I think what we're seeing here is that, if you steal from very rich and powerful people (like the directors of GS), you will be severely punished. That's why Bernie Madoff is in prison for the rest of his life: he too stole primarily from rich people.

Of course, if you steal from the less-well-connected, nothing much will happen to you. Thus the directors of Goldman, AIG, Citi, etc who bet their shareholders' equity, and also risked the pensions of many workers, did not go to jail. Instead, they got themselves installed in the Treasury department, and got their cronies even more money from taxpayers!

As Matt Taibbi said "Why isn't Wall Street in jail?" : http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/2/22/matt_taibbi_why_isnt_wall_street_in_jail

Then again, as Billie Holiday sang, "Them that's got shall get, them that's not shall lose. So the bible says, and it still is news!"

The research says that cellphones don't cause cancer. Agreed. But do cellphone EM fields affect your thoughts? Has that kind of research been done? Of course USING a cellphone affects your thoughts. It can even cause brain injury, if you are driving a car and end up hitting your head on the windshield because you were distracted and hit a tree. The question is whether the radio waves from the cellphone antenna are doing something unusual to your neurons.

The snowblower was invented in Montreal, for a good reason: they get lots of snow, and it stays in place until March. Hence the city has come up with an almost militaristic solution. It involves giant snowblowers, dump trucks, blinking red lights, and looking for your car (which is not where you parked it) after the city crews come up your street: http://chicagomontreal.blogspot.com/2006/01/snow-removal-in-montreal.html

Toronto has such a machine: http://www.toronto.ca/transportation/snow/torontomelt.htm

This comes as a surprise only to Americans. The rest of the developing world knows that the U.S. likes dictators. Many latin American countries endured dictatorships that were endorsed or tolerated by the U.S. government, mostly because the dictators favoured the interests of American companies. It's nothing new. What's surprising is that Joe Biden would be candid enough to claim on national TV that Mubarak isn't a dictator.

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