a thaumaturgical compendium

Jamie, Finn, and I took a short walk along the American side of the Niagara Gorge today, just adjacent to the whirlpool. It was warm with just a bit of a breeze—perfect for a stroll. The whirlpool is a huge pool in the Niagara Gorge where the runoff from the Falls does a quick circle before heading out at an angle toward Lake Ontario. On the Canadian side, there is a cable car of Spanish design that goes back and forth over the whirlpool and has done so for nearly a hundred years. Though we didn’t see it today, there is also, apparently, a jetboat tour of the whirlpool for those who want a closer view.

I’m not too sure the jetboat is a good idea, though. The rapids run to Devil’s Hole, home of a dark evil snake god, and various misfortunes over the millennia. Buffy doesn’t have the only Hellmouth.

Did you know that they shut Niagara Falls off at night?

(As always, click for bigger versions of the pics.)

Once again, I am going to have people sign up for office hours this year. It seems that they still stop by when I am working, which is cool, but this way they know that I’ll be there and they will have my full attention.

I’ve also put up the (super simple) script I use for this. You’re welcome to make use of it, if you like. It’s basically a way to put up various kinds of sign-up lists.

The Garmin Forerunner 201 just made it to the top of my Christmas list. I’ve been in the market for an inexpensive GPS receiver for a while now, looking for something durable and ultraportable that will talk to my Zaurus. Though I may still need to do a little fiddling to get them to talk, this looks to be it.

No, I won’t be running any time soon. But I do want to track how much I’m walking. I also want this to automatically geocode the blog entries I make on the Zaurus, and provide (when in wireless range) an indication of whether I am at home or school. On the road may be a bit more fussy.

Update: Assuming there are drivers for the Zaurus, an SD GPS system is another possibility. These things are getting tiny.

I’ve been assembling some things to give to new grads to help them figure out the process of being a graduate student. I plan to distribute Prof. Pang’s advice in the next meeting.

I usually tell them to carry a small notebook and a pen; forgot too at this year’s orientation. Too bad the ones over at Cafe Press are so big…

I have a bunch of similar advice to distribute this semester, including things like “The Young Economist’s Guide to Professional Etiquette” and “Networking on the Network.”

The Transportation Safety Administration released a barrage of PR today, hitting every news channel possible on what must be a slow news day. (Where’s Korea again? Oh, way over there.) Their message: airport screeners are protecting us from passengers carrying weapons aboard airliners.

And boy are they! Since February of last year, they’ve seized almost 1,500 guns, 2.3 million knives, and 50,000 box cutters. If they hadn’t been on the ball, all of our flights might have been hijacked!

But wait a second. What are we supposed to make of those numbers? Does this mean that 2.3 million knives made it on board during the 16 months before February of 2002? Or does it mean that they have seen an uptick of confiscations? That might actually be news, though I suspect if this were the case, they would have made it part of the story.

Obviously, 2.3 million people were not all planning to use their pocket knives to hijack a plane. Maybe 3 were. I don’t know.

So what it means is that they’ve managed to deprive millions of people of their tools and knives and guns, but they haven’t made clear that this has made the skies much safer.

Now don’t get me wrong. I like the idea that they have a metal detector on the way into a flight. I even don’t mind them at concerts, and in courthouses. But these figures demonstrate the obvious: the security checkpoints work really well at stopping those who mean no harm from bringing things onboard. I am glad they have started to allow people to carry their nail clippers again, but I think that the best move is for them to (a) chill and (b) fund the air marshal program.

Oui (Now defunct porn mag): Is there a code of dos and don’ts in a championship?

Schwarzenegger (Current republican frontrunner in California gubernatorial race): Of course; but when you become a star almost anything goes. It’s like Ali doing something dirty in the ring—not many people are going to take it too seriouisly. You’re not supposed to talk while you’re posing, for example, yet I used to do it all the time and it would blow the other guys’ minds. If you were going through the compulsory poses—a double bicepts pose, say—I’d just turn to the guy next to me and say, “What a shame, what a disadvantage for you,” or I’d psych him in reverse by saying the disadvantage was mine, that he was definitely going to be the one to win. Once, I even sent a guy off-stage. He was enormous, really fantastic, and the audience was screaming for both of us, so you knew it was going to be close. After about 15 minutes of posing, I told him that I’d had enough and that we ought to quit, just walk off. He agreed, turned around and left and I just stayed on. The audience immediately turned against him and I won—my first Mr. Olympia title, in 1970.

[via Smoking Gun]

An account of the competition:

Oliva leaves the rostrum and Schwarzenegger waves him back, challenging his sportsmanship … Sergio climbs back. He won’t be accused of “chickening out!” in any competition.

The posedown begins all over again – Lewis, Schwarzenegger and Oliva. But the fact that it’s Arnold’s day is now clearer than ever. Gritting teeth, straining muscle, swelling veins, stretching, twisting, flexing. “Arnold – Arnold – Arnold,” the crowd continues and we all know it officially when at the completion of the posedown Bud Parker announces the winner, “Mr. Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

Frankly, I have little problem with Arnold’s womanizing or drugs or partying, all indications that he lives his life at full blast. Maybe I would make different choices, but this hardly disqualifies him from government. When it comes to his scorched earth lack of ethics and his treatment of those whom he feels are his inferiors, it makes me sick that he would even get a single vote from the people of California.

Had great plans to make the Communication Theory seminar more tech-enabled this year, but no time to make it happen. When I found out that we would have 28 graduate students in the seminar, I kind of went back to the drawing board. 28 students in a very seminary class (i.e., much of it is driven by discussing readings and drawing out central ideas and tensions), can be difficult; there is a lot of opportunity for social loafing.

So I’m trying something I am calling the Extreme Socratic Method. It is customary in graduate courses to have students lead discussion in turns, assigned at the beginning of the course. There are a lot of good reasons for this: it allows each student to take a more in-depth look at one facet of the material, for example. In this class, there will be one discussion leader for each reading, but they will not know who that discussion leader is until 2 minutes before we discuss the material. This way, everyone should be familiar enough with the material to be able to provide a decent summary and raise questions of interest.

That may seem onerous, in that a student never knows when she might be called upon to lead the discussion. On the other hand, this is similar to requiring students to write short response papers for each reading. Anyway, I don’t know how it will turn out, but I promise to provide some feedback (and I’ll invite the participants in the seminar to do the same).

Here’s the syllabus for the class:, 53K. Hope they have as much fun reading these as I did (and will!).