Maggie's Farm

Half of college students fear expressing ideas in the classroom

I do not think that that is anything new.  

I still think Rubber Soul might be their best record, but it's all fun. Were they rock and roll, or plain pop?

Klingenstein, via MC's Calls For More Fighting Spirit From Conservatives:

 We simply cannot teach our citizens, current and future, that their country is no good and expect to have a country for very long. No country can survive on a diet of endless self-loathing. We need to teach our citizens to love and cherish their country.  And we need to stop wallowing in our sins of racism. We are talking ourselves into ruin. As far as I can tell, all this talk about racism has brought us nothing but hardship for blacks, division, and race hustlers. Let's instead talk about what we Americans have in common, and let's start judging Americans by the content of their character...

I'll agree with that, but as a huge multicultural nation I am not always sure as if Americans feel that they have a lot in common. Even in 1776, the population was deeply divided.

The magic glue that can and should bind all Americans together is the US Constitution. It applies to everybody. It happens to be Constitution Day today.

This piece has been widely noted. I have no real comment about it other than to note that IQ matters, but so do many other personal traits and qualities which are not so easily measured but which are also genes to a real extent: 'The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality'—A Review

What does "social equality" mean anyway? 

I used to feel that it was a good challenge if nothing else. As I get older, I am more prone to lazy grammar and incomplete sentences.

Verbal communication has become more casual, hasn't it?

Althouse discusses diagramming complex sentences. 

"Shall" is a dandy word, but not used much in the USA anymore. Perhaps it sounds stuffy, or maybe people do not know how to use it. You can say "I shall attend" but you can also say "You shall take out the garbage"

Shall vs Will

I admire this man's skills. I admire all skills. I have to pay real money for people who can do these things and feel defective in not knowing how.

This guy has one eye, plays cello and banjo, so he has talents beyond talking. 

From a friend who is a graduate of that illustrious university

Men abandon higher education in droves, trail female student enrollment by record levels

Maybe they do not wish to enroll in Intro to Trans Studies 

Anne Applebaum considers cancel culture in The Atlantic: THE NEW PURITANS. Social codes are changing, in many ways for the better. But for those whose behavior doesn’t adapt fast enough to the new norms, judgment can be swift—and merciless.

She could be canceled for that article, don't you think?

It is a form of terrorism, and none of it is "for the better."  You can scare people into not saying what they think, but you can't scare them out of free-thinking unless you start with the little kids. Oh, wait...

Eighty percent of success is showing up.

Woody Allen 

Plenty of readers might not approve of Woody Allen, but that quote certainly applies to my life trajectory. You meet people, some of them think you are neither stupid nor an ahole, and good things tend to happen. 

Bari Weiss on back to school

Suzy Weiss on home schooling 

Reader sent us this info:

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.

Why was that gauge used?

Well, because that's the way they built them in England, and English engineers designed the first US railroads.

Why did the English build them like that?

Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the wagon tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

So, why did 'they' use that gauge then?

Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that same wheel spacing.

Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?

Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break more often on some of the old, long distance roads in England . You see, that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads?

Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England ) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since.

And what about the ruts in the roads?

Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match or run the risk of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome , they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder 'What horse's ass came up with this?', you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses' asses.)

Now, the twist to the story:

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah . The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle design feature, of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system, was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass. And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important? Ancient horse's asses control almost everything......

The Social Science Monoculture Doubles Down

 The overwhelmingly left/liberal professoriate has been looking for psychological defects in their political opponents for some time, but the intensity of these efforts has increased markedly in the last two decades. The literature is now replete with correlations linking conservatism with intolerance, prejudice, low intelligence, close-minded thinking styles, and just about any other undesirable cognitive and personality characteristic. But most of these relationships were attenuated or disappeared entirely when the ideological assumptions behind the research were examined more closely...

Related,  The Breakdown of Objective Reality. A crisis of authority has left the public increasingly willing to believe implausible things.

  The Internet, after all, is a playground of impossible fantasies. The digital self, as L.M. Sacassas has noted, is a featureless and colorless reproduction of an actual human being, intrinsically devoid of identity, so that, in principle, it is capable of becoming anyone or anything. The will to believe in a hidden prophet called “Q” is no more bizarre than the will to believe in a proliferating variety of “genders.” For those born with a smartphone in hand, the whole concept of reality, to the degree it exists, appears in the guise of a soft and pliable substance to be molded according to one’s dreams.

You can see why I almost never term things "storms". The Beaufort Scale.

Early in their conversations in Barcelona, Huber, Erker and their colleagues realized that a clock is anything that undergoes irreversible changes: changes in which energy spreads out among more particles or into a broader area. Energy tends to dissipate — and entropy, a measure of its dissipation, tends to increase — simply because there are far, far more ways for energy to be spread out than for it to be highly concentrated. This numerical asymmetry, and the curious fact that energy started out ultra-concentrated at the beginning of the universe, are why energy now moves toward increasingly dispersed arrangements, one cooling coffee cup at a time.

Do facts matter? Re-linking from Undoing the Enlightenment:

 Several Disenlightenment urges reinforced one another in the case of James Damore, the Google engineer fired in 2017 for writing a memo discussing sex differences in his field. The National Labor Relations Board declared that Damore’s “statements about immutable traits linked to sex — such as women’s heightened neuroticism and men’s prevalence at the top of the IQ distribution — were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment notwithstanding efforts to cloak comments with ‘scientific references’ and analysis.” The scare quotes around references to science tell us that science must be ignored whenever it conflicts with Disenlightenment dogma. In the Enlightenment, science was often referred to as a process of unveiling — the frontispiece to Diderot’s Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers depicts the figures of Reason and Philosophy unveiling the figure of Truth. According to the National Labor Relations Board, though, science is more of a cloak.

A Telescope for Social Justice

In Foreigh Affairs,The Longest Wars 

Here was the paradox: he knew from Vietnam that what the United States was doing in Afghanistan wouldn’t work—but he thought he could do it anyway. And there was something else. If he applied the real lesson of Vietnam—don’t—he would be out of a job. And then who would he be?

Over time, he learned to save Vietnam for his staff. One day, as he sat through another White House meeting on Afghanistan, listening to another optimistic military briefing, a quote surfaced from the deep past, and he scribbled it down on a scrap of paper and took it back to the office to show his young aides, who of course had no idea where it came from: “How can we lose when we’re so sincere?”