Bini's birthday.

Today was Bini's birthday! We went to Eve's Restaurant for a fantastically sublime dinner. Happily, their kitchen was open after 9:30PM, since we wouldn't have been able to get to eating until then. Their birthday special is apparently a free dessert or drink. Luckily for us, when I called ahead they were willing to allow Bini to have a free appetizer instead of a choice of others. (Of course, she/we did end up having a fantastic triple chocolate dessert.)

Happy Birthday, Bini!

Shaman Drum commercial & Brown Jug

The Shaman Drum (and Amer's across the street) was having a commercial filmed. I don't know for what, but it did mean that I was not able to get a sandwich at the deli.

I guess I should have asked where the commercial was eventually going to be shown, but I was not thinking about that at the time: merely where to get myself fed for lunch.

Tuesday was the second weekday with a majority of undergraduate students off to wherever they decide to go during the U of M's incredibly early Spring Break.

Walking through campus is almost like walking through an eerie potential future world where there are large institutional buildings with very few people to fill them. Of course, all the restaurants are all well under-capacity, meaning it's easy to get a seat. On the flip side, it means that the waitstaff are really getting a short shrift, since waitstaff is one of those positions that doesn't get their base pay at the level of minimum wage. (For some reason, the federal government, way back in history, decided that waiters don't need to get the full benefits of minimum wage, and so, until this day, they are slaves of tips - and the ups and downs of the local populace who don't really want to take the time to calculate an extra 15% on top of the 6% sales tax which isn't always included in the bill that is brought to your table.)


Anyway, Menan, Morgan, and I went to the rather empty Brown Jug for some food, and got into a discussion of intra-familial relationships. In Tanzania, the words "aunt," "uncle," "nephew," and "niece" mean different things than they do in an English context. Similarly, so do "mother" and "father." Very interesting. It took me an hour to figure this out (and I'm not sure that I really did get all of it) - but I wonder how confusing it might be for visitors when someone starts calling several different people their "mother." (Btw, the pizza was standard, but pretty good.)

Start of Spring Break

Last night was a happy hour, followed by going out to Bridge to Terabithia. Turns out that we were the only ones in the theater! The film was pretty good, but I think it would have been better if the final scene wasn't so over-done. Oh, well.

So, I'm taking the bus back this evening, and I get off at my stop. Across the street, A2 Waterworks is tearing up the street. So, what else am I do do except take a photo?


I also took some time earlier today and took a photo from atop one of the rocks outside the Dana Building.

Happy (Chinese) New Year!

It's the Year of the Pig! Happy New Year!

¡Es el Año del Cerdo!

United States highway map

I saw this online the other day, and was trying to find it again. It's the link to the highway's map of the United States done in the style of a subway map. I personally really like it. However, it needs to have more color! (I'm not a big fan of the use of orange-on-white.)

Anyway, check it out here.

They're back.

Robins. They have been sighted. (By me.) Apparently I was the only one who saw them without having to have it pointed out. Robins are back, and its the 15th of February. They were pretty much the only bird flying (perching on branches, eating dessicated berries, pooping, etc) about whilst I was walking back to the Dana building earlier today.

Role of Universities

One very interesting lecture presented was Jim Duderstadt’s presentation on the history of the institution of “the university,” the university in Britain, the early United States, and The University of Michigan. The concluding remarks about the future of higher education, as well as the Spellings Commission were also very elucidating.

A couple of points of interest that came up for me were:

· the continued desire of higher education to continue to require a liberal arts education;

· research universities teaching basic classes; and

· an (apparent) lack of connection between secondary and higher education.

With regard to the first point – the continued desire to teach a liberal arts education – is, I believe, one of the major points of weakness in the US higher education system. While this is usually seen as a major strength of the US system, I am cognizant of the continually quickening pace of the world’s economies. Students in US higher education are waiting two years – half of their potential time of training at university – to decide their major field of study. This is compared to students in the UK who are admitted directly into their majors, and take courses almost exclusively within it. In Taiwan – as far as I understand their curriculum – all students are required to take a series of “core” courses (“colloquia”), but then stay pretty confined to their disciplines.

The idea that the US-educated university graduate knows a little about everything, and more about their topic is a good thing to have, but I believe that there are enough students who are in the system that have little desire to learn outside their field. This leaves me at an intellectual fork-in-the-road situation: should students be forced to take courses they do not want to (and professors and lecturers teach courses to these students who do all wish to learn) in order to have a liberal education, or should the requirements of education be changed to be more in line with a different goal?

I feel that a student body should not be forced to take courses for the sake of broadening their education – that is what personal development (for which everyone has a whole lifetime) is for. Instead, the US university system should use the first two years of each students’ academic tenure to try and instill the traits they desire in their graduates. Hopefully, these would include a strong basis in ethics, as well as training in thoughtful reasoning, leadership, and cooperation, as well as the basic tools each student would need in continuing within their chosen field.

This last point brings me to my second point of interest: research universities teaching basic classes. Should UofM be offering classes in basic algebra, biology, chemistry, etc? What difference does it make for a student to take such courses at an expensive research university, as opposed to a community college? A lecturer at a community college should have as much knowledge with such foundational material as any professor, lecturer, or graduate student at a research university. Indeed, I would make the argument that a professor at a research university who is interested in the cutting-edge of science might be less inclined to be interested in re-hashing the basics of his or her field every four months. If this is the case, it makes little sense that such a professor would teach such a class, leaving it (or as much of the running of it as possible) to his or her graduate students – which is what happens in many of these introductory 100-level courses around campus. So why should a student (or the parents of a student) pay thousands or tens-of-thousands of dollars to learn material from a graduate student when they can pay a fraction of the cost to learn the same material at a community college? Although Jim didn’t go into it very much in his presentation, I subsequently learned from him that the original setup of the University of California system was set up to focus only on upper-level and graduate courses, but was eventually scrapped due to recruitment concerns.

Of course, this could potentially all be solved by having a much-improved secondary education system in the United States. The major gap was one of the major findings of the Spellings Commission (barring the meta-findings of political “tampering”). In the UK, there is a Department for Education and Skills which can set teaching (and presumably learning) requirements nationwide, and although many debates occurred in the UK about the benefits and pitfalls surrounding teaching to tests, during my time living there, I felt that those students coming into universities were of a greater level of academic maturity than many of the Junior Year Abroad (JYA) students from the United States. While there are definite problems with the British education system, there should be a greater emphasis on connecting the skills learned in secondary education with those of university. Potentially having upper-tier universities require certain prerequisites for entry, or have a “catch-up” year or semester for students who need one before starting in on their actual degree.

And this leads me back, full-circle, to the questionable insistence by United States universities to stick to a liberal arts education. I feel that the problems with holding onto this commodity – decreased specialization, recalcitrant students being taught by disinterested lecturers/professors, high financial costs to learn basic subject matter, etc – will outweigh the benefits of a broader education. A breadth of education should be encouraged throughout a person’s schooling and life, and not forced upon those individuals who choose to be specialists. At the same time, universities should strive to teach all their students a set of tools – thoughtful reasoning, leadership, cooperation, etc – to help study and solve field-spanning problems that we are beginning to see today.

Snow has fallen

Snow has fallen on Ann Arbor. Not a lot, but enough to add some contrast to the previous photo of the iced tree in the front yard.
I wonder how many people might be able to actually come out to ABC as the snow continues to drift down... Who knows? I'll just have to go and see.

Ice on the trees.

Yesterday's rain froze in the branches of the trees. Now the large tree in front of the house is blocking the driveway of the house! We can't drive out of here without having to (re)move branches...
And I want to get to ABC for some happy hour pints!

SNRE Winter Solstice Party

Yesterday, the 2006 Winter Solstice Party was held. So, with every annual event, many things were unchanged from time in memorium. (Well, for most of the years that I've been here, at least.) So, just to bore everyone reading this thing, I'll break down how it was the same:

• Once again, it was in the Dana Commons.
  
• Once again, the Ecotones (lead vocals again Kate Elliott) played the standards.
  
• Once again, I was taking photos of people (although not as many people were telling me to, "Stop already!").
  
• As part of a new tradition, the SNRE StuGov was distributing pre-purchased "MICHIGAN NATURAL RESOURCES" hoodies, and selling their surplus. According to Christine, there was a bit of a clamoring from people to get their hands on these hot little dealy-whos (that's my take on what she said, but I think I captured the assimilation desires of the students adequately).
  
• Once again, good food was served. (This time, there seemed to be more meat dishes than before... ) It was well-attended by the first year students, and I could swear that people stayed for minutes longer than last year - a much less of an eat-and-run.

So now that the Winter Solstice (previously - before my time here - known as the "Paul Bunyan Ball") is done, what else is there to do? Well... there are exams for people who took courses with exams. There is the SNRE StuGov-organized happy hour at Leopold's on Thursday evening. There's the whole "getting-ready-for-holidays" followed quickly by the "getting-ready-for-winter-semester", and then the eventual nervous breakdown.

Until next post: "PEACE."

December 7, 2006

Sixty-five years ago, a country that arguably no longer exists bombed a country that has drastically changed, causing the two countries to go to war against each other and their allies, and bringing the longest-serving leader of the bombed country to issue that now-famous (in America) phrase, "A date that will live in infamy."

But how famous/infamous is the day (12/07)? I looked up December 7th on Wikipedia, and found that...

• 2048 years ago (apparently), Cicero died.
  
• 230 years ago the Marquis de Lafayette tried to join the newly-formed American army as a major general.
• 219 years ago, Delaware became a state.
• 143 years ago, Richard Sears (founder of Sears) was born.
  
• 89 years ago, the United States declared war on Austria-Hungary
• 78 years ago, linguist Noam Chomsky was born.
  
• 57 years ago, the Republic of China moved its capitol city from Nanking to Taipei.
• 50 years ago, basketball star Larry Bird was born.
  
• 41 years ago, Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras "dis-"excommunicate the other's office that had been in place for the previous 911 years (12 years before the Battle of Hastings took place)
• 34 years ago, Apollo 17 (the last US lunar mission) took the "Blue Marble" photo of earth.
• 31 years ago, Indonesia invaded East Timor.
• 24 years ago, Galileo spacecraft arrived at Jupiter.

A lot of other stuff happened on this date, but I can't be bothered listing them. All-in-all, discussion of the bombing of a naval base in a far-flung territory of an up-and-coming world power by another up-and-coming world power happened. The "date that would live in infamy" appears to be as much as famous/infamous as any other day when the context of the year is removed. But this is obvious.

I don't think that the attack on Pearl Harbor is remembered in Japan anymore. Indeed, a search on the MSN/Mainichi News search engine, "Pearl Harbor" comes up with links to the movie, the wikipedia entry, and the online tour of the museum. As I said at the start of this piece, the nation of "Imperial Japan" no longer exists. It is effectively as dead as the nation of "National Socialist Germany". The fact that they both are called "Japan" and "Germany" are merely a recognition of the people that live there, rather than the political identity of that nation.

In this way, I would say that the understanding of the differences between Imperial Japan and modern-day Japan are a gulf that one would find difficulty shooting a cannonball over, just as the Imperial Japan of the early 1900s was a different country from the Shogun-controlled Imperial Japan from the early 1800s. One could similarly say that the United States post Civil War was a different country than the one that existed even two generations.

Voted

My vote was cast at 9:50AM (or there abouts). Although there were many state positions up for election, I did not end up voting for all of them. I decided that I would not vote for races where there was only the maximum number of candidates up for the vote. Unfortunately, this meant that I didn't vote for five or so races, but I have found out that I am personally opposed to a person running unopposed. (Unfortunately, there was no option for R.O.N. - Re-Open Nominations.)

It is raining today. One hopes that this does not unduly affect election turnout.

I have just come into work, and found out that I am one of only two people here. Since the IFR is part of the Michigan DNR (and the majority of people here are state employees), no one is here, since all state employees are given this day off to go vote. I approve of this practice, and feel that there should be some way for the state to allow this to happen for all citizens. I was discussing this with the other person here - Tom - and came up with the idea that it would be grand if private business was not allowed to take punitive actions against a person who could provide standard proof that he/she was out voting on election day. (Of course, this raises the question of what immigrant workers would have to do on election day...)

Finally, I watched the History Channel's program on Carthage. I didn't know that the city of Carthage was so greatly fortified. The show was a great one, and I hope to see the one next week about the Maya.

Snow Falling on UM

So, there was recently a small flurry of white stuff falling on campus. Like what fell last night, this did not stick. But is this the start of the winter? (Answer: of course it is, you dope! Autumn is the doorstep into winter; the START of winter, if you will.)

Snow on the ground.

Okay, so there wasn't a lot of snow that stayed on the ground by the time I got to the bus stop at 9:20 this morning. However, there is likely to be more tonight.

Currently, the temperature is a nice (!) 37F, but - with the wind - apparently feels like 25F. With the sun out, I think that this weather is really NICE! Ahh... Autumn - the hopefully-slow decline into winter.

I noticed one thing while waiting for the bus this morning: people do really odd things while driving in their cars. I know that this is something that shouldn't be too difficult for me to realize, but it just struck me as odd. There was one person driving with one hand, while shading her eyes with the other, driving along at 40mph, apparently mostly blinded by the sunlight reflecting off the slick road. Another person was blithely (blindly) driving along at a similar clip while applying lip gloss while looking into the rearview mirror. (Apparently, she felt that looking intently into the mirror would save her from the blinding rising sun while driving eastward.

Well, enough of that for now. I expect to have more snow photos tomorrow (I might actually post them as well).

SNRE Campfire

The 2006 SNRE Campfire went off without too much of a hitch. Things got to a slightly late start, but there was a well-attended water relay race, followed by 16 cross-cut saw teams. Because Burt didn't do his schpiel this year, Jim put together a presentation. I felt that it was a good first try, but needs a few more iterations before reaching perfection.

I was surprised that no one other than me decided to actually feed the fire (after all, this was SUPPOSED to be a campfire event). Still, in the end, it was "all good". The hotdogs were plentiful. The desserts were tasty. The company was all good. And photos were taken...

Josh, Jay, Oracha, Yuka, and Tong

Hans fights off Sara's attempts of scuttling his waders.

Damon and Solomon attempt to beat their previous cross-cut sawing time. However, they only barely managed to beat 2 minutes. (The winning time was 1:05.) Sarah sits on the log, staring blankly into space (seemingly oblivious to the rusty saw tearing through wood not even a foot away).

Jim gives a (humorous) presentation of the SNRE experience.

Dan, Tom, Jennifer, and Sarah "serenade" the crowd with guitar, drum kit, cello, and bongo.

Tired.

Late September winds and rain are making me tired. Or maybe it's my lack of food (and lots of coffee) creating a physiological imbalance leading to fatigue.

Autumn-time,
And the weather is breezy.
Leaves are blowing,
And the skys are grey.

Your's truly's tired,
And he wants to sleep.
So hurry up Mr. Clock,
Read 5 P.M.

Okay, so more bad lyic translations (apologies to the original Summertime lyrics), but that's what my head is currently spewing out.

On a side note, check THIS LINK out if you have time. It's an interesting call out on YouTube for people to speak a list of words in their own (presumably local) accent. Some are funny, but I would say that the word list doesn't do a good enough job of exploring the differences in accent. Still, the idea got a lot of apparent interest, and several responses. (I think it's interesting that there seemed to be a not insignificant number of East Asian descent respondants - all living in different places in the world.) One interesting meta-comedic (I think this is the correct word I'm tryign to use) response was an East Asian doing an FOB-like response.

Farewell Bernhard

Bernhard: have a great vacation and hope your work goes well. Sabrina and I will have to visit you von Zeit zu Zeit.

Sabrina, Bernie and Dan (looking much like stage crew members) at the very end of the night.

Mark (sitting), David, me and Bernie. (The flash was too bright.)

Tao's new motobike (with sidecar)

Tao got a motorbike (with sidecar) from the Chinese Army. Apparently, it was never really used from the time it was built in the mid-1960s. The bike (with sidecar) is based on a Soviet design, which was (itself) based on a BMW design from the 1930s. Last night, we all got a short ride in the side car (or on the rider seat) for a turn around town.

K takes time to ensure that Tao's noggin stays put.

Terry and K await the return from the gas station fuel tank fill-up trip.

Terry, K, and I have just run over Dan! Oh, no, Terry, keep your eyes on the road!

Tao gives a lift to Emily and Jen.

Toledo Speedway evening.

On Friday, I went with Terry and Dan to the Toledo Speedway to watch several "Figure 8" races. While not a Demolition Derby, per se, the various cars, cars-with-trailers, and school buses were likely never to be raced/used after that night. Therefore, demolition was always a factor hanging in the air. One point from that evening that I realized before even getting there was how out of place I would be; that I would be about as invisible as the full moon on a clear night in the open prairie. I was right. Admittedly, I could have taken some trouble in making myself a little less conspicuous by taking off my hip-worn camera bag, wearing a ball cap, and putting on a different t-shirt (say, a Michigan one). I didn't care to do so. Well, it meant that there was always a little bit of a shock that I would be there - talking with the people as if nothing was amiss (the look on the face of the girl working at concessions was priceless - I wish I had my camera available).

I would have taken more photos of the race action, but for two problems:

1. There was a large fence blocking access to the speedway proper (which is a good thing, in case a large piece of vehicle were to be propelled in the general direction of the stands) that reflected all the light from the flash, making photography difficult, and

2. There was a very nice, but very persuasive police man making sure that no one got close to the afore-mentioned barrier, especially during the course of a race.

So with those two caveats known, please accept my paltry slection of photographs, taken during periods of a race that involved a brief pause:

Large construction vehicles removed buses too battered to continue further in the race.


The "Chris, will you marry me?" bus wins the final race of the evening! (We all later discussed the point that it would likely be all downhill for the racer from this evening.)
The motor-madness crowds all try to find their way out of the Speedway, all at once. We decided to go to the Speedway's bar (yes, the motor speedway has a place for you to drink before driving home) in order to try and wait out the mass exodus of cars before returning to hippy-dippy Ann Arbor.

No rain.

No rain today, and little indication of rain in the near future, however, gray skies go on and on:

Gray Skies (apologies to Irving Berlin)
I was happy, just as happy as I could be
Ev'ry day was a sunny day for me
Then good luck went a-charging out my door
Skies were clear but they're not clear anymore

Gray skies
Crying on me
Nothing but gray skies
Do I see

Corvids
Cawing a song
Nothing but corvids
All day long

Never saw the clouds building up high
Never saw things going good-bye
Noticing the days hurrying by
When you're all gray, my how they fly

Gray skies.
Sunshine is gone.
Nothing but gray skies.
From now on!

Anyway, there were a few students this morning playing on a large see-saw, raising money for charity. Also, I saw some fungi growing on the side of some railroad ties that used to form the platform base of an outdoor art installation (see below)