Bookmarks from Saturday June 13th-Friday June 18th 2010
The Burger Lab: How to Make Perfect Thin and Crisp French Fries | A Hamburger Today
this looks awesome. DIY + nerd science!
It’s Complicated David Souter finally tells Americans to grow up.
“Souter’s speech thus represents much more than an ode to a changing Constitution or a forceful admission that something that sounds suspiciously like “empathy” means that “judicial perception turns on the experience of the judges, and on their ability to think from a point of view different from their own.” Souter’s words even transcend his own high-minded call to “keep the constitutional promises the nation has made.” What Souter asked Americans to do in his Harvard speech is to live with ambiguity. To, in his words, acknowledge that there is a “basic human hunger for the certainty and control that the fair-reading model seems to promise,” while recognizing, in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes‘ formulation, that “certainty generally is illusion and repose is not our destiny.” He is telling us to stop dreaming of oracular judges with perfect answers to simple constitutional questions. He is telling us, in other words, to grow up.”
Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors
“interestingly, they also find students whose professor had higher student evaluations typically did worse in subsequent courses. They attribute this to the “teaching to the test” that they think may go on in classes where professors have high student evaluations. Secondly, they find that students who took Calculus I from professors with lower student evaluations did better on subsequent courses. ”
The Civil War as Revenge of the Nerds – Personal – The Atlantic
“There’s a way of looking at the ugliness after Reconstruction–the rise of the Lost Cause, the Klan, the lynchings–as a tragic search for Southern white male identity. First the old slave patrols go. Then the Confederate Army is subdued and humiliated. Then blacks began to dominate “manly” athletic pursuits. Then Martin Luther King exposes the immorality of the Southern system. Reeling from “each successive volley, the Southern racist–and really any white racist–is left with a question: If the Southern white man is proven inferior physically, mentally, and even morally, than what is he?
HEY STOUFFERS! F$$K YOU IN YOUR F$$KING TOASTED A$$HOLE.
via . « Grocery Eats groceryeats.com post very NSFW (but very funny)
Almost All Is Vanity – PostClassic
“We have three markets. There’s a commercial market, entirely determined by huge corporations whose sole interest is money. We’re never going to make a dent in that one. There’s an orchestra-music circuit that you have to enter young, and it’s all about who you know, and the music sucks. And there’s an academic market, which demands a healthy respect for the Schoenberg line and a suspicion against anything populist. I and my 400 closest friends don’t fit any of these markets.”
“Success Is Just Another Form of Failure” – PostClassic
“The artists, on the other hand, are at a permanent disadvantage. The most creative of them cannot present their work with the kind of empirical verifiability that translates as prestige going up the ladder – except by winning awards administrated by other universities. And those who aim for and achieve any kind of popular or commercial success virtually negate the explicit aims of the institution.”
Bookmarks for October 16th through October 22nd [del.icio.us]
![Bookmarks for October 16th through October 22nd [del.icio.us]](http://www.paulbailey.us/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/bear-in-griffith-park.-on-Flickr-Photo-Sharing1-150x150.jpg)
Bookmarks from October 16th through October 22nd:[del.icio.us]
- Space, movement and Rudy Perez — latimes.com -
“The Times cited Perez as “the conscience of Los Angeles dance.” That he continues choreographing is something of a minor miracle. Not only is the arts economy dire, but Perez also has been visually impaired for the last decade. Moving slowly and burdened with hazy vision at best, Perez says the work keeps him going. The Armory engagement is particularly meaningful, because it was there, in 1992, that the Center first presented “The Dance-Crazy Kid From New Jersey Meets Hofmannsthal.” clip “The site-specific concert is dedicated to Cunningham, who died in July at age 90. It features two works with original music by longtime collaborator Steve Moshier, performed live by the composer and his Liquid Skin Ensemble.”
- WitnessLA.com » Blog Archive » The Arrest of Alex Sanchez – Part 5: A Game Changer?- UPDATED -
“FIRST LET’S RECAP THE BACK STORY: Alex Sanchez is the El Salvadoran-born, former MS-13 gang member who transformed his life to become a nationally respected gang intervention leader. Sanchez founded and is the executive director of Homies Unidos, and has been praised in cities across the country as someone who has helped turn around the lives of many, many young men and women. Then this past June, Alex was arrested by the FBI as part of a federal racketeering indictment and accused of plotting the murder of another gang member among other charges. It was not that the Feds accused Sanchez of shooting anyone himself, or personally dealing in drugs and guns. Worse, the indictment maintained that Sanchez is a shot caller—AKA a leader—of a particular clique of MS-13 who ordered such things done. He was, said the Feds, leading a double life and had successfully pulled the moral and psychological wool over the eyes of his myriad friends, admirers and supporters…”
- Big teaching cuts this week at CSUF – College Life OC – OCRegister.com -
“Faculty at Cal State Fullerton will be on furlough Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of this week as part of a larger move by the California State University system to save hundreds of millions of dollars to help balance the state budget.” The furloughs will affect thousands of students and hundreds of professors and lecturers at Orange County’s largest university, and will be followed on Friday by a general furlough for management and staff workers who aren’t on the faculty.
- Là ci darem la mano- A Conversation October 18, 2009 -
“Joe: seems weird to me that the entire genre of classical music is being portrayed as this sort of backwards, insecure entity it seems to me that the person who wrote it comes from the point of view of an outsider me: yeah except she doesn’t, i mean she knows classical music pretty well Joe: I’ve learned from the school that musical taste is extremely personal and if there are overall “musical trends” it’s more a result of music that either appeals to everybody by being kind of soul-less or music that captures the thinking of a particular time period to me, the 21st century is tech-obsessed, and preoccupied with nostalgia and particularly reworking the classics so these musical trends don’t surprise me at all. They’re just a product of the times…” …. Joe: it’s not new me: but 1. none of these artists are new they’ve been around Joe: though to some it may be great… … me: there’s no angle on this article that makes me care. none of the content or position is interesting”
- The Random Band Game – ConceptArt.org Forums -
This is incredibly fun and addicting… 1 – Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “random” or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band. 2 – Go to “Random quotations” or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album. 3 – Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days” or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover. 4 – Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.
- LA Eastside » Target’s humorous “illegal alien” costume -
‘Dear Target, What’s up with this “Illegal Alien” costume? I don’t get why a corporation that boasts about giving back to the community (can’t say I didn’t thoroughly enjoy the ¡Bienvenido Dudamel! concert a few weeks ago) and celebrates Nuestra Gente would sell such a despicable costume. (I know not all undocumented immigrants are Latino, but we do make up a plurality of the population.) Is it to make a buck? Is that enough to alienate (no pun intended) undocumented immigrants, their allies and our dollars? Couldn’t you make a buck by not selling “humorous costumes” that demean and make light of the situation faced by many undocumented immigrants and advance dehumanizing language? Is it humorous that thousands die trying to cross the US/Mexico border? Between 1998-2004 1,954 migrants died on the perilous journey north source). Since 2004, the Arizona Star Border Death Database has recorded 1,193 deaths at the border. Funny, no? ¡Chistoso!”
- Artists Paid-Spotify -
“I love Spotify as much as the next music fan, but its struggle to extract value is in danger of becoming a spectacle. To consumers it’s a miracle, to the industry it’s a problem to be solved. The strategy looks right – drive a developing ad-products business as much as possible, while trying to upscale users to a pay model for a better experience. It has to be the test case and I would strongly argue, deserves all the help it can get from its music partners. We need to begin to realise though, Spotify’s potential. It has the potential to generate revenues equivalent to a large niche, while at the same time eating further into CD revenues. This is the future music market – fragmentation into a number of niches.”
been there done that
i’m usually pretty good at staying out of the direct gaze of the spectacle. the 24-hour cycle cultural, religious and political maneuvering usually takes up more time than i am willing to invest in. unfortunately summer its easy to get pulled into the latest ‘war’. the summer the hulabaloo of the moment is ‘securing our [...]
