What am I even doing?

Terrible

In California, the board acted Thursday on a proposal from the university system’s president, Janet Napolitano, which came after several years of pressure. A lawsuit filed last year by a largely black school district in Compton, Calif., and a coalition of students and advocacy groups argues that the time-honored tests discriminate based on race and income.

The decision, however, ran counter to a recommendation from the system’s faculty senate, which voted in April to keep the SAT and ACT. A faculty task force commissioned to study the impact of standardized tests found that they predict college success within the University of California system more effectively than high school grades or other measures.

In fact, the task force found that in many cases the tests gave a leg up to black, Latino and low-income students by offering an additional metric for admissions officers who might have rejected them because their grades did not meet the university’s threshold.

Robert May, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Davis, who appointed the faculty panel, said the regents’ decision would add confusion and significant costs to the admissions process at the mammoth system, and make admissions determinations even more subjective in the short-term. […]

But as California has struggled to maintain campus diversity since voters passed a 1996 ban on affirmative action, pressure has grown for the school system to take action. Its top campuses have become almost as difficult to get into as some Ivy League schools and are demographically dominated by white and Asian students.

For the last 20 years, black enrollment at University of California schools has scarcely broken 4 percent, though African-Americans represent 6.5 percent of the state’s population. Nearly 40 percent of the state is Hispanic, California’s largest ethnic group, but only 22 percent of students in the school system are.

For his model, Praxiteles used the beautiful Athenian courtesan Phryne. Phryne was a legend in her own right. She earned so much money from her liaisons that she offered to sponsor the rebuilding of the walls of Thebes, so long as they included the inscription “Destroyed By Alexander The Great, Rebuilt By Phyrne The Courtesan” (Thebes declined). While in Athens, she committed some unspecified offense, and got charged with impiety, a capital crime. Athenaeus writes that when the trial seemed to be going against her, she disrobed in the middle of the courtroom. The judges were so awed by her beauty that they became concerned she might be a god, and that something terrible would happen if they harmed her. They voted to acquit. She was lovers with basically all the famous and important Athenian men of her day, and one of them was Praxiteles, the greatest sculptor in the world. Thus the Aphrodite of Knidos.

It was the most famous statue of its time. Pilgrims would come from all over Greece to look at it. Sometimes more than look. There was apparently a problem with lovestruck young men breaking into the temple to copulate with it. It was a really good statue.

According to a legend recorded by Antipater of Sidon, the statue’s fame reached Aphrodite herself, and she descended to Knidos to judge it. She got confused and upset, wondering when Praxiteles had seen her naked. It was a really good statue.

Around 260 BC, King Nicomedes of Bithynia offered to buy it. One source says that in exchange for the statue, he “offered to liquidate the entire national debt of Knidos, which was immense”. The Knidians refused. It was a really good statue.

It stayed in place until the Christian era, when it was destroyed as part of the general persecution of pagans. Some sources say instead that it was rescued and brought to Constantinople by a wealthy collector, but that his museum caught fire and it was lost in the blaze.

I find myself fascinated by these kinds of stories. Stories of legendary objects, things so far outside the normal range that they seem almost supernatural. There are a lot of them in fantasy - Tolkien is very good at this. A gem brighter and more beautiful than any that have survived to the present day, an elven city fairer than any built by mortal men. Part of what makes the past so alluring is that it has this kind of thing, something beyond all your experience, something where all you can do is speculate fruitlessly about what it would have been like to live in a time when you can see such wonders…

…except that the Romans were as practical as the Greeks were fanciful, so they sent a bunch of sculptors to Knidos to make a bunch of replicas, and many of these have survived. There’s a picture of one on Wikipedia. It’s a very pretty statue, but if I saw it in a museum I’m not sure I’d take special notice of it. These things are always more impressive in your imagination.

And here’s the linked CDC article about how they estimate flu deaths. I really hope they weren’t deliberately overestimating them to “encourage good hygiene”, and they certainly don’t say anything about that, but it’s the CDC, so who knows: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/how-cdc-estimates.htm

Loss of language is scary enough; it would be paralyzingly terrifying if your thinking went with that too.

This normally happens to me with some frequency at work, but even more now.

Have some contrarian to the contrarians discourse, as a treat.

So this is a bit of a wild theory, but here goes. You know how you go to the store and they’re out of something and you go why the hell? Why that? Why does anyone think that random thing is an essential item to have during a pandemic?

Well, what if it really is random? In ordinary times, sometimes the supermarket will be a little low on one thing or another, and in ordinary times, you simply pass by paying no attention. But now, people are worried. What if someone sees that there’s only four of one brand of mustard left, and they think, oh no, people are hoarding mustard, I better get some. So they buy what’s left of French’s, and then someone else comes along and sees the empty spot on the shelf, and thinks oh no, I better grab a few jars of Grey Poupon….

and

b) pro-social distancing means going shopping as infrequently as possible.

The grocery stores I normally shop at have instituted rationing for a number of staples: One package of meat, three cans of tuna, three cans of soup or other processed food, three cans of vegetables, two things of frozen vegetables if there are any other than Okra available, one thing of frozen processed food… 

where the heck is Rhode Island

*checks Google Maps*

lies, lies and calumny, most of it isn’t even an island!

Well that plus two other things: first, an astounding number of independent municipalities – what would be villages with no administrative autonomy in most states – are independent towns with their own governments

(in part cause because of the proximity to two major cities, New Jersey developed in pre-railroad days with arable land dedicated to truck farming supplying fresh fruits and vegetables to the urbanites, this is why it’s “The Garden State”)

Second, it’s legal and common for people to be elected to local and state government simultaneously

In Europe, most agricultural regions are tightly clustered towns, with the acreage of the actual farms spread out and farmers commuting to their land.

In America, the government had free reign to distribute most of the land after the initial colonies. In order to prevent land barons buying up all this land (because of Jefferson’s ideal of the yeoman farmer), they passed laws saying you had to live on the land you farmed in most cases. This disrupted the formation of all those bucolic European towns, and led to the sparsely settled, ubiquitous suburbia that American farmland became.

Except in New Jersey which was already a farming basket before any of those laws (well really the land was already distributed.) So it was one of the few states to still have the old European “many, many small, irregular little towns” aesthetic. (The south’s plantation based economy obviously encouraged other development.)