links for 2009-03-24

"The small speck of light shown in the upper left of the picture above, labeled as MGC 10-17-5, is actually a faint galaxy in the field of view of NGC3690. It has a visual magnitude of +15.7: this is a measure of its integrated luminosity as seen from the Earth. It is a really faint object, and barely at the limit of visibility with the instrument I had. The question I arrived at formulating to myself this morning was the following: how many photons did we get to see per second through the eyepiece, from that faint galaxy ?"

"Imagine a car lot that has 100 cars on it. However, some of these cars have problems. Half of them will have engine troubles that total the cars – the engines blow up and the cars are then worthless – and this will happen just after purchase. The other half are perfectly fine. Unfortunately, there is no way to tell prior to purchase which type of car you will get no matter how hard you try. Thus, half of the assets on the car dealer’s "balance sheet" – the cars on its lot – are toxic, and lack of transparency makes it impossible to tell which ones are bad prior to purchase."

"Not one of the 16 teams remaining does not resonate as a recognizable brand name in college basketball. None could be considered a remote surprise to have advanced.

The tournament has been as predictable as a 401(k)’s decline or Jim Nantz’s trying too hard to romanticize a story line. So, before any attempt to describe how it should go from here, let’s look back at how it got this way. "

"Numerous readers have already listed the reasons why, judged as a conventional novel, it’s pretty bad: wooden dialogue, over-the-top melodrama, characters barely recognizable as human. But of course, Atlas doesn’t ask to be judged as a conventional novel. Rand and her followers clearly saw it as a secular Bible: a Book of Books that lays out for all eternity, through parables and explicit exhortation, what you should value and how you should live your life. This presents an obvious problem for me: how does one review a book that seeks, among other things, to define the standards by which all books should be reviewed?

Mulling over this question, I hit on an answer: I should look not at what’s in the book—whose every word is perfect by definition, to true believers who define ‘perfect’ as ‘that exemplified by Atlas Shrugged‘—but at what’s not in it. In other words, I should review the complement of the book."

"The University of Michigan Press is announcing today that it will shift its scholarly publishing from being primarily a traditional print operation to one that is primarily digital.

Within two years, press officials expect well over 50 of the 60-plus monographs that the press publishes each year — currently in book form — to be released only in digital editions. Readers will still be able to use print-on-demand systems to produce versions that can be held in their hands, but the press will consider the digital monograph the norm. Many university presses are experimenting with digital publishing, but the Michigan announcement may be the most dramatic to date by a major university press."

"Take any Business story from the past year and think how it might have been reported on differently if it had appeared instead in the Work section. Housing bubble, time-bomb mortgage lending, bubble-backed securities, bailouts, Too Big To Fail, tax-funded bonuses, etc. They would all have been reported on very differently if the reporters had been operating in a framework of the needs, concerns and interests of workers rather than of investors."

"> inside and grade or else

You enter the white apartment complex and begin to grade your students’ final papers. The good ones are predictably good. The poor ones are predictably poor. The hours drag like sleds pulled by drunk slugs. You think you fall asleep when in fact that is what your student thinks language is. You grab a pen and—

> JAB IN EYES JAB IN EYES"

Thank God we don’t have socialized medicine. That would be dehumanizing.