August 2006 Archives

After my catastrophic template meltdown, the main page is back up and running. Since I rebuilt it from scratch, I actually now understand how all of the MovableType template tags work, and I was able to eliminate some extraneous stuff that wasn't doing anything. I also updated and changed some of my links, most notably adding links to the blogs of some notable UChicago economists (the Becker/Posner and the Levitt). They do a good job in writing and not being too technical. There is still some IE butchery that goes on, so I implore you to use Firefox, especially if you run Windows XP. I'm not sure about Safari now, but it should look pretty good with that browser. Now for the rest of the site... Let's just say that it's getting there. Archives and comments are intertwined somewhat and represent my next challenge.

Rumor has it that your's truly, Kiva, Jonathan, Colin, and a few others are all on an MTV commercial. I haven't seen it myself, but apparently it is a clip from our appearance on the High Five TV show. From what Kiva told me, they make fun of us for looking nerdy. I feel scandalized, having my likeness thrown about on such a low and vulgar network.

I hate college rankings. They're pretty arbitrary and meaningless, and people put WAY too much emphasis on them. Still, it's like a spectator sport: it's a guilty pleasure to see how your favorite performs each year, blatently ignoring the fact that although rankings change a lot from year to year, the institutions stay basically the same.

My pleasure at the latest edition of the Princeton Review's rankings, comes not so much from the rank, but from it's impact on a long-standing argument I have with Mr. Jonathan N. Kadish. For the last two years, he has aggressively argued that it is simply not possible to receive a good undergraduate education at any institution within a 15 mile radius of living graduate students (I'm guessing that he has no objection to dead ones, although his opinion on this matter is so strong that I wouldn't assume so). A secondary, but still important, criterion of his is that the enrollment of the institution be no larger than his high school (1650 students). By these criteria and his preexisting bias, he also maintained a derisive position on the University of Chicago, as a place where masochistic students go to study, be miserable, study some more, and end it all by committing suicide. With a grad student to undergrad ratio of about 2:1, he consistently reminded me that it might be one of the worst places to attend for the college years.

So surprise, SURPRISE, Mr. Jonathan N. Kadish! The Princeton Review lists the schools with the "Best Overall Academic Experience for Undergraduates" as:

1. University of Chicago
2. Stanford
3. Rice
4. Columbia
5. Reed
...
...
cough... cough...
...
11. Beloved Pomona College

Wahaha!

Ok, so this is all meaningless egotistical posturing, but the point should be made clear enough. Rankings are meaningless, and so are hyper-dogmatic beliefs about colleges and what makes them good or bad. I guess in that respect we're equally hopeless. I'm exaggerating Mr. Kadish and his beliefs a lot here, but I think that it was the one argument on which we could never really agree or agree to disagree. Pomona is a very good and prestigious school and he enjoys it a lot.

Oh, and in case you didn't get the message, UChicago is a fantastic place too!

I have absolutely destroyed my templates on Movable Type. The entire site layout is going to have to be rebuilt. The next time I do a complete rebuild, the site is going to go to crap, so don't expect much for awhile. As for the comments, I think they might actually be completely and totally broken now.

Sorry that the comments have been so bad recently. I'm meddling in HTML, JavaScript, and the MT markup language, and I really have no idea what I'm doing,

I'm terribly critical of the US News and World Report college rankings, but their results for 2007 are rather humorous, and feel substantially more accurate to me personally. Finally, Princeton is rated 1st in the nation, over Harvard, which now languishes at 2nd. My own personal institution, the University of Chicago finally moved up from an absurdly low position of 15th, to a more accurate space at 9th. UPenn, finally got shoved down from 4th to 7th (there is no way that it's better than Stanford, as last year's ratings showed. Caltech, while technically tied with MIT and Stanford for fourth, is placed higher on the list, which is about right too. I'm still quite surprised that Duke is even at 8th (Who's even heard of Duke anyway? What do they even do there?). Ahh, anyway. That's the latest roundup.

The comment system is currently broken. If you really want to post something, make sure you copy it to the clipboard before you press "post", and you can get it to work.

I was thinking about the implications of eliminating all national holidays this evening. There are quite a few days of the year, such as New Year's Day, Christmas, and others, on which the vast majority of people do not work. This seems horribly inefficient to me. The economy is essentially going into short-term hibernation. If you think about the value of lost work that the entire laborforce could have done in these periods, the cost of holidays is surely in the tens of billions of dollars. I would say that even if the current number of holidays were converted to flexible off-time that could be used at any point, there would still be appreciable efficiency gains, since businesses would be open for more time. All of this depends on a lot of variables and quite a bit of empirical evidence, which may or may not be supportive, but it is an interesting idea nonetheless.

However, one could just as easily argue that holidays in fact stimulate economic activity by compelling consumers to spend more. After all, people undoubtedly purchase the most goods during the November-December period. Not withstanding, this leads to the real question, which is: To what extent is consumer's expenditure on holidays driven by the amount of time that they have off from work versus a pure desire to celebrate the holiday for its own sake?

I don't know the answer, but I like to entertain the idea of abolishing holidays. It would eliminate the pressing problem in today's pluralistic society of what constitutes a day substantial enough to be a federal holiday. Why is Christmas more important than Hanukkah? The fact that more people celebrate it? Possibly. But is Columbus Day more meaningful than Hanukkah, or Kwanza, or the winter solstice pagan festival? It seems strange, since Columbus was essentially a greedy moron, who happened upon the not-so-new world, where he promptly and savagely enslaved an island, and brutally murdered and disfigured its inhabitants when they could not find him any more gold on Hispanola (the supplies had been exhausted and placed in Columbus's estate and the coffers of Spain). The Spaniard influence eventually succeeded in eliminating out much (most?) of the indigenous population in the Western hemisphere through disease and warfare. Should we celebrate that? It's a curious question.

Despite its surprising "success" in the past few years, überfluss has actually remained in an unfinished and haphazard state for probably a couple of years now. After a small disaster with templates when I upgraded MovableType 3.15, my energy was dominated by writing instead of maintainance. The situation really has gone on for an inexcusable amount of time, so I'm taking the time to standardize the layout of pages, delete outdated links, and improve historical navigation. Hopefully I will upgrade to MovableType 3.3 once I finish all the aesthetic improvements. I'm also toying with adding some other pages, but if I do it, I'll do it very discreetly. The emphasis of the site always has been blogging and writing, and it will continue to be so. Any changes or additions will be very secondary to this goal.

Some say that the college dormitory is an inherently ugly creation. I can't deny that, by definition, it lends itself to a certain degree of unpleasantness. After all, communal living with college students--many of whom are just beginning to understand the word "hygiene"--has some intrinsic disadvantages. Nevertheless, upon receiving my housing information from UChicago, I've realized that things may not really be that bad after all. I'll be living in a single in Burton-Judson Courts. To see for yourself why I'm maybe even a little excited about my living arrangements (despite the bathrooms), go to some of the following links:

UChicago Housing Website
UChicago Wiki Entry on B-J (some less flattering than others...)
A Student's Pictures

As some interesting tidbits, note that Kurt Vonnegutt and Carl Sagan were both residents of B-J, and a couple of its residents built a successful nuclear reactor inside their dorm room in 1999 for the University's famous (or perhaps infamous) scavenger hunt.