Tray Do

One of my alma materi, the campus of the Boneyard, is phasing out trays in its cafeterias. [Link] The excuses given for this have to do with saving money, environmental friendliness, saving money, energy conservation, saving money, reducing food wastage, and saving money.

I am not going to debate any of these reasons for the simple reason that I don’t have numbers on them so I can’t begin to make a nerdish assessment of their validity. Given the recent track record of the administration at this campus, I have my suspicions that everything but money is eye candy.

I am not a great fan of college cafeteria cuisine, a phrase whose only validity is its Agnewesque alliteration. I had more than ample experience with the cafeteria in Paty Hall on the campus of the Black Warrior, whose only food superiority was in comparison to the Morrison’s (commercial) cafeteria that parents invariably insisted on eating at when they visited their children-students. In this one institutional annecdote, I can subjective assess ‘dorm food” to be superior to corporate oligarchy food by a factor of at least 1.5.

Despite my poverty of trying to live on a teachnig assistantship, I did occasionally partake of food at the cafeteria of the Illini Union. This is not strictly a dorm cafeteria since, obviously, it is not located in a dorm, although this is not a negation since I have been on small campuses where there was a central dinig facility and it was often geographically close to the student center. Also, the Illini Union cafeteria is frequented by staff and faculty as well as students.

My visits were usually on cold days when my snake mind had convinced my primate mind that a cup of hot chocolate would be a boon. For a boy from Nawth Alibam, who had just come from four years at the campus of the Black Warrior, central Illinois in winter often seemed indistinguishable from the lowest level of Dante’s Tartarus. There was also a bit of palate rebellion here against my almost steady diet of cosmetically damaged oatmeal, IGA peanut butter on toasted, more-than-day-old bread, and cosmetically damaged Banquet TV dinners. Somehow the urge seemed to reach its climax on Thursdays which was Ruben day at the cafeteria. The prospect of that New Yawk delicacy transplanted to the midwest and made overwhelmingly gooey was somehow compelling in the same way of the first urination of the day.

The point to all this is that I, and most of the folks there, had books and paraphenalia we were carrying. This was before the day of the back pack except for those who had the thought as original and visisted the army surplus store – hence then all packs were green. And scarce since this was in the middle of the Vietnam confrontation and the union had been trashed just a term earlier by anti-war hedonists.

And because we were carrying stuff, usually a book and a notebook in my case, purses by the women, …. we needed someplace to put that stuff while we made our way down the cafeteria line to a table. Trays were a necessity not so much for carrying just food but the combination of food and other stuff. This may not be necessity in a dorm cafeteria where one has a room to store stuff in, but in a more general environment discontinuing trays is likely to have a negative impact on many people and they will look elsewhere for repast.

Thursday Thuddings

I note an article on the popularity of books on “things to do before you die”. [Link] I regret that I find this both amusing and appalling, and for the same reason. Do people really have to go read in a book (or watch an entertainment) to figure out what they would like to do before they discorporate? Makes GEICO commercials seem intellectual and superstition novel.

Next, I note, courtesy of the English press, that Dell is finally offering some boxes with Ubuntu pre-installed. [Link] Again I am unsure of whether I should well up tears of joy or pity. Dell boxes are quite well suited to linux, and Ubuntu in particular, despite the common presence of Nvidia graphics cards and horribly non-compliant wireless cards. Now if they would just explain to Hp just what a slug SLED is? Notably the article mentions not pricing so we might not be surprised at Ubuntu – zero price – boxes tagged at a higher figure than VISTA boxes. Just how much money is MegaHard giving the box manufacturers to install VISTA? Half the cost of the hardware?

There is also the not-news that Gooey’s calculator is busted. [Link] It’s also spayed and microcephalic as well. Won’t even calculate reliably zeroth order spherical Bessel functions of the first kind, and off the origin at that. If this is what Web 2.0 is all about I shall stick to client software, HP RPN calculators, and my laboratory notebook. On which note, we have determined that archival quality ink, either Noodler’s or Diamine’s, is less than 0.03 the cost of the ink in those plastic sticks sold by Bic, Papermate, Pilot, and the like.

We also tender our congratulations to Ardrey and Merlin on the recent, successful dewombification of their new offspring Ichabod. [Link] The 116 g infant is supposed doing well, being especially vocal for one of his species.

Less endearing and definitely exasperating is an article [Link] on how both the O’Bama and the son of Cain are continuing their political affiliations’ practices of either detesting or ignoring science. Perhaps we should be discontent that the Yankee nation will undoubtedly obtain the new chief executive we so richly deserve?

Kudos

I note in the Daily Illini, the student house rag of the campus of the Boneyard, that Perfesser Charley Slichter will be awarded the National Medal of Science. [Link]

Perfesser Slichter was was one of the Big Three of Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy when I was a graduate student. The other two were Herb Gutowski who was grand exalted kudzu of the chemistry shul, and Ted Rowland who was a disgruntled political wannabe in metalurgy. Charley was known for having written the best book on the subject, a slender head banger of a tome.

Well done. Well deserved.

Warning Order

SCP regrets to inform that his presence will be required the next few days at a ritual of familial transmogrification. Communication being what they are in Alibam, and demands on SCP’s time being what they undoubtedly and painfully will be, blogging will, with high probability, be minimized for the next few days.

Greater Metropolitan Arab

To quote the Kingston Trio, “in response to a diminishing number of requests,” I am doing a bit of a blot on Greater Metropolitan Arab, common called R’b (pronounced ARRub.) The name is the result of a bit of dyslexia on the part of either the local representative of the Yankee government (at the time,) a postal clerk, or the city founder, depending on which bit of folklore one subscribes to. It was supposed to be named “Arad” but the dyslexia kicked in and rotated the “d” into a “b”. Obviously that name would have been at least as unfortunate since it would be heard as “arid”.

Unfortunately, the name Arab is a bit of a disadvantage these days. The Homeland Security gestapo seem to periodically entertain the idea that a town named “Arab” must be a hotbed of terrorists and they dispatch a gaggle of agents in black General Motors SUVs with GSA plates to scour the city. Somehow the publicly available demographics that muslims comprise the third smallest minority in town, just ahead of people of Lithuanian-Tibetan heritage and Mercotians. The closest to terrorists in town are a slightly high national representation of nerds, engineers and scientists, but this is normal in Nawth Alibam and is the primary reason that the thieves politicians in Montgum would like Nawth Alibam to disappear in a gravitational singularity.

The only remaining vestige of the originally intended name is a road named for Arad Thompson which enjoys the notoriety of bing a major semi tractor route running through a residential area. This sort of paradox is typical of Arab. For example, politics in Arab seem to largely turn on attracting chain businesses and thus doubly depleting local coffers by not only removing the basic cost of goods from the community but franchise fees as well. I have actually been told by these politicians that we can only attract new residents in this manner, which quite ignores the type of people that are likely to reside here. People who have to eat in corporate or government cafeterias or fast food stands for lunch are not likely to want to eat similar fare for dinner.

Almost all of the businesses in Arab are second or third tier. Only a few primary manufacturing concerns, all diminuative, add to the top of the cash flow. So far as I can determine there are no knowledge or information industries here at all. Most of the residents are employed in Huntsville and so Arab is largely a now dying bedroom cmmunity being sapped by the rising cost of transportation. This is abetted by the local businesses who have not yet discovered Arab is a bedroom community and bieng open before and after working hours is more important than being open during working hours. Hence the continued success of chain businesses as the only game in town agter 1800 hours.

The shul system is one of the bright spots of the community, rated highly within the state. This is, of course, rather like saying one has a superior cess pool since the actual goodness of the system is something of the order of 0.1 of what Huntsville’s was in the ’50′s and ’60′s. Because the town’s political atmosphere is split between those who were born and raised in Arab, and the bedroom community commuters, the education apparat is held in high esteem by the former and low ridicule by the latter. This is reflected in the arrogant paranoia of the local teachers who seem to have considerable problems in swithcing from intimidating the children of high shul dropouts to being intimidated by the children of nerds with postgraduate degrees.

Geographically, R’b is located in Nawth Alibam.

The major transportation artery is US 231 which runs fitfully through R’b, punctuated by an inordinate number of traffic signals, none of whom have functional left turn capability. Most of the chain businesses are located on this four lane bumper carriageway and the downtown is slowly drying up as local businesses relocate to the highway. The downtown area is quite friendly, as indicated by a grave yard immediately off the center of town wherein lie many discorporate residents including several Yankee army veterans who remained after the Recent Unpleasantness to reside in Arab. Horses are generally forbidden downtown except during homecoming and christmas parades (maybe) and hence sanitation overall is excellent.

Businesses in town are about equally divided in number between chain and local firms, the latter about equally divided between real businesses and tax loss businesses that are started by the wives (usually) of commuters and are in operation only long enough to sustain the optimum tax loss before going out of business and being succeded the following year by another such.

That which we cannot Measure

I am rather gratified this morning to note that Ms. Alexa Harrington, who blog at “Educated Nation”, [Link] has returned from end-of-summer spiritual purification rituals. Evidence was presented of this by an email notifying me that she had posted a comment on one of by blots. [Link] In her inimitable manner, Ms. Harrington has struck deeply into the “I wonder” center of my brain with this comment. In particular, I reproduce here what to me are the salient parts:

Someone should do their thesis on the cycles and patterns of topics in the blogosphere.

Even Qadgop was moved by this to pause in his daily exercise of shredding sheet neutronium with his claws and tongue to trans halfway between continua in consideration.

The thought here is that one of the preliminaries to assessing “the cycles and patterns of the blogosphere” would be to develop a taxonomy of blogger and their blogs, which in turn generates the prerequisite of some assessment of whether these can be considered the one or the many since some blogs have multiple bloggers and some bloggers have multiple blogs. This vector schizophrenia aside, it has become rather apparent that some effort needs be bent to provide the blog universe (at least the part on Tellus) with some categorical taxonomy.

I should comment at this point that many of us are familiar with taxonomies. The one that comes most rapidly to mind is the one used in libraries to catalog books. The examples of this I am familiar with are the Library of Congress and the Dewey Decimal systems. In a sense these taxonomies are a map of all knowledgeable information, or at least that component that may be recorded and expressed in some variant of American English. (Both of which constraints are, of course, severely limiting.)

What we are not necessarily familiar with is the underlying theory and practice of taxonomies. I suspect most people think that some smart guy(s) sit(s) down who is broadly and deeply knowledgeable and composes a taxonomy in much the same way that we array cans of vegetables in our cupboard. This is only partly correct. There is actually a set of maths theory (and practice) for constructing and affirming taxonomies (taxonomies, like good vector spaces need righteous orthogonality.) An elementary (as in elements of, not the lowest taxonomy class of shul) presentation may be found in Dunn and Everitt’s An Introduction to Mathematical Taxonomy. One should also exercise care in applying these in situations involving practitioners of a taxonomy; I have been savaged more than once by excellent librarians driven to berserker frenzy over detailed kritik of their favorite system.

Despite this existence, we must also admit that rather few taxonomies are composed on maths grounds. Rather, they tend to grow in a Mopsyish fashion and only after they have evolved to a point where their operation is serious jepordized are they revamped using rigorous methodology. The best example of this process, to mu knowledge, is biological taxonomy which has suffered and is suffering severe trauma under the onslought of DNA measurement. Despite this stress, which leads one to enquire if it induces biologists to partake of junk food, the taxonomy of living “things” is made increasing credible and utile, at least to the view of an auslander.

To demonstrate why we have need of such in bloggery, let us consider the common, at least by myself, of the categorization of bloggers (and their blogs) based on whether there is recompense or not. In general, paid bloggers write their blogs on the part of or under the sponsership of some organization and hence have many characteristics of traditional journalists including excessive simplification. Unpaid bloggers, on the other hand, tend to be whiners in some dimension and say things as they think them. The taxonomic questions arise when we consider the cases of bloggers who have advertising on their blog sites. Are all of these paid? Or are the ones who only advertise enough to have a revenue neitral blog effectively unpaid, whiners as it were as opposed to simplistic blatherers? And are those who derive a positive cash flow paid?

I await some product of effort to develop this taxonomy. And given the time of quadriyear, it might be especially fitting if the developer were named Truman.

Unnetishness

I also had occasion this morning to listen to a podcast episode of “Future Tense”. [Link] These are five minute ‘casts, several per week, dealing with information technology/society matters, and I use them as end of session fillers when I have only a few minutes to go on my scheduled exercises. Even so, I also fall behind on these so I can’t tell you how old the ‘cast is. Its subject however, was those people who have never “connected” to the internet.

The fellow being interviewed, whose name I never got and would not have retained had I, was talking about those people who have never experienced the internet expect possibly by looking over someone’s shoulder. These are people who may use computers, but do not use them to connect to the internet, do IM or email, or the like. The demographic does not include people who use internet at work but not at home. The fraction of these people were cited as ~0.2 of the population of the Yankee republic, over half of which were people over the age of 65.

My first thought was that this may be why these people are over 65, at least based on the previous listened podcast about monkeys and junk food. My second thought was my mother who used to use a computer a bit, back before the web was wide, but she could or would not learn its use and so the computer was donated to the local library. She also declines to have a cellular phone despite the protestations of various members of the family that she needs it for emergent emergencies, which sounds redundant but is not if one considers complexity theory.

This is not to say that we do not continue to inveigle her to become a computer user, primarily because of her interest in genealogy and the grandchildren are tired of her complaining that they never visit nor write frequently enough. It should be commented this is not at all without its risks. The idea of administering my mother’s computer is frightening to say nothing of depressing, many days administering and maintaining the computers of FD SCP and my contribution to the grandchild pool is whelming.

Kibblr Management

The fitness center/gym, located in Scant City, sometimes referred to as the medical-industrial park of nawth-west Marshall county, is in a chaos. The new management is striving industriously to make the place even less user friendly than it has been, displaying emphatically that whoever designed the multipurpose facility should have been exposed immediately after birth, and that those who cannot pass a course in hotel management progress (?) downward to health management.

On a more rational level, the situation demonstrates once more that compromises are always weaker than extremes. Or in Clauswitzian terms, the overhead of friction is insatiable.

Amidst this chaos, it was particularly rewarding to have podcasts to retreat one’s concentration into. This morning, being Wednesday, was programmed for an episode of Quarks and Quirks. This was an old ‘cast since the program is on holiday, but as usual it had an interest density of ~ 0.5 unsullied by the datedness of the dialog. The stickiest piece of this was an interview with a biological type about the dietary habits of monkeys and its insights into humans.

It seems that these folks did an experiment where they took a collective of hierarchical monkeys and changed their diets to offer them their regular foodstuffs, an industrially produced and according to current lights, balanced kibble, and an alternative that was the equivalent of junk food, particularly in terms of fat content. The purpose of the experiment was largely “go and look see.” There was no food rationing, plenty of each type of foodstuff was available freely.

The outcome of the experiment, the analysis of observation, was that the incidence of consuming the “junk” kibble was inversely correlated with the position in the social hierarchy. In simple terms, the proles are the junk food and the plebs ate the balanced food. The researchers’ analysis of this was that the lower one is in the hierarchy the more stress one is under to watch out for those above one and to avoid nekulturny behavior.

Now this strikes a resonance. I have been trying to read Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms with dizzying non-success. [Link] My problem is his maths. The book is written for the popular market so all of the technical aspects have been “consumered” down to some grade shul level. Partly as a result of this, and partly because the mathematical usage of economists is WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY different from that of physical scientists (learned from trying to read refereed journal articles on dispersive things written by and for economists), I keep running into those mind thudding collisions akin to running one’s car at interstate highway sppeds into invisible telephone poles.

My biggest problem here is with “rates”. In maths terms, rates are almost always the derivative of some observable quantity with respect to some variable, that variable most often, predominantly, being parametric time. In Clark’s book, a rate appears to usually be a stochastic sample of a population taken over an interval of time normed to the size of the population. This has rather less to do with what are commonly called rates than speed has to do with velocity components, but the analogy is not meaningless and indicates how it is very difficult to read the book for any gerat length without having to divert to dissect and analyze what is meant by something that is said where the words make no sense.

This should not be taken as any disagreement with Clark, merely a statement that physicists and economists do not speak quite the same language.

But at any rate, one of the points Clark advances, based on good and widespread observation, is that historically those in the upper levels of an hierarchical society live longer (and have more children) than those in the lower level. This finding on monkeys gives some possible insight into why this occurs. It also indicates why our society is so addicted to fast/junk food.

And notably, it also gives us some advice for Generation Y individuals. This is an inducement to become a supervisor or manager. It reduces the office stress level and you will thus eat better and live longer.

The Price of Depravity

I have previously mumbled upon the matter of the cost of college textbooks. [Link] That blot was largely concerned with my experiences with textbook costs and the vacuous promises of student government organizations for reform.

In recent months of my daughter trying to finish college through a evening shul, I have become reacquainted with the world of textbook buying. As a result, I have become aware of a new shell game in academia and what appears to be an ethical lapse on the part of academics. This was largely confirmed when I found an article in my RSS feed subscriptions from the Chicago Tribune on a movement to make open source, online, no charge textbooks available. [Link]

As yet this movement is so incipient as to have no statistical weight.

I should comment that I have not taught any regular courses since I found myself as a low level manager spending more time on travel than in town and hence rather than yank about students, I stepped back from my mechanics lectures. Since then I have limited myself to teaching the occasional seminar or continuing education courses, where, of course, the text materials are either drawn from journals or are provided. I have maintained contact with colleagues who do lecture regularly and I have noticed a rather disturbing trend. Not only do updates of textbooks have expected times of a couple of years rather than ten or better, lecturers have been addicted to lecture materials provided by the textbook industry.

I will undoubtedly label myself as a member of a staid, old shul when I observe that I find this practice to be lazy and reprehensible. Lecturers who do not prepare both themselves and their materials for lecture are remiss and incompetent.

When I was a graduate student I had a few lecturers who “read the text” to us. These lecturers were soon identifies as objects of disdain, disrespect and avoidance and quickly removed from the podium by administration. They did however serve as excellent negative role models that firmly convinced myself and my fellow students that we should never commit such grievous sin ourselves. After a period of absence I have to wonder where the present state of affairs has come from, whether it is a matter of good people led into depravity or bad people substituted for good.

The fact remains that if one is an educator, a teacher, a lecturer even, one has an obligation to do the best one can to provide the student with the best information and communication one can. While this is a two way street, being a communication, neither side can abrogate or be exempted from that responsibility. It is not at all clear that teachers, lecturers, who have abandoned their own preparation for some canned drivel have not done so.

Further, there is a stewardship responsibility incumbent upon teachers and their organizations to provide good education without beggarding their students. Current textbook prices clearly fall beyond that limit. When I lectured I always chose texts with an eye to cost as well a content, and provided my students with copies of my lecture notes and references. Yes, this cost me but that was primarily paper costs that can today be avoided by electronic means. Professors who are too lazy to do this deserve neither tenure nor respect.

Frozen Stuff – Falling – From the Sky

First, we have kudos to Mary D”Souza, a graduate student at U Queensland. A Piled Higher and Deeper candidate student, she proposed wrapping Tellus bound asteroids and meteorites in reflective sheeting to use solar pressure to deflect them. [Link]

I should refrain from making genderist comments about aluminium foil and leftovers, but I shan’t, especially since asteroids and meteorites are rather reminiscent of solar system leftovers. I am not an aluminium foil person. I am also not a plastic wrap person. Those channeled sealing bags, usually called some term incorporating the word “zip”, are about as much as I can fandle and are often beyond me. Twist ties and clips I can handle.

The problem with foil and plastic wrap are the dispensers. They consist of a box containing a free roll of the material with a cutting edge, usually serrated, on the lip of the box. I am quite admittedly unable to operate these simple apparati. The most common problem is that I end up miscutting the material as a result of the klutz factor; occasionally the unrolling process goes catastrophically out of control and I am unable to re-roll the unrolled material.

As a result, wrapping leftovers in aluminium foil or plastic wrap must be performed by FD SCP who has no difficulty with either of my two handicaps in this matter. I am however, much more adept than she at placing CDs and DVDs in the microwave oven and making light show. Given that some fraction (by volume) of all of our stored leftovers > 0.5 end up in garbage, this activity is miniscualy shy of being as frivolous as it sounds.

The comparison I wanted to make however is that if almost-a-phd (prounced to rhyme with “thud”) D’Souza’s proposal works, and my back-of-the-envelope number crunches using exatmospheric theoretical analysis (yes, that is a pun) indicates it will be under the right conditions, then the analog to leftovers is more apt than not. Resoundingly, it also gives a reason for the continued pursuit of manned deep system flight by NASA. And it may help humans get off the dirt ball. Boo Yah!

Next, we have consideration of whether, and how, professionals should advertise. In this case, I use professional in the classical sense of someone who is paid for using their knowledge gained by education as opposed to training. We fully expect those in the crafts to advertise but justicers and physicians? Not that physicians outside the cosmetic arts seem to need to advertise, perhaps because of the dearth of students in such fields?

At any rate, a member of the bar located in Auburn, Alibam, best noted as the site of the primary campus of Alibam Polytechnic Institute not only advertises, as is now permitted under Alibam law and rules, but has hired the actor who formerly played the captain on Star Trek to be on his broadcast video advertisement. [Link] This has evidently been considered askance by the bar who have respectfully petition the chief justicers of Alibam for a quick rewrite of the rules to forbid such.

We also observe that a graduate student at Columbia C near Chicago got in dutch with the Chicago Public Library over losing a DVD. [Link] Seems the graduate student worked with some children in an after shul program and borrowed the DVD of a cartoon as a treat for the children. When she lost the DVD and forgot to tell the library about it they hit her with replacement and late fines, and when she didn’t pay the fines they suspended her privileges.

So rather than owning up to her misdemeanors, she cried to the media who intervened to get her fine reduced and privileges reinstated – a year after they were revoked. The amazing part of this is that despite the crying over the student’s hardship, the access to the library was done without for a year. This leads us to observe that either this isn’t much of a student or the library isn’t very important.

I can identify with the student’s problem and can only cousel that honesty is painful but the best thing. Also, don’t argue with the librarians until you sign their paychecks. And don’t lose any out of print materials.

And lastly, courtesy of the Washington Times, [Link] the Farmers’ Almanac predicts a cold, miserable winter. Boo Yah! After the wimpy winters the last couple of years I was thinking I needed to move to Canada, or at least the upper penninsula.

And what do lawyers and actors have to do with stuff falling from the sky? Think airplanes.

Gives a whole new dimension to the sleaze that is attorney advertisement.