University Diaries has already looked at Four Loko, which everyone calls blackout in a can, so I guess we have to as well. It’s the bière de choix at increasing numbers of campuses, and so there are increasing blackouts.

One school – Ramapo College – has now banned Four Loko, and a bunch of states, plus the FDA, are investigating the marketing (usually targeted at young people) of all cheap “caffeinated alcoholic beverages.”

Excerpts from a 2008 interview with Benoit Mandelbrot, father of fractals — rough mathematical shapes “whose uneven contours … mimic the irregularities found in nature” — who died today at 85.

I can stand loneliness. In fact, I’m rarely comfortable in a big crowd, because big crowds automatically are very specifically organized by dates, by tradition, by training. And I don’t sound like a mathematician. I don’t sound like a physicist either. Nor do I sound like an art critic. There’s very great strength in being a stranger, if one brings something new.

… Perhaps my early rootlessness gave me an awareness that one can live without being so completely specified.

… [A] large number of truths that I discovered did not result from purely mathematical deduction but from skilled examination of mathematical pictures.

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I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes…

Air New Zealand has a refreshingly smutty ad campaign going on.

… and all right-thinking people. From UD, girl reporter, at Inside Higher Ed.

1.) I threw some plant and branch material from the back woods into the fireplace just now, and instantly the house smelled of marijuana.

“It smells like marijuana,” said Mr UD, coming in from reading on the deck.

“Totally,” said UD. “Could the author of Ferdinand the Bull…. ? No…” (Munro Leaf was the last owner of our house. We bought it from his sons.)

2.) Either Tabasco Sauce is losing its oomph, or I’m developing an immunity. The heat is gone!

… recounted here. Fun cast of characters, and makes for some interesting subsidiary reading.

The part about the sloppy professor threatening to sue the careful graduate student is a high point.

There’s much in this story that explains why a lot of people hate professors. As long as stories like this one keep happening (University Diaries has chronicled quite a few of them), Sarah Palin has a clear rhetorical field.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm has a slightly different take, though. SOS says Look at the passage he got sloppy with.

But this power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the “privilege” of a dominant class, which exercises it actively upon a passive, dominated class. It is rather exercised through and by the dominated. Indeed, it is perhaps unhelpful to think in terms of “classes” in this way, for power is not unitary and its exercise binary. Power in that sense does not exist: what exists is an infinitely complex network of “micro-powers”, of power relations that permeate every aspect of social life. For that reason, “power” cannot be overthrown and acquired once for all by the destruction of institutions and seizure of the state apparatuses. Because “power” is multiple and ubiquitous, the struggle against it must be localized. Equally, however, because it is a network and not a collection of isolated points, each localized struggle induces effects on the entire network. Struggle cannot be totalized–a single, centralized [pagebreak 139-140] hierarchized organisation setting out to seize a single, centralized, hierarchized power; but it can be serial, that is, in terms of horizontal links between one point of struggle and another.

What sort of person, reeling with nausea from prose beyond anything George Orwell savaged in Politics and the English Language, would say Now this is exactly what I want to write in my book. In fact, I think I’ll lift verbatim a bunch of his beautiful phrases.

LOCALIZED LOCALIZED TOTALIZED CENTRALIZED HIERARCHIZED CENTRALIZED HIERARCHIZED LAY IT ON ME BABY DO IT TO ME ONE MORE TIME ONE MORE IZE BEFORE IZE CRIZE MIZE IZE OUT BABY OVER YOU

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Update, from the very long comment thread:

One problem in academia these days is that hardly anyone reads anyone else’s work.

There are UFOs all over Chelsea; a sea lion attacked and chased a University of Otago rowing crew; Malmesbury wants to be a philosophy destination resort; and Waikato New Zealand now grows oolong tea.

… there’s this amazing bit of writing at the end of D.H. Lawrence’s story, Odour of Chrysanthemums, in which a miner’s wife gazes at his dead body laid out in her parlor. Her husband has just suffocated in a sudden mine collapse (his body is still warm). As she prepares his body for burial, she thinks about their lives, and about his death….

Before I quote those lines: Lawrence’s theme is the polar opposite of the theme we’ve all been rather emotional about as we watch long-buried husbands triumph over isolation and darkness. We watch them return to union with life and with their beloved, and our sense of love as the central reality of human existence is deepened.

It’s positively mythic! The return from the underworld… Their eyes, too weak for the radiance of above-ground life, had sunglasses on them… Now gradually they regain that radiance: The love of life, and the love of the beloved.

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In Lawrence, the darkness of the mine has fetched up as the deeper truth of the woman’s life.

… She saw him, how utterly inviolable he lay in himself. She had nothing to do with him. She could not accept it. Stooping, she laid her hand on him, in claim. He was still warm, for the mine was hot where he had died. His mother had his face between her hands, and was murmuring incoherently. The old tears fell in succession as drops from wet leaves; the mother was not weeping, merely her tears flowed. Elizabeth embraced the body of her husband, with cheek and lips. She seemed to be listening, inquiring, trying to get some connection. But she could not. She was driven away. He was impregnable.

… They never forgot it was death, and the touch of the man’s dead body gave them strange emotions, different in each of the women; a great dread possessed them both, the mother felt the lie was given to her womb, she was denied; the wife felt the utter isolation of the human soul, the child within her was a weight apart from her.

… The man’s mouth was fallen back, slightly open under the cover of the moustache. The eyes, half shut, did not show glazed in the obscurity. Life with its smoky burning gone from him, had left him apart and utterly alien to her. And she knew what a stranger he was to her. In her womb was ice of fear, because of this separate stranger with whom she had been living as one flesh. Was this what it all meant—utter, intact separateness, obscured by heat of living? In dread she turned her face away. The fact was too deadly. There had been nothing between them, and yet they had come together, exchanging their nakedness repeatedly. Each time he had taken her, they had been two isolated beings, far apart as now. He was no more responsible than she. The child was like ice in her womb. For as she looked at the dead man, her mind, cold and detached, said clearly: “Who am I? What have I been doing? I have been fighting a husband who did not exist. He existed all the time. What wrong have I done? What was that I have been living with? There lies the reality, this man.”—And her soul died in her for fear: she knew she had never seen him, he had never seen her, they had met in the dark and had fought in the dark, not knowing whom they met nor whom they fought. And now she saw, and turned silent in seeing. For she had been wrong. She had said he was something he was not; she had felt familiar with him. Whereas he was apart all the while, living as she never lived, feeling as she never felt…

Life with its smoky burning gone from him… Great writing.

… and smarts” suddenly dies.

Richard Nagareda, professor of law at Vanderbilt, has died at the age of 47.

Not long ago, Vanderbilt featured him in a slide show series called A Day in the Life of…

By all accounts, he was a great teacher, a wit, and a sweet man. His work on mass torts – “allegations of tortious misconduct affecting large numbers of broadly dispersed persons” – was enormously influential.

An example of very good writing from one of the miners.

Dubbed “el enfermero” — the nurse — [Johnny Barrios Rojas] served as the miners’ medic during the ordeal, dispensing medication sent in by health officials, passing out nicotine patches and photographing wounds.

He reportedly ended all his letters this way: “Get me out of this hole, dead or alive.”

‘Tis wonderful. UD‘s thinking of making it her automatic signature on her emails.

(Barrios is also the Francois Mitterand of the group.)

… is the clever title Peter Copeland, a geology professor at the University of Houston, has given his forthcoming book about writing well when your subject is geology.

Copeland quotes in that book something UD wrote about good writing many years ago on this blog:

Writing—and speech—are intimately disclosing acts. The real difference between a good writer and a bad writer lies in the degree of awareness each brings to this truth. The good writer knows that, like it or not, she’s going to be giving away many things about the quality of her consciousness whenever she writes anything. She’s a good writer largely because she has some degree of control over what she discloses, over the effect she creates, over the human being that materializes, when she sets pen to paper.

UD‘s flattered to have her thoughts about writing featured in this way, for an audience of scientists. She looks forward to reading Copeland’s book.

READ ALL ABOUT IT!!!

… How Colleges Have Given Up On Educating Your Child and What You Can Do About It (helluva subtitle) have asked UD to take a look at the book and write about it. When she receives it from them, she will do that.

… the simple gratitude of former students for professors who were memorably kind to them. In these stories, students who go on to make some money come back to the school and endow scholarships to honor the professors.

Most recently, a Chinese couple who twenty years ago studied with David Kaplan, a music professor at the University of Saskatchewan, just gave a million dollars – the largest donation in its history – to the music school.

Kaplan… was singled out by the two former international students for his effort to help them navigate a new university, a new city and a new culture.

… “David Kaplan took them under his wing and gave them all kinds of encouragement and made sure they succeeded,” said current music department head Gerald Langner.

… Also a former student of Kaplan’s, Langner knows why Xu and Chen remembered their professor 20 after they left the U of S.

“Kaplan has inspired so many students,” Langner said. “He’s one of the best instructors I’ve ever had, period. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be in music right now.”

This method of a university getting money seems much more attractive to UD than the school, in a quid pro quo, putting its absolutely richest hedge fund guy on the board of trustees.

UD acknowledges that if the hedgie approach works, the university gets not one million but one billion. Yes. She can’t deny this. Game, set, and match. But…

Like hedge funds themselves, it’s very risky.

Very.

… lots of interesting responses. Writers debate in particular the author’s motivations.

The likeliest motivation, which does not appear on the list of possibilities to which I’ve linked you, seems to UD simple intellectual curiosity. Not to get revenge, or reassure yourself you’re hot, or compare notes to confirm you’re normal, or take control of your own narrative, yadda yadda…

Why don’t people take the thesis for what it is? It’s a thesis. This is a woman interested in a perfectly interesting question. How does a particular group of people behave sexually? What are the variants, etc?

Do we look at a Masters and Johnson study and say they did it in order to take control of their personal narratives?

True, their methods were not as unorthodox – or unethical – as those here, but the Owen study wouldn’t be the first in which an observer was in one way or another involved in her own protocol.