Bookmarks from Saturday June 19th-Friday June 26th
“Riches can be lost, fame can flee, but music — ephemeral as it is, just molecules of air being pushed about — stays with you. It really doesn’t get any better than this.”
link: Renewable Music: No greater pleasure
“You might have thought that with the chief of police and all those command officers present that the operation would have been run more smoothly. If that was indeed your expectation you are not a police officer, certainly not one with the LAPD. Police officers everywhere know, and LAPD officers might know best of all, that the degree of success in any tactical operation is in inverse proportion to the number of command officers present. Seldom has this proven more true than in downtown Los Angeles Thursday evening. I even saw, while running to one trouble spot with my colleagues, an assistant chief who was also running, but in the opposite direction. (It was just as well; he only would have been in the way.)”
link: Pajamas Media » What I Saw at the Lakers Riots
“In my second year I worked as his teaching assistant. CalArts had no grades, but we did have pass, high pass or fail. John’s system was if we went down the roster and could remember the person, we passed them. If we could remember the person and the work, it was a high pass. If we couldn’t remember them, we failed them, but if they came back and argued for another grade, they would pass. It was a brilliant system that could never work today.”
link: John Baldessari’s former students share memories – latimes.com
“I don’t want to be like Henry Moore,” he said, “just making big monuments for public spaces, like the one beside the Met on the piazza over there. Yet I’m currently involved in a piece I didn’t want to do, for a major American orchestra I have a long history with. I wanted to write a string quartet, but this orchestra is having its centenary and they really pleaded. Eventually I had to give in.”
“I have yet to eat at the Kogi truck or any of the “new” catering trucks. I will not dare turn my back on my beloved loncheras, so I haven’t had the opportunity to taste their food, a fusion of Asian and Mexican, enter The Red Hot Kitchen. I never thought that eating a tofu burrito would be so delicious. And the salsa ? Mathematical.”
link: LA Eastside » Red Hot Kitchen
“The main problem is that most of the places in 90042 that are good to watch the deportes, are not the places that are open this early morning. (Oh, the days when Mr. T’s Bowl opened at 6AM and the drinks were correctly priced.) That being said, there are a couple of good places to catch the games with people here.”
Highland Park World Cup Fever « 90042
“One particularly interesting suggestion is to have journals publish lists of rejected papers along with the accepted research. This would act as a sort of public punishment and might encourage scientists to submit their research to appropriate journals on the first try. Another method to decrease the science community’s focus on metrics would be to allow tenure candidates to submit just their top few papers for evaluation. One commentator notes that, unlike in most fields, science output is not directly proportional to effort. Instead of ranking scientists purely on their publication records, credit should be given for all sorts of activities that don’t necessarily come across in traditional metrics. Establishing publicly available datasets, serving on committees, and developing new experimental set-ups should all be taken into account in hiring and tenure decisions. More journals should follow the leads of PLoS ONE and The Journal of Negative Results and begin publishing negative or inconclusive findings.”
link:School Is Turned Around, but Cost Gives Pause – NYTimes.com
“Locke High represents both the opportunities and challenges of the Obama administration’s $3.5 billion effort, financed largely by the economic stimulus bill, to overhaul thousands of the nation’s failing schools.The school has become a mecca for reformers, partly because the Department of Education Web site hails it as an exemplary turnaround effort.But progress is coming at considerable cost: an estimated $15 million over the planned four-year turnaround, largely financed by private foundations. That is more than twice the $6 million in federal turnaround money that the Department of Education has set as a cap for any single school. Skeptics say the Locke experience may be too costly to replicate.”“When people hear we spent $15 million, they say, ‘You’re insane,’ ” said Marco Petruzzi, chief executive of Green Dot Public Schools, the nonprofit charter school group that has remade Locke. “But when you look closely, you see it’s not crazy.”
Quality, not quantity: ending science’s “academic prostitution”
“Then I read it and responded,” said Mrs. Holzer. “Although it had no plot line. That worried me a little. I see now it should have worried me more. Basically ‘Dude’ was everyman. Everyman who loses his innocence and fights to regain it. But ‘Dude’ was also Gerry Ragni’s own life. His memories. Temptations. His fears. His struggle to create. He’s one of 10 children from a poor Italian family in Pittsburgh, you know. When he was 5 years old, he began painting crazy beautiful pictures all over the walls of his family’s house and his parents couldn’t stop him. Even then he believed he was a genius. That belief has made him tireless.“
“The Dude” New York Times Review 10-22-72
