"What happened, for instance, to swell the bureaucracy at the UC over the past two decades? There now are nearly as many senior managers (8,144) as tenured and tenure-track faculty (8,521). As recently as 1993, the ratio between these groups was much different - 2,429 to 6,846.
Put another way, 18 years ago the student-to-upper management ratio was 62-to-1. Now it's all the way down to 2-to-1. The ratio of students to regular faculty, meanwhile, has risen from 22-to-1 in 1993 to 26-to-1."
It's simply the way school systems operate - make any cut the most visible/painful while ignoring the bloat within administration. Here in Albuquerque, if they're short on funds they always talk about class sizes or firing teachers, while ignoring the fact that less than half of the district employees are teachers (including substitutes they barely break 50%). Let me say that again: *Less than half* of the district employees are full-time teachers.
I don't know anything about Bishop, but (1) Hatch's seat wasn't up for grabs this cycle, and I doubt he is a favorite of the Tea Party, (2) Matheson is a Democrat, and (3) Bennett is a lame duck who was defeated by the Tea Party candidate in the Republican primary. So, what exact point are you trying to make?
I foresee discrimination against Apian American students by college admissions offices - they are known overachievers (e.g., "busy little bee"), and will be penalized for having little in the way of extracurricular activities and being seen as clannish and hanging out with their own kind. If admissions were based strictly on merit, our universities would be overrun with swarms of them...
Uh, okay. You could also say that 'wetback' isn't racially charged, since it could apply to anyone who swam across the Rio Grande to get here. Try it and let me know how that works out for you.
More anecdotes: When I was taking classes at Northeastern, at the end of every exam - when the professor called for the exams to be turned in - the Chinese students would continue to hurriedly write while talking to each other in Chinese (I assume Mandarin, could have been Cantonese, I wouldn't know the difference). It was obvious to any casual observer they were comparing answers, and I was always incredulous the professors never did anything about it.
OTOH, in my recent classes at the University of New Mexico, the few Chinese students we had were all very good - worked hard, worked well in groups, no hint of any shady behavior. Now, this was in architecture, where you live or die by your studio work, and that is nearly impossible to fake/cheat. People can tell if you've done the work or not.
1 in 40? I wonder if that is the same proportion of people who can be fighter pilots. In a past life I was a Weapons Director in the Air Force - fancy title for someone who looks at a radar screen and says "the bad guys are over there!" I worked with fighter pilots (primarily the F-15 and F-16), and the thing is, no one task they do is all that complicated. The catch is that you have to do several at the same time:
1) Fly the plane 2) Operate the radar 3) Search visually outside the cockpit 4) Talk/listen to your wingman 5) Talk/listen to radar controllers (that was me)
Only when you have mastered all these can you then:
6) Develop a mental picture of what is going on - "Situational Awareness" (SA) 7) Decide on the proper tactics and execute them, and 8) Get yourself into position and employ the weapons systems
Experienced pilots are obviously masters of all 8. An inexperienced pilot can get bogged down on step 2, and never hear you repeatedly telling him that the bandit is rolling in on his six-o-clock.
Of course, they get better, and I wonder if proper training could turn more people into 'supertaskers'. Then again, we don't spend hundreds of hours and millions of dollars training the average driver.
You know, I have to chuckle every time I see one of these stories. When I was back in school, it was pretty standard classical stuff - the Greeks, Shakespeare, Newton, the Scientific Method, etc. Now, it happened to be that dead white guys came up with most of that stuff, but that was just how it was. But sometime after I left, the Deconstructionists, the Postmodernists, the Moral Relativists, and the Frankfurt School got their hands on the reigns. No ones 'truth' was any better than another. The scientific method was no more valid than animism. Everyone got their own truth.
Well, guess what, folks? Now the Christian Fundamentalists (and the Islamic Fundamentalists) are pressing for their own 'truth'. Remember, yin and yang - everything contains within itself the seed of its opposite. That's one piece of non-white guy wisdom that holds up pretty well.
...but the scientists obviously hate Rush Limbaugh. They could have picked anyone's voice - not a polarizing political figure. How about Gilbert Gottfried? How about low male voices like James Earl Jones versus high pitched female voices?
How do you, Mr. 'Scientist', expect me to take your research seriously when you demonstrate that you are irrational and let your politics color your work?
I'm curious when you raced Pikes Peak - I watched the race a couple of years ago from lower on the course, and the road was tarmac at that point. It's my understanding that every year the road's owners pave a little more of it, with the goal of eventually paving all the way to the top - they want to make it easier for the tourists to reach the summit. Changes the nature of the PPHC, but economics wins out. Now if 'Shelley' has to handle both tarmac and gravel in the same run, that's actually fairly impressive.
Craft: On the contrary, Cameron can still direct a hell of an action sequence, and he and his crew have extraordinary craft. Not just Pandora's CGI, but translating a motion capture performance from a real actor. The actors are also pretty good across the board, no one's performance grated. They were up to the material. The material itself on the other hand...
Plot and Character Development: My biggest gripe isn't that it's basically 'Dances With Wolves' in space -- my gripe is that it *is* 'Dances With Wolves' in space. It's as if someone took the same script outline and said, "Okay, Kevin, you make the movie with Indians. James, you make it with aliens." Except, you know, Kevin's movie came out twenty years ago. I realize there are only so many basic stories, but not only did I know where they where they were going, I knew exactly how they were getting there. Nothing came as a surprise *at all*. Characters serve the same exact purpose in both movies - I half expected Jake's main rival to show up at the end of the movie on a six-legged horse on a cliff yelling "JakeSully! JakeSully! I am Wind In His Hair! Can you see you are my friend?! Can you see I will always be your friend?!"
Politics: I am going to attack Cameron's politics here, in ways you might expect and others you might not.
The half-white part of me is glad to know that in 150 years, no matter how jacked-up things are, evil white Americans will still run things. Emerging powers in Asia and elsewhere will have no cultural influence whatsoever - it will still be white guys in charge with a few Hispanics and Blacks thrown in for seasoning. Take THAT China and India!
The evil-human camp is shaped like a Pentagon. Subtle, James, subtle. (Note: If you want to make a Vauban-like star fortress, make one, or just make a rectangular military camp like we've done since Roman times.)
Even though modern helos have a fairly even high-pitched tone, helos in the future will once again have the same distinctive whop-whop sound that Hueys from Vietnam had. For a Boomer like Cameron, every fight in a jungle is Vietnam. "This is The End. My only friend...The End."
Despite white guys being the villains, only a white guy can lead you to victory - even if he is in a ten-foot tall blue body. You know, James, at the LIttle Big Horn, Geronimo wasn't a white guy that went Native, he was an actual Native. That is the part that ultimately grates for me, the patronizing attitude. Cameron is indulging the white liberal fantasy: riding to the rescue of an indigenous people and saving them from his own evil society, and in the end, being accepted as one of them. Cameron uses the highest of our film-making technology to critique us and our technology. The Na'vi get technology as a freebie - carbon-fiber skeletons and a databus connection to other living things. Well, sorry, but us humans have to work at that sort of thing.
Comic-Book Guy Critiques: You know, for the 'Sky People' we don't seem to know jack-shit about aerial combat. Apparently, we've forgotten stuff that Eddie Rickenbacker and Manfred von Richtofen figured out a century ago. Leaving aside that you could just drop stuff on the Na'vi from orbit, why do you come in low and slow so the enemy can jump you from above and behind? And why do you have helos, mechs, and transports, but no jet fighters? On a planet with the enemy riding around on pterodactyl-like critters, wouldn't it be nice to have some fast-movers that can fly above them?
All that aside, I say see it, and see it in 3D. Think of it less as a full movie and more as an amusement park ride.
A lot of folks were uncomfortable with the deficit spending under Bush. Even leaving that aside, and leaving aside the bank bailouts, stimulus, and auto maker bailouts of the past year, the Obama budget deficits will be significantly greater than the largest Bush deficits:
Note how *none* of Obama's deficits will be less than Bush's deficit of '08, by the White House's own admission, and how the Congressional Budget Office thinks their numbers are too optimistic.
After the first Gulf War the Shiites in the south of Iraq revolted against Saddam. We foolishly allowed him to fly helicopter gunships and he crushed them. The Shiites took us up on our suggestion to overthrow Saddam and we left them high and dry. We did slightly better by the Kurds in the north, and under the cover of the no-fly zone they basically carved out an autonomous province before the war in 2003 ever started - our 'invasion' there consisted of parachuting in an airborne brigade to work with the locals.
You could assert the Sunni never stood up for themselves (why would they, they were in charge), but your assertion that the people of Iraq never stood up for themselves ignores very recent Iraqi history.
Furthermore, blacks are generally socially conservative (with Southern Baptists replacing Catholics in this case), and their higher turnout to vote for Obama also brought in more votes against gay marriage. It was actually the high turnout of hispanics and blacks that doomed gay marriage, but folks find it much easier to direct their ire at a few Mormons.
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Note: I assume the '2-to-1' is a typo and the author actually meant '27-to-1'
"What happened, for instance, to swell the bureaucracy at the UC over the past two decades? There now are nearly as many senior managers (8,144) as tenured and tenure-track faculty (8,521). As recently as 1993, the ratio between these groups was much different - 2,429 to 6,846.
Put another way, 18 years ago the student-to-upper management ratio was 62-to-1. Now it's all the way down to 2-to-1. The ratio of students to regular faculty, meanwhile, has risen from 22-to-1 in 1993 to 26-to-1."
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/585302/201109191844/By-The-Way-We-Teach-A-Little-Too.htm
It's simply the way school systems operate - make any cut the most visible/painful while ignoring the bloat within administration. Here in Albuquerque, if they're short on funds they always talk about class sizes or firing teachers, while ignoring the fact that less than half of the district employees are teachers (including substitutes they barely break 50%). Let me say that again: *Less than half* of the district employees are full-time teachers.
http://www.aps.edu/about-us/district-information
"At 20, you have the face you were born with. At 40, you have the face you deserve."
Get with the times - everything these days is the fault of the Koch brothers. The KOOooOOooOOCH Brothers!
If the Gulags, The Great Leap Forward, and The Killing Fields are any indication, atheists are really good at murdering everybody including the poor.
I don't know anything about Bishop, but (1) Hatch's seat wasn't up for grabs this cycle, and I doubt he is a favorite of the Tea Party, (2) Matheson is a Democrat, and (3) Bennett is a lame duck who was defeated by the Tea Party candidate in the Republican primary. So, what exact point are you trying to make?
I foresee discrimination against Apian American students by college admissions offices - they are known overachievers (e.g., "busy little bee"), and will be penalized for having little in the way of extracurricular activities and being seen as clannish and hanging out with their own kind. If admissions were based strictly on merit, our universities would be overrun with swarms of them...
"When seconds count, the police (and firefighters, and EMTs, etc.) are only minutes away."
You mean the folks who told us for thirteen years that refined carbohydrates should be the *foundation* of our diet?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USDA_Food_Pyramid.gif
Salmon? Olive Oil? No! They have fat! More pasta! More bread! Yeah, the government would never steer you wrong...
Uh, okay. You could also say that 'wetback' isn't racially charged, since it could apply to anyone who swam across the Rio Grande to get here. Try it and let me know how that works out for you.
More anecdotes: When I was taking classes at Northeastern, at the end of every exam - when the professor called for the exams to be turned in - the Chinese students would continue to hurriedly write while talking to each other in Chinese (I assume Mandarin, could have been Cantonese, I wouldn't know the difference). It was obvious to any casual observer they were comparing answers, and I was always incredulous the professors never did anything about it.
OTOH, in my recent classes at the University of New Mexico, the few Chinese students we had were all very good - worked hard, worked well in groups, no hint of any shady behavior. Now, this was in architecture, where you live or die by your studio work, and that is nearly impossible to fake/cheat. People can tell if you've done the work or not.
Well obviously she has development issues - she still can't really talk, and she's shot people on multiple occasions.
1 in 40? I wonder if that is the same proportion of people who can be fighter pilots. In a past life I was a Weapons Director in the Air Force - fancy title for someone who looks at a radar screen and says "the bad guys are over there!" I worked with fighter pilots (primarily the F-15 and F-16), and the thing is, no one task they do is all that complicated. The catch is that you have to do several at the same time:
1) Fly the plane
2) Operate the radar
3) Search visually outside the cockpit
4) Talk/listen to your wingman
5) Talk/listen to radar controllers (that was me)
Only when you have mastered all these can you then:
6) Develop a mental picture of what is going on - "Situational Awareness" (SA)
7) Decide on the proper tactics and execute them, and
8) Get yourself into position and employ the weapons systems
Experienced pilots are obviously masters of all 8. An inexperienced pilot can get bogged down on step 2, and never hear you repeatedly telling him that the bandit is rolling in on his six-o-clock.
Of course, they get better, and I wonder if proper training could turn more people into 'supertaskers'. Then again, we don't spend hundreds of hours and millions of dollars training the average driver.
According to People for the Ethical Treatment of Underwater Robots, it's finally free!
You know, I have to chuckle every time I see one of these stories. When I was back in school, it was pretty standard classical stuff - the Greeks, Shakespeare, Newton, the Scientific Method, etc. Now, it happened to be that dead white guys came up with most of that stuff, but that was just how it was. But sometime after I left, the Deconstructionists, the Postmodernists, the Moral Relativists, and the Frankfurt School got their hands on the reigns. No ones 'truth' was any better than another. The scientific method was no more valid than animism. Everyone got their own truth.
Well, guess what, folks? Now the Christian Fundamentalists (and the Islamic Fundamentalists) are pressing for their own 'truth'. Remember, yin and yang - everything contains within itself the seed of its opposite. That's one piece of non-white guy wisdom that holds up pretty well.
...but the scientists obviously hate Rush Limbaugh. They could have picked anyone's voice - not a polarizing political figure. How about Gilbert Gottfried? How about low male voices like James Earl Jones versus high pitched female voices?
How do you, Mr. 'Scientist', expect me to take your research seriously when you demonstrate that you are irrational and let your politics color your work?
I'm curious when you raced Pikes Peak - I watched the race a couple of years ago from lower on the course, and the road was tarmac at that point. It's my understanding that every year the road's owners pave a little more of it, with the goal of eventually paving all the way to the top - they want to make it easier for the tourists to reach the summit. Changes the nature of the PPHC, but economics wins out. Now if 'Shelley' has to handle both tarmac and gravel in the same run, that's actually fairly impressive.
Taking your gripes out of order:
Craft: On the contrary, Cameron can still direct a hell of an action sequence, and he and his crew have extraordinary craft. Not just Pandora's CGI, but translating a motion capture performance from a real actor. The actors are also pretty good across the board, no one's performance grated. They were up to the material. The material itself on the other hand...
Plot and Character Development: My biggest gripe isn't that it's basically 'Dances With Wolves' in space -- my gripe is that it *is* 'Dances With Wolves' in space. It's as if someone took the same script outline and said, "Okay, Kevin, you make the movie with Indians. James, you make it with aliens." Except, you know, Kevin's movie came out twenty years ago. I realize there are only so many basic stories, but not only did I know where they where they were going, I knew exactly how they were getting there. Nothing came as a surprise *at all*. Characters serve the same exact purpose in both movies - I half expected Jake's main rival to show up at the end of the movie on a six-legged horse on a cliff yelling "JakeSully! JakeSully! I am Wind In His Hair! Can you see you are my friend?! Can you see I will always be your friend?!"
Politics: I am going to attack Cameron's politics here, in ways you might expect and others you might not.
The half-white part of me is glad to know that in 150 years, no matter how jacked-up things are, evil white Americans will still run things. Emerging powers in Asia and elsewhere will have no cultural influence whatsoever - it will still be white guys in charge with a few Hispanics and Blacks thrown in for seasoning. Take THAT China and India!
The evil-human camp is shaped like a Pentagon. Subtle, James, subtle. (Note: If you want to make a Vauban-like star fortress, make one, or just make a rectangular military camp like we've done since Roman times.)
Even though modern helos have a fairly even high-pitched tone, helos in the future will once again have the same distinctive whop-whop sound that Hueys from Vietnam had. For a Boomer like Cameron, every fight in a jungle is Vietnam. "This is The End. My only friend...The End."
Despite white guys being the villains, only a white guy can lead you to victory - even if he is in a ten-foot tall blue body. You know, James, at the LIttle Big Horn, Geronimo wasn't a white guy that went Native, he was an actual Native. That is the part that ultimately grates for me, the patronizing attitude. Cameron is indulging the white liberal fantasy: riding to the rescue of an indigenous people and saving them from his own evil society, and in the end, being accepted as one of them. Cameron uses the highest of our film-making technology to critique us and our technology. The Na'vi get technology as a freebie - carbon-fiber skeletons and a databus connection to other living things. Well, sorry, but us humans have to work at that sort of thing.
Comic-Book Guy Critiques: You know, for the 'Sky People' we don't seem to know jack-shit about aerial combat. Apparently, we've forgotten stuff that Eddie Rickenbacker and Manfred von Richtofen figured out a century ago. Leaving aside that you could just drop stuff on the Na'vi from orbit, why do you come in low and slow so the enemy can jump you from above and behind? And why do you have helos, mechs, and transports, but no jet fighters? On a planet with the enemy riding around on pterodactyl-like critters, wouldn't it be nice to have some fast-movers that can fly above them?
All that aside, I say see it, and see it in 3D. Think of it less as a full movie and more as an amusement park ride.
Yes, I should clarify that NASA plays little to no role in our deficit/debt. The 'chumpchange' tag on the story could apply to the entire NASA budget.
A lot of folks were uncomfortable with the deficit spending under Bush. Even leaving that aside, and leaving aside the bank bailouts, stimulus, and auto maker bailouts of the past year, the Obama budget deficits will be significantly greater than the largest Bush deficits:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2009/03/21/GR2009032100104.html
Note how *none* of Obama's deficits will be less than Bush's deficit of '08, by the White House's own admission, and how the Congressional Budget Office thinks their numbers are too optimistic.
Paneer, to be specific...
After the first Gulf War the Shiites in the south of Iraq revolted against Saddam. We foolishly allowed him to fly helicopter gunships and he crushed them. The Shiites took us up on our suggestion to overthrow Saddam and we left them high and dry. We did slightly better by the Kurds in the north, and under the cover of the no-fly zone they basically carved out an autonomous province before the war in 2003 ever started - our 'invasion' there consisted of parachuting in an airborne brigade to work with the locals.
You could assert the Sunni never stood up for themselves (why would they, they were in charge), but your assertion that the people of Iraq never stood up for themselves ignores very recent Iraqi history.
Furthermore, blacks are generally socially conservative (with Southern Baptists replacing Catholics in this case), and their higher turnout to vote for Obama also brought in more votes against gay marriage. It was actually the high turnout of hispanics and blacks that doomed gay marriage, but folks find it much easier to direct their ire at a few Mormons.
And they also recommended a couple of changes to DES when it was being developed:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/10/the_legacy_of_d.html
Folks at the time thought it was some nefarious backdoor, but a couple of decades later came to realize it actually improved the security of DES.