Kieran Healy

Microsoft redesigns the iPod package. Hey, it’s funny, so it “must be true”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/02/28/if-its-funny-must-it-be-true/, right? (Actually in this case that’s correct.) Via John Gruber.

Looks like the site is getting killed right now. “Try this link”:http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4313772690011721857&q=microsoft+ipod.

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

Via Pharyngula. I have to say that having “None of the Above” as the second option out of four on Q7 caused me some concern.

“It’s”:http://www.irish-tv.com/wander.asp available on DVD. Astonishing.

Raw material for a short paper in moral philosophy, to be written by someone who is actually a moral philosopher.

*Case 1*. A woman “loses her expensive camera”:http://lostcamera.blogspot.com/2006/02/camera-unlost-but-not-quite-found.html while on holiday in Hawaii. Some time later:

I got a call from an excited park ranger in Hawaii that “a nice Canadian couple reported that they found your camera!” … “Hello,” I said, when I reached the woman who had reported the camera found, “I got your number from the park ranger, it seems you have my camera?” We discussed the specifics of the camera, the brown pouch it was in, the spare battery and memory card, the yellow rubberband around the camera. It was clear it was my camera, and I was thrilled. “Well,” she said, “we have a bit of a situation. You see, my nine year old son found your camera, and we wanted to show him to do the right thing, so we called, but now he’s been using it for a week and he really loves it and we can’t bear to take it from him.” … “And he was recently diagnosed with diabetes, and he’s now convinced he has bad luck, and finding the camera was good luck, and so we can’t tell him that he has to give it up. Also we had to spend a lot of money to get a charger and a memory card.”

They have no intention of returning the camera. The camera owner says at least send me the memory cards plus $50 and we’ll say no more. She gets a package in the mail. A note inside reads “”Enclosed are some CDs with your images on them. We need the memory cards to operate the camera properly.” She calls the camera-thief back, angry, and is told “You’re lucky we sent you anything at all. Most people wouldn’t do that.”

*Case 2*. An Irishman and his Azerbaijani wife adopt an Indonensian boy. After a while, “they decide that it’s not working out”:http://www.rte.ie/news/2006/0223/dowset.html (apparently they had “trouble bonding”) and they “dump him”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2091-2003949,00.html in an orphanage in Jakarta. This one seems to have worked out OK for the boy, as the Irish High Court just ruled that the parents must support him financially till he is 18 and he has full succession rights to their estates.

I’m wondering why the people in each case thought their actions were justified. Also, we normally think that it’s better to have at least made an effort in the direction of doing the right thing than not to have bothered, or actively done the wrong thing right from the beginning. But in these cases the initially worthwhile actions (calling the camera owner; adopting the child) make the subsequent bad faith seem that much worse. We’re taken by surprise as the story veers off in the wrong direction.

I wonder whether it’ll be possible to preempt the spin that this was all because of his silly remarks about women in science, and ergo Summers was forced out by intolerant liberals. Probably not — even though, you know, Summers is in fact a liberal and you may remember him serving in the Clinton administration. There’s a line from Douglas Adams that I think explains the real situation a lot better: “You’re a clever man … but you make the same mistake a lot of clever people do of thinking everyone else is stupid.” Not a good management style, especially at Harvard, even if your policy goals are worthwhile.

Dan Drezner “picks up”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/002592.html on today’s NYT article about students emailing their professors in slightly weird ways. I thought the article ran together several different kinds of email oddness, some of which are more of a problem than others. One thing it didn’t mention: even though universities give students email addresses, it’s often the case that students won’t use them. Instead they prefer their free hotmail or yahoo or gmail addresses. No problem as such there, except that sometimes the students pick the kind of addresses for themselves that aren’t exactly professional-quality. Frankly it feels a bit odd to correspond with, e.g., missbitchy23 or WildcatBongs about letters of reference or what have you.

_Addendum_: One other thing: Assistant Professor of English Meg Worley’s rule that students must thank her if they receive a response because “One of the rules that I teach my students is, the less powerful person always has to write back.” Very Foucauldian. Only not really. I think Erving Goffman makes the observation somewhere that the capacity to be gracious is actually an _aspect_ of being powerful, not something that’s _owed_ to the powerful. In any event, I thought it seemed a little snotty. _More_: In the comments thread to “this post”:http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=149#comments by Tim Burke, Meg says she was misquoted, and the rules she says she talked to the reporter about are in fact quite reasonable. Stupid NYT.

The phenomenon of “Biblically Correct Tours”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/17/AR2006021700397.html is much in the news recently. (P.Z. Myers has a “summary”:http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/02/biblically_correct_tours.php). Essentially, a creationist named Rusty Carter leads people on tours around museums chatting away about how dinosaurs and people lived together, how the world was created in seven days, and how the earth is only six thousand years old, _ad nauseam_. So I thought I’d mention Martin Rudwick’s new book, “Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226731111/kieranhealysw-20/, a (very, very large) history of how scientists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries figured out that the earth was very, very old. Certainly much older than six thousand years. The problem of the age of the earth is a good one partly because because it’s so tangible, partly because it’s a good story (the French and English scientists are great, and Thomas Jefferson gets a look-in as well), and partly because it was solved[1] more than two hundred years ago. Richard Fortey “reviewed the book”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n03/fort01_.html in the LRB (subscription req’d) recently. He begins the review with an anecdote:

bq. … as I had anticipated, a caller from Kentucky duly declared that the world had been created in seven days, and what did I have to say to that? I invited the caller to ask himself whether, when his grandfather used the words ‘in my day’, he meant one particular day, or rather a season or a phase of life. I went on to say that the biblical ‘days’ could be better understood as whole eras, domesticated by a familiar terminology in order to make them comprehensible. Had I but known it, the same argument had already been thoroughly rehearsed by French naturalists more than two hundred years earlier. My creationist caller was restating a position which was already unfashionable in the late 18th century.

People like Rusty Carter make you appreciate scholars like Rudwick — not to mention the Enlightenment.

[1] I mean, it was established that the earth wasn’t just a few thousand years old. Sorry for the unclarity.

Scott McLemee: “The effect of constant web access is a kind of mental entropy.” Similarly, a recent comment by “Dave Pell”:http://davenetics.com/2006/01/referrers/:

I can’t read books. I can’t even focus on a magazine article without stopping every few paragraphs to email my team at Rollyo about tweaks we should be making to our new Firefox tool (or whatever happens to be to project of the moment). I can’t listen to other people for more than a few seconds. Eye contact is unthinkable (too much else to see). … Did the internet make me like this? Did the always connected, always emailing, always browsing, always IMing and always going all-in while playing online Texas Holdem gradually destroy my ability to focus and think clearly? Or was I just a guy with a short attention span who was therefore drawn to the internet?

Last we heard from Andrew Sullivan, he was “hyping up the danger”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/02/11/the-papers-continue-fatuous/ of clerical thugs being able to blackmail western democracies into dismantling themselves. I suggested that, insofar as civil liberties were being eroded, this was something elites in these countries were doing to themselves. Now I see that he’s come up with an example from (noted democracy) Russia of, in his words “How Muslim Blackmail Works”:http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/2006/02/how_muslim_blac.html. One of Russia’s leading Muslim clerics said that anyone planning to turn out for a gay pride parade in Moscow “should be flogged”. The parade was canceled, and QED says Sullivan. Except that, as “Cathy Young argues”:http://cathyyoung.blogspot.com/2006/02/hyping-muslim-peril.html the news reports actually show a more complicated picture. The short version is that rather than being canceled in response to this pressure it was vetoed by the city government, and the muslim cleric was joined in his opposition to the parade by the Mayor, the local Russian Orthodox Bishop and others. Astonishingly, Putin’s Russia turns out not to be such a haven for free speech, civil society or popular dissent. Who’d have thought it?

“A bill”:http://www.azleg.state.az.us/FormatDocument.asp?inDoc=/legtext/47leg/2r/summary/s.1331hed.doc.htm presently working its way through the state legislature here in Arizona proposes that universities and colleges be required to “provide a student with alternative coursework if the student deems regular coursework to be personally offensive,” that is, where “a course, coursework, learning material or activity is personally offensive if it conflicts with the student’s beliefs or practices in sex, morality or religion.” The “Arizona Daily Star”:http://www.azstarnet.com/allheadlines/116146 and “Inside Higher Ed”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/02/17/ariz have more. Although Arizona is home to the Grand Canyon, the bill was prompted not by evolutionary theory but by “Rick Moody’s”:http://www.twbookmark.com/authors/96/195/ novel, _The Ice Storm_. No, really. Someone didn’t like the description of the wife-swapping key party in the book, which you will recall from the book and film is not exactly full of admiration and cheerful praise for the well-balanced people participating in it. (And even if it were, etc …) “There’s no defense of this book,” said State Senator Thayer Verschoor ==(R)==, “I can’t believe that anyone would come up here and try to defend that kind of material.” (I heard recently that a book by some filthy-minded Irish guttersnipe containing graphic descriptions of bowel movements, urination, masturbation and sexual intercourse is on the syllabus of many college English courses. I can’t believe that, either.) Senator Jake Flake (R – Snowflake. No, really) partly disagreed, but mainly I wanted to mention that his name was Jake Flake, of Snowflake, AZ.

Since I’ve been teaching at the University of Arizona, my feeling is that my undergraduate students have been personally offended mostly by the reading and writing requirements for my courses. So in the (hopefully) unlikely event that this legislation passes, maybe I’ll have to provide an alternative “No Work/Sleep All You Like” option for them.

Observed in the wild, from a book I was reading this morning:

bq. Adam Smith … opens _The Wealth of Nations_ with an unlikely peon to a pin factory.

Sounds like the first few scenes in a Dickensian novel — the unlikely peon (because, as will be revealed later, he is really the heir to a large fortune) is sent by his bitter guardian to work cutting, drawing and polishing pins. Or, seeing as it’s Smith, doing only one of these things.

“Alan Schussman”:http://www.schussman.com/article/1256/letters-to-the-editor-passing-in-the-night reads the letters to our school newspaper, the “Daily Wildcat”:http://wildcat.arizona.edu/, so I don’t have to. The context is an effort by Republican state legislators to “require that a U.S. flag be displayed”:http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/breakingnews/021506AZ_Schools_Flags in every public school and university classroom. Tucson Democrat Ted Downing responded that “This is not the proper way to bestow patriotism. If we want we should spend more on teaching American history.” Today in the “letters to the editor”:http://media.wildcat.arizona.edu/media/paper997/news/2006/02/16/Opinions/Mailbag-1616232.shtml?sourcedomain=wildcat.arizona.edu&MIIHost=media.collegepublisher.com a number of University of Arizona students provide evidence that he might be right. Here’s Rob Monteleone (a senior), for example:

It doesn’t surprise me that someone who represents affirmative action wants to twist and distort the Constitution to suit the needs of poor, always-the-victim minorities. The Constitution was written so that all men would be treated equally. Whites, blacks and anyone else in this country … even the ones who don’t belong here.

As Alan remarks, “I’d suggest Amendments 13, 17, 19, and 24 as starting points for Ted Downing’s civics curriculum.”

Accidents happen. But the various responses (official and unofficial) being put forth on Cheney’s behalf get ever more weird. They include: (1) Whittington didn’t get a shotgun blast in the face, he was merely “peppered”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/13/AR2006021300452.html with a “pellet gun”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/007677.php. (2) Cheney has “paid his seven bucks”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_02/008219.php. (This seems to be the only official response from the Vice President’s office so far.) (3) No need for a statement from Cheney saying he feels terrible about what happened, because Whittington has already accepted responsibility for the accident. It was totally his fault. (4) Besides, why should “anyone have been interested”:http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2006/02/mcclellan_grill.html that the Vice President of the United States shot someone in the face? I mean, (5) “People get shot in the face all the time”:http://powerlineblog.com/archives/013138.php while out hunting, and you’d know it if you weren’t a liberal, east-coast, latte-drinking effete snob.

Prize for most bizarre exculpatory counterfactual goes to (6) “If Cheney had been trout fishing and a companion had walked behind him as he started to cast, so that “he inadvertently snagged his friend”:http://tbogg.blogspot.com/2006/02/warning-innate-ignorance-ahead-least.html, resulting in a hospital visit, would we have seen this kind of frenzy? I don’t think so.” The counterfactual _I_ have in mind is a bit more relevant: what if it were Whittington who had shot– er, sprayed — _Cheney_ in the face, in an otherwise identical fashion? How would things be playing out amongst the VP’s defenders? Would they be blaming him for being stupid enough to walk into a hail of shotgun pellets? Do you think we’d have seen no more than a quick photo of Whittington “skulking back home”:http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2006/02/still_more_ques.html, with no word of apology or expression of embarrassed regret? Do you think Cheney would be accepting responsibility for the accident from his ICU bed?

Andy Hamilton on this week’s _News Quiz_, quoted from memory: “What gets me about these hardline clerics in Iran and Iraq is how they think Sharia law should apply over here. How would people in Iran feel if they woke up one morning and found that Lambeth Council had wheel-clamped all their cars?” (“Or invaded,” one is alas tempted to add. But it was a good joke all the same.)

Incidentally, Radio 4’s _The News Quiz_, when set against NPR’s execrable _Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me_, joins the long list of cultural objects that serve to illustrate the difference between Britain and the United States. Others include _The Office_ (UK) vs _The Office_ (US), _Yes Prime Minister_ vs _The West Wing_, and so on.