Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Apocalypse, Sign of the

Metallica baby lullabies

Government in Action

RL sent me a nice little case study of government in action.

And, he was so kind as to write the lede for me, also, in the email:

The current mayor made opposition to a bridge that would connect a small airport on an island a football field away from downtown the centerpiece of his election campaign. Upon winning, he killed the project. The result was a multi-million dollar settlement to aggrieved parties that enabled one businessman to ~start~ a commercial airline at the airport. Even better, he got to evict what would have been his main competitor. Federalism at its very best- local govt kills a business venture, but the feds step in and provide seed money and a chance to build a monopoly.

(You do have to read through some amazingly inane stuff in that article before you get to amazingly dumb stuff)

Thanks, RL!

ProfGRRRRL strikes

Poor ProfGRRRRRL has been to too many faculty meetings (i.e., N>=1)

She nails the patois:

Step 3 -- Random comments and brainstorming (may occur in any order)
CF 2: [excited ramble about why this would benefit the department]
CF 4: [excited ramble about how this would benefit his students]
CF 3: [attempt at joke]
CF 5: [segue into pet project issue that is not entirely related]
Chair: Let's get back on topic
CF 6: [excited ramble about how [idea] would please the dean's office]
CF 1: [pie in sky brainstorm about how this might increase FTEs, solve world hunger, and improve the entire university's ranking]

Step 4 -- Original dissenters are supportive
Policy Wonk: It sounds like there is interest in [idea], and if there is no policy preventing it we could try.
Historian: As long as we make sure to not repeat past mistakes

Step 5 -- The put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is moment
Chair: Well, if we're going to do this, we should figure out who would be in charge. Maybe we need a subcommittee. Who would like to volunteer?

Step 6 -- Crickets


Yepper, yepper, yepper. She left out the part about the Chair seething with fury from start to finish, knowing at Step 1 that it would end up at the same play as always. But maybe other Chairs don't do that.

A bonus: The Night Before School Starts, also by ProfGRRRRL.

(nod to Dirty Davey)

Monday, August 28, 2006

Best Patent Ever

I literally weep with joy at the chance to deliver this news to readers of the End.

There is a patent, an actual US Patent # D419,233 , for a...device? Article of clothing? What would you call it?

Because it is a "unisex short with reversible condom."

It works like this: You wear it as an "innie" or an "outie", just like a belly button.

Men would wear it with the condom covering their protuberance. Women would wear it...well, you know how women would wear it. That would be the "innie": this space available.

Both sexes might want to wear something over it, unless they are in Venice Beach, CA. Or Pittsburgh, CA, the home of the inventor, Roly R. Brodie.

The images are....not work safe, I'm sure. And I could not view them with my browser. So, I may have this wrong, on the details. Please let me know....

(Nod to David Reid)

UPDATE: You just need AlternaTiff to view the images. Not that you will want to, really.

The Laws of Space and View

I had an epiphany. For the past few years, I have had a "chairman" type office. 160 square feet of floor space, corner, three large windows, looking directly onto Duke's lovely main quad. In those years I have done....crap. Chairman stuff. As I wrote about before, the urgent stuff crowding out the important stuff.

Anyway, the epiphany is that there are two dimensions that almost perfectly describe the assignment of office space in academics. These are (1) space and (2) windows/view. Let me explain.

1. Space: the unused frontier. Here is "Munger's Law of Academic Office Space":

The larger the office, the less time it will be used.

This could be because the (non)occupant is travelling a lot, of course. But it is just as likely that the person with a large office has (yes, I'm not making this up) another large office! In academics, the people with large offices are more likely to have multiple offices. In any case, new assistant profs are assigned a grotto, and fill it completely with stuff, because they pretty much live there. The real capis have more, but use it much, much less.

The reason it is important to have two offices? Paradoxically, it is to explain why you are not using your office! "Where is Dr. Smith?" "Oh, he must be in his other office." Yeah, yeah...THAT must be it.

2. Windows/View: the antidote to work. Here is "Munger's Law of View":

The more windows in the office, and the better the view, the less actual academic work will be done in the office.

As far as I can tell, "nice" offices used to be given out to people as compensation for administrative duties. That is, we all know it sucks to be an administrator, but we'll give you an office with these beautiful views of the Old Well, the bell tower, the mountains, the ocean, something.

But after the proliferation of McAdminstration in state universities*, there are dozens of demi-deans scampering the halls. If you aren't careful, you crunch three or four of them underfoot, like little cockroaches, just walking to a meeting. They are there to ensure that real administrators don't have to do any administrative work, to go along with the academic work real administrators at state universities are being paid extra not to do.

The norm held, though: Admin people get nicer offices. And nicer furniture. Even though most of them never receive visitors except other admin people. They have never done any academic work, and never will. But they have a most excellent view of the football stadium, and Saturdays they could see part of the game from their window. If they were ever there on a Saturday. Or even a Friday afternoon.

*I haven't been at a state university in some time, and perhaps things aren't as bad as I remember. But I bet that if anything it has gotten worse. I have to admit, I don't see the same trend at private universities. There is a proliferation of administrators to deal with students, but that is at least partly a response to customer demand. But I don't see the same proliferation of "vice associate deputy provosts of building custodian management" as at state schools.

Skoal!

It is true, I have the oddest retail experiences of anyone I know. People ask if I stand in line all the time, but I don't. It is just that.....well, listen.

Stop at a BP station, ten miles outside of Knightdale, NC. Not a metropolitan setting. I set the gas pump to fill the tank (it has one of those little clips on the handle, so you can start pumping and then walk away).

Go inside to get some coffee. Behind the counter, implausibly (we are 20 miles from a town of even moderate size), is a very Sikh man. Turban*, loud non-English yelling into a cell phone, Indian music from a small radio.

He is yelling nearly non-stop. I congratulate myself on what an international, cosmopolitan place I live in. I pour the coffee, get the cream from the little cups with paper tops, and then look for a place to throw away the little cups (each of which holds exactly one spit of cream).

There is a white trash can over at the entrance of the cash register enclosure. I put the spit-o-cream cups in the trash. The can had a swinging lid, and I pushed my hand through and dropped the trash in.

Walk around to the front of the little counter, put down the coffee, and say, in my best "Southern Gentility Welcoming Person of Color and Foreign Origin to the New South" voice, "Good morning, sir!"

And my Sikh guy stops talking for the first time since I entered the store, looks at me like I just spit on him, and says, "WHAT!" Not a question, more like an accusation.

Astonished, I hold up the coffee. What I want is pretty obvious. I want to give him money.

"What about the Skoal!" Again, not a question. And his eyes made it quite clear I would need to work quite a bit to rise about the status of simple excrement.

It took me a second to realize he meant the famous Skoal, perhaps America's favorite smokeless tobacco. "Just a peench between your cheek and gum," as Walt Garrison used to tell us in the TV commercials.

"I don't want any Skoal." Meekly. I'm not sure why. But the attack was so unexpected. If he had been white I would have yelled at him. But I was being welcoming and cosmopolitan. And Sikhs were treated rather badly after 9/11 by people who thought they were Muslim (as if THAT were an excuse).

Sikh puppy, shouting again: "You took some Skoal! I heard you. I heard you take it!"

Now, I don't see how he could have heard anything through the third world economics lecture he had been giving over the cell phone. But he could not have heard me take Skoal, since I hadn't.

The only thing he could have heard was the trash can lid. I said so. "I got coffee, got some cream, and put the cream cups in the trash." And then I stared at him.

He backed down, but only in a technical sense. "Sorry, sir, I thought I heard you get some Skoal." His tone was precisely that of, "So, I hear yo mama is a Christian, you piece of dung."

I walked out to the car, and he was still peering at me out the window. Last I saw, his turban was bobbing behind the window; for all I know he was writing down my license number so he could call the police on another "Skoal absconder."

Thoughts:

1. If I were black, it is likely I would have an experience like this, or worse, at least once a week. Since this REALLY pissed me off, realizing the fact in the previous sentence is pretty unsettling. So, I did learn SOMETHING from the experience. It sucks to have people just completely mistrust and disrespect you, for no reason. This is not exactly news, but it is useful for white people to get reminded of it (society takes care of reminding all the non-whites).

2. BRITISH Petroleum? Like it is still the Raj? Is that the problem: a taste of the deflated empire?

3. Skoal? Of all the things to be accused of shoplifting. I want to think I look more like a sensual guy, the kind who would need to steal condoms because I go through so many (well, not literally, but...). But Skoal? I don't have any teeth missing.

*This description of Sikh turbans is unintentionally quite amusing.

Friday, August 25, 2006

Vintage Baseball

Jim Bouton, who came down a couple of years ago and gave a great talk at Duke about his then new book, Foul Ball, has a new project. (He doesn't get tired of projects).

The Vintage Base Ball Federation (VBBF) was officially launched yesterday.

Got some pretty decent coverage, at several places.

Congratulations, Jim, and good luck.

(Full disclosure: Jim B has been very supportive of my run for Governor of NC, and has agreed to write the foreward for the resulting book. He is a big believer in participant observation, which he is certainly good at himself. Now, I'm not saying he would VOTE for me; he just loves encouraging other people to do weird stuff. I am going to have to work to make that book even half as good as either Ball Four or Foul Ball. And, I was using the latter book in class; a very fine textbook on local land use from a public policy perspective)

(Nod to my man Martin, who is complicit in nearly everything)

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Joanna Nails It

I think this is quite interesting.

Tending towards knee-jerk open-borderism myself, I am interested in the articles she links. Maybe open borders are bad....

But her main point, that the real justification for draconian immmigration restrictions is our inept welfare state provisions and disastrous education policies, seems spot on. Don't blame the immigrants. Maybe we need to regulate immigration, but the reason is that we can't get our act together on core issues.

And the result is a second-best or third-best world where we don't know if we are doing good or doing harm. The theory of the second best tells us stuff is complicated, once you depart from the path of righteousness. But second best is a two-edge sword: if the deviation from optimality is the RESULT of bad policy, then additional policy interventions (like immigration restrictions) may make things worse, not better.

My Prediction: We Will Hear More About This

The Lebanese Red Cross Ambulance incident: a counterclaim.

This is interesting in a broader sense, because this is what bloggers do.

Send me other links, for or against the hoax claim (I'm agnostic), and I'll post them.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Concealed Position Returns

Concealed Position returns, after a hiatus.

Her most recent entry captures, in a wonderful brief narrative, the relationship that a surprisingly large proportion of women seem to have with their mothers. Now, CP's experience was worse than most, but teenage girls and their moms....wow. Armageddon.

Plus, I think all mothers put some version of "the curse" on their daughters.

My wife actually went so far as to voice openly the hope we wouldn't have girl babies. She had been one, and it was pretty tough dealing with the mom. In my wife's view...no daughter, no curse.

You really don't understand your parents until you have children.

I, for example, learned a great deal from my own father about how (not) to raise children. I am more like him than I'd like to admit. Remembering his mistakes helps me avoid those mistakes. But now I do understand him: until the day he died, he told me often, "You aren't smarter than I am. You are just better educated. And I paid for that education. So what makes you think you are so great? You aren't so great." Then he would have another beer.

The answer just turned out to be that I am mostly happy, while he never really was. God rest your tortured soul, Dad. And welcome back, CP.