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With apologies to my relatives for all the times I refused a second helping…
Archive for April, 2011
April 18th, 2011
I’m glad that Mike thinks that civilization has returned to the Bay Area. It’s about time. Here in Los Angeles, we have had a superb classical station, an excellent jazz station, two terrific news and general-interest programming stations, and a sort of mix-and-match music-news etc. station for a while. I couldn’t really expect such diversity [...]
April 18th, 2011
Category: Religion and Politics
The NYT today features a story on whether Quinoa is Kosher for Passover, highlighting the controversy among what it calls “observant” or “Orthodox” Jews. But although the story is informative, it completely misses the point. The only reason why quinoa would not be considered “כשר לפסח” is that people might confuse it for corn, lentil, [...]
April 18th, 2011
Category: Climate change, Science and its methods
One of the predicted consequences of global warming – and let’s note that we have already had a good bit of that; it’s not something that might happen – is extreme weather events: wetter storms, more violent storms, and so on. The devastation from the 240-odd tornadoes this weekend’s storm wound up is exactly that [...]
April 17th, 2011
Many years ago, the typical public radio station played classical music and some jazz all day, news like Morning Edition and All Things Considered at drive time, some public affairs or newsy features in the early evening, and more music at night. About the time I moved to Berkeley in 1991, public stations started doing [...]
April 17th, 2011
In my freshman year I took the introductory chemistry course for people who had had some chemistry, and as it happened, that year William Lipscomb took it over from a popular prof who was on sabbatical. His long line of PhDs (three more Nobels, uh-huh) and colleagues will be writing remembrances of his scientific contributions, [...]
April 17th, 2011
Category: Uncategorized
This article on well fed judges was compelling stuff. It made me think of this paper by Figlio and Winicki ABSTRACT School accountability systems based on high-stakes testing of students have become ubiquitous in the United States, and are now federal policy as well. This paper identifies a previously-unresearched method through which schools faced with [...]
April 16th, 2011
Category: Personal moment
I posted an obituary in this space for my good friend David Kramer, killed last year by a drunk driver. As I understand the details, he was stopped at a traffic light at 3am. He was rammed from behind by a vehicle that was going about 100 miles per hour in the moment before the [...]
April 16th, 2011
The same edition of The Economist in which Keith found the fascinating article about judges’ lunches (reminds me of the classic Brecht line, in Blitzstein’s translation, “first feed the face, and then talk right and wrong“) has a truly heartbreaking story from the West Bank. Just read it. [Update 17/IV: Here's the original. In this [...]