Posts Tagged ‘Indiana Jones’
Thursday Morning Link Transmission!
* American says no to MOOCs. So does SFSU.
* Meanwhile, Florida Polytechnic University says no to tenure.
“We want to be a leading university, and we wanted to attract faculty who think out of the box, and who are ambitious and creative,” said Ghazi Darkazalli, vice president of academic affairs. “We don’t want them to be worrying within the first five or six years whether they’re going to be tenured or not.”
Far better for them to spend those five or six years trying to get a TT job at another school.
* Scenes from the Fitness Palace at Purdue.
* In practice, however, that doesn’t happen. The scholarships go towards “merit aid”, which is often, dismayingly enough, a polite way of saying that the college is helping to pay for wealthy kids to attend, even if they’re not particularly smart. Some 20% of students with GPAs below 2.0, for instance, receive merit aid. And at the same time, the “need aid” is carefully calibrated so that poor kids won’t take the colleges up on their offers… See also: Colleges Soak Poor U.S. Students as Aid Funneled to Rich.
* The Troubling Viral Trend of the “Hilarious” Black Neighbor. And its equally unhappy, equally exploitative shadow.
* Elizabeth Warren wants to cut student interest rates to near zero.
* Food service workers in St. Louis have gone on strike. So might adjuncts in Chicago. Amazon workers sue over mandatory post-shift search. Cooper Union Students Occupy President’s Office To Protest Tuition.
* Why Cops Bust Down Doors of Medical Pot Growers, But Ignore Men Who Keep Naked Girls on Leashes.
* NYC Considering Allowing Non-Citizens To Vote. Good!
* “Demolishing the Competition: The Longitudinal Link Between Competitive Video Games, Competitive Gambling, and Aggression,” a new study that will appear in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, found that aggressive behavior is tied to competition, not violence, in videogames and gambling, according to Forbes.
* Scientists also say that guns are bad, glass is not a liquid, and the Toba catastrophe may not have happened.
* This 17-Year-Old Coder Is Saving Twitter From TV Spoilers (Spoiler: She’s a Girl).
* Here’s another example — I’ve watched every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (several times) and I never noticed that Riker doesn’t know how to use a chair. When the guy sits down he pulls the chair back and dramatically slings his leg over the back of it like he’s mounting a freakin’ horse. He apparently does this all the time, regardless of the situation. It’s nuts.
* Lucas wanted Indiana Jones 2 to be a dinosaur movie. I honestly can’t decide if this is the best or the worst idea I’ve ever heard.
Spitballing Indiana Jones
Spielberg fires off ideas with an adolescent’s stamina—and not all of them are bad, either. In fact, among his spontaneous interjections are some of the most iconic episodes in the film. “I have a great idea!” he exclaims. “There is a sixty-five-foot boulder, that’s form-fitted to only roll down the corridor, coming right at him. And it’s a race. He gets to outrun the boulder!”
Spitballing Indiana Jones, at the New Yorker.
LUCAS: In the essence it’s just bullshit stuff where he wanders around Cairo trying to uncover the mystery of his puzzle. At the same time, you meet all these interesting characters and every once in a while somebody throws a knife at him, or he beats somebody up, or somebody beats him up. Typical Middle Eastern stuff.
Sunday Links
* Following up on the Star-Wars-as-maps link: Indiana Jones as maps.
* At USC between 1998 and 2012, 92% of white men were awarded tenure, but only 55% of women and minorities in the same departments. Via @reclaimuc.
* The Dark Side of the Digital at MLA.
* The Chinese website Tencent reports that a father got so upset with his son’s nonstop MMO playing that he hired an in-game hit-squad to kill his son’s character whenever it spawned, in the hopes of discouraging the young man from playing.
* For some in the burgeoning stop-hitting movement, the goal is nothing less than a total legal ban on spanking in all settings, as has been passed by 33 nations in Europe, Latin America and Africa (soon to be 34 when Brazil becomes the largest country to outlaw spanking in final action expected this year).
Tuesday Night
* Today’s thing that every academic is linking: How The American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps.
* The study, by David Stuckler at the University of Cambridge and others, found that for every 1 percent increase in unemployment, there is a an associated 0.8 percent increase in suicides in people younger than 65.
* The Poochie Supremacy: How informed awareness is ruining Hollywood.
* Climate change: not all bad? It might be ruining high school football.
* Another great what-if from Randall Monroe: Is there enough energy to move the entire current human population off-planet?
* And some rare good news: Raiders of the Lost Ark is coming back to theaters.
Good Morning Friday
* Via Boing Boing, Ayn Rand’s Lord of the Rings. There’s some kneejerk misogyny in the coda, but the parody itself is pretty good.
* The New Yorker will let you go inside the mind of a condom and a failed superhero, but it won’t let you read an article about my “Plan B” as a forensic linguist or the Junot Díaz story that tricked me into reading New Yorker fiction for the first time in years without a subscription.
* Deforestation in a Civilized World.
* A Land Without Guns: How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting Deaths. In part by forbidding almost all forms of firearm ownership, Japan has as few as two gun-related homicides a year.
All the Wednesday Links
* The headline reads, “Student Loan Debt Delinquency Is Much Worse Than We Thought.”
We find that 27 percent of the borrowers have past due balances, while the adjusted proportion of outstanding student loan balances that is delinquent is 21 percent-much higher than the unadjusted rates of 14.4 percent and 10 percent, respectively
Meanwhile, college costs have sextupled since 1985.
* The Supreme Court looks prepared to rule that international law doesn’t apply internationally. Well done, sirs.
* Attorney General Eric Holder concludes no due process is a kind of due process. This whole “rule of law” thing is going great.
* Paul Pillar: We can live with a nuclear Iran. Of course we can.
The simple argument is that Iranian leaders supposedly don’t think like the rest of us: they are religious fanatics who value martyrdom more than life, cannot be counted on to act rationally, and therefore cannot be deterred. On the campaign trail Rick Santorum has been among the most vocal in propounding this notion, asserting that Iran is ruled by the “equivalent of al-Qaeda,” that its “theology teaches” that its objective is to “create a calamity,” that it believes “the afterlife is better than this life,” and that its “principal virtue” is martyrdom. Newt Gingrich speaks in a similar vein about how Iranian leaders are suicidal jihadists, and says “it’s impossible to deter them.”
The trouble with this image of Iran is that it does not reflect actual Iranian behavior. More than three decades of history demonstrate that the Islamic Republic’s rulers, like most rulers elsewhere, are overwhelmingly concerned with preserving their regime and their power—in this life, not some future one. They are no more likely to let theological imperatives lead them into self-destructive behavior than other leaders whose religious faiths envision an afterlife. Iranian rulers may have a history of valorizing martyrdom—as they did when sending young militiamen to their deaths in near-hopeless attacks during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s—but they have never given any indication of wanting to become martyrs themselves. In fact, the Islamic Republic’s conduct beyond its borders has been characterized by caution. Even the most seemingly ruthless Iranian behavior has been motivated by specific, immediate concerns of regime survival. The government assassinated exiled Iranian dissidents in Europe in the 1980s and ’90s, for example, because it saw them as a counterrevolutionary threat. The assassinations ended when they started inflicting too much damage on Iran’s relations with European governments. Iran’s rulers are constantly balancing a very worldly set of strategic interests. The principles of deterrence are not invalid just because the party to be deterred wears a turban and a beard.
On the other side, of course, we have the not-at-all-fascistic-sounding slogan “peace through strength.” Occupy Everywhere? What could possibly go wrong?
* Football: It’s worse than you think! Via MetaFilter, with more from Ta-Nehisi Coates.
* Matt Zoller Seitz on what makes Mad Men great.
* When Gabriel García Márquez interviewed Akira Kurosawa.
Marquez: Thank you very much. All things considered, I think that if I were Japanese I would be as unyielding as you on [the subject of the bomb]. And at any rate I understand you. No war is good for anybody.
Kurosawa: That is so. The trouble is that when the shooting starts, even Christ and the angels turn into military chiefs of staff.
* How Goldman Sachs does it: they’re on every side of every deal.
* Archie Comics continues to insist on its own relevance: now they’re giving Cheryl Blossom breast cancer.
* I give Colbert the edge over Stewart re: Rush.
* And exactly how long ago was a long time ago in a galaxy far away? io9 is there.
Great Unknown, Han and Chewbacca are forced to make a jump to hyperspace to flee Imperial attackers. (OK yes, we know it’s non-canonical, but this is a thought experiment so just bear with us.) The Millennium Falcon crash lands on Earth, where Han and Chewbacca are attacked by Native Americans. Han receives several arrow wounds in the process, and Chewbacca holds his partner as the last bit of life flees from him. The second half of the story leaps 126 years into the future, with Indiana Jones and Short Round searching for Sasquatch in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, only to find Chewbacca and the bones of Han Solo.
Blaspheme!
Tuesday Night Links
* Community is back March 15, but NBC still hates you; they’re putting Parks & Rec on hiatus instead.
* 46 Things to Read and See for David Foster Wallace’s 50th Birthday. Via MeFi.
* Weirdest Unsolved Mysteries of World War II. I feel certain Indiana Jones was involved in each of these.
* “How New York Pay Phones Became Guerrilla Libraries.”
* A literary history of erasure.
* When Jon Hamm met Miss Piggy.
* Cory Doctorow reviews Lawrence Lessig’s Constitutional-conventionalist One Way Forward.
* ‘I exist wholly for you. I will never reject you. You cannot disappoint me.’ A brief history of the money shot.
* Canadians: They’re Just as Bad as Us!
* And of course you had me at 1811 Dictionary in the Vulgar Tongue. Via Kottke.
FLOGGING CULLY. A debilitated lecher, commonly an old one.
COLD PIG. To give cold pig is a punishment inflicted on sluggards who lie too long in bed: it consists in pulling off all the bed clothes from them, and throwing cold water upon them.
TWIDDLE-DIDDLES. Testicles.
TWIDDLE POOP. An effeminate looking fellow.
Friday Links
* My career in academia-based standup comedy begins with this report from Inside Higher Ed. Republican professors grade like this, while Democratic professors grade like this…
* I linked to a little bit of this yesterday, but actually the entire A.V. Club interview with Dan Harmon is pretty compelling reading for Community fans.
* I’m pretty sure I could play Indiana Jones better than Tom Selleck. They really offered him the part?
* Also at Blastr: 10 great unmade Star Trek series. Brian Singer’s idea for a Federation in decline actually doesn’t sound bad.
* I get that Gawker thinks I should find this funny, but the whole thing is just so sad.
Tuesday Night Links
* Amazing omnibus World Cup calendar. Related: Why aren’t the great powers dominating the soccer pitch? Both links via Steve.
* Bad news / good news: Blanche Lincoln wins in Arkansas after all. But it looks like Harry Reid will face a far-right candidate with ties to anti-government extremists the Oath Keepers.
* I’m shocked, shocked: Lindsey Graham will vote against his own climate and energy bill.
* More details on that Hurley/Ben Lost epilogue.
* Details coming out on Indiana Jones 5.
* The New Yorker on why teens love dystopias.
* Thinking Collapsistarianism. Could this be the fifty-first contemporary political ideology?
Closing! All! My! Tabs!
* Al Gore is coming to Duke this April.
* Arbitrarily defined political, social, and religious positionalities correlate with a measurement that doesn’t mean anything to prove people like me are smarter than everybody else. Science!
* For the doctors in the audience: A transit map of the human body.
* John Roberts, radical. Via MeFi.
For the past few years, I’ve been giving Roberts the benefit of the doubt, hoping that he meant it when he talked about the importance of putting the bipartisan legitimacy of the Court above his own ideological agenda. But, while Roberts talked persuasively about conciliation, it now appears that he is unwilling to cede an inch to liberals in the most polarizing cases. If Roberts continues this approach, the Supreme Court may find itself on a collision course with the Obama administration–precipitating the first full-throttle confrontation between an economically progressive president and a narrow majority of conservative judicial activists since the New Deal.
* This note shows that the aggregate fiscal expenditure stimulus in the United States, properly adjusted for the declining fiscal expenditure of the fifty states, was close to zero in 2009. While the Federal government stimulus prevented a net decline in aggregate fiscal expenditure, it did not stimulate the aggregate expenditure above its predicted mean. In other words, the federal stimulus primarily covered shortfalls in state budgets; it wasn’t new spending.
* Congratulations, Senate Republicans, on another historic benchmark.
* Another day, another set of outrageous lies from Fox News.
* Another academic career ruined by Facebook?
* Health care, they say, by Easter. Thirty-six Senators now support the reinserting the public option through reconciliation; here’s how they can bring it to a vote. Meanwhile, in the House, Pelosi only needs 216 votes. It’s still being reported that the House will act first.
* Steve Benen has a list of the additional Republican ideas that Obama now wants in the health care bill. I’m certain they now hate these ideas too. Quick, call a summit!
* On Nicole Kidman’s pre-existing conditions.
* When Sartre wrote for Hollywood.
* What Smith and [Stanley] Fish are doing is asking a stupid question — where are the Orders of the Cosmic Dictator? — and failing to note that there seems to be no evidence of a cosmic dictator, and his orders are merely pretenses put up by institutionalized frauds. And then they run about in circles, flailing their arms and screaming at the people who point out that there are no orders.
* How to resign from the Catholic Church.
* A History of Obama Feigning Interest in Mundane Things.
* Globalization, as seen through your taco.
* Rejoice: marriage equality in DC tomorrow.
* And please, leave Indy alone.
