Bicoastal Curious

bicoastal March 18th, 2007

The internet, like Yale Law School, has been described as “civilized anarchy” because it runs amazingly well with very few rules. Part of the reason why it can do so, in fine west coast style, is that the community can act quickly to establish unwritten but well known norms to protect itself and its members.

Washington Post article on irresponsible site run by Jarret Cohen and Anthony Ciolli

Brittan Heller — The Pocket Part

Brittan Heller — SMJ

Brittan Heller — Teen Jeopardy!

New Leaders Initiative — Heide Iravani

Health Fellowship — Heide Iravani

Earth Island Fellowship — Heide Iravani

Brower Youth — Heide Iravani

Chancellor’s award — Heide Iravani

Free the World — Heide Iravani

(Thanks to Grumblez for the links.)

• Cooperation
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City of Progress March 13th, 2007

When one refers to something as “biweekly”, that is to say it occurs every other week. This is different from “semi-weekly”, which refers to something that occurs twice a week. Thus, biweekly=semimonthly. Please correct me if I am wrong.

• Uncategorized
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bicoastal March 12th, 2007

“When it comes to choosing law schools, students favor Yale for the same reason nondrinkers favor screwdrivers: it’s the most palatable way to swallow something you don’t really want.”

- At the Bar: The Lawyer Who Helped Set the Flag Debate Aflame Calmly Prepares to Go On, New York Times, June 22, 1990, at B5

• Mutterances
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bicoastal March 12th, 2007

I walked into a Swatch store the other day, but promptly walked out when I realized I had absolutely no use for a watch. When I was a kid I loved to buy and wear cool watches, but ever since I got a cell phone I haven’t needed one. Apparently I’m not alone, as a friend tipped me off to a story in Slate on the declining sales of watches.

Although my watch usage is related to the development of new technologies that happen to give the time, like computers and cell phones, I actually took off my watch for the first time in college when a friend, who was a math major who wore shorts and sandals in the winter, explained that she didn’t wear a watch because it freed her from the habit of worrying about time when she didn’t need to.

The time is irrelevant most of the time: it only really matters when you need to be somewhere or meet a deadline. And when you really need to know, there’s almost always a clock within sight. Not having a watch actually makes you more efficient, because you don’t waste time looking at the wrist or worrying about the passing seconds. And, it’s more relaxing because you’re not looking at your wrist or worrrying about the passing seconds.

This, I think, is a particularly west coast approach to a productive life.

And, it’s doubly appropriate because my sandal/short wearing math major friend who discovered this paradox grew up in Pittsburgh, and later moved to Palo Alto.

• Workplay
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bicoastal March 10th, 2007

The NYT Magazine ran a photo spread last week called “Coast Lines: For These Up-and-Coming Men’s-Wear Designers, Los Angeles and New York Are More Than Just Points of Departure.” Maybe I’m not patient enough to tease out what the headline has to do with the spread, or maybe I’m too fashion-blind to understand why this is a bicoastal story, but there it is. The bicoastal trope in all its glory.

• Instances
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bicoastal March 10th, 2007

The New York Times reports that Ira Glass, creator of This American Life, moved with his wife from Chicago to New York last March.

That’s one up for the east coast, with no loss in utility for the west coast.

• Improvements
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bicoastal March 9th, 2007

Today I tricked out someone’s Mac. Here’s what I taught her/installed:

Command-Tab - Switch between applications with ease.

Quicksilver - pixie sticks for your fingertips

Isolator - block everything else out and focus on your writing

Dictionary - do you really know the meaning of “irony”?

Address Book & iCal - replace Palm Desktop

iSync - sucks to be out of sync

BluePhoneElite - get calls, sms during class

Firefox search engines - add new search engines to the search box

Mail - LDAP directories, and download your Gmail into a POP account

Netvibes - best RSS reader on the web

Del.icio.us - social bookmarking and the Firefox plug in

Adium - instant message with your friends on different networks

VLC Media player - play all video formats from the pre-YouTube era

Cocktail - a healthy mac is a happy mac…

Carbon Copy Cloner - …until it dies and you have no backup

NERDWOOD!

Am I missing anything?

• Nerdwood
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bicoastal March 7th, 2007

In 2003, these academics wrote an article:

Cass R. Sunstein & Richard H. Thaler, Libertarian Paternalism Is Not an Oxymoron, 70 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1159 (2003)

Two years later, this academic responded:

Gregory Mitchell, Libertarian Paternalism Is an Oxymoron, 99 NW. U. L. Rev. 1245 (2005)

It’s a deliciously blunt response and it has a distinctively east coast pissing match flavor. Is this an effective technique in academia for persuading others?

A west coast approach is exemplified by Alan Sokal’s academic prank. Sokal wrote up a nonsensical “postmodern” argument about the construction of quantum physics and got it accepted by a (once) respectable academic journal:

Alan Sokal, Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, 46 Social Text 217 (1996)

But Sokal teaches at NYU and received his Ph.D. from Princeton, so it’s not surprising that he also said this:

“Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.)”

Are there any other serious figures in academia who prank instead of, or as a complement to, argumentation?

Is one technique more effective than the other? In what circumstances?

• Scholarship
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bicoastal March 5th, 2007

Why can’t Google provide satisfactory answers to the following fundamental questions?

Why me?

Why do I feel so miserable?

Why do I feel so happy?

• Philosophy
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City of Progress March 5th, 2007

It has been a real struggle to generate my first post for bicoastalcurious.net. I feel obliged as the newly appointed west coast correspondent to add important perspective to this otherwise unilateral operation. I sat down at my office a few days ago and began to compose my first post and I was really foundering. My office-mate looked over at me noticing that I was not stewing over my normal suite of spreadsheets or graph and asked me what I was doing. I explained that I was writing an entry for a blog. He replied, “aren’t you supposed to just like sit down and write what comes to you..” He was born and raised in southern California, and he was right. I am the west coast correspondent, what was I doing? Using the thesaurus, checking my grammar, adding footnotes, fact-checking my sweeping generalizations…I spent 18 deformative years on the east coast but come to you today with a vow to curb my analytical and neurotic sensibilities and provide quasi-objective perspectives from the west coast.

Stay tuned for:
“The Civil War vs. The Mexican America War; an often overlooked comparison”

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