing incident. Their page about the history of the organization and its current activities shows the crash that killed Pete Snell, discusses the physics of a crash, and shows the sort of testing that goes into certifying a helmet. The photo at the very bottom of this page shows a sample drop test of a helmet that tests for the sort of thing that happened to Massa.
The Massa incident was as close as it gets. Getting hit in the head by 1 kg spring at a relative velocity of about 160 mph would be fatal without a helmet even when the spring was deflected by the nose of the car and the bolster on the side of the cockpit. Even the helmet was put to the ultimate test, because the impact point was at the edge of the opening. You can see the effect in the AP photo that accompanies this news article. Higher resolution images of just his helmet and eye injury are available if you search "massa crash" on google images, but I don't recommend doing so.
The Physics
Some things about the collision of an object with a helmet are outside your control. The momentum of the incoming object is a given. The amount of momentum transferred to your head and helmet is somewhat under your control, but mostly depends on things like the angle of impact that you really can't do much about. Bouncing off (elastic collision) makes the momentum transfer worse for your head, so design can help a bit, but physics puts a lower limit on what engineering can do about this part of the problem.
The amount of momentum transferred to the helmet is what is called "impulse". You can reduce injury if the helmet or its lining is soft enough to increase the duration of the collision, thereby reducing the force applied to the head. This is also the job of seat belts and other safety systems, but only a helmet can protect you against the impact of an object or the road itself.
BTW, there isn't much that a helmet can do if something large (like a wheel) hits you at high speed. There are things that will kill you in motorsport. Based on one of Hemingway's rules, that is what makes car racing a sport. (If there is no chance that the animal you are hunting can kill you, he did not consider it a sport.)
The helmet has to provide an artificial skull, to protect your skull. (That means it has to be hard and strong, so it is the job of the lining to dissipate energy.) Even though the impact was right at the edge of the "eye socket", the helmet Massa was wearing did an amazing job. It appears that fragments from the helmet or visor injured his eye, although the damage could also result from a fracture as the helmet hit his head. That is the other thing the helmet has to do: absorb energy and redistribute the forces over the entire head. Massa's helmet just barely managed perform that task. He still had a fractured skull as well as a concussion from the forces that were applied to his head by the helmet.
Apparently he also had a fracture at the base of the skull (what killed Dale Earnhardt), which is supposed to be less likely with a HANS device. His roughly 120 mph impact with the tire barrier should not have produced this, as I understand the designs, so that might also have resulted from an unanticipated motion of the helmet from the spring impact. It also makes me worry about how the emergency people were moving him in the news photo I link to above!
And just to be clear:
Physics is not the entire story. Physics tells you the constraints of the problem. It tells you what physical principles apply and what forces MUST result from those principles under specified conditions. Engineering is the task of choosing materials that will handle those forces and dissipate energy without adding too much weight, so the forces that get to the head are within limits known from the analysis of deaths and injuries from past crashes. More will be learned from this one.
"The Poetry of Sarah Palin's Tweets"
If you haven't seen it ... check it out. [Sorry for the ad.]
This is seriously good stuff, although it owes a lot to William Shatner channeling the beat era Howl of Allen Ginsburg plus a very careful choice of tweets.
But what fun! What insights could we glean from this poetry?
And could it bring back beat poetry in REAL coffeehouses like I recall from my freshman year in college? Haiku, meet tweet-haiku, limited to 140 characters. A new art form!
PS -
Since the ad I am seeing is for cat owners, I'll counter it with this story about a UK cat that rides a bus.
You can't watch very much of the chattering classes on cable news without seeing the ongoing rants about whether Obama is a "natural born citizen" and eligible to be President. You can see some of the latest here.
My opinion is that they are asking these jive talking politicos the wrong question.
They should be asking these Republicans if they think John McCain is a natural born citizen eligible to be President of the United States.
You see, every Republican member of Congress was at the convention and voted to nominate McCain. If they think it is so important that we know if Obama was born in the US (not to mention all future Presidential candidates), why didn't they press that issue with McCain before nominating him? After all, there is no question at all that Sen. John Sidney McCain III was born in the Panama Canal Zone, not in one of these United States.
If being the son of a United States citizen was sufficient for them to nominate McCain, why isn't it good enough for Obama? That is the followup question for any of these solons.
Or is it possible that they were all part of a bizarre conspiracy to elect McCain, sue to have him immediately declared ineligible, thereby putting Palin in the Presidency? Then Palin gets someone like William Kristol approved by Congress as her VP, and immediately resigns because she is a lame duck. Coup complete.
Nah, that isn't possible. They are just jive talking maroons.
The news yesterday contained a horrifying story about how the US military leveled part of the ancient Babylon archaeological site. They apparently bulldozed mounds that were what remained of parts of guest palace of King Nebuchadnezzar's, damaged pottery that had cuneiform writing on it along with other items that date back over 2500 years, and carried on activities that damaged the reproduction of the Ishtar Gate at that site.
I am embarrassed that they did not know better, as one would expect from any decent humanities course or bible study in church school, but there is a precedent from World War II:
Kyoto.
Every time I happen to hear a story about Kyoto that mentions how it managed to survive the war, I wish they would tell the whole story. The people planning the bombing of Japan had no idea of its religious or historic significance, let alone the beauty of the temples that fill the city. The only reason it was not firebombed was that it had been put at the TOP of the list of places to use the first atom bomb! Hiroshima was number 2.
You see, in order to be sure we could see the effects of the bomb, we wanted to use the A bomb on a pristine city. The people in Hiroshima and several other cities were sure they had said a special prayer to have been spared the bombings, whereas the reality was they were in the cross hairs of something far worse than about 400 planes carrying explosives and incendiaries sufficient to burn tens of square miles.
But it happened that Secretary of War Stimson knew Kyoto well, and fought hard to get it off the list and to keep Gen. Lemay from bombing it with conventional weapons during the rest of the war. You can read the details in "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes. Either Groves and others were ignorant of its cultural value to the world, or they wanted to destroy it for that very reason.
One would have hoped that today's generals would know something about Babylon's history and the nature of archaeological sites, if only because this city had an important role in the Bible, but apparently not. I'd hope that humanities teachers everywhere can draw on this as a teachable moment in their classes.
Late last week, I posted my thoughts about the Gates Arrest based on the content of the police report.
Since then, we have heard the actual content of the 911 call (or, at least, significant parts that the media consider relevant, but the transcript is available from a local paper) and it raises new questions about the approach taken by the Cambridge police, both the arresting officer and the dispatcher. Indeed, when you read the transcript, it sounds like the dispatcher was doing some profiling when asking "And what do the suitcases have to do with anything?". Not even listening, it would seem, as that got turned into "backpacks" by the time the cop reported it back to us.
So, what do I think now?
First, just because the caller says she was careful about giving the race of the two men does not mean race played no role in the call since she was not the initial witness. It was another woman who had been watching what took place. However, it is clear from the call that she never even saw one of the men - probably Gates, unless she thought Prof. Gates looked Hispanic - so his race was never an issue for her. Certainly it answers my question about what she "said", because she never said what the arresting officer claimed she told him.
The important thing now is that her statements make it very clear that the story in the police report, that she told the cop that she "observed what appeared to be two black males with backpacks on the porch", was, shall we say, quite wide of the truth. She doesn't have to answer for that, but it was fun to read how the Cambridge Police Commissioner acknowledged that the police report contains a reference to race, but said the report is merely a summary of events. Wow, can you imagine a defense attorney using that to impeach the information in any report filed by that officer in the future?
But second, why was the elderly neighbor woman concerned? That was part of my earlier question, as she was the original witness, and it remains unanswered. Was she concerned because she saw dark skinned men pushing on the door? Would she have been concerned if it had been a 60 year old white man doing it with the assistance of a white Limo driver?
However, there is no question in my mind that I would want one of my neighbors to call the police if they saw something like that happening, but I think my actual neighbors (including ones who walk this area regularly) know what I look like! Similarly, I think they know that a black family lives next door and would never question a black person going into that house. (That might make my neighbors less well protected from black-on-black crime, just as it makes folks in the wealthy all-white suburbs less protected against their neighbor's kids robbing them.)
Third, there are now serious questions about the part of the police report related to the cause for the arrest. We have heard the transmissions from inside the house, and there was no indication at all that Prof. Gates was yelling loudly enough to interfere with communication. Quite the opposite. The premise given to get him out of the house was just that, a premise, based on what the police department released about the call.
Finally, the caller was pretty clear about the most likely possibility that the men lived in the house (said so more than once) and were just forcing a stuck door and that she was just calling to be on the safe side. The dispatcher made the suitcases sound ominous rather than an indication of a likely non-emergency situation, as intended by the caller.
That is something for everyone to remember: the officer responding to a request will likely be totally unaware of what was said to the 911 operator, either because it got filtered by the operator or was only partially heard while finding the way to the address in question. Assume the cop has incomplete or inaccurate information, and explain all details as if it was the first time.
So, to give a one-line answer to the question about whether an apology is in order, I think the cop owes her and the rest of us an apology.
Note added:
Forgot to include a link to this interesting analysis, which matches my view that this was about Power more than race, although I still think he was arrested for being "uppity" based on the officer's own description of his shock at not being treated as the Master and his stated concern about being shown up in front of his fellow officers.
