2014 — 26 June: Thursday
I was driven out of the house1 before both a cuppa and my breakfast this morning in urgent search of (inter alia) a tube of anti-histamine cream. Turns out I misunderestimated the success rate of yesterday's horseflies and the itchy swellings are simply no fun at the moment. Of course, having read Ben Goldacre's "Bad Science" section on hayfever and allergy remedies I remain dubious about the list of ingredients, but just the cool gunk is itself quite soothing.
Amended final score...
... Tick bites:0 Horsefly bites:3
It says something...
... about my withdrawal from the world of higher education when I can read an interesting piece (by the chap who wrote the marvellous "A Jane Austen Education") about the new documentary "Ivory Tower" (from the chap who made "Page One: Inside the New York Times") without even knowing what a MOOC is. Though it sounds unpleasant. Source and snippet:
College, as the movie points out, was always treated as a black box: 18-year-olds were inserted at one end, 22-year-olds came out the other, and as long as the system appeared to be working, no one bothered to inquire what happened in between. Americans, as a result, have very little understanding of what college is about... The debate has been left to the politicians, the pundits, and increasingly, the hustlers and ideologues. Few who talk about college in public understand it, and few who understand it talk about it.
Personally, I was "inserted" at 17 way back in September 1969, and emerged (many pints of beer, ten terms, and hours of library time [skipping boring 'Mechanics' tutorials] later) still alarmingly clueless about the Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Not to mention girls. But at least knowing I needed a job with computers rather than aeronautical engineers. No child left behind, right?
One of my...
... more rapacious credit card companies2 has finally woken up to the fact that I've stopped using their card despite their regular balance transfer offers, periods of zero interest (plus whopping handling fees) and other unwanted blandishments. It's the card with the highest credit limit, too. In my hardly-new reduced 'circumstances' I could care less, but not much less.
They've sent me an ultimatum: use the card in the next 60 days, or they will close my account. I wonder where I've tucked it away. I wonder if I can be bothered to find it, too. Probably not, I'm thinking.
My late-afternoon...
... post-lunchdate at the "Three Tuns" (thank you, Mike!) and post-Carlo's icecream parlour listening has been NPR's Diane Rehm show, and an interesting discussion with Lawrence Lessig on SuperPACS and political campaign fund-raising issues. This third paragraph of the Abstract from "Testing Theories of American Politics" (PDF file) is germane, if rather heavy, reading:
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
It suggests the "1%" can buy the guvmint policies that suit them. Josephine Public cannot. It seems to me it may yet turn out to have been an awful mistake to grant "Corporations" the status, and some of the same rights, of "People". Not least because the larger the Corporation, the more likely the sociopathic tendencies of the "Person" in charge of it...
It's just (16:22) started to rain. Bye bye pollen.
I've just discovered SoundCloud — where Terry Gross, for example, can host material from her wonderful NPR "Fresh Air" show that's just a little too outré for North American ears to hear 'directly'.
A couple of...
... months ago, I was delighted to quote from a Lewis Thomas essay. My next excuse comes as a result of reading "Eurekas and Euphorias" (a fine collection of scientific anecdotes assembled by Walter Gratzer in 2002). It's excerpted from "Clever animals".
Cats are a standing rebuke to behavioral scientists wanting to know how the minds of animals work. The mind of a cat is an inscrutable mystery, beyond human reach, the least human of all creatures and at the same time, as any cat owner will attest, the most intelligent. In 1979... Moore and Stuttard repeated the (35 year old) Guthrie experiment, observed the same complex "learning" behavior, but then discovered that it occurred only when a human being was visible to the cat. If no one was in the room with the box, the cat did nothing but take naps...