Monthly Archives: September 2011

Weird underediting from the BBC

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One of my Google News searches is art + theft. This morning it turned up a story on the recovery of two Bolivian paintings in Washington, DC, where a dealer asked the Art Loss Register to check out the two.

The portraits, Saint Rose of Viterbo and Saint Augustin, were among more than 100 religious artefacts stolen from the church, which is a national monument, at the same time.

Admittedly, it’s the BBC news FOR Latin America, but still. That’s not quite English. Or Art-talk. First, we don’t call those things portraits, since they aren’t. They are icons (even in the non-Byzantine orbit) or, more simply, paintings. Second, if you’re going to call her Rose of Viterbo, you might as well refer to him as Augustine. Or Rosa and Augustin. Either way. But not a mix.

Washing in cold…

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Read the last sentence here and think about how the seriously Green are likely to react:

After realizing how much energy was used to heat water for laundry, Procter set a goal to convert 70 percent of all washing-machine loads to cold water by 2020; by Procter’s estimate currently 38 percent of laundry loads globally were done in cold water.
But in trying to create Tide Coldwater, Procter’s scientists were confronted with a problem: hot water does help get clothes cleaner. In fact, thermal energy is one of three secrets to cleaning clothes, along with mechanical energy and chemicals.
“When you reduce one, you have to do better in the others,” said James Danzinger, a senior scientist who works on detergents for Procter & Gamble.
So the company set its scientists loose to find new chemicals to compensate, and what they came up with was a detergent, Tide Coldwater, with different enzymes and surfactants that work better in cold water.
. . .
The chemical composition of the new cold-water detergents, which cost about the same as regular detergents, is “totally different” from what was found in detergents a decade ago, said Dr. Mueller-Kirschbaum of Henkel. Some even contain chemicals that coat fabric fibers so that they are less likely to absorb dirt in the interval before the next washing.

Really? Chemicals coating the fibers of our clothes?
Do these scientists live in the real world at all?

Understanding Stimuli

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Pacemaker or defibrillator? Or maybe hole in the ground?

After the biggest stimulus in American history, this is still about what I think. A bigger stimulus would have given us a bigger temporary boost to consumption, and it might have prevented some human capital depreciation, which is important. But I do not think that making it 30% bigger, as Paul Krugman seems to be insisting that we should have, would have somehow transformed it from a pacemaker to a defibrillator. We would still be now about where we are: growth stagnant, unemployment around 9%. We’d just be in more debt.


That’s Megan McArdle. Does she mean that if we hadn’t installed a pacemaker we would be measurably worse than stagnant with unemployment around 9%? Because that’s not the outcome the administration promised. Whereas my father’s pacemaker seems to have worked pretty much as advertised.
Of course, I tend to think of the late stimulus as a hoard — a hole dug in the ground where one deposits valuables to prevent them being taken by the enemy. And a bigger hoard, if you don’t come back to dig it up, is just more for archeologists to find later and use to figure out your failed society. But I know very little about economics, and believe less of what I read.

Schadenfreude isn’t attractive from the outside. But from the inside, it’s a very pleasant emotion.

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Remember when “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
Heh. I am SO enjoying the pre-campaign special election results from downstate — the Ds lose a district they’ve held since the 1920s.
And some people have to pretend like they expected this might happen when Weiner imploded.
Every time something like this happens I remember a faculty lunch talk in October of 2008, in which a specialist in American history (no link to his campus bio to protect the vainglorious) proclaimed that this would be one of those long-term realignment elections . . . and ended the talk with an altar call: New York is a safe Blue State — come ring doorbells in Pennsylvania this weekend!
Guess even the NY 9th Congressional District isn’t safely Blue any more. Heh.
My father (a lifetime professor) points out that my real problem as a denizen of the groves of academe is that I have no one to giggle WITH — only people to giggle AT. Luckily for my spiritual life, that particular historian lives in Rochester and is in a phased retirement plan, so I may never see him again. Otherwise I might be tempted to say something, which would not be sweet.

Yay – we have permission to search!

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You know, the log-jam from a few years ago is really starting to break up. There are 11 tenure track jobs advertised already on our HR website.* Four more are about to be added, including ours for an Early Modern Art position (that’s Renaissance/Baroque for those not up on fashionable nomenclature). Know anyone to prod to apply?

*Biology, Economics, Education, English, Environmental Studies, French, History, Mathematics, Physics, Psychology, Sociology — soon to be followed by Art History, another Econ position, Political Science, and Women’s Studies.

How many jobs is Obama really interested in? One. His.

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Ms. McArdle:

You can say that Obama has no choice, because the GOP is just so damn obstructive that they won’t pass anything anyway. As it happens, I disagree–I don’t think that he could have gotten the whole thing through, but the GOP would probably have given him a few pieces to avoid looking like total jerks, and while that might not have done too much for Obama’s re-election chances, it probably would have meant a lot to the schmoes trying to make their mortgage payments in a tough economy.
But say it’s true. If it is, I really wish that Obama hadn’t wasted my Thursday evening, and that of 31 million other Americans, listening to a jobs plan that was only designed to produce one job–a second term for Barack Obama. I mean, I don’t blame him, exactly. But I get a little pang when I realize that I could just as well have spent that time bleaching the grout in the master bath.

Yesterday was – whew, thank goodness it’s over.

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Art 101 at 9:05; finished off the ancient Near East.
Office time.
Noon – 1:30 – Provost search committee meeting and conference call.
Home to grab a jacket to take to a new tailor downtown for alterations.
3:00 – met 10 of my Art 101 class for an optional tutorial in thinking about sculpture. We talked about the Elizabeth Blackwell statue on the Quad. Their paper about the William Smith statue is due Friday.
4 – 6ish – first Faculty Meeting of the year.
6:30 – 8:00 – dinner with some colleagues
That was a moderately busy day!
Statue of Elizabeth Blackwell on the Hobart and William Smith Quad
Gosh it was a pretty day, though!

Green energy – turns out that was the color of the money they were stealing

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Beautiful. Just beautiful. FBI raids on the most-favored-energy-company.
And then there’s this story:

According to White House visitor logs, between March 12, 2009, and April 14, 2011, Solyndra officials and investors made no fewer than 20 trips to the West Wing. In the week before the administration awarded Solyndra with the first-ever alternative energy loan guarantee on March 20, four separate visits were logged.

Further – now the FBI is searching the houses of Solyndra executives.