Potentially new phrase of the day
The Soviets were fond of channeling resources into big, impressive heavy industries — steelmaking, for instance. Is this an example of “conspicuous production?”
(Sorry.)
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Fri, 25 Mar 2005
Fun juxtapositions from the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Cambridge
Where else but in Cambridge would these two establishments share a wall?
Wed, 23 Mar 2005
Oh, so that’s why no one replied to my email
While wondering idly why no-one had replied to my emails for a while, I checked the status of the spool and received some delightful news:
jdb@bigbox:~$ mailq 2005-03-22 16:28:01 563 bytes 2005-03-22 18:06:25 837 bytes 2005-03-22 18:07:12 25462 bytes 2005-03-22 23:09:25 1144 bytes 2005-03-22 23:28:17 2990 bytes 2005-03-23 00:28:01 563 bytes 2005-03-23 04:07:01 562 bytes 2005-03-23 04:07:10 1068 bytes 2005-03-23 04:07:10 1206 bytes 2005-03-23 04:22:01 2054 bytes 2005-03-23 06:38:54 18937 bytes 2005-03-23 08:28:01 563 bytes 2005-03-23 10:38:16 2898 bytes 2005-03-23 10:42:10 2547 bytes 2005-03-23 10:43:40 2010 bytes 2005-03-23 10:44:26 1038 bytes 2005-03-23 11:22:40 523 bytes 2005-03-23 13:27:31 1401 bytes 2005-03-23 14:56:11 982 bytes 2005-03-23 16:14:35 3904 bytes 2005-03-23 16:28:01 561 bytes 2005-03-23 16:37:41 943 bytes 2005-03-23 19:35:21 494 bytes 2005-03-23 21:04:18 6257 bytes
Mail had been backing up for the past 24 hours and I hadn’t even noticed it. It wouldn’t be the first time this had happened – frequent wedging was one reason why I switched from exim to nullmailer, on the principle that a simpler mta would be a more reliable MTA (that, and Harvard firewalls port 25, so there was no point in running a real SMTP server anyway).
Restarting nullmailer cleared the queue, but left me wondering how to notify myself next time this happened. I couldn’t use email, for obvious reasons. I considered having a sound play through the speakers if the queue seemed wedged, but that would only work when I was at home.
I settled on a cron job to periodically dump the output from mailq to a file. My RSS reader, feedonfeeds, now prepends this file’s contents in giant honking red letters to my RSS display — procrastination via RSS now has a purpose!
While writing this, it occured to me that another solution would be to alias mutt to a script that alerted me if the queue was non-empty before running mutt:
#!/bin/sh
# warns user if WATCH's output is nonempty before running mutt
MUTT=/usr/bin/mutt
WATCH=/usr/bin/mailq
TMP=`/bin/tempfile`
$WATCH > $TMP
if [[ -s $TMP ]] ; then
less $TMP ;
fi
rm $TMP
$MUTT
Tue, 22 Mar 2005
GSAS vote result
From: Benjamin G Lee <bglee@fas> To: gradsdirect@deas Subject: [gradsdirect] FW: poll results Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 21:06:11 -0500 Results of the GSAS vote on Larry Summers: Total participants: 1543 1. I lack confidence in the leadership of Lawrence H. Summers. Affirm - 608 Deny - 699 Abstain - 90 Need more information - 146 2. I regret the President's mid-January statements about women in science and the adverse consequences of those statements for individuals and for Harvard; and also regret aspects of the President's managerial approach. I appreciate the President's stated intent to address these issues, and to seek to meet the challenges facing Harvard in ways that are collegial and consistent with longstanding faculty and student responsibilities in institutional governance. Affirm - 945 Deny - 362 Abstain - 149 Need more information - 87
The first question is (at least) direct. I’m pleasantly surprised that President Summers garnered a majority of the votes cast for a position (rather than abstentions and NMI).
The second question is a mishmash of several questions that any useful poll would separate; everybody who voted on it probably interpreted it differently.
How to score an above-the-title slot on the Drudge Report
By now, everyone’s heard of the website whose owner promises to butcher and eat Toby, his pet rabbit, unless he receives US$50,000 by the end of June. As with the infamous Bonsai Kitten, Snopes says that it’s a hoax.
Toby’s owner had the right idea, but he wasn’t exploitative enough: I’d like to see a website whose owner vows to have an abortion unless she receives some enormous amount of PayPal donations in the next nine (eight…seven…six..five…four…) months. (Bonus points if the “mother” fakes her photo the old-fashioned way using a balloon, rather than just stealing pictures from Google Images or launching Photoshop.)
Maybe Drudge will dust off his flashing-police-beacon animated GIF for this one.
Mon, 21 Mar 2005
Troll of the week
Don’t miss this excellent, excellent troll post from insidehighered.com. It’s 1500 words of a college instructor complaining about students leaving his class to use the bathroom. The comments range from incredulous to irate, which is the hallmark of a truly great troll. It’s not quite up to the quality of Is your son a computer hacker?, but it’s very, very close.
Text of the GSAS poll on President Summers
The Graduate Student Council of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is holding a poll on the same questions that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (the faculty responsible for Harvard College and GSAS) considered last week. The text of the poll is below:
Graduate Student Vote on President Summers
Questions marked with a red asterisk (*) are required. You must answer all required questions to have this survey considered complete.You are logged in as: Joseph Barillari (HUID:
redacted)
(your answers will be separated from your identity before they are visible to course staff)Last Tuesday the FAS faculty voted “lack of confidence” in President Summers. Today and tomorrow GSAS students will have chance to vote anonymously on the same question. Harvard and the world want to know what thousands of Harvard graduate students think about their university president.
Polls will be open from 7am Monday (March 21) to 5pm Tuesday (March 22).
The two questions are those offered to faculty last week.
It’s a quick and easy process, and the results are vital to the ongoing debate.
Copyright ©The President and Fellows of Harvard College
I would be curious to know the results of both polls broken down by department; or even just with the science and non-science departments separated.
I’d be wasting pixels if I commented on the controversy itself; instead, I’ll point the reader to FAS Prof. Steven Pinker, who published a detailed treatment of it in TNR. Shortly after President Summers’s speech, he also appeared in a delightful interview in the Crimson:
CRIMSON: Were President Summers’ remarks within the pale of legitimate academic discourse?
PINKER: Good grief, shouldn’t everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, as long as it is presented with some degree of rigor? That’s the difference between a university and a madrassa.
Update: see this.
Fri, 18 Mar 2005
Kristof’s peanut gallery
Nick Kristof is one of the two NYT columnists who are still worth a read. (The other one should be obvious. ) China Wakes and Thunder from the East aren’t bad, either. But the most entertaining Kristof content comes from his blog at the Times, where he posts selections from readers’ letters. If you want truly to see truly bad political prognostication, look no further than here:
I’m rushing around, getting ready for a trip to Africa, but here’s a sampling of email about my Hillary column. Ted from Minneapolis writes:Energy conservation, energy self-sufficiency and global environmental crisis management will be the overriding issues of the next 20 years, not abortion. Hillary Clinton is not well-positioned to get elected or to deal with the real problems. If she were, I’d back her.
Emphasis mine. A real Karl Rove, this one.