Chickens counted, hatched

On Friday, I received a tenure-track offer from Saint Joseph’s College of Maine. I was a little surprised to get a flyback offer, since they asked me some tough questions in my APA interview. But flyback I did, and I thought my teaching demo and interviews went well. I also was really impressed with what I saw of the college, so by the time I got home, I was hoping they’d make me an offer. It was hard waiting on word from the Dean, but since I was the last candidate to visit campus, I only had to wait a week.

St. Joe’s—I’m just assuming that’s what people call it for short—is a small Catholic school run by the Sisters of Mercy. They have just over 1000 undergraduates, but there is a plan on the table to increase enrollment to 1400 and add a couple buildings. There are only about 80 faculty members, so it’s a small community. I got the distinct impression that its exceptionally collegial, though, which is certainly attractive for a new prof.

The campus is on the shore of Sebago Lake, in view of the White Mountains. On clear days, you can see New Hampshire and Mount Washington, where the world record for surface wind speed was recorded: 231 mph. (Fun fact: the mountain experiences hurricane force winds an average of 110 days a year, according to the ever-infallible Wikipedia). The city of Portland, Maine is about 18 miles away, and many faculty live there. It’s supposed to be a great city. I saw just a bit of the Old Port section, which is just swarming with restaurants. I also noticed a handful of independent bookstores on my one drive into town. Living directly in the city can be expensive, but it’s very affordable to live on the outskirts, so we’re hoping to be able to buy a house soon after moving out there.

So at some point over the summer, we’ll be making the 3175 mile drive across the country. That’s going to be a pain in the butt, of course, but I think once we get there we’ll really like it. When I told some of my students that I might be moving to Maine, one of them, who rarely says anything at all in class, asked, “You’re leaving Santa Barbara for Maine?” The tone of voice she used would have been equally suited to the question, “You’re going to hammer that four-inch spike into your skull?” It sounds crazy to lots of people, but (apart from the fact that I just need a job), Watoosa and I are really looking forward to living out there. It was all we could do to keep ourselves from thinking about it before Friday. We like cold weather, we’ll be close to Boston (2 hrs., or so), we’ll be able to avoid impoverishing ourselves, we’ll have lobster for every meal of the day, and we’ll have four distinct seasons (with a cool summer, no less). We’ve loved Santa Barbara, and would have been happy to stay, but since that’s not possible, Maine is a fine alternative. If you’re ever up in that part of the country, you’ll have to drop by.

Go Monks!

Lostonomics

I’m maybe an episode or two away from punting on Lost. Despite the writers’ avowals that they will avoid suffering the fate of The X Files, I don’t see how they can possibly avoid it. They’re writing checks that they can’t cash, and the backstory stuff is just getting tedious.

Anyway, for those of you who are still interested, and even for those of you who once were, I came across this site that spells out the economics of the Losties. It’s not too long, and it doesn’t require any previous knowledge of economics. Since I’ve been thinking about this issue myself ever since I first got into the show, I found this analysis pretty interesting.

In short, Jack represents socialism, Sawyer represents capitalism, and Locke (despite his namesake) represents some form of primitive tribal economics. The page also indicates ways in which these characters diverge from those economic types.

To my mind, they’re mostly on target with Jack, although it might be more accurate to say that he is simply an authoritarian, and one of the ways that manifests itself is through the distribution of goods and resources. This has been one of the infuriating things about his character. If I were a Lostie, I would chafe under his heavy-handedness, especially when he makes such terrible decisions (think: if there’s one doctor on the whole island, why would we send him off to do the really dangerous work?). Not only does he want to control the distribution of resources, he also wants to control information (and he’s not alone in that regard). That’s a pretty good recipe for failure.

There are similar economic questions to be asked of Battlestar Galactica. How they can produce things like clothing, light bulbs, paper and ink? What do they use for currency? How do they procure and distribute public goods among the fleet? Are they recording or transmitting specialized forms of knowledge (like medicine)? But I try not to let questions like that get in the way of my enjoying the show.

The Future is Now, Science Man!

Reason recently linked to this page that posts a column from 1950 by the science editor of the New York Times. He speculates about what life will be like for Americans in the year 2000. Some of his predictions are a bit… off:

This Dobson house is not as highly mechanized as you may suppose, chiefly because of the progress made by the synthetic chemists. There are no dish washing machines, for example, because dishes are thrown away after they have been used once, or rather put into a sink where they are dissolved by superheated water….

When Jane Dobson cleans house she simply turns the hose on everything. Why not? Furniture (upholstery included), rugs, draperies, unscratchable floors — all are made of synthetic fabric or waterproof plastic….

Cooking as an art is only a memory in the minds of old people. A few die-hards still broil a chicken or roast a leg of lamb, but the experts have developed ways of deep-freezing partially baked cuts of meat. Even soup and milk are delivered in the form of frozen bricks….

…[S]torms are more or less under control. It is easy enough to spot a budding hurricane in the doldrums off the coast of Africa. Before it has a chance to gather much strength and speed as it travels westward toward Florida, oil is spread over the sea and ignited. There is an updraft. Air from the surrounding region, which includes the developing hurricane, rushes in to fill the void. The rising air condenses so that some of the water in the whirling mass falls as rain.

On the other hand, he got pretty close on a couple other predictions, such as this one:

Of course the Dobsons have a television set. But it is connected with the telephones as well as with the radio receiver, so that when Joe Dobson and a friend in a distant city talk over the telephone they also see each other. Businessmen have television conferences. Each man is surrounded by half a dozen television screens on which he sees those taking part in the discussion. Documents are held up for examination; samples of goods are displayed. In fact, Jane Dobson does much of her shopping by television. Department stores obligingly hold up for her inspection bolts of fabric or show her new styles of clothing.

And this one isn’t too far off, either:

Fast jet and rocket-propelled mail planes made it so hard for telegraph companies all over the world to compete with the postal service that dormant facsimile-transmission systems had to be revived. It takes no more than a minute to transmit and receive in facsimile a five-page letter on paper of the usual business size. Cost? Five cents. In Tottenville the clerks in telegraph offices no longer print out illegible words. Everything is transmitted by phototelegraphy exactly as it is written—illegible spelling, blots, smudges and all.

My predictions for the year 2050 are as follows, in no particular order:

1. A bottle of Coke at a convenience store will cost around $5.00. Average starting salary for a recent college graduate will be well into six-digit figures. New York, San Francisco, and possibly even Seattle and Boston will have become too expensive for everyone except the fairly wealthy or people who have inherited their homes. We will still use cash, but pennies will have been phased out of currency, and we’ll be talking about doing the same with nickels and maybe dimes.
2. The South’s population will exceed the Northeast’s. This will be due partly to two kinds of economic refugees: those coming from Mexico to look for jobs (and finding them), and those fleeing the prohibitive cost of living on the two coasts. However, the influx of Mexicans into the U. S. will have greatly reduced as the Mexican economy improves.
3. The entertainment industry will be completely transformed. The major industry players (movie studios, television networks, and recording studios) will continue to try—and fail—to control user-generated content and file sharing. They are already worried about profitability in the digital age, but there is just too much demand for entertainment for me to believe there’s no profit potential. Many of them (especially record labels) will play an even larger role at signaling quality for savvy consumers than they do today. The single will increase in importance while the album will decrease; however, there will be new ways to generate revenue through music sales, perhaps by bundling a physical copy of an album with features like unique cover art. The transformed market will make it easier for local bands to enlarge their exposure, but will make it harder for musicians to become super-rich superstars. More of their wealth will come from playing concerts, which will likely look (and sound) a lot different than they do today. FM radio will continue to suck, but satellite and internet-based broadcasts will be widely available and used.
4. There will be more people reading books in electronic form as readers improve, but the majority of books will still be published and read as hard copies.
5. There will not have been a successful manned mission to any other planet. The major players in space will be the U.S. and China, and to a lesser extent, the E. U. Russia will focus its efforts elsewhere. We will return to the moon, and there will be talk of private firms developing lunar-based industrial ventures (such as mining), but no one will seriously think about living anywhere but Earth. Space tourism will be a small industry, and people will come up with a lot more fun things to do up there over a weekend than float around.
6. There will be a playoff system for Div. I college football, although it will take a long time to develop it. It will use many of the bowls as the preliminary games. The SEC will continue to dominate, and at least four of its teams will have won national championships, some of them multiple times. The U.S. will become more competitive in soccer and will make it to the World Cup finals. We will also win a few more gold medals in Olympic basketball, but not many more than that. Baseball will continue to be as exciting as watching paint dry. Los Angeles will get an NFL franchise. Birmingham will not.
7. Fewer gifted students will go to college, but slightly more people in the lower parts of the intelligence distribution will. As a result, the value of a college degree will be devalued, giving an incentive for many to pursue graduate degrees.
8. We will still use cars, but they will not fly. They will be cleaner and quieter, however. A number of cities will regret having placed so much faith in commuter rail, although few people in power will admit it publicly. Still, traffic congestion will be worse in many places, even though lots more people will be telecommuting. There will still be plenty of oil, but we will still not have an economical alternative energy source for transportation.
9. The earth’s average surface temperature will be higher, but we won’t mind it too much.
10. The Koreas will reunite, and they’ll do it peacefully. Cuba will become a democracy, also peacefully. The U.S. will not be in Iraq, because Iraq will not exist—it will split into two or three states, and it won’t occur without strife. Ultimately, Turkey will accept a Kurdish state due to a combination of pressure and incentives from the E.U. Parts of Africa will show political and economic improvement, but the continent as a whole will be far behind the rest of the world.
11. Everything will be largely different from what we imagined, and largely for the better.

It's the Final Countdown

Cue that awesome Europe hit song!

The release date for Harry Potter and the Amazing Technicolor Invisibility Cloak Deathly Hallows is July 21. I was rather…er, troubled by the way the last book ended [SPOILER ALERT! READ NO FURTHER IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW THE ENDING OF BOOK 6!]—Dumbledore’s death seems to show that he was wrong to place faith in Snape, which in turn suggests that redemption is impossible. It didn’t bother me that Dumbledore died, but it was the way he died: as a sucker.

Since Book 6 was obviously setting the stage for Book 7, I was willing to suspend judgment. I can see a couple ways of making Dumbledore’s death more palatable, but I can’t see how any of them would be satisfying or not a deus ex machina. So, I’ll be interested, and a bit worried, to see what Rowling does.

Here’s a lengthy blog post full o’ predictions for HPADH.

Here’s your Final Countdown fix. Watch, and shudder as ye behold what musical abominations the Swedish welfare state hath wrought.

Hand-crafted Star Was

Someone has too much time on their hands. Get it?!