WOULDN'T IT BE NICE? A Constitutional federal budget.

FORESHADOWING? The wreck of Columbia foretold here.

COSTS AND BENEFITS. Are you safer driving to the launch pad or riding the Space Shuttle? Hint: the basis of comparison matters.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: "Message to Christians: if you're offended, get over it. Message to Muslims: we feel your pain, and we'll make you feel better, even it requires censorship." That's Laura Ingraham, as noted on Betsy's Page.

LEARNING BY DOING. The Library and Information Science class weblog notices they've been noticed. Grading scale looks honest enough.

IT BEGAN WITH PLATO. The SCSU Scholars offer a response to my suggestion that limiting the power of the machinery of repression is more important than obtaining control of it. "But it isn't that simple. When you conceive of rights as coming from the state, as does the modern liberal (as opposed to the classical one), then power is relatively constant. You can't create or destroy it, you simply fight over who will possess it. Like Tolkein's Ring, nobody is safe from the lure of power. (It always comes back to Tolkein.) Stephen is right, but he's asking people to think about this in a way they simply cannot fathom."

Fair enough. I argue that it comes back to Plato: this is simply the latest iteration of the philosopher king model. And I am a relatively small and inexperienced voice in the conversation. Let me offer a larger and more experienced voice: "All you freedom-loving 'left wing" thinkers in the West! You left laborites! You progressive American, German, and French students! As far as you are concerned, none of this amounts to much. As far as you are concerned, this whole book of mine is a waste of effort. You may suddenly understand it all someday -- but only when you yourselves hear 'hands behind your backs there!' and step ashore on our Archipelago." It may not be mine to finish the task, but I will not give it up.

Tolkien? Latecomer when it comes to magic rings.

NOT A KNOCKDOWN PUFF. The latest coverage of the Columbia post-mortem is looking at causes other than tile damage account shedding of external tank insulation on takeoff. "[Shuttle program manager Ron] Dittemore said that during Columbia's final minutes, the autopilot was causing the craft to rapidly move the control surfaces and to eventually even fire small rockets in a losing effort to gain control of the yawing motion of Columbia." Couple that with the slight rise in temperature on the port wing and you have something akin to a sailboat on a broad reach getting hit with a knockdown puff. In a displacement sloop, you simply ease the jib and the main and keep going. In a planing catboat, such as the Laser, where there is only a mainsail, that is a very dangerous strategy (it took me a few swims to figure it out) as easing the main has the potential to create a positive feedback loop leading to the sail rolling the boat to windward: the death roll. (Best have the cunningham lead made fast, as that's the only thing holding the mast to the boat as it turtles.) The proper response to the knockdown puff is to trim in and enjoy the ride! (I have some silverware attesting to how enjoyable THAT can be.)

Knockdown puffs don't happen at the edge of the atmosphere, according to a meteorologist I asked. "At that altitude, they wouldn't have come into contact with stronger winds. They'd have to get another 50,000-100,000 feet lower for that. Also, the wind gradient in the jet stream up there is never that sharp; since the friction of the earth's surface is zero for all intents and purposes, the only way there could have been anything remotely wrong is if they flew over a really tall thunderstorm. Obviously, the weather was fine where it happened. Clear air turbulence is not a factor up there, either." So, what happened to provide signals to the guidance system to make corrections that did not provide negative feedback?

UPDATE: My brother the King Air pilot provides the following "no s***, this really happened" moment: "I, for one, have experienced failures of the autopilot on the King Airs that I (used to) fly in which the autopilot was working perfectly well and suddenly decided to send some odd command or another causing one of those brief moments of sheer terror during the hours of monotony that we quip about. There have been cases in which the attitude indicator from which the autopilot takes its input tumbles and the autopilot "corrects" and places the aircraft in an unusual attitude. However, with all of the back up systems on the space shuttle, I should think that a tumbled gyro or flaky autopilot would be taken off line and replaced by one of the redundant ones.

It will be interesting to see what NASA learns from this accident."

Quite.

DEPORTATION?. Where Worlds Collide notes that the Charities Commission has dismissed Sheikh Abu Hamza as an agent of London's Finsbury Park Mosque. Hamza is one of those who saw divine intervention in Columbia crashing. As Where Worlds Collide notes, "Of course, all Hamza achieves is to encourage an anti moslem backlash. It's long overdue to deport this nutjob (who's not a UK citizen). That's assuming we can find a single country in the world that would accept him."

GAINS FROM TRADE. India West finds unsound economics in the "war for oil" argument.

WHAT FUTURE FOR SPACE EXPLORATION, II. "To make a business out of flying reusable rocket-powered vehicles, you need to fly more than once a day, not just every couple of weeks." That sounds like a shuttle operation. It's XCOR chief engineer Dan Delong describing progress with Dick Rutan's E-Z Rocket. They're still a long way from a going commercial proposition. But it's time to think anew about the roles of rocketry, and the role of government in those roles. Paul Krugman is not the only commentator to suggest, "It's an open secret that the only real purpose of the International Space Station is to give us a reason to keep flying space shuttles." Here is a prescient 1998 column by Rocket Boy Homer Hickam: "What we will see in the next five years, then, is a NASA that is going to build the ISS, exhausting our shuttle fleet and its supporting personnel in the process. If we're lucky enough not to have a shuttle failure, or wholesale resignation of disgusted NASA engineers, the result of all of this expenditure of effort and money will be some linked trailers in space which we will grandly call a space station, a station, unfortunately, in name only. Its inclination will be too northerly to use for an efficient crewed flight to the moon or moving out along the plane of the solar system to Mars or anywhere else." He's not done: "These two programs [the space station and the shuttle] continue to dominate NASA and will, if we continue to let them eat our space agency alive, ultimately strand us as a space-faring nation as surely as the payloads aboard our recently misfired rockets." Ultimately, Hickam, also, would like to go to Mars, but with something other than chemical-fueled rockets.

But basic research and development, and interplanetary missions, are something different from placing satellites in orbit. Happy Fun Pundit, who has some thoughts on the role of government in space exploration, hasn't finished his argument. There are reasons to unbundle the interplanetary missions and the development of new rocket engines from the somewhat more routine placement of satellites, particularly commercial satellites, in orbit. There is no reason for the entire space enterprise to be a government monopoly.

WHAT FUTURE FOR SPACE EXPLORATION, I Plant the flag on Mars, according to Pathetic Earthlings and James Lileks and Sgt. Stryker and Charles Krauthammer and Spider Robinson. Perhaps so. But then set that as a goal, and have the people and the machinery to make it happen.

INSTITUTIONS EVOLVE TO REDUCE TRANSACTION COSTS. "In the 21st century, a government must earn its right to claim sovereignty," argues Ralph Peters. Perhaps so, although his criteria for granting sovereignty are somewhat more stringent than the conditions laid down ab initio in the U.S. Constitution for the right to vote.

SIGMA-ALGEBRAS. In reality, the content of the evoked set matters.

THANKS, Mr. Kazem.

THE FIRST IMPRESSION IS USUALLY WRONG. No giant leaps, please.

BILLBOARDS WE'D LIKE TO SEE. Thanks!

REPRESSIVE VS. LIBERATING INTOLERANCE. Both Betsy's Page and Joanne Jacobs point to a Daphne Patai essay noting a new interest in academic freedom as an absolute value. To quote Joanne Jacobs, "Campus Watch and No Indoctrination are causing acute goosebumps in academia." As I noted some time ago, "It's really very simple, if one thinks about it. Give John Ashcroft no power you'd fear to see in Janet Reno's hands, and give Catherine MacKinnon no power you'd fear to see in mine."

NEW SOURCE OF COMPANY MAIL. Arnold Kling is offering comments on economics, from the right of Brad and the left of Virginia, who pointed me his way. But would you really want to use the Hotelling-Eaton & Lipsey-Salop model as the starting point for the economics of web logs?

COMPARATIVE DISADVANTAGES. The SCSU Scholars have the following description of their University's Johnny-one-note president: "Even [in reference to Columbia] he had to bring race in. He quite simply has shown no capability to understand any of the functions of higher education nor the issues concerning it other than his one pet issue. Our poor university has been badly served for a long time by administrations significantly weaker than either our good faculty or excellent students deserve, and Saigo continues that weary tradition."

KIA ORA. Daniel Drezner is back from New Zealand, where, he notes, "[i]t was very relaxing to be in a country where the leading paper had -- maybe -- two pages of global news coverage. This is in contrast to the endless coverage of the America's Cup." Which, this year, will be contested between Team New Zealand and a Swiss team with Chris Dickson, New Zealander, at the helm. Where is the "arm of the sea" in Switzerland? On the other hand, there is a Lake Geneva, and the Societe Nautique de Geneve translates loosely as Lake Geneva Yacht Club.

Professor Drezner notes that President Bush has moved the cloud of dust another three yards.

CORRECTION. Russell Coutts, not Chris Dickson. Both are Kiwi mercenaries, but Coutts, along with tactician Brad Butterworth, are from the New Zealand effort that brought the Cup south in 1995 and defended it in 2000. Racing starts February 15.

THIS LOOKS DUBIOUS. An Italian website is publishing pictures that purport to show large cracks in the wings of a Space Shuttle. (Via Drudge.) Don't believe everything you see. The picture correctly shows Earth in the background, with the cracked wings in the foreground. The Shuttle takes a tail-toward-Earth attitude for orbiting. That means the photographer (on the Space Station? a remote on a satellite?) must be further from Earth than the Shuttle. Could not have been someone on the Space Station. Unlikely to have been a spy satellite.

TWO NATIONS? "It is almost as if we have become two nations: One, a nation of whiny chattering victims, of therapists, nannies, litigators, and a navel-gazing obsession with feelings. The other, a nation of quiet valor." That's Milwaukee author and talk-show host Charlie Sykes this morning.

25 YEARS No freight car more than 25 years old may be used for interchange service on the U.S. and Canadian railroads. Here's a bibliography of inter alia the rules for interchange service and these people handle specific questions for shippers and carriers. The fastest a freight car goes is usually 70 mph (110 km/h) and the coldest temperatures they encounter are no worse than -50 (Celsius or Fahrenheit, either way much warmer than the upper atmosphere.)

ARGUMENTAM AD MISERICORDIAM. With useful responses for professors. (Via Newmark's Door.)

SLAVOPHILIA. Lileks.

THE WEAKEST PLACE MUST STAND THE STRAIN. What ultimately happens is a matter of logic. Might also make uncovering the ultimate cause of Columbia's failure more challenging.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A ROUTINE TRIP. Yes, that's the point behind a recent Scrapple Face post, but there's a serious point to it. We seem to recognize the non-routine-ness of space exploration, as Transterrestrial Musings explains, and Pathetic Earthlings rebuttal to Gregg Easterbrook spells out.

It's a point daily commuters would do well to bear in mind as well.

InstaPundit's comparison of the Shuttle failure with a fatal train collision in Zimbabwe (there was one in Australia recently as well, noted at Where Worlds Collide.) misses the mark in three ways. "What makes the Columbia's loss more striking than the deaths of train passengers is that space exploration is forward-looking, not just part of ordinary life, and such a loss is a setback to something important, and noble. It's not that astronauts' lives are worth more than those of anyone else; it's what they do, and what it stands for." First, that depends on your perspective. My well-worn 1991 edition of Jane's World Railways describes the National Railways of Zimbabwe as 2759 route-kilometers, 313 km electrified, of 1067 mm gauge (3'6" or Cape gauge, use S track to model it in O scale) in a country slightly larger than Montana. By contrast, the New Zealand railways operate 4227 route-kilometers, 519 km electrified (at two different voltages) of 1067 mm gauge on two islands together about the size of Colorado, with mountains to match, and the Boston and Maine Railroad operates 2532 route-kilometers of 1435 mm gauge (4' 8.5") track on a much-shrunken network of tracks in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and bits of Maine and New York. The railway is still an instrument of prosperity and progress in much of the world (yes, even new steam locomotives on the Jingpeng Pass are more of a great leap forward than anything Chairman Mao envisioned) and a train crash remains a setback to the aspirations of many people. Second, our attitudes toward risk are much different now than they were when the railroad was opening up the North American hinterland. Every rule in the Consolidated Code of Operating Rules is written in someone's blood. It took a long time, and a lot of maimed and dead trainmen, before the automatic air brake and the automatic coupler became standard equipment, and we still tolerate rather a lot of carnage at the highway crossings. We ought not let that carnage harden us to the loss of seven astronauts; rather, we ought to contemplate the costs and benefits of making other things that seem routine safer. Finally, there are commonalities between the space program and railways in much of the world. Consider Professor Reynolds's recommendation to Congress: "Although the United States has made significant progress already in developing a truly commercial space sector, it has a considerable distance yet to go. For decades, all space activity was undertaken by governments, leading to the creation of institutional structures, bureaucratic cultures, and ways of doing business that are poorly adapted to the commercial marketplace. In trying to promote the growth of commercial space industries, the U.S. government must overcome these inbuilt biases, and encourage the formation of new structures and cultures that are well-suited to the realities of the commercial marketplace." That is the nature of railroading around much of the world. Professor Reynolds's colleague, Brock Yates, is able to demonstrate his ignorance of railroading realities in part because the structure and culture most suited to the commercial marketplace in transportation in the United States is one of freight service only, with single-shipper trains often of a single cargo (including a shipload of containers) for a single destination. I am sympathetic to the suggestion that space exploration is not exclusively a government function. Perhaps our space policy makers can learn a few things from our railroads.

VISIONS OF THE FUTURE. Blaster's Blog has some observations about the State of the Union address lacking an uplifting vision, something along the lines of the 1939 New York World's Fair or perhaps President Kennedy's deadline for a round trip to the Moon. He also has some eerily prescient comments about the obsolescence of the Space Shuttle. But I wish to focus on one of the items in his tribute to the World's Fair, the "Raymond Loewy designed locomotive."

Raymond Loewy only made it look fast. The design staff at the Pennsylvania Railroad designed it to go fast. The Interstate Commerce Commission gave its operators the railway equivalent of a speeding ticket. And scaled down, it is an absolutely awesome desk ornament, when it's not being tweaked to run.

REALITY IS MORE EXCITING. Not much speaking going on.

REALITY IS NOT SO EXCITING. "It's him! The Karlson millionaire! That independently wealthy playboy!" Not here. But if you want to find out that millionaire's dirty little secret, read more.

WE GET SO SOON OLD AND SO LATE SMART. Dissecting Leftism did some work on the phenomenon.

A PICTURE WORTH MILLIONS OF DOLLARS. But what would the Grievance Lobby have left to do?

NOTICE OF DISRUPTION OF SERVICES. All the plausible and implausible reasons your train is late. (Via Where Worlds Collide.)

MAKE IT FIT. You have to plan ahead, even in N Scale. On the other hand, British modellers would likely find my basement spacious.

INNUMERACY. During the coverage of the search and recovery of Columbia several commentators brought out the "one failure in 100" argument as if such an event was inevitable. I wish one of the following: expectation was easier to understand, expectation was taught more effectively, or people would work harder at grasping what it means. (My frustration is not limited to transportation disasters, the same thing happens when major floods occur two out of three years in the same area.)

The expectation of one catastrophic failure in 100 missions is a PROBABILITY. Got that? It does not mean that there WILL be a catastrophic failure on mission 100, OR on EXACTLY one of missions 1, 2, ..., 100. It means that, to the best knowledge of the designers, something CAN go wrong and their ESTIMATE of its LIKELIHOOD is 1 in 100. (Let's see, when pitchers and catchers report, I will revisit this argument. I'm too bummed to attempt to be funny today.)

I also found the talk of Columbia's failure on "only its 28th mission" galling. Does anybody remember why this experimental aircraft is called the SPACE SHUTTLE? It was intended to operate on, if not subway frequency, something resembling the sailing schedules of the transatlantic passenger liners of yore. The fleet was supposed to approximate that pace for the first time in 1986. Under the original plans, Columbia and her sisters were to have completed their 100 missions by now and be in honorable retirement at inter alia the Air and Space Museum.

Where we are, then, is this: an EXPERIMENTAL aircraft (the prototype, in this case) for which the mean time to failure of many components is not well-defined, in operation beyond its design life (not a fatal flaw, the Model T Ford, the Piper Cub, the B-52 bomber, and the GP-7 locomotive hold up well.) The problem with experimental machinery is that you don't know with great precision what components are worn out by use as opposed to by age. We understand that for automobiles: change the oil no later than three months OR no further than 3,000 miles from where you are now. The analogous conditions for what constitutes a life-expired component of an experimental machine are nowhere near as well-defined. Kindly be advised that the consequences of failure of a life-expired component often are serious.

ETERNAL FATHER FOR SPACEFARERS. Jim Flowers' Radio Weblog provides two other stanzas, one penned by Robert Heinlein.

TRAIN BLOGGING. Looks like a recent start up, focusing on HO scale.

Lord, guard and guide the men who fly

Through the great spaces in the sky
.
Be with them always in the air,

In darkening storms or sunlight fair;

Oh, hear us when we lift our prayer,

For those in peril in the air!

MORE ON GRADE INFLATION. Number 2 Pencil doesn't fool around. "In the last Statistics class that I taught, I set a grading scale that was tougher than the one conventionally used at the university, and I told the class on Day 1 that I was not afraid to flunk people. There were several C's, D's, and F's in the class, despite the fact that I gave a great deal of extra credit work. The students who received these low grades were undoubtedly unhappy with me (although one had the grace and presence of mind to apologize for his poor performance and assure me that he would work harder when he took the course a second time). However, the students who did earn A's did a tremendous amount of work for it and were very proud of their results. I know, because they put this on their evaluations." Why can't the hotshots at the famous universities show this kind of backbone? (No. 2 Pencil likely has also identified the folly of extra credit. Who among the professoriate hasn't had the experience of the weak student asking for extra credit, which, if it isn't offered on a consistent basis to all students, is grounds for a grade appeal, but I digress? As if not doing the regular work but asking to do something special as a substitute for that work will save you. Yeah, right. "Superintendent? I broke the feedwater heater pump again. If I drain the water from the air brake system, you won't fire me, right?)

The post also provides a link to a Bruce Bartlett column that has picked up the original story. Here's the money graf: "Unfortunately, grade inflation is not costless. One consequence is that students are discouraged from taking science courses, where the nature of the subject matter has held down grade inflation, in favor of those in the humanities, where it is rampant. Over time, this has caused universities to drain resources from science programs. Eventually, this will harm economic growth by reducing technological innovation and advancement." Perhaps. Bartlett also has this: "Reinforcing the inflationary trend in grading was the growth of student evaluations in promotion and tenure decisions for professors. Obviously, students tend to give good reviews to those who are easy graders. And as graduate school became the norm for increasing numbers of college students, there was more of a premium on good grades. In this sense, credential inflation -- requiring more and more education to do the same job -- has contributed to grade inflation." The phenomenon he notes is not so obvious. It takes latent variable analysis to tease it out. (Via Newmark's Door.) And Bartlett misses the real crime: colleges are now providing much of the basic training the sixth grade used to do.

RAPID GOOGLE RESPONSE. A quick hit on vintage ge waffle iron (alluded to here, there is a cottage industry in such antiques.)

FINGERFEHLER? On the CBS radio news at 6 pm Lima, President Bush is responding to a proposal that Saddam Hussein go into exile, and he endorses exile for Saddam and several of his henchmen who have tortured the "Iranian ... er, Iraqi people."

CONVEX COMBINATIONS. Problem for the graduate students: give a credible example of consumer preferences that would not be convex. After class, some students wondered what I was getting at. I asked if they'd clean house with a convex combination of ammonia and bleach. They weren't sure what I was talking about. I warned them not to attempt it.

THERE GO THE SHORTCUTS. A Chicago television station will present the results of some research it has done on alternate routes to get around predictable expressway congestion. The effect of that broadcast (10 pm this evening on the CBS affiliate, which I believe is channel 2) will simply be to make those routes no faster than the slower routes, or the expressways, which clog at predictable times and locations each day.

A CLASS WEBLOG PROJECT. Looks like a startup. Will report on developments.

FISKING THE STATE OF THE UNION. Stephen Zunes has a lengthy response to the foreign-policy parts of the State of the Union Address. I'm sure there will be fiskings of his efforts. One point that bothers me in much of the criticism of the war effort: why does assistance, whether to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, or to the Iranian resistance, or to the Shah, sometime in the past, vitiate a critical perspective today? I'm not old enough to remember: when George Kennan proposed containment of the Soviet Union, or Winston Churchill noted the Iron Curtain, was there tut-tutting about how Lend-Lease and the Murmansk convoys kept Stalin fighting?

PUT THE ARMS TRADERS OUT OF BUSINESS. Thus the Green Party proposes to bring peace to the world. I suppose that means model railroaders must give up their utility knives. I also note a potential schism in the Left: is corporate power bringing unemployment to the Third World, as this columnist notes, or is it exporting good American jobs to sweatshops in the Third World?

LOWERING THE BAR. "If this earnest young man had been held to higher standards, he'd have a decent chance of accomplishing his goals," observes Joanne Jacobs. Quite so.

THE EXTENT OF IGNORANCE. There's more to the emergence of an industry standard (VHS, QWERTY, Britney Spears) than many believe. Jack Schofield's debut Guardian column provides the details. (Via Newmark's Door.)

FOOTNOTE: The Spears reference is more than a troll: in today's antitrust economics class I posed the following problem: from a large pool of teenage girls who can lip-synch, why do relatively few (I named two, the students provided a few more) earn most of the income from doing so? It's not that easy, as the class is figuring out.

CHOICES AMONG INSTITUTIONS. Arnold Kling borrows some useful anthropology to make the case for sound economics in public policy. (Via InstaPundit.)

MIXED STRATEGIES. Useful classroom simulations and tricks, from Atlantic Blog.

PERHAPS THEY DO NOT PROTEST ENOUGH. Atlantic Blog has responded to my take on grade inflation with a story of administrative grade-tampering. And, indeed, I have not had the experience of having all my grades adjusted upward by the administration. (The administration here does not have that power. And if it offered me such a warning, my response would be that it wouldn't happen again, because my resignation would be on the chairman's desk. I would rather dispatch trains -- or sling hash -- than be party to a lie.)

Sometimes I wonder if this evil isn't triumphing because good men and women are doing nothing. I reread Professor Rojstaczer's essay, and I see, "Parents and students want high grades. Given that students are consumers of an educational product for which they pay dearly, I am expected to cater to their desires not just to be educated well but to receive a positive reward for their enrollment." Note the Divine Passive. From whom comes that expectation? What power does that person wield? Is the prestige of a tenured post at an elite institution worth such a sacrifice of one's integrity?

EVERYTHING IS PROFANE to those for whom nothing is sacred, notes Gene Veith. Amen. (Via Ed Driscoll.)

WHAT IS IT, LADIES? Northern Star editor Barbara Bystryk complains about college men who are "Gen-Y scum [actually Thirteenth Generation relics] who’ve embraced a degenerated form of chivalry. They’ll pitch a can of Miller High Life at a woman, adjust their package and stare at her breasts when they talk to her. Then they wonder why the woman is frowning and eager to go home to wash her hair or feed her cat," and lays down her ultimatum: "A lot of women would agree that it’s nice to be taken out by gentlemen who are well-mannered. But, we can usually tell if their socially acceptable actions are insincere, desperate attempts to 'get some.' They’ll get some all right — at home, alone."

On the other hand, columnist Courtney Cavanaugh defends Christina Aguilera: "It was hip to envision an attractive female teen prancing around in a school- girl skirt. It was cool to use this image to add excitement when the wife wasn’t doing it for you anymore. It was acceptable for a minor to serve as the male fantasy to most men who will never attempt (very rightfully) to fulfill their secret fantasies about the girl next door." Christina, in fact, is being authentic. "Her need to be raw and even raunchy has always been lurking under the surface of this brave, determined and sexually secure woman." That's just the kind of authenticity that leads the Thirteenth Generation holdovers to behave like cads.

GRADE INFLATION. Atlantic Blog and Highered Intelligence both link to a Washington Post editorial by a Duke professor lamenting yet again the phenomenon of inflated grades (or marks, if you will.)

Methinks my colleagues do protest too much. There is something to be said for grading in a traditional manner, word gets out, and the high-achievers register. There is also something to be said for taking a tough-minded approach: Think of yourself as being in a room full of aces. You might be an ace yourself. But if you don't perform, you won't make ace.

MUST AMERICANS BE STUPID? Northern Star commentator Jessica King doesn't think so, but she's not sure what to do. Tightly Wound suggests that condescending attitudes by those responsible for the learning might play a role.

HOTHOUSE WOMEN: Critical Mass nails the Seven Sisters: "They exclude men even as they tout their commitment to non-discrimination; they promote themselves as places where sheltered young white women can have transformative encounters with people from different ethnic and racial backgrounds even as they promise nonwhite applicants respect, community, and identity; they engineer a safe and nonthreatening McDiversity of skin color for students that does more to shelter them from difference than to educate them about it." Discriminations has more. Peter Wood, my favorite former university administrator, has a new book in press that is creating the buzz.

ECONOMICS IS WHAT ECONOMISTS DO. Newmark's Door links to the latest public eruption of the ongoing debate in economics about what is important. The article, from Chronicle of Higher Education, reports on a possible division of the Notre Dame economics department into two departments. The doctoral program would be in an economics department that focuses on mainstream approaches. The current department chairman, Richard Jensen (an excellent game theorist whose early work provided a basis for some of my empirical work), observes, "'industry standards' dictate that publication in leading journals is the key to promotion and tenure." Put another way, prestige within the discipline means doing MIT- or Northwestern-style exemplifying theory. Meanwhile, the Marxists, institutionalists, Austrians, and the like "would be consigned to a department focusing on economic thought, social justice, and public policy. But with no graduate program, that would amount to exile and slow death, say the Marxist, labor, and development economists and historians of economic thought who make up a large minority of the 21-member department," reports the Chronicle. Newmark notes that the article "and misleadingly conflates the thoughtful criticisms of Deirdre McCloskey and Ed Leamer" with what he characterizes as less-well-thought-out objections. Professors McCloskey and Leamer, as well as Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow, have appeared at at least one American Economic Association session on new directions in economics: the one I attended at Chicago in 1998 drew a large and vocal audience. People disagreed about some things but got on well, there's something about having to work with other academics on a daily basis that brings out the worst. (As an aside, the department at Notre Dame, a relatively small university, has a faculty of 24. Contrast that with the 13 at Northern Illinois University, a largish state university.)

India West, a weblog maintained by an economics graduate student in London (with a history background!) has a long and thoughtful post about the Chronicle article, and he recommends this essay on the relevance of the problems to which the mathematics is applied.

For my part, I see good points being raised by all. Today, in antitrust economics, I had to deal with the political economy of antitrust (perhaps it's the lifestyles of the rich and famous, not the deadweight losses, that give us the antitrust laws: certainly President Roosevelt did not call John D. Rockefeller a "malefactor of misallocation.") On the other hand, without the models of strategic competition (some rooted in game theory) we can't evaluate the claims that the trusts were efficient.

INCENTIVES MATTER, even perverse ones.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. Is your profession coming apart, or do the sunlit uplands beckon? InstaPundit channels J.P. Morgan: it will fluctuate.

IT'S THE CULTURE, STUPID. Columnist Bill O'Reilly wrote, "Eminem may be the 'people's choice,' but he is as harmful to America as any al Qaeda fanatic," for which Andrew Sullivan nominated him for the Derbyshire Award and Vast Right Winged proposed an O'Reilly Award for "absurd hyperbole." Indeed so, as O'Reilly made a fairly sensible point earlier on in his column: "We are living in a hypercompetitive society where those who become educated and disciplined in their work and personal habits have a major advantage in the workplace. Just providing the basics for a small family requires a fairly high skill level in something. Earning a living also requires an understanding of how society operates and an acceptance of the 'rules.'" Indeed so, and the coarser parts of the popular culture are a morality play for those who would take the time to observe, and to understand.

LIBERATING TOLERANCE, Oregon State style.

CAMPUS LIFE VICE PRESIDENT APOLOGIZES. Campus Nonsense has the details.

BERKELEY ENVY? The DeKalb City Council does not support unilateral pre-emptive military action against Iraq. The Mayor might veto the resolution.

UFF DA! From the wrath of the Northmen, O Allah protect us.

MORE ON THE SUV WARS noted on Newmark's Door.

DURABLE GOODS. Newmark's Door links to an article that dissents from his colleagues dissent from the QWERTY... keyboard as a canonical example (others: VHS rather than Beta, small English coal wagons, MS-DOS, Lionel three-rail track) of the lock-in of a demonstrably inferior technology. The article makes the point that some typewriters are easier to convert than others, and offers the following discussion of durable typewriters: "By the time Dvorak patented his simplified keyboard in 1932, the typewriter market was saturated with machines so durable that some dealers bought up and destroyed used machines in the hope of selling more new ones (Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing Owner's Manual Version 2.0, 1991)."

I believe that's called a trade-in. But typewriters are much more durable than automobiles or locomotives. The Chicago Tribune did a human interest story (the story is now only available for a fee) on a typewriter repairman who is making a good living reconditioning typewriters for sale in countries not so far down the information superhighway. The repairman has a website (the link to the collectors webring might be of interest, anybody want a 1951 GE waffle iron?) and he'll sell you a vintage typewriter if this screen stuff doesn't appeal.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. President Bush's State of the Union Address was relatively short on new programs, although his hydrogen fuel-cell car initiative will surprise some people. The concluding part was a rather somber call to war. What was most telling was, no recognition of people in the galleries, a Third Turning touch introduced by President Reagan and continued by President Clinton.

BUG OR FEATURE? US Could Destroy UN with War.

DATELINE END OF TRACKS. Tonight's PBS "American Experience" described some of the high and low spots in the building of the transcontinental railroad. In the Chicago area, Union Pacific provided sponsorship for a warts-and-all history of what is now their property (and there is a lot of corruption great and small, petty crime, construction camp following, Indian wars, and just plain error) in the construction of the railroad.

I have yet to look at the supporting information online in detail, but note the following: the producer of the program is historian David Haward Bain, author of Empire Express. Stephen Ambrose has also written a popular history of the transcontinental railroad, Nothing Like It in the World. The centennial history of Union Pacific by Maury Klein, now out of print, but it turns up at railroadiana shows, is worth a look, several rail enthusiasts have noted that it is better-researched in some ways than the books previously named.

UPDATE: The links to the books didn't go in last night account congestion at Amazon's site. I want to add a couple of other observations about the program. Unlike many railroad documentaries that wallow in nostalgia and give the impression that the railroad is only slightly less obsolete than the Conestoga wagon, the concluding few minutes of the program showed modern freight trains slugging it out on Donner Pass, Sherman Hill, and the Great Plains. That was particularly effective, as the contemporary footage in the main body of the program showed the geographical barriers without revealing the railroad. And the great shelf around Cape Horn, high above Colfax, California, will again see trains, as Union Pacific have discovered that one track through the Feather River Canyon and one track over Donner Pass are not enough capacity.

Next week's "American Experience" also promises to be of interest: the real story of John Nash. Academicians don't get many movies made about them, let alone documentaries.

RETURN OF THE UNABLOGGER. With pictures. (Via InstaPundit.)

BATTLE OF IRAQ. Read it and understand it.

CROSS-CULTURAL STRATEGIES. James Lileks finds the fatal flaw in the diversity boondoggle.

METER-BAND SUV FILTER. Vodka Pundit wants one.

WORST-CASE SCENARIO? Opinion Journal's vision of what's destabilizing.

NO MORE RESEARCH FOR JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Senator Daschle proposes to ban uncertainty.

YOUR RIGHT TO SAY IT. The SCSU Scholars have an update on the attempted mugging of a student by a professor over the display of an Israeli flag and some provocative art. The legalities are still in progress. The art is provocative. So is some of the other art posted by the Scholars. The Superintendent agrees with the sentiments in the post: make whatever statement you want, but don't expect me to help pay for it.

WELCOME DOXAGORA READERS. And thanks to The Watchful Babbler, operator, for the honor. The principal emphases here are on economics (the Superintendent's field) and the follies of the academy (mostly for failing to live up to its potential, often for faddish behavior). The engineering is here (well, en passant here too.) The weblog has been quiet the past couple of weeks because of additional engineering work going on in the basement (that involved a bit of shopping.)

DISQUIETING. Yale Law professor Amy Chua visited the Chicago area for a public presentation and an Extension 720 appearance featuring her new World on Fire, which argues that the introduction of open markets and open access to voting in developing countries, particularly those with what she calls "market-dominant minorities" (people who have prospered through some combination of business acumen and connections with dictatorial governments whilst being different from the ethnic majority) under some circumstances fosters an explosive mix of repression, or genocide, or nationalizations. Worth reading. Also worth reading carefully. For example, she suggests that viewing nationalizations through the lens of Cold War politics is misleading. "These nationalizations and confiscations have been anti-market, but only in a limited sense. They target not the institution of private property itself, but rather the wealth of a hated ethnic minority. (p. 135)" There is a name for such behavior: national socialism. Chua recognizes this: "Like the ethnonationalist movements of the developing world, National Socialism was never truly socialist. (p. 205)" It is left to the reader, however, to connect the dots.

LIFE AFTER COLLEGE IS THE REVENGE OF THE NERDS. Life during college is something rather different. (Via Milt's File.)

I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. Dave Barry has an upside-down weblog. At least for the present. He is moving house to Blogger. (Via Transterrestrial Musings, also noted by Joanne Jacobs.)

LAUGHTER IS THE BEST MEDICINE. Critical Mass discovers a George Will proposal to introduce intellectual diversity at the University of Michigan. Critical Mass notes, "The crippling humorlessness that characterizes PC campus culture today is a sign not of its intellectual seriousness or even of its moral integrity, but of its shallow preference for conformity over debate and its callow reliance on emotional and intellectual blackmail to achieve its ends. It deserves to be laughed at, and it deserves to be challenged to learn to laugh. In public as in private life, laughter may indeed be the best medicine." Indeed so. Ronald Reagan might have done more to end the cold war by referring to the Soviet Union as a cartoonish system, at the same time that more serious observers were contrasting the promises of "scientific socialism" with reality. In like manner, the diversity boondoggle produces higher dropout rates among the very people whose presence it wishes to encourage, self-segregation among the people who are supposed to get along, and retention programs that attempt to achieve in University what the high schools have failed to do.

REMEMBERING RICHARD MITCHELL. From Virginia Postrel comes news of the passing of Underground Grammarian, Richard Mitchell. Alas. Here was a man who, years ago, noted, and wrote well about, the institutional rot, much of it self-inflicted, in the University. Many years ago, before "diversity" became the latest management fad, Mitchell argued that University was the opposite of diversity, particularly if University hoped to be anything other than an indoctrination center or some kind of training ground. I'm paraphrasing. Mitchell put it much better. My copy of his essay will no doubt turn up in my study immediately after I log off.

UPDATE: It's online, in a 1988 essay called "The Curriculum from Hell," bringing in inter alia Dante, and the sentence reads, "And that’s what a university is, if it is a university, and not a jumped-up trade school, or a conditioning station for docile citizens, or a pulpit of ideology. It is a place devoted to the study and preservation and nurture of whatever human wisdom can be found that pertains to everybody who lives, or has lived, or ever will live, on Earth."

FOR FURTHER RESEARCH. Looser immigration laws, tighter enforcement. Does that mean more border guards, or more workplace raids, or a longer wait for government services such as driving licenses or income maintenance?

PATERNALISM. Cheap food makes you sick, and it encourages concentration and monopolization. India West has analysis, as does Newmark's Door.

ELEGANT LITTLE MONSTER. Peter Kaminski has information about the internet web-worm that wrought so much havoc Friday and Saturday. (Because of the relatively warm temperatures, I cut some plywood in the garage rather than post. The next cold wave rolled in last night.)

PEOPLE RESPOND TO INCENTIVES. Sex, death, pubs, and why the lines are longer in the emergency room.

REDEFINING HIGHER EDUCATION. In order to be accredited as universities, said universities must take on the tasks high schools are failing to do. (I am not making this up. Via SCSU Scholars.)

UPDATE: Joanne Jacobs links approvingly to a disapproving post by No. 2 Pencil.

TAX INCIDENCE. Cal Pundit has put all the pieces together. Thanks!

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. The Polish Corridor and Sudetenland, anyone?

RAISING RIVALS' COSTS, in this case invoking the public interest in reducing shuttle-van congestion at airports. (Via InstaPundit.)

TECHNICAL WRITING. Do a Google search on radial tangential acceleration (that's what makes spin-'n-barf rides do their thing...) and you land, inter alia, here!

MELTING POT. Birth announcement in the local paper. One set of grandparents in Mexico. The other set in Kosovo. Is this a great country, or what?

FOURTH TURNING ALERT: "Now that Republicans control both houses of Congress and the other two branches of government, Democrats have to fear not only losing elections. They have to fear that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and, yes, Karl Rove could conceivably consolidate a new Establishment, dominating the next half-century as FDR's progeny dominated the last one," notes Robert Bartley. More importantly, where are the thirtysomethings? An Establishment cannot stay Established without an infusion of novices and postulants. The Silent Generation, passing from the scene, neglected its children. Hee hee.

WINNERS, WHINERS, AND LOSERS. Packers rule. Details. (Via Hit and Run.)

PIKERS Tim Blair and David Brooks have described their perfect transgressive SUVs. Clearly they understand nothing about raw power. A V-24 engine is simply a bent crankshaft waiting to happen, there are other ways to get the displacement you want, and it's tacky to embed smaller vehicles in the grille (or on the pilot, my preference.) The right way to keep score is the military way: stencils under the engineer's window.

FISCAL POLICY, AND PIGOUVIAN TAXES. Examination material here (for the SUV thread) and here (for fiscal policy.) (Via Asymmetrical Information.)

MORE SHARP THINKING: "Our society is extremely uncomfortable with the natural facts of distinction and difference. Nonetheless, such is the stuff of human nature. Some people are not equipped to do practical works with their hands. Others are not equipped to do advanced critical thinking. We need both kinds of people -- and both are very valuable. That means for some that education stops at an early age, for others that it will never do so. But today, there are certainly too many people in higher education. With average intelligence by definition constant, this has lead to a dumbing down of universities, and a lack of well-trained plumbers taking pride in their work," notes the Oxford correspondent of Giants and Dwarfs. There is much truth to what he says. Do not, however, confuse it with a recommendation that more students be tracked into trade schools. I have seen far too many weak university students who couldn't carry water for a patternmaker.

PLUGGERS.

Otherwise known as the Spielberg Effect (via Education Weak.) Doesn't surprise me. I'd put Northern Illinois University's best students up against the best at any other university you can think of, and I predict that the students who don't take their gilt-edged opportunities seriously wouldn't last long here either.

LIBERATING TOLERANCE noted at Texas A&M.

OPENING OF THE METROPOLITAN LINE. The story is now available online. (Via Transport Blog.)