Every time I hear about John McCain’s “Straight Talk Express” I can’t help but think of R. Kelly’s Real Talk (NSFW). Perhaps someone should do a mashup.
Monthly Archives: April 2008
This one is for you
You know who you are. More egregious copyright violation on YouTube… Horace Silver’s “Filthy McNasty.”
I’m blogging up a storm, it seems.
Evolution in action
At Pharyngula there’s a great article on evolution in action among a lizard population. On the other hand, maybe some aliens went and visited the island and intelligently redesigned the lizards so they could eat vegetation better…
links on academic freedom
Over at Crooked Timber, guest blogger Eric Rauchway has a set of links about academic freedom. Over here at Berkeley there’s a bit of a push to get the law school to fire John Yoo, author of the infamous “torture memos,” which provided the (il)legal justification for contravening the Geneva Convention. Yoo has tenure, so firing him is quite an extreme move. The argument for firing him is that he engaged in gross professional misconduct and is a war criminal and letting him teach constitutional law is questionable given his willingness to toss out the Constitution. The other side says that as a matter of academic freedom, he should be allowed to engage in whatever political activities he likes outside the academy and that he has already been judged an excellent scholar by the standards of his discipline. Firing him would set a dangerous McCarthy-esque precedent and we should err on the side of caution.
In my view, unless Yoo is formally censured by his own peers, public pressure to fire him is just that — public pressure. Jane Kramer wrote a fascinating piece in The New Yorker about the tenure battle of Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropologist at Barnard who drew the ire of some fringe pro-Israel because her book, Facts on the Ground tries to eludicate the discourse (in a Foucauldian sense) of archaeology in Israel and its relationship to Zionism and the concept of the Israeli state. These groups organized a petition threatening Barnard and Columbia in order to get them to deny her tenure. There too we saw a public outcry over perceived harmful actions of an academic. In Abu El-Haj’s case, her detractors basically made up things about her, selectively and misleadingly quoted from her book, and pretty much didn’t have a leg to stand on. Yoo’s case is different — he clearly wrote some odious memos that have had horrible consequences. However, unless he is disbarred (which is possible), I tend to side with those who say finding a loophole to fire him would do more harm than good.
Somewhere, languishing on my shelf is the book Academic Freedom after September 11. I read half of it and then switched to something less dry, but maybe I should go back to it now that my interest has been re-whetted.
Barber Tango
I was re-listening to Thomas Hampson singing Samuel Barber’s Despite and Still, and realized that the song “Solitary Hotel” is a Barber-ized (but not barbarized) tango — the loping and chromatic triplets are a strange contrast to the text from Ulysses, but they share the same pensive suspension.
Of course, my favorite song is probably “A Green Lowland of Pianos”: (text by Czeslaw Milosz, after the Polish of Jerzy Harasymowicz):
in the evening
as far as the eye can see
herds
of black pianosup to their knees
in the mire
they listen to the frogsthey gurgle in water
with chords of rapturethey are entranced
by froggish, moonish spontaneityafter the vacation
they cause scandals
in a concert hall
during the artistic milking
suddenly they lie down
like cowslooking with indifference
at the white flowers
of the audienceat the gesticulating
of the ushers
out of my hands
It’s 210 pages + 12 pages of front matter and out to my committee. My wrists are killing me.
Cake or biscuit, it makes a difference
Only in the UK could this happen:
The UK Treasury is facing a £3.5m bill, because of VAT wrongly imposed on a Marks and Spencer teacake, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled.
Customers paid VAT for 20 years before the authorities accepted the product was a cake, which does not command VAT.
more chapter headings
So my thesis is almost in to my committee, but I keep making cosmetic changes. After dinner I didn’t feel capable of editing the main text, so I finished up adding in the chapter headings. I think they might imply I’m a bit more cynical than I am, but…
List decoding for discrete AVCs
Derandomization for discrete AVCs
Limited feedback and rateless coding
at the risk of infringing
This used to be one of my favorite Frank O’Hara poems, and I always wanted to do something meaningful with it, from an artistic view. I tried something for one of my composition classes but gave up. Maybe after I turn in my thesis I will become inspired…
Instant coffee with slightly sour cream
in it, and a phone call to the beyond
which doesn’t seem to be coming any nearer.
“Ah daddy, I wanna stay drunk many days”
on the poetry of a new friend
my life held precariously in the seeing
hands of others, their and my impossibilities.
Is this love, now that the first love
has finally died, where there were no impossibilities?— Frank O’Hara
Fafblog is back!
Fafblog is back! This better not be an April Fool’s joke…