I get the headlines from the New York Times emailed to me every day. It saves a lot of money, fuel and paper in the long run. Today, the venerable NYT sent me this headline for the article about Bill Gates stepping down at Microsoft: Gates to Cede Software Reins in Era of Change. At least the editors of the actual paper are smarter than the geniuses who modify the titles for the emailing. An era of change? Is that opposed to all the other eras where nothing changes? (more…)

Popularity: 6% [?]

Once again the United States leads the world in prisoners per capita. After an encouraging decline in recent years, the US prison population rose 2.6% last year, meaning that 1 out of every 136 Americans are currently in prison. This means that 4.7% of AfricanAmerican males are now in prison. More striking, 11.9 percent of black males aged 25-29 are in prison! By far, the south leads the way (10 of the 14 states with the highest incarceration rates), with Louisiana leading the way at over one percent incarceration (1138 per 100,000). That said, the state with the highest rate of black incarceration was… in South Dakota. The greatest differential between black and white incarceration rates was in Iowa.

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Popularity: 15% [?]

Everyone is familiar with Ivan Pavlov’s experiments whereby Pavlov noticed that dogs begin to salivate before the food actually reaches their mouths. He then conducted a long series of experiments manipulating the salivary action of dogs and established the basic laws for what he called “conditional reflexes” (see also Ivan Pavlov, Wikipedia). Through extensive observations of my own, I have uncovered similar conditional reflexes in national park tourists. It has been proven that tourists in an unfamiliar location begin to purchase useless crap before any need for said useless crap is established. The law that governs this behavior is as follows: “If you haven’t bought something, you didn’t go there.” This obligates tourists to buy one or more item from every location visited, no matter how useless those items are. I call it the First Law of Tourism and expect that in the future, it will make me famous just like Newton’s Third Law made him famous (okay, he might have been famous without the laws of motion because apparently he did some other stuff too).
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Having just come off a holiday weekend in a heavily-touristed locale, I was thinking last night and this morning about SRPs – Spoiled Rich People. The way I see it, poor people often have an excuse for being crabby and pushy. They’re on the brink, they’re against the wall, they need this, whatever this is. From my limited experience working in hotels and ski areas, though, some rich people seem to think that because people kowtow to them at their business or at their hospitals (physicians, in my hotel experience, were the most likely demographic to be pricks, worse even than lawyers), people should kowtow to them everywhere. Of course, my wife spent three days guiding a certifiably rich (not just wealthy) family earlier this year and they were the most pleasant folks you could ever meet – relaxed, fun and generous – which is as it should be. They’re rich, they ought to be able to put up with a bit of inconvenience, because when they’re not on vacation, they don’t have to put up with dangerous inconveniences like not being able to afford rent or health insurance.
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Popularity: 5% [?]

In the tradition of the Harper’s Index, here’s the first ever Ranter’s Index, a compendium of numerical one-liners mostly based on polls. What percentage of American cell phone users have stopped having sex to answer the phone? How does that compare to Italians? It’s all in here as well as a few odd facts about Iraqi, American and German optimism.

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Popularity: 5% [?]

I’ve been wondering about this a lot lately because, you know, she broke up Jen and Brad, but then she did adopt those children and does all that stuff for Africa. Okay, I’m kidding. In fact, sometimes I think that if I see another magazine cover in the supermarket checkout with breaking headlines about some celebs marriage, I’m going to hurl. (more…)

Popularity: 4% [?]

I’ve been stuck on Intelligent Design and John Calvin lately, but actually I’m mad about a broad range of issues that go far beyond the ongoing right-wing attack on American democracy. Someday I hope to work my way through the long backlog of rants regarding academia and its ills. I came across an old paper of mine from about 1989 and my eye fell on this sentence in the introduction:

First, however, let me begin with a quick historiographical tour that, hopefully, will find the reader awake at the end of it.

Ah yes, an auspicious start to my graduate career!

Popularity: 4% [?]