Elite schools are the opiate of the middle class.

As Walter Benn Michaels puts it in "The Trouble with Diversity," universities are where the rich send their children, in order to "launder their privilege into qualifications." What a great phrase!

The USA claims to be a free and open society, where anyone can, through natural talent and hard work, rise to a higher class, and become wealthy and influential. But of course that's a lie. Social classes exist here just as they do in all countries, and the rich upper classes will always remain dominant, the poor you will always have with you, and the middle class will always be insecure and will strive to move into the upper class. It's not different here, it's just that we've been sold on the myth of equal opportunity.

Because of this lie, the rich have to hide their inherited advantages, and must show evidence that they actually have talents and are hard-working. Middle-class workers have to be kept asleep, lest they realize that the people who own the corporation do so through wealth, and not through merit. Hence the corporate owners send their kids to Yale, Harvard, Princeton and Stanford, to mask that inherited privilege with the trappings of actual skill and effort.

I've walked through the campus at Princeton, and the undergraduates there all appeared to float through space, as if life had never presented them with any obstacles, as if anything was possible, as if the future held great delights. They weren't snobbish. They were very nice people, but they truly knew that they were masters of their universe.

So how does this relate to the NY times article in question? Why do private-university graduates have higher salaries than state-university graduates? Simply because they are rich and connected *BEFORE* they enter the hallowed halls. That wealth and advantage are there after they graduate, and helps them land great jobs. They would probably land those jobs if they didn't attend those schools, but then the resentful middle-class workers would smell a rat.

In other words, the school you attend makes no difference. What matters is what class you were born into.

You've just rediscovered anti-aliasing!

This one's on APOD: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap101110.html

The eight author (Philip M. Hinz) seems to work at the Steward Observatory in Tucson, AZ. The article says that the observations were done at the VLT (Very Large Telescope) at the ESO (European Southern Observatory) on Paranal mountain in Chile. However, Hinz may deserve substantial credit, since he was part of a team that actually used an APP for the first time, according to this article. That article did not look for exoplanets, but the astronomers did successfully image a faint companion for the star mu Herc A. That companion had previously only been observed spectroscopically.

Posters here are missing a big point about the process of creative writing: when you write, two parts of your mind are at work: the creator and the critic. The creator comes up with the material. The critic edits the material, worries about punctuation, spelling, over-all structure, the fact that the phone bill is overdue, your spouse's opinion of your work, street noise, paragraph formatting, etc.

The critic's main role is to say "NO". "You can't say that". "You spelled that wrong". "That word is hyphenated badly". "You should close quotation marks after the period." (I just noticed that) etc.

The problem with wysiwyg word processors like MS Word and their kin is that they show you nice formatted paragraphs (encouraging you to worry about hyphenation), underline misspelled words (making you go back and fix them), even criticize you grammar. By its very nature, a word processor engages the inner critic.

I have learned that the best way to write is to 1: make a mess; 2: clean it up (see "Writing your dissertation in fifteen minutes a day"). It's best to just write, let the words come out in a mess, maybe complain about the fact that the words aren't coming out, anything to get the pipeline going. Only at the end of the session, when you're done writing, should you go back over the text, fixing things up. Fixing up text is easy, once the text exists. However, creating the text is hard, if you're always stopping to fix it up.

That's why ed is a wise choice. It disables the inner critic. It has no spelling checker, no grammar checking, doesn't format as you type. It's wonderful.

Alejo

You could prevent the trees from rotting and returning the CO2 to the atmosphere: bury the trees deep underground. Just daydreaming, but we could chop down the forests that cover mountains, strip off the tops of the mountains, haul the trees there, and cover them with the overburden we had removed. Strip mining in reverse.

And, millions of years in the future, we could do it all in reverse order.

Of course it's space-inefficient. But if you're the Library of Congress, you're probably willing to endure the low bandwidth. You certainly won't be able to retrieve the information quickly, but if you're archiving the data, you can tolerate slow retrieval.

It's not quite as bad as you think, though: if you've saved a 4.3 GB DVD onto 2200 pages of paper, and you placed the printed stack onto a sheet-fed scanner which does about 1 page/second, it would take you about half an hour to do the scanning.

That's less time than it takes to play the DVD!

Physical space inefficiency would be an issue. DVDs are small, but 2200 pages takes up as much space as a box of files, about one cubic foot (about 30 liters, or 0.03 cubic meters). Not to mention that paper is heavy.

That's the cost of permanence.

Alejo

Short of carved writing on stone tablets (eg, the Behistun monument), the longest-lasting medium I can think of is printed paper. Libraries know how to archive it: it's called a book.

There are ways to take digital files and convert them to bitmaps (eg www.ollydbg.de/paperbak). You can print the bitmaps, and read them back reliably with a scanner. About 500K can fit on one page of paper, so a one-hour MP3 recording (about 60MB) would take up 30 sheets of paper. If printed on acid-free stock, this should last for centuries. The pages could be bound in a book, whose introduction would describe the encoding, and provide an algorithm to extract the data.

Why rely on currently-fashionable media like the chemical dyes in a CD-R when good old reliable natural-fiber materials like paper are known to last centuries?

Alejo Hausner

I tend to make exams open-book, but was dismayed when one of my students had bought only the electronic version of the textbook! I had to lend him my copy. No biggie for me, but students should be wary of electronic textbooks, lest the prof bans electronic devices during exams!

Alejo

The real problem here is power consumption. The LCD's signal has to be stronger than the reflection's signal, and you can only do this by giving the LCD a very powerful backlight, which would wear your battery out very quickly. Probably backlights can't even be made that bright anyway. The bright light would also hurt your eyes.

On the other hand, you could make the surface matte, thus adding noise to the reflection, and also adding noise to the LCD image. To overcome this noise, you would again have to make the LCD brighter. Same problem.

Our eyes perceive relative brightness, not absolute brightness. They tend to adjust to the over-all brightness we see, and only distinguish differences in brightness. That's why, if it's bright outside, and you look into a dark house through a window, you can't see in. The light from inside the house is indeed coming through the window, but the reflected light is much stronger, and your eye perceives the variations in the reflected image, not the fainter variations in the light transmitted from the inside. Hence you have to lean in and cup your hands around your head to block out the daylight, to see the light from inside.

That's why you need curtains. At night, people inside a lit room in a house see only their reflections on the window, not the fainter light from outside. But people outside see the stronger light from the room, not their own fainter reflection.

So, just use a matte surface, and crank the brightness way up.

Polarized glasses won't work. Most reflections are only partly polarized. Hence a polarizing filter will only eliminate a portion of the reflection. Only reflections at the Brewster angle are purely polarized, and that's a pretty shallow angle. Polarized glasses are good when you're driving, because most of the reflections you're trying to get rid off (reflections on the road surface) come in at a shallow angle, and are strongly polarized. The reflections in question here come in nearly perpendicular to the screen surface.

Pahhleeze, Mrs. Obama!

Yet another bunch of blather about weight loss from a skinny person! Hasn't anyone read the research? The simple equation

(weight loss) = (calories in) - (calories exercised)

is wrong! Well, at least the usual assumptions about it are wrong. Read Gary Taubes' "The Scientist and the Stairmaster" (http://nymag.com/news/sports/38001/). The "common sense" approach to weight loss (eat less, exercise more) misses a really big factor: the body is charge. You are not a detached mind, your brain is inside your body, and your body doesn't want to let go of that fat. So, your body is going to tell your brain to exercise, or to eat. The body is in charge, your will is not. YOU ARE NOT IN CHARGE.

When fat people eat, and their blood sugar rises after a meal, insulin tells their cells to grab that sugar, and store it as fat. They run out of blood sugar, so their bodies tell them to

1. stop moving, to conserve energy.
2. eat more (NOW!) to get the blood sugar up.

the poor brain (and its side-effect, the will) are helpless before the body's command.

From the outside, it looks like fat people are lazy gluttons, so that's why they gain weight. But it's backwards: they gain weight (they turn sugar into fat), so they become inactive and hungry.

We skinny people (myself included) are just the opposite. When we eat, our blood sugar doesn't get turned into fat. There's lots of sugar around, so our body tells the brain to start moving, to burn the sugar off, and to stop eating, to keep the sugar from going up again.

Again, it looks like skinny people can control themselves, and exercise and THEREFORE lose weight, but again the causality is backwards.

What is actually going is a bunch of skinny snotty people imposing their prejudices on fat people. This has to stop.

Your preacher was right. Symbolically, NASA is indeed about an alternate way to heaven. No matter how much civilization we accumulate, we're still genetically hunter-gatherers, and we still think religiously. We can know that there is no God, but our religious instincts are still there. You can't kill an instinct.

Let's be cold-blooded an rational about it: not a lot of real science is being done up in the International Space Station. There are much cheaper ways to do research than to cram people into cylinders orbiting in hostile space. The same goes for going to moon, or, worse, Mars. So it's not really being done for science. There is a lot of mythology driving the space program: the yearning for heaven, wanting to become like gods, controlling the forces of the universe like Prometheus or Faust, exploring mysterious worlds, all of these are irrational motivations, based on religious instinct.