The quoting of an aphorism, like the angry barking of a dog or the smell of overcooked broccoli, rarely indicates that something helpful is about to happen.

I pulled this off some post in the Smalltalk newsgroup. Anyone know the full provenance? Thanks, Mike!
11:16:39 PM  #  comment []

Coming from Bala Cynwyd in the morning, I saw a black Acura in front of me with the vanity plates “CGI” and started to feel all cheery and happy when I realized that it could mean something completely different, like “Corben Guillaume Ingersoll” or something like that. Then I saw the Settlers of Catan box sitting in full view in the back window. I think that answers that puzzle.
1:19:29 AM  #  comment []

In the Key Reporter (Winter 2003), Mel Elfin writes about the state of higher education. He is editor emeritus of the US News & World Report College Guide. In it, after his indictment, he makes several recommendations:

1. Degrees should signify a familiarity with a coherent core of knowledge and some competence in processing that knowledge.
2. Institutions need to make distinctions between the necessary expenditures and the merely prestige-enhancing or perquisite.
3. More cooperative, less competitive colleges, sharing some of the common burdens faced by all colleges, such as similar resources. Housing and rec facilities arms race must stop.
4. Academia must see itself as part of a continuum, not as “higher” education.
5. Trustees must ask the right questions, recognize artifice in the answers, then have the courage to challenge the system.
6. Recognize the vast potential of the Internet.
7. Academia must free itself from entrenched, dysfunctional customs, traditions, and attitudes bequeathed from cultures long since past

Paul Graham’s Nerds essay seems to disagree with the third point, at least for the lower levels of education. And I think I would disagree with it as well. Less competition for tenured professors does not seem conducive to quality teaching or the production of knowledge. More competition may shake up the entrenched order he complains about in his last point. But he and Graham were disagreeing about interinstitutional competition, not internal competition. I’ll shut up now.

Or not: As for the Internet, I don’t think that its potential, vast as it is, should reshape curricula. If anything, it should be the other way around: higher education must train students to be more rigorous in their thinking about what others write, especially with the sloppiness inherent in Internet publishing. Not just sloppy grammar, sloppy spelling, but sloppy thinking.
1:12:19 AM  #  comment []

A very tolerant man gave me change for my fiver in the elevator when the front desk could not help me out. Thanks be to tolerant men.
12:44:19 AM  #  comment []