… takes all the fun out of Angels and Demons:

In this followup movie to The Da Vinci Code, Hanks hears a dire warning that the half-gram of stolen antimatter will cause “a cataclysmic event” if it comes into contact with matter. “They take this in a special canister off to Rome with the intent of blowing up Vatican city,” [Roger] Moore said.

“To put it a little bit into perspective, if we took all the antimatter that we make in one hour at CERN and we dumped it into this cup of tea here, the result would be an increase of about 1 C. So we don’t even make enough antimatter to make a good cup of tea, so you really shouldn’t be worried about anybody blowing anything up with this.”

The movie’s premise makes for exciting science fiction, but fiction it certainly is, Moore said. Scientists are nowhere near capable of making that much antimatter. “It would take us about 10 million years to make half a gram of antimatter, so unless you are planning to live this long, you don’t have to worry just yet,” he said. “The other problem is, even if you could … grab all this antimatter that we’re making, we can’t store it.”

… in Tehran,  commenting on events in Iran:

“Iranian people took up opposition and used an open space to express what they want. Their vote was not just against [incumbent President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad but [against] what he stood for.

… But the most amazing thing is just that so many people came out into the streets to demonstrate and protest.

And for me personally, the most important thing was that [Mir Hossein] Mousavi had taken up reformist slogans which he had previously fought against. I was there at the beginning and I was thrown out of the university that Mousavi shut down as part of the Cultural Revolution.”

[Interviewer]: You’ve talked about and write about the importance of literature and culture in the fight for human rights and liberty in Iran and around the world. But is art, culture, literature ever going to be more powerful than religion? Is it enough to start a revolution?

“If you look at it in the long term – yes it is. [I’ll] never forget when Paul Ricoeur, the philosopher, came to speak in Iran. He was an eighty-year-old but was treated like [the American rock star] Bon Jovi.

At one point the minister for Islamic Guidance said to him: “People like us [politicians] will vanish but you people will endure.” That will always remain with me. We don’t remember the king who ruled in the time of [14th century Persian poet] Hafiz, we remember Hafiz.

… I think Iranian women have become canaries of the mind. [The interview’s translator makes a mistake here. It’s canaries in the mine. But UD‘s enchanted by canaries of the mind.] If you want to gauge a society and how free it is, you go to its women.”

… rise up in Iran. Follow it on Andrew Sullivan.

… limns the declension of Ruth Madoff:

Before the scandal, Mrs. Madoff radiated an understated sense of taste. She favored slim black pants, fine-gauge white cotton crew necks, Susan Bennis Warren Edwards crocodile-leather flats and classic gold jewelry, according to a friend of the family who saw her regularly at gatherings.

Now Mrs. Madoff spends her days largely confined to the two-story four-bedroom penthouse on 64th Street near Lexington Avenue, dressed in jeans and an Oxford-style shirt, according to someone who is in touch with her regularly.

… at the BBC, titled A New Citizenship, allow UD to pause in her daily irrepressible point-making and remind you why she does what she does on University Diaries. (“I do what I do, I think what I think, and to hell with the rest of it,” wrote Harold Brodkey in the last days of his life, in This Wild Darkness; “you don’t actually exist for me anyway — you’re all myths in my head.”) The lectures allow her to shut up for a moment about university coaches and university medical faculties and PowerPoint professors and laptop students so as to refresh your memory as to what ma blogue is all about.

Like Sandel — like Christopher Lasch, like John Kenneth Galbraith, like Mickey Kaus, like a lot of people — UD‘s distressed by what Sandel calls the drift “from having a market economy to being a market society.” Sandel argues that the post-communist triumphalism of American culture has meant a complacency about morality, about civic values that transcend materialism.

The public life of democratic societies is not going all that well… [T]he momentum and the appeal of markets [has made us forget that] norms matter. [The problem is that] markets leave their mark on social norms…

Some of the good things in life are corrupted or degraded if turned into commodities…. How [do we] value [non-market] goods[?] [I have in mind things like] education…

These are moral and political questions, not merely economic ones. We have to debate the moral meaning of these goods, and the proper way of valuing them…. [We must] argue about the right way of valuing goods.

Sandel provides straightforward examples of public activities degraded by commodification — one of his examples, close to UD‘s heart, since she’s a longtime donor, is that of blood donation — but he also mentions education, a far more complex instance of civic decline.

Complex enough, in fact, to keep a blog devoted to the commercialization of universities — the transformation of endowments into hedge funds, complete with managers who, although they work at a non-profit institution, take home thirty million dollars a year; the transformation of campus athletics into a money-driven, money-losing corruption machine; the transformation of medical research into farcically compromised corporate hucksterism — very busy indeed.

I think it’s crucial, when talking and writing about the degradation of civic life into cynical materialism, to avoid platitudes. Not everything in America has declined in this way, and the problem with some writers on the subject (Lasch in particular) is that they exaggerate things. But if we confine ourselves to universities, if we irrepressibly focus on what they’re turning into, I think we make Sandel’s point for him. In abundance.

… killed in a car crash in Uganda.

He was much more than a professor, as his charming webpage shows.

Luke Cole, a leading theorist and practitioner of environmental justice law, who battled toxic waste facilities, mega-dairies, mining companies and other pollution threats in poor and minority communities in California and Alaska, died Saturday in a car crash in Uganda. He was 46.

Cole was traveling with his wife on a rural road in western Uganda when a truck hit their vehicle head-on. He died at a clinic a short time later, according to his father, Herbert Cole. His wife, Nancy Shelby, was flown to a hospital in Amsterdam, where she is recovering from her injuries.

… An avid birder, connoisseur of root beer and collector of bobbleheads and miniature spy cameras, Cole had taken off in early March on what was to be a four-month sabbatical. He traveled to South America, Antarctica, Madagascar and South Africa. Uganda, where his brother lives, was one of his last stops…

La Kid qua Batwoman sings with The Sirens, a George Washington a cappella group.

She’s the blond with the mask and the black cape, standing directly to the left of Wonder Woman (Wonder Woman is Sara Fellman, one of UD‘s students).

Blaming the MBA degree for the country’s current financial mess is unfair.

Pablo Triana elaborates:

… MBAs did no more and no less than what a typical Wall Streeter has the potential to do. Once they receive that diploma and cash in their sign-on bonuses, MBAs became businesspeople, thus displaying the same potential weaknesses as any other businessperson (MBA or not, high school graduate or not): temptation, avarice, corners-cutting, cheating. The MBAs involved in the crisis found themselves in such unsavory position not because of their academic credentials but because of their (degree-neutral) actions as businesspeople. I mean, it’s not like the MBA-endowed Merrill Lynch traders who gorged on impossibly toxic securities based their reckless decisions on anything they were taught years prior by some taciturn professor. “Man, b-school made me so greedy and unethical that I had no alternative but to purchase $100 billion of Subprime CDOs” was most certainly not the rationale behind the actions of the punters anymore than his HBS brainwashing was the main motivation behind Jeffrey Skilling’s peccadilloes in Houston.

B-school administrators and faculty (together with naïve outsiders) are simply assigning too much weight to what goes on inside their hallowed grounds. Maybe that’s why they are blaming their students and the gaps in their education for the worst crisis since the 1929 Crash. These people assume that what MBAs are taught at b-school dictates their future professional activities, and nothing could be further from the truth, especially in the case of finance, particularly in the case of trading activity. I know, I studied and taught at top b-schools. B-schools arrogantly believe that what they teach affects graduates throughout every single day of their lives, but in fact MBAs can’t forget what they were taught soon enough (and employers too typically assume that they didn’t learn much; simply witness the contents of the training programs at investment banks). Note to administrators and profs: no, what you taught (or didn’t teach) MBAs did not cause the crisis; your indoctrination is not that important, is not that relevant, is not that influential, not by a long shot. Once your students receive their diplomas, they, frankly, forget about you. As they should, as grown-up businesspeople…

… discusses the recent exposure of an anonymous blogger’s identity.

… medical school professors conspiring to place fake articles praising their products in respectable journals, the reporter stumbles on one John Buse.  Buse, a professor at the University of North Carolina, is remarkably candid about things.

Buse said in a Nov. 28, 2006, deposition that working with drugmakers over a long period of time can change the way doctors think about clinical problems.

“It’s sort of like Stockholm Syndrome,” Buse said in the deposition, referring to a psychological phenomenon in which kidnap victims begin to sympathize with their captors.

“I’m not saying that the pharmaceutical industry captures me,” Buse said. “But to the extent that the relationship has something above and beyond medicine, science, you know, it could cloud one’s judgment.”

Buse added that many researchers develop emotional attachments to drugs they’ve discovered or studied extensively.

“There’s this natural tendency for people to fall in love with your drug: it’s like your child,” Buse said. “So you have a hard time accepting criticism.”

So there are at least two motives behind the outrageous conflict of interest scandal in America’s medical schools:

1.) A passionate affair with your drug which makes you desperate to protect it and show it in its best light — a desire its manufacturer abets.

2.) Raw greed.

… over, as one newspaper reader puts it, “the 24 arrests [on the football team] in less than 4 years and the fact that we are now being called the new THUG U and the University of Felons in Gunsville.” Another reader puts things in perspective: “[W]hen I was 18-22 I was also finding my way in life. Shooting AK’s, getting tased, and stalking ex-girlfriends is all just part of growing up.”

Students coming to the University [of Georgia] for orientation have more to worry about than making friends or getting lost on campus.

University Police found one student, at the University for his June 4 orientation, asleep in a second floor bathroom in Creswell Hall after a night of drinking at a nearby fraternity house.

“I was woken up by the police and cuffed in the bathroom,” said Michael Houck, an 18-year-old incoming freshman from Peachtree City. “I was in prison for about 12 hours before I was bailed out,” he said….

… The circumstances surrounding the death of Alain Monnier, professor of religion and anthropology in Geneva remain unclear for now, with police saying only that a knife was found in a nearby river and that he died of a stab wound to the heart.

Monnier was a professor for 21 years at the University of Geneva and he was last seen Thursday 4 June when he left his home in the Jura, near the Doubs river area, to go for a walk. His body was found Saturday. Police are not excluding all [should be ‘any’] possibilities, from suicide to accident to murder.

Most of the articles about this are in French, but this one, from Geneva Lunch, conveys the basic elements. Unless police find signs of a struggle, I’d say suicide. Hard to know how you accidentally end up with a knife in your heart.

This article describes a vivid, original personality of enormous warmth and inspiring intellect. He lived a rich life.

Here’s his home page at the university. He did religious ethnography.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm starts her day with this letter to the Chicago Tribune from one of Clout U’s trustees.

As always her comments appear in parenthesis, in blue.

This is in response to your series “Tribune watchdog: Clout goes to college.” [Terrific opening. Real human interest there. Can’t you just feel the warm pulsing humanity of the writer?]

To correct at least some misconceptions, I write to share factual observations. [The Trib didn’t write a novel. Why not correct all of its mistakes? Too busy, I guess. Too important.] I am the senior (longest-serving) trustee of the University of Illinois. All who know me recognize that I take this role very seriously. As a trustee, just as if we were legislators, we are “agents” of the citizens of Illinois (trustees are appointed by the governor and approved by the Senate). [Parentheses and quotation marks already mucking up the works. Drop the pompous all who know me crap. Putting agents in scare quotes makes being a trustee sound underhanded.]

Many times I have been asked: “Can you get my son /daughter into the University of Illinois?”

The answer is always the same: “No, but I would be happy to check on the status of the admission.”

I believe that offer to make an inquiry is one of the duties of the position, again similar to what a legislator would do for his or her constituent. Those inquiries are sent to the appropriate chancellor — not with advice or with any request, other than checking the status of the admission.

The answer, good or bad, is given back to the requesting individual. That advice can range from “yes”; “perhaps, depending on acceptances of offers already made”; “no”; to “would you like a counseling interview?”

And there the role of a trustee stops. [Well, obviously not, or there wouldn’t be a national story raging and a legislative investigation pending into preferential admissions practices among trustees and others at the university. The letter writer thinks you’re stupid.]

Quite frankly, I have never heard of a “Category I” list.

Allow me to also state that I have never spoken with or made a written request to an admissions officer. My offers to check admissions status have been extended to anyone who has asked — not just the politically connected, or the donor, or to someone with whom I have a business or professional relationship.

The Tribune chose to publish an e-mail communication from me totally out of context — referencing the situation as “epidemic.” As the economy slowed, more and more students were switching from private to public university admissions requests. The applicant pool swelled in both numbers and quality. More and more families were concerned, and sought information.

This was the epidemic, not some “list.”

As I recall, at the time I may have had information requests in for three students. That e-mail, coupled with the picture from central casting (a most nefarious character shot), was nothing less than irresponsible sensationalism. [Harrumph! (Brushes mustaches nervously.)]

I welcome responsible journalistic inquiry; I abhor the adornment of the inquiry with supermarket check-out line trappings.  [I am a lofty person. Mark ye my lofty words and mark them well!   Welcome. Abhor. Inquiry. Trapping. There are others where those come from, and I will happily write you another letter in which I use some of them. ]

… was, you recall, Sympathy for the Devil, Rolling Stones.

The wood thrush’s ee-oh-lay — which, now that the babies are here, I hear all day long — is the theme to Mission Impossible.

The ee-oh-lay notes start at fifteen seconds into the Mission Impossible You Tube. It’s those three strong notes that work through the piece, a leit-motif.

Here’s the wood thrush. Hear it?