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.
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.
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?
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?
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?
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”
bicoastal March 5th, 2007
“Low rank induces misery. The physiological routes have been followed in several studies of primates in the wild. Serotonin is a brain chemical which is associated with positive well-being. Among vervet monkeys, dominant males have much higher levels of serotonin than subordinate ones, and this is an effect, not a cause of high rank. These findings were replicated in (admittedly limited) studies in humans. Another study has shown that in rhesus macaques, the furring of coronary arteries (’atherosclerosis’–the main cause of heart attacks) is inversely related to social rank. A study of baboons in the wild has found that all the biological stress markers follow the social hierarchy, rather like British civil servants. This provides a physiological basis for a type of behaviour observed in both animals and humans, the phenomenon of ‘Learned Helplessness’: the experience of being boxed in a corner, and faced with intractable dilemmas or choices with no obvious escape. Numerous studies in both animals and humans show a consistent set of responses: depressed mood, loss of interest, loss of appetite, insomnia, slow thoughts, loss of energy, feelings of worthlessness and guilt, diminished ability to think, and poor concentration.”
–Avner Offer, The Challenge of Affluence (2006) (citations omitted)
bicoastal March 4th, 2007
“The popular notion that law school is an exceptionally stressful experience for
many students has been substantiated by longitudinal studies (Benjamin, Kazniak, Sales, & Shanfield, 1986; Shanfield & Benjamin, 1985; Sheldon & Krieger, 2004). Indeed, the emotional distress of law students appears to significantly exceed that of medical students and at times to approach that of psychiatric populations (Dammeyer & Nunez, 1999).”
– Sheldon, Kennon M. and Krieger, Lawrence S., “Understanding the Negative Effects of Legal Education on Law Students: A Longitudinal Test and Extension of Self-Determination Theory” (July 2006). FSU College of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 206 Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=913824
bicoastal March 3rd, 2007
Yesterday a group of lawyers and law students at an eastern law school sat down to talk about working and living on the west coast. The lawyers all worked in California, and the students were planning to move out west for work. One student asked whether it was difficult for students raised or trained on the east coast to move out west. The lawyers made some interesting observations:
