YEAH, LET'S GET RID OF MATHEMATICS.

David Foster comments on the difficulties, recession or no, businesses have finding workers with quantitative skills.

Journalists and academics often blame the missing-skills problem on what they claim to be the higher skill levels required by today’s technology, but I think this aspect of the situation is overstated. I doubt that a present-day manual for an alarm system is really a more complex document than, say, a maintenance manual for a piston-powered airliner circa 1950. And while a modern CNC machine tool does require (at least) a knowledge of decimal arithmetic to program or probably even to set up, a true machinist on traditional equipment also needed this knowledge. It is possible that the average mix of verbal and mathematical literacy requirements for jobs has shifted somewhat upwards as a result of advancing technology and increased management focus on worker involvement, but I think the main problem is not that the skill requirements have become dramatically higher but rather the skill levels of the prospective workers coming out of the schools have gotten lower.

That doesn't stop some people from suggesting that school completion might be enhanced by reducing the obstacle to completion called algebra.

TRAIN YOURSELF TO RELAX.

At The Christian Science Monitor, Andrew Holland suggests that building additional roads is unlikely to reduce traffic congestion.

In our biggest cities — also the source of the greatest portion of our wealth creation — the highways and transportation systems are becoming more jammed by the day. It should be obvious that more transportation infrastructure options are needed in America’s densely packed regions.

The Interstate Highway System has been successful in linking the country together, but I’m afraid that it promotes sprawling, auto dependent development — which essentially outsources a major cost (fuel) to consumers. More highways, even if they could be built to meet capacity, are not the answer for dense regions because they have proved to only encourage more oil-dependent sprawl.

I believe that High Speed Rail (HSR) is the way to build dense, interlinked cities and regions.

It is true that vehicle ownership has increased by a greater proportion than has new road mileage. All the same, the Law of Peak Hour Expressway Congestion will continue to bite, as road commuters will take the benefits of new roads in the form of sleeping in a few more minutes.

That noted, High Speed Rail is likely to be the long term solution.  In the immediate run, faster running times for commuter and regional intercity trains, better connectivity among trains, and strategic placement of third tracks and interlockings to keep local trains out of the way of limited and express trains will entice riders out of their cars.  As that ridership grows, political sentiment may follow.  The answer to "Why can't we have faster trains in Indiana the way they have in Michigan?" is going to be very different than "Why can't we have passenger trains here the way they have in Europe (or China or Japan)?"  Regular readers know that the answer to the latter question is "Neither the Europeans nor the Chinese have stack trains or 125 car coal and grain trains."

FAT, DUMB, AND DRUNK IS NO WAY TO ROW.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel introduces a local Olympian with an unusual lede.

Megan Kalmoe wanted to make a change after her freshman year at the University of Washington, when she filled the gaps between "partying myself and my waistline into oblivion" with a whole lot of nothing.

On the scale of slug to Olympian, she was much closer to slug.

Kalmoe, a native of St. Croix Falls, Wis., decided to do something totally out of character as a sophomore and walked onto the school's rowing team.

College is supposed to be about second chances, and Ms Kalmoe has surely done well with hers. All the same, is there nothing the university can do to diminish the incentives to party to oblivion?

STROKE, STROKE, STROKE.

The United States eight, with the James twins aboard, finished just outside the margin of error.

The 2012 Olympic edition was one of the most exciting of all time, with all six boats finishing within about a length of one another.

Overwhelming favorite Germany took the gold in 5:48.75. Canada slipped past Great Britain in the last few hundred meters to snatch silver with a time of 5:49.98, while the British in 5:51.18 barely held off the hard-charging Americans. The U.S. clocked in at 5:51.48.

With the start of a new semester approaching, I'm considering how to turn three-tenths of a second short of a medal into three-tenths of a point short of a B.

BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, AND NOT A STACK TRAIN TO BE SEEN.

Fox Business interprets China's increased spending on railroad tracks as an economic stimulus project.

In its latest bond prospectus published on Chinabond, an official website for debt issues, the railway ministry said Monday it plans to spend 470 billion yuan (US$73 billion) on infrastructure investment this year, up from the CNY406 billion stated in a prospectus issued earlier this month.

The Association for American Railroads reports that freight railroads have invested a total of $500 billion dollars (these are probably non-comparable current dollars) on permanent way improvements since 1980.  Those moneys have produced a 70 mph Kate Shelley Bridge in Iowa, two main tracks through the Abo Canyon, and up to four tracks for fluid movement of coal trains in the Powder River Basin.

SPREADING THE WEALTH AROUND.

It's usually good news to be the fourth-best gymnast in the competition.  Unless the second- and third-best are also on your team, and you're at the Olympics.

It’s an emotional day for this American team, which has just delivered a remarkable performance and set the score to beat in the qualifications of these Olympic Games.  But it’s a shocking heartbreak for America’s national and world champion, and one of the favorites to win the biggest prize of all here in London. 

I don't know the origin of this quota for country qualifiers. Wouldn't it be karma if the rule was pushed through with the urging of the U.S. Olympic Committee during the Cold War as a way of limiting Soviet medals?

YOU GET EXCELLENCE WHERE YOU EXPECT EXCELLENCE.

The people who wash out of Navy SEAL training are by no means slouches.

The seven or eight out of ten men who fail or quit SEAL Training in the Navy are not just average guys walking the streets today, their the best the Navy has.

These are guys who have worked their asses off to get to BUD/S. The best runners, the best swimmers, above average intelligence, superior eyesight and physical strength.

These are the guys who quit or fail training and not some regular clown that thinks it looks cool.

Why do they fail? Simple... They are completely unprepared to be thrown in the Arena at BUD/S. They have no idea how hard it is, they have no idea what kind of guys become SEALs, they have no idea of the commitment, and they have no idea of the life style.

In short, they think they know, but what the really know is next to nothing about being a SEAL and they quit. Fast...

As I type this, the Games of the XXX Olympiad are in progress, and it's a good bet that many a young man with dreams of the Dream Team will not put enough effort into making free throws to make the junior high junior varsity.  Football training camps are open, and more than a few linemen will be cut for not getting started on the snap-count.

Put it together: there's no question about doing whatever it takes to get the best Special Forces, where the stakes are very high, or the best athletic teams, never mind the stakes.

But getting the best quantitative thinkers?  Retired political scientist Andrew Hacker views the attrition from middle school algebra with dismay.

A TYPICAL American school day finds some six million high school students and two million college freshmen struggling with algebra. In both high school and college, all too many students are expected to fail. Why do we subject American students to this ordeal? I’ve found myself moving toward the strong view that we shouldn’t.

Let's focus on the substance of his argument, rather than the tangential possibility that many of those students, particularly in middle school, don't bother with algebra because the school culture has teachers looking the other way, particularly where promising athletes are concerned.

Making mathematics mandatory prevents us from discovering and developing young talent. In the interest of maintaining rigor, we’re actually depleting our pool of brainpower. I say this as a writer and social scientist whose work relies heavily on the use of numbers. My aim is not to spare students from a difficult subject, but to call attention to the real problems we are causing by misdirecting precious resources.

The misdirection is probably someplace else. Is the military depleting its pool by making Special Forces training so hard?

Mathematics, both pure and applied, is integral to our civilization, whether the realm is aesthetic or electronic. But for most adults, it is more feared or revered than understood. It’s clear that requiring algebra for everyone has not increased our appreciation of a calling someone once called “the poetry of the universe.” (How many college graduates remember what Fermat’s dilemma was all about?)

Instead of investing so much of our academic energy in a subject that blocks further attainment for much of our population, I propose that we start thinking about alternatives. Thus mathematics teachers at every level could create exciting courses in what I call “citizen statistics.” This would not be a backdoor version of algebra, as in the Advanced Placement syllabus. Nor would it focus on equations used by scholars when they write for one another. Instead, it would familiarize students with the kinds of numbers that describe and delineate our personal and public lives.

Perhaps so. On the other hand, Jason Fertig suggests a rebuttal, based on efforts elsewhere in the liberal arts to make the material more accessible.

Why not cut history and literature while we’re at it? How vocational are those subjects? Also, many students get away with subpar writing in non-quantitative classes; if that writing were assessed with more rigor, we would see failing numbers akin to what we see in calculus classes.

Quite possibly true.  Daniel Willingham (via Marginal Revolution) offers a more scholarly rebuttal.

The inability to cope with math is not the main reason that students drop out of high school. Yes, a low grade in math predicts dropping out, but no more so than a low grade in English. Furthermore, behavioral factors like motivation, self-regulation, social control (Casillas, Robbins, Allen & Kuo, 2012), as well as a feeling of connectedness and engagement at school (Archambault et al, 2009) are as important as GPA to dropout. So it's misleading to depict math as the chief villain in America's high dropout rate.

That's tangential to tonight's argument, although it's consistent with the Cold Spring Shops theme that inculcating middle-class habits might be the most important thing the common schools can do.

But the explicit teaching of abstractions is not enough. You also need practice in putting the abstractions into concrete situations.

Hacker overlooks the need for practice, even for the everyday math he wants students to know. One of the important side benefits of higher math is that it makes you proficient at the other math that you had learned earlier, because those topics are embedded in the new stuff.

We take it for granted that Special Forces take target practice every day, and the basketball Olympians spend an hour a day shooting free throws. It somehow becomes abusive for U. S. schools to expect similar perseverance, never mind that Professor Hacker attributes Finnish and Canadian math performance to perseverance?

Who will learn higher math in Hacker's ideal world? He's not clear on this point. He says he's against tracking, but notes that MIT and Cal Tech clearly need their students to be proficient in math. Does this mean thateveryone gets the same vocational-type math education, and some of those going on to college will get access to higher math?

If that were actually implemented, how long before private vendors offer after school courses in formal mathematics, to give kids an edge for entrance to MIT? Private courses that cost, and to which the poor will not have access.

Indeed.  But perhaps it requires parents, teachers, school administrators, and students to insist that children get the kinds of opportunities to develop their intellectual capital, and the grooming of talent, that everyone appears to take for granted when it comes to the sports program.  With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine.

SITUATIONALLY UNAWARE.

Eyes on the sidewalk, people.

On city streets, in suburban parking lots and in shopping centers, there is usually someone strolling while talking on a phone, texting with his head down, listening to music, or playing a video game. The problem isn’t as widely discussed as distracted driving, but the danger is real.

Reports of injuries to distracted walkers treated at hospital emergency rooms have more than quadrupled in the past seven years and are almost certainly underreported. There has been a spike in pedestrians killed and injured in traffic accidents, but there is no reliable data on how many were distracted by electronics.

There has to be an update of this old trademark of the Long Island Rail Road, showing contemporary device-thumbing commuters crashing into each other, or, worse, walking into the path of a train.

We used to say of a klutz that he couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time. Walking and texting is more difficult.

A study by researchers at Stony Brook University in New York compared the performance of people asked to walk across a room to a target — a piece of paper taped to the floor — without distractions and then again next day while talking on a cellphone or texting. The group that talked on the cellphone walked slightly slower and veered off course a bit more than previously, but the texting group walked slower, veered off course 61 percent more and overshot the target 13 percent more.

“People really need to be aware that they are impacting their safety by texting or talking on the cellphone” while walking, Eric Lamberg, an associate physical therapy professor who conducted the study, said. “I think the risk is there.”

The world we live in, however, is a world in which using public resources to protect people from themselves becomes the default policy option.

State and local officials are struggling to figure out how to respond, and in some cases asking how far government should go in trying to protect people from themselves.

In Delaware, highway safety officials opted for a public education campaign, placing decals on crosswalks and sidewalks at busy intersections urging pedestrians to “Look up. Drivers aren’t always looking out for you.”

Philadelphia officials are drafting a safety campaign that will be aimed in part at pedestrians who are looking at their devices instead of where they’re going. “One of the messages will certainly be ‘pick your head up’ – I want to say ‘nitwit,’ but I probably shouldn’t call them names,” said Rina Cutler, deputy mayor for transportation and public utilities.

Hey, it's Philadelphia, where Eagle fans boo Santa Claus. "Nitwit" is polite.  For those decals to work, people have to notice them, which they aren't doing if they're playing Angry Birds.  London's "Look Left" or "Look Right" curb markings work, in part, though, because pedestrians visiting from much of the rest of the world grasp that British street use is a survival of the days of mounted swordsmen.

A NOISY SIGNAL OF SOCIABILITY?

Truthdig's Chris Hedges doesn't like beer-'n-circus.

Fraternities, sororities and football, along with other outsized athletic programs, have decimated most major American universities. Scholarship, inquiry, self-criticism, moral autonomy and a search for artistic and esoteric forms of expression—in short, the world of ethics, creativity and ideas—are shouted down by the drunken chants of fans in huge stadiums, the pathetic demands of rich alumni for national championships, and the elitism, racism and rigid definition of gender roles of Greek organizations. These hypermasculine systems perpetuate a culture of conformity and intolerance.  They have inverted the traditional values of scholarship to turn four years of college into a mindless quest for collective euphoria and athletic dominance.

Makes for a good polemic, and against the background of football practice beginning and probation officers returning from summer vacation, it might be timely. But the article fails to test any hypotheses.

The corporate world sees football players, fraternity brothers and sorority sisters as prime recruits. They have been conditioned to join the team, to surrender moral autonomy, to accept and carry out acts of personal humiliation, to treat with contempt those who oppose them or who are different, to define their life by an infantile narcissism centered on greed and self-promotion and to remain silent about crimes they witness or take part in. It is the very ethic of corporations.

The ruling elite sees in Greek organizations and football programs the training ground for the amoral class of speculators, bankers and corporatists who pillage the country.

Perhaps a small sample drawn from Dartmouth College will convince some readers. But more formal investigations are possible.

The fraternity and students value wages and fraternity socializing values. We provide sufficient conditions under which, in equilibrium, most members have intermediate abilities: weak students apply, but are rejected unless they have high socializing values, while most able students do not apply to avoid taint from association with weaker members.

In the Bayesian equilibrium, fraternity membership is at best a noisy signal of ability, valuable to sociable but low-ability students, but therefore poison to high-ability students, the more sociable of whom would be offered membership in the fraternity, if they bothered to rush.  In a full-information world, there is a separating equilibrium in which only high-sociability individuals apply and only mediocre or high academic individuals pledge.   Perhaps that cohort is "amoral": there's always another research question to ask.

The working-paper version of the article offers additional evidence on fraternity membership patterns at the University of Illinois.  The probability that a student is a fraternity member, conditional on grade point average, increases for grade-point averages below 3.5, decreasing thereafter.

That evidence is not in the published article, but the supporting data are available at the American Economic Association website.

RECLAIMING THE CULTURE?

In a nation of moochers, epater les bourgeois is out of fashion, according to Glenn Reynolds.

In today’s culture of immediate reward, a work ethic centering on self-discipline and the ability to defer gratification is almost, to use a favorite term of the avant-garde, transgressive. Hmm: With so much of our economy and politics now based on the absence of those characteristics, maybe it really is a bit transgressive.

But those mores just may be making a comeback in these tough times. The fact is, self-discipline and the ability to defer gratification really do help you get ahead, avoid debt and feel more in control of your life.

In boom times, even slackers can do well enough (or borrow enough to seem to) to make those rules seem old-fashioned and unnecessary. But when the bust comes, reality reasserts itself and those trite sayings (“waste not, want not,” “neither a borrower nor a lender be,” etc. — Kipling’s “Gods of the Copybook Headings”) turn out to be not so much trite, as true.

At any rate, we can hope that saving money, avoiding debt and treating friends and family with consideration are now edgy enough to become trendy.

Perhaps so, although those strivers might be the remnant in a country increasingly occupied by Romulans.  In Victor Davis Hanson's neighborhood, trendy California is no longer the California of the Beach Boys.

The internet, video games, and modern pop culture translated into a generation of youth that did not know the value of hard work or a weekend hike in the Sierra. They didn’t learn  how to open a good history book or poem, much less acquire even basic skills such as mowing the lawn or hammering a nail. But California’s Generation X did know that they were “somebody” whom teachers and officials dared not reprimand, punish, prosecute, or otherwise pass judgment on for their anti-social behavior. Add all that up with a whiny, pampered, influential elite on the coast that was more worried about wind power, gay marriage, ending plastic bags in the grocery stores — and, well, you get the present-day Road Warrior culture of California.

And nobody is clever enough to maintain the roads.

If one were to drive on the 99, the main interior north-south “highway” from the Grapevine to Sacramento, one would find places, like south of Kingsburg, where two poorly paved, potholed, and crowded lanes ensure lots of weekly accidents. Can a state that has not improved its ancestors’ highway in 50 years be entrusted to build high-speed mass transit? Can a state presently $16 billion in arrears be expected to finance a $100 billion new project? Can a state that ranks 48^th in math field the necessary personnel to build and operate such a postmodern link?

More to the point, would a latter-day Charles Crocker, E. H. Harriman, or Fred Gurley approve the investment in such a project? Or would those investors view most of California as a revenue desert?

One of the strangest things about Road Warrior was the ubiquity of tattooed, skin-pierced tribal people with shaved heads and strange clothes. At least the cast and sets seemed shocking some thirty years ago. If I now sound like a reactionary then so be it: but when I go to the store, I expect to see not just the clientele, but often some of the workers, with “sleeves” — a sort of throwback to red-figure Athenian vase painting where the ink provides the background and the few patches of natural skin denote the silhouetted image. And stranger still is the aging Road Warrior: these are folks in their forties who years ago got pierced and tattooed and aged with their sagging tribal insignia, some of them now denoting defunct gangs and obsolete popular icons.

One expects such a description of Thirteenth Generation crude from a Tory. To read something similar in Common Dreams suggests there might be something more afoot.

Every tattoo I’ve ever seen manages to detract from the person’s appearance. In truth, seeing that crap plastered on people’s bodies makes me think of graffiti spray-painted on an overpass.

Expectedly, the author there frets about the potential for Romulans to sell advertising space on their bodies, and, expectedly, the there's-no-such-thing-as-deviancy-to-define-down crowd doesn't like his essay.  Whatever.  It will be difficult to reverse the polarization and social stratification of the U.S., or any other large industrial country, without equipping young people from difficult backgrounds with the tools to interact with people who inherited, or saw the wisdom of acquiring the intellectual and commercial skills that characterize a productive person.

CONCENTRATING THE BETA CAROTENE.

Milk is white, and many cow's-milk cheeses are yellowish.

After a cow chews the cud, beta-carotene dissolves into the animal’s fat stores and ends up in fat globules in its milk. However, protein clusters and the membranes that surround fat globules in milk conceal the pigment’s color, reflecting light in a way that makes milk appear white and opaque. But during the cheesemaking process, the pigment is released: After bacterial culture and rennet have been added to milk and the coagulated mixture is cooked, the fat membranes dissolve and the protein clusters loosen so they can’t reflect light anymore. The beta carotene is made visible, and it also becomes more concentrated, since the the lean liquid component of the milk, called whey, is drained off. It follows that the fattiest cheeses, and those from cows grazed on open pasture, tend to have the deepest natural color.

More acidic cheeses, like cottage cheese and feta, retain their dense protein structures and so continue to appear white.

Orange cheese has other artificial colors in it, which might be an attempt to pass it off as something better, or to maintain product consistency.

Today, many supermarket cheddars are still colored to satisfy consumer’s expectations of what cheese should look like. (Research has shown that color preferences influence how people shop for cheddar.) But inconsistent cheese color isn’t much of a problem anymore, since large-scale confinement farms have come to dominate dairy production over the last 30 years. Cows kept in confinement and fed a carefully formulated mix of grains, protein supplements, and dried grasses tend to turn out milk with virtually no irregularities. Milk from confined cows also contains considerably less beta carotene than milk from pastured cows—hence the need for dye.

Good aged Wisconsin cheddars are beige shading to white. But the Slate columnist asked an expert at the University of Wisconsin's Center for Diary Research, your reference source for all things social.  Proofreaders must have gone to sleep again.

UNIVERSITIES ARE FAILING AT THEIR MISSION.

It has been 25 years since the publication of The Closing of the American Mind.  There's a long recollection by Andrew Ferguson at The Weekly Standard.

The crisis was​—​is​—​a crisis of confidence in the principle that serves as the premise of liberal education: that reason, informed by learning and experience, can arrive at truth, and that one truth may be truer than another. This loss of faith had consequences and causes far beyond higher ed. Bloom was a believer in intellectual trickle-down theory, and it is the comprehensiveness of his thesis that may have attracted readers to him and his book. The coarsening of public manners, the decline in academic achievement, the general dumbing down of America​—​even Jerry Springer​—​had a long pedigree that Bloom was at pains to describe for a general reader.

“The crisis of liberal education,” he wrote, “is a reflection of a crisis at the peaks of learning, an incoherence and incompatibility among the first principles with which we interpret the world, an intellectual crisis of the greatest magnitude, which constitutes the crisis of our civilization.”

Professor Bloom did not write his book as a political manifesto, and yet Jennifer Rubin suggests it might have diagnosed a failing in political thinking.

In sum, the left systematically has dumbed its side down, to the point where supposedly well-educated elites are untrained and unaware of our country’s history and constitutional traditions. The left thinks words have no fixed meaning (health care and health insurance, are close enough, so they insist we can define the latter to be the former.) The liberal elites have a poor grounding in market economics so they swallow the idea that health-care insurance is “unique” because others’ purchases affect your cost of goods. (Surprise: all markets operate this way.)

Although Mr Ferguson embellishes the cultural-decay hypothesis at length, an observation elsewhere in his article, suggesting that the United States of today is in many ways richer than the country of 1987, raises the possibility that people don't have to work as hard at thinking about Big Ideas now as they did then, as the cost of not thinking is no longer as great.  That is, if the country is, in fact, richer.

MARKET TESTS?

What good is universal health care without practitioners?  The New York Times discovers that in economically stressed areas, and in specialties that the technocrats would like to keep affordable, there are doctor shortages.

“We have a shortage of every kind of doctor, except for plastic surgeons and dermatologists,” said Dr. G. Richard Olds, the dean of the new medical school at the University of California, Riverside, founded in part to address the region’s doctor shortage. “We’ll have a 5,000-physician shortage in 10 years, no matter what anybody does.”

Food for thought there. On one hand, perhaps that's the evil rich outbidding everyone else to make it remunerative to become a high-end cosmetologist. On the other hand, perhaps that's evidence of regulatory and insurance complications trying the idealism of otherwise public-spirited medical students. Or, as the article continues, because difficult patients in rough neighborhoods can be as morale-sapping to health care practitioners as they are to teachers.

But the growth in the number of physicians has lagged, in no small part because the area has trouble attracting doctors, who might make more money and prefer living in nearby Orange County or Los Angeles.

And prices still function to allocate demand.

Physician compensation is also an issue. The proportion of medical students choosing to enter primary care has declined in the past 15 years, as average earnings for primary care doctors and specialists, like orthopedic surgeons and radiologists, have diverged. A study by the Medical Group Management Association found that in 2010, primary care doctors made about $200,000 a year. Specialists often made twice as much.

Should be interesting work for health economists, evaluating the national government's ability to bend the cost curve and realign the incentives so as to produce more primary care physicians and fewer specialists.

NOTES ON A NEW TIMETABLE.

I recently picked up and leafed through the most recent Amtrak national timetable, or, in the case of the eastbound Empire Builder, a reference point for a worst-case scenario.

In the Northeast, the southern end of the Corridor is now somewhere in Virginia, with a comprehensive schedule of day trains running between Richmond and New York City or Boston, and two regional trains between Springfield, Massachusetts and Lynchburg, Virginia.  Passengers may have the option of changing from regional trains to Acela Expresses to expedite their journey, as a number of the northbound regional trains leave Philadelphia a few minutes before an Acela that overtakes the regional train somewhere around Trenton.   To the south, there is something resembling a corridor into North Carolina.  On the West Coast, a corridor is beginning to emerge, although a traveller hoping to go from Sacramento to San Diego or make an international excursion into Vancouver, B.C. has to look at the background shadings carefully to determine how much of the trip is by train and how much involves a connecting bus.

There are a lot of connecting buses in the timetable, including a service that runs Quad Cities - Galesburg - Peoria - Bloomington - Champaign - Danville - Indianapolis timed to connect with a number of the trains radiating from Chicago, and an echo of a Soo Line day train connecting Milwaukee to Wausau by way of Appleton and Stevens Point, nowhere as fast as the old North Woods Hiawatha service through New Lisbon.  Unaccountably, the schedule does not mention a bus to Green Bay that leaves Milwaukee a few minutes after the noon arrival of a Hiawatha Service train from Chicago.

The timetable no longer includes a table of arrivals and departures at Chicago, probably because such a table would frustrate riders identifying all the non-connections among the corridor trains.  The arrival times for long-distance trains are guesses most days, anyway.  A quick look through the midwestern schedules shows the first departures of the day for Pontiac, Mich.; St. Louis; and Quincy leaving before any inbound trains arrive.  The first arrival (except Sunday) from Milwaukee offers a feasible connection to the first departure for Carbondale, and the second arrival (first Sunday) arrives nine minutes after the second departure for St. Louis.  I could go on.  The last arrivals from Pontiac, St. Louis and Quincy are after the last departures of the evening.

Amtrak might realize savings from servicing as many train sets as it can in its Chicago yards, and those first-morning-outward, last-evening-return services are a round trip of a single set from Chicago.  Unknown, though, is the revenue lost to the carrier because each corridor exists unto itself, without regard to the lost Sturtevant to Springfield or Kalamazoo to Macomb or Urbana to Ann Arbor or Indianapolis to anywhere ridership the current schedule implies.

There's another reminder of how things have changed on the cover of the timetable.  Look closely at that red nose illuminated by the bumping post in Washington.  Two tracks over is a Pennsylvania Railroad E unit, in tuscan red with the later single gold stripe.  That paint job might have been a symbol of decline, and yet, it brings memories of through sleeping cars from Boston to Pittsburgh, and train service from Chicago to Florida by way of Louisville.

A VICTORY AGAINST POVERTY, A DEFEAT FOR DEMOCRATS?

In City Journal, Fred Siegel suggests how that happens.

The Obama administration’s pursuit of electoral victory in 2012 seems to be based on abandoning private-sector middle-class and white working-class voters. As Thomas Edsall rightly argued recently in the New York Times, the Democrats have become a top-bottom coalition comprising, at one end, highly educated professionals—many of whom work for government or are beneficiaries of government subsidies—and, at the other end, low-income recipients of government welfare benefits. But this isn’t a new model. New Yorkers who remember John Lindsay’s mayoralty from 1966 to 1973 will recall the devastating impact that a similar top-bottom strategy had on the city.

You'd think rent control would have done something to keep affordable housing in New York, but that's not what happened.

Only those at the top and the bottom could fully recognize, albeit for different reasons, the sins of American middle-class society. Liberalism had become a matter of style, and the rich were becoming part of the liberal coalition. The middle class was the problem—and soon enough, the middle class had a problem with New York liberals. The city, which hemorrhaged 600,000 jobs in the wake of Lindsay’s second term, suffered a massive emigration of middle-class residents during the 1970s. New York careened into the fiscal crisis of 1975 and near-bankruptcy. The city recovered from those calamities eventually, but the Left’s top-bottom approach in New York has never really changed since.

Now, under President Obama, the top-bottom alliance has gone national. Though the president may, like Lindsay before him, find a way to get reelected, the Democrats will pay a steep price for alienating the middle class.

Manhattan might be home to wealthy people, including more than a few recipients of farm subsidies. But many of the finance and trading house jobs are now in Jersey City, as are the homes of many of the workers.

PAGING NIKOLA TESLA

Among the goodies at this year's Oshkosh Air Show, battery-electric airplanes.

A two-day electric flight symposium continues on Friday with speakers from NASA's Langley Research Center, Argonne National Labs and electric aircraft designers.

[Chip] Yates, the entrepreneur behind the world's fastest electric motorcycle, made the 16-minute maiden flight of his electric aircraft July 18 in California. A few days later, he brought to Oshkosh his vision and his plane - a Long-EZ homebuilt aircraft - outfitted with a 258 horsepower liquid-cooled, brushless electric motor and 453 volt, 600 amp battery pack.

"We're sort of tired of hearing electric flight is not feasible, and we're tired of people blaming battery manufacturers," Yates said Thursday.

Before he can fly Lindbergh's 3,500-mile nonstop route, though, he and his team must figure out how to recharge the batteries - in air.

Yates will need to recharge the battery pack five times while recreating Lindbergh's route, which he hopes to do in 2014. He's talking to the Navy about using aerial drones to recharge or possibly a probe from an aircraft, similar to the military's air refueling planes, or even docking with another aircraft in midair, said Mike Beadle, mechanical engineer on Yates' Flight of the Century project.

Now, if only J. P. Morgan hadn't withdrawn funding from Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower project because effective ways of monitoring and metering consumption didn't yet exist ...  But at MIT (where, according to a physics student, the Tesla notebooks are in an archive) a team has illuminated a lightbulb at a distance, using Tesla-style induction coils.  Lightbulb, battery charger, beam me up!

THE EVOLUTION OF COOPERATION.

Keith Hennessey reacts to Our President's "You Didn't Build That" theme.  He highlights a line from the speech that provides the context Our President claims his critics are overlooking. "The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together." In his column, the phrase is a dog-whistle expression.

“You didn’t build that,” and “You didn’t get there on your own,” and “blessed” and “fortunate” have one thing in common.  They deemphasize the idea that success is earned.  This makes it easier for President Obama to justify taking more from those who have succeeded.

Perhaps, but the Opposition could as easily take on the President on the proper institutional arrangements to secure cooperation among individuals. There's a famous Adam Smith quote from which the last two sentences often get used out of context.

But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

Advantage can imply, but need not equate, to using the police power of the state to take from some to provide to others.

NOT YET THE WEEKEND.

Instapundit suggests that there is little political hay to be made over the absence of gun laws in Chicago, because there are already strict gun laws in Chicago.  Legal Insurrection notes that there are parts of Chicago probably more dangerous than a movie theater, and as Friday dawns, there's already been more death than one bad day at Cole Hall brought.

STUCK IN TRAFFIC?

Years ago the Bonhomie and Hattiesburg Southern Railway urged shippers to Save Time and Money by Missing Bedlam and Confusion.  I think Bedlam and Confusion are left-side slip-ramps on the Dan Ryan and Eisenhower Expressways, and commuters are saving their time and money by taking the commuter trains instead.

The 2011 Urban Mobility Report makes clear that without public transportation services, travelers would have suffered an additional 796 million hours of delay and consumed 303 million more gallons of fuel. Had there been no public transportation service available in the 439 urban areas studied, congestion costs for 2010 would have risen by nearly $17 billion from $101 to $118 billion.

“This report clearly shows as our economy rebounds, expanding public transportation use is key to reducing traffic congestion,” said American Public Transportation Association (APTA) President William Millar. “Even if you don’t ride public transportation, there are clear benefits in supporting expansion of public transit options. Better public transportation in your community means less congestion on the roads.”

That's a lot of New York minutes, according to the tabular data, and the report confirms a suspicion of mine, that Metra's weekend fares probably induce a lot of substitution away from the roads for families headed to the Chicago museums.

Indeed.  Never mind that ad executives of the Mad Men era had little reason to like George Alpert.

THE FUNDAMENTALS.

A former Secretary of State offers some reasons for continued U.S. leadership. Beyond the expected meditations on diplomacy and military affairs, comes this.

Our talent has historically come from every part of American society, without regard to class and economic circumstance. But when a child’s zip code determines whether she will get a good education, we are losing generations to poverty and despair. The crisis in US education is the greatest single threat to our national strength and cohesion.

That crisis has multiple causes. Whether or not it has ever been the case that open admission to leadership positions existed, there is truth in the bundling of good schools with good neighborhoods.  Whether the schools can overcome the unraveling of institutions elsewhere remains to be seen.