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I've only done a very little bit of beading, using a loom, but now I learn that you can crochet with beads, and I'm getting visions of a whole new type of craft supply I could start hording. Not good. I've been oogling the beaded chokers and purses at Victorian Crochet and reminding myself I really don't need a tiny beaded purse, no matter how cute they are. Perhaps just a few beaded snowflake or bell ornaments....
More recommended fun films from the Internet Archive Moving Image Archive: In the "social guidance" genre, Dating: Do's and Don'ts from Coronet Instructional Films, circa 1949, is a charming story of a boy's first date, including how he chooses the girl to invite and alternate-world demonstrations of what not to do, such as lunging in for a goodnight kiss. For the absolutely surreal, check out A Case of Spring Fever, a 1940 Handy Jam Organization film in which an animated spring punishes a man who curses out his broken sofa springs by forcing him to live in a world without any springs, thus converting the poor guy into a pro-spring evangelist who begins lecturing his friends on the merits of springs as well. The question remains why GM, the film's sponsor, felt the need for a film promoting the virtues of the mighty spring.
The Internet Archive Moving Image Archive seems to have undergone a recent redesign, including the ability to browse by subject and a review system. Lots of fun stuff in there. The evening I watched Choosing for Happiness, a 1950 film in the "Marriage for Moderns" series in which a young woman repremands her friend for expecting men to change to meet her fancy rather than understanding that you can only change yourself. Like the other films in this series, there's a lot of truth in it, but there's also a lot of out-datedness. I particularly like the scene portaying a date to the park, in which the woman wears a bathing suit and sunbathes, while the man is wearing pants and a long-sleeved plaid shirt. Oh, and the nerd who complements a girl by saying she's so smart, it's like she's a man.
Pet the cat! More satisfying than you would think. [via PCJM]
I listened to the streaming VH1 radio for about a week before it mysteriously disappeared. I've become really sick of all of my MP3s again so I looked around and found Live 365 and they seem to have an okay selection of stations. Honestly, I haven't looked beyond 80's Retro Radio yet tonight. The first 10 songs up, I knew every word to, and it's great grading music (which is what I'm doing right now). How can you go wrong with a station that starts with In Your Eyes, and then moves on through Breakout, Bette Davis Eyes, Simply Irresistible, Let's Dance, and If You Leave. And that's at 2AM no less, with no bleary DJs to put up with. I love the internet.
The Boston Globe Magazine yesterday ran a case study of one pharmaceutical company's efforts to keep generic alternatives to their expensive name-brand drug at bay, thus maintaining high prescription costs.
Through lawsuits, the makers of Prilosec have managed to keep the generics at bay while unleashing a half-a-billion-dollar marketing blitz to move people off Prilosec and onto Nexium, their costly, patent-protected new Purple Pill, which even their own studies show to be barely more effective than the original.
Now that I'm weblogging again, I'm also returning to reading other webloggers. And, as always, Gail has linked a few beauties in the past month that I feel compelled to archive for myself as well. I have no idea what I would do with it, but I covet this Element Collection containing all 92 naturally occuring elements. The Bible According to Cheese is too weird to pass up - if you liked LEGOs acting out Bible stories, you'll love cheese cubes acting out Bible stories. I know it's bad to snark on babies, but Baby's Named a Bad, Bad Thing just snarks on their names, so that's okay, right? Of course, how can it matter, I also laughed at I am better than your kids. And I laughed hard at these reviews of the 20 Worst Video Games of All Time. Heck, I had to do a Google search before I believed that "Extreme Sports with the Berenstein Bears" was a real game.
Philosophically, this NYTimes Op-Ed piece on the Homeland Security Act and privacy violations meshes with my own concerns, but such precise predictions of what will come to pass made me go look up the Information Awareness Office and have a look for myself. It's an interesting read. My guess is that they do want to collect a wide and possibly irrelevant seeming collection of personal data - their approach is heavily learning-based, and it seems that they hope to tease out correlations that people wouldn't normally spot by learning correlations that work rather than building and testing correlations they hope would work. Problem is, where's their positive data going to come from, and do they have any prayer of statistical significance with many more non-terrorists than terrorists in the bunch? This isn't a domain where the technology can be applied blindly with complete reliability. I don't want to give up my privacy for a needle-in-the-haystack search relying on technology of questionable relevance.
Don't even get me started on how pissed I am that the military applications of NLP are moving beyond translation tools and simple extraction/summarization into this kind of software. I was wondering who was funding all that research into automated story telling....
Last night a friend regailed us with a description of the underground tunnel connecting the concourses in the Detroit Metro Airport, and I hesitantly admit that I was suspicious enough of the bizarrely psychadelic nature of the display that he described that I jumped on line and confirmed that commuters through Detriot do indeed get treated to "a wonderful light and sound show" as they rush from gate to gate (select item 7 in the virtual tour for a poor rendition of the tunnel). I'm almost hoping for a layover there sometime, now.
The Bookworm Game is making the rounds - definitely check it out - it's worth waiting through the ridiculously long load time. It's Search-A-Word meets Scrabble.
Galileo (the spacecraft, not the mathematician) made its final flyby before being decomissioned (read, crashed into Jupiter), last week. The JPL Galileo Home Page has a nice description of this final flyby as well as the history of this thirteen year old spacecraft. It will take almost a full year for the ship to complete its final orbit and burn up in Jupiter's atmosphere!
It has become very clear that I cannot afford to devote significant writing time to this website over the coming months. Thus, a slight redesign to put less pressure on having "enough" content to warrant an entry. Yes, it's also a bit messier, but hopefully in a cozy, home-like manner. Or something like that....
As predicted by my quote at the end of this article in the Cornell student newspaper, I've spent the past week since the unionization vote catching up on my sleep and some of the other aspects of my life which were sorely neglected for the past month. After devoting at least 40 hours a week to this activity (and I don't know who I'm trying to kid pretending any obsession of mine could take over that little of my life), I was quite burnt out from even thinking about the whole process. But I'm now well enough rested to reflect on the experience.
To this day, I am surprised by the huge margin by which the CASE/UAW union was voted down. I knew, from the first time I talked to a CASE/UAW organizer over a year ago, that they were running a political campaign. From the first time they misrepresented their opposition's concerns in a string of strawman arguments, it was clear they wanted to win, not engage in honest, open debate. But even knowing all that, I heard their claims that they had wide support in all but one department (mine, incidentally), that they had somewhere between 60% and 80% support (depending on who you talked to), and they were certain to win. I still don't know if it was strategy, or they really believed it.
The later is possible. Two out of the six leaders of At What Cost? signed union cards during the initial unionization drive, technically allowing them to be counted as supporters. One has to assume that others also changed their minds after signing cards, but were less vocal about the matter. Perhaps CASE/UAW never factored this into their calculations.
I suspect they certainly did not factor in the number of people who signed cards simply to make the organizers leave them alone. The card drive was quite agressive, with organizers going door-to-door with check lists of every student in each department. Students who expressed indecision were visited day after day, until they expressed opposition or signed a card, and many people told me that signing the card was the path of least resistance. Add in the fact that some people signed cards because they supported having a vote, but intended to vote no - not what the cards were meant to express, as they were used to indicate to the NLRB that there was sufficient interest in unionizaton to warrant a vote. We had long objected to card counts being used as a measure of support, but I never dreamed it could be so far off.
In a rather harsh commentary, a columnist in the student newspaper expressed what I think many people were thinking about the union defeat - ultimately, people didn't like the people doing the organizing and their tactics, and didn't want to give them the power they were requesting. People were turned off by seeing posters being ripped down, people being called and visited at their homes at night, and other aspects of the aggressively political campaign being run (many students got letters signed by Hillary Rodham Clinton and other New York democrats supporting graduate students' right to vote on unionization, though not actually saying they should vote yes, I noticed). In our ivory tower idealism, graduate students want to believe that isn't how decisions are made at places like Cornell. Hearing the same people engaging in these practices say that the vote is really about whether one believes in democracy just offended people even more.
The proposed CASE/UAW union was voted down at Cornell, but the unionization discussion is clearly far from over. Their website says that they will continue to meet and work on affecting graduate student conditions, and quotes from interviews make it clear that this will involve continued attempts to form a union. I have heard second hand that the 30% vote that was received is being interpreted as a mandate to push forward. A friend who sent e-mail to the address on their website to inquire about their upcoming meeting has yet to receive a reply - it remains to be seen how open the debate on whether and how to unionize will be. I would hope that the organizers would have understood that graduate students will not vote for a union in which they had no input as to the structure, composition, and affiliation. Graduate students will not tolerate a union formed through secrecy. At least, I hope they won't.
Tomorrow: Background - How did all of this happen anyway?