Every Professor's Fantasy

It isn't what you think:

Masters of the McMansion

I've always wondered who designed houses for the nationally-known developers like Centex and Hovnanian. They're important people, because their designs are going to populate our suburban landscapes, and shape the way we live, for generations.

Today's WSJ calls them "production architects" in an interesting article about four of the superstars and the new trends that they'll be bringing to us soon.

Some of it seems like welcome news to me:

Now, with downsizing boomers and first-time home buyers poised to dominate the housing market for the next decade, [Chris Lessard] is looking for ways to eliminate wasted space. "I want to make houses that are as efficient as a boat," he says.

That means getting rid of two-story foyers and vaulted ceilings and resurrecting ideas from small, efficient homes from the '20s through the '50s, like pop-out dormers, galley-style pantries, built-in bookcases and closets tucked under the eaves.

Those are some of the features found in his Craftsman-style "1920s" collection currently for sale in the community of Brambleton in Ashburn, Va. The 2,500- to 3,400-square-foot homes with detached garages in the rear are being built by Miller & Smith Homes, McLean, Va.

But not everything these guys do is all that great:

If Southern California sometimes looks like Tuscany, that's partly because of Aram Bassenian. In his 36 years as a production architect, Mr. Bassenian has borrowed plenty from that rural Italian style, inspired by frequent trips overseas, and has popularized stacked stone turrets ...

... and the Tuscan style is here, too. I like turrets and towers as much as the next guy, but does every building have to have one? By my reckoning, we've got new Tuscan towers on Elizabeth's Pizza, towers at the Shops and Friendly, towers at the Village at North Elm, and more to come?

This is Greensboro, friends, not Tuscany. Let Greensboro be Greensboro, and Tuscany be Tuscany.

Witold Bialokur is My New Hero

He's 71 years old and still runs 10k's faster than I ever did. He's in a NY Times story about the causes of frailty in aging adults.

One of the main causes may be undetcted cardiovascular disease, but I'm more excited about a second cause they may have discovered:

A second finding is just as surprising to skeptical scientists because it seemed to many like a wrongheaded cliché — you’re only as old as you think you are. Rigorous studies are now showing that seeing, or hearing, gloomy nostrums about what it is like to be old can make people walk more slowly, hear and remember less well, and even affect their cardiovascular systems. Positive images of aging have the opposite effects. The constant message that old people are expected to be slow and weak and forgetful is not a reason for the full-blown frailty syndrome. But it may help push people along that path.

Read the story, and be sure to watch the video of Witold. He'll make you feel young, and want to run.

lonelymals15

I'm testing my new video technology, an Aiptek DZ0-VT3 digital video camera that I got at Target as a quasi-impulse purchase (I've been thinking about it for months).

For the price, I think it does quite well. Here's some video: love me, love my dogs.

Rocket Boomlet

When my brother and I were kids in the late 60s, we went through a phase of building Estes rockets.

Some of the things we did were a little unorthodox, such as using a cherry bomb instead of a nose cone. It was a lot of fun when the rocket did a horizontal swerve and exploded on a neighbor's roof.

Last weekend, we did a little nostalgic rocketry, courtesy of my brother (without the cherry bombs). It was a blast! (listen for the ejection charge at the end of the launch).

Res Rusticae

A few classical thoughts about the Goat Lady ...

The people who were selling their stuff yesterday are very knowledgeable not only about res rusticae ("country things"), but also about city slickers.

The pig guy at the pigsty was talking about the "omega three" fats in the whey-fed pigs; the organic gardeners were talking about sustainable agriculture; the family that owns the farm has sold an agricultural easement on it to the Nature Conservancy; many of the cheeses they sell have French names ... I could go on.

Let's just say that their product and lifestyle they're selling seems aimed to appeal to a very specific urban demographic.

It might appear that this situation -- with savvy, entrepreneurial rural folk highly attuned to the culinary and lifestyle preferences of an urban elite -- is a thoroughly modern affair. But it isn't.

The Roman writers Varro and Columella both wrote (highly entertaining) agricultural handbooks* whose target audience was gentleman farmers, owners of beautiful country villas, who were raising and selling luxury foods to the Roman upper class: exotic fowl, fish, honey, wine, and olive oil, along with such delicacies as snails and dormice.

The more things change ...

*Cato the Elder also wrote one, but he didn't approve of luxury.

Sam's Pro-Denmark Rally

Sam's pro-Denmark, pro-free speech rally drew a nice little crowd of supporters:

From left: Sam Wharton, David Boyd, a young Boyd, Glenn, Ed Cone, and Roch Smith, Jr. Trajan the Belgian Malinois chose this moment to scratch, as he often does when he's bored.

Pastor Joel Gillespie showed up a bit later:

Lots of nice people honked, waved, gave us the "thumbs up," and otherwise showed their support (one young lady even offered us a dollar!). News & Record photographer Kim Walker showed up and took a few photos.

I'm proud of my son and grateful for the support that our friends showed for him and for free speech.

Update: Sam's rally has made the big time!

Update II: Some people in New York City had the same idea. But Sam's rally has them beat. By my calculation, the NYC rally drew about 0.0025% of the local population (200 people out of a population of 8 million). Sam's rally, however, drew a whopping 0.0035% of the Greensboro population (8 people out of a population of 231,000). I should also point out that Sam had this idea even before Christopher Hitchens did.

today Sam is off to Boston for the Harvard Model Congress convention, where he will be taking the role of Secretary of the Army Togo West.

Take that, Daniel Dennett

Leon Wieseltier delivers one long, philosophico-literary dope slap to Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon in a New York Times review.

Wieseltier, The New Republic's literary editor, calls the book a "shallow and self-congratulatory book" and "a sorry instance of present-day scientism." And those are some of his nicer comments.

Wieseltier's penetrating criticisms of Dennet's reasoning and analytical presuppositions reminds me (paradoxically) of Noam Chomsky's famous destruction of B. F. Skinner's attempt to explain human language in behaviorist terms.

The Times's link was titled "Science vs. Religion," but the review is really about scientism vs. philosophy.

Update (from the comments below, and elsewhere): a negative review of Wieseltier's review here, and yet another from a scientist at M.I.T. here, and some interesting discussion by National Review's John Derbyshire here.

Selective memory

Retired economics professor Michael A. Stoller wrote in this morning's News & Record,

Personally, having spent the last 40 years of my life around academics, I am inclined to believe that the overwhelming majority of academic social scientists are liberals because decades of reading, researching teaching, debating, and studying their disciplines for 60 hours a week or more on average has led them to the conclusion that liberal arguments make a lot more sense than conservative arguments in explaining real-world politics and economics.

Well, yes -- one would certainly hope that they hold those opinions as a result of serious thought and study rather than on a mere whim, although it's not clear to me why the opinions of scholars who are sheltered within academia's comfortable confines should be more perspicuous than those of business people and politicians who actually run the economy and the state.

But onward. He continues,

In support of my position, I would cite the facts that we have done far better economically (i.e., the '60s and '90s), diplomatically, educationally, and yes, even militarily (unless you consider Iraq a success and Panama, Granada and Desert Storm to be equivalent to World Wars I and II) under liberal administrations.

Coming from an economics professor, this just seems bizarre to me.

What about the huge economic expansion in the '50s under Eisenhower? What about the fact that Kennedy jump-started the economy by cutting marginal tax rates? What about stagflation, malaise, and the "misery index" under the economically liberal presidents Nixon and Carter in the '70s, who pursued the Keynsian economics prescribed by academic economists? What about the fact that the drastically lowered marginal tax rates started under Reagan (top rates were cut from the 70% range to the 30s) have been altered only a little by his Democratic and Republican successors becuase they were obviously so successful? What about the fact that stagflation was tamed by adopting the monetary policies of the conservative Milton Friedman, who was a laughingstock among liberal academic economists -- until the successful implementation of his ideas proved that the liberal academics were wrong?

As to social policy, Professor Stoller seems to forget that LBJ's Great Society did much less to reduce poverty than did Republican welfare reform signed by the Great Triangulator, Bill Clinton.

And military policy? Hmmm. There's a war that Prof. Stoller left out. The Vietnam war, started under Kennedy, prosecuted vigorously by Johnson, ended by Nixon: about 50,000 dead soldiers in the cause of defeat.

I knew there must be a name

for the subculture I inhabit. I am a Crunchy Con.

Rational Exuberance

Marta Hummel wrote a good and well-researched story on local bloggers and blogging in general, "Bloggers' exuberance declines considerably," in today's News & Record.

I especially like it because I get quoted in the same story with Glenn Reynolds and Ed Cone, two big-time bloggers! Ed likes it somewhat less.

Marta quoted me very accurately, but she didn't punctuate one sentence as I had expected, or as I would have preferred. She wrote that I said,

Writing, well, takes a lot of time and research and effort.

which is a verbatim transcription of the words I actually said. But what I meant to communicate was,

Writing well takes a lot of time and research and effort.

I've been hammering my students this semester about the importance of punctuation in writing. Maybe I'll use this as an example.

Or make them go out and buy Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

John Hammer Responds

My letter (previous post) was printed in today's Rhinoceros Times, followed by an Editor's note from John Hammer:

Despite repeated inquiries and requests, I have found it extremely difficult to find out the time and place of meetings, and it is illegal to hold a public meeting behind locked doors, which this committee does. According to Greensboro, North Carolina: The County Seat of Guilford by Ethel Arnett, the stadium was erected in 1922.

I checked John's reference, and Mrs. Arnett does indeed give 1922 as the date the stadium was built. Every other source I've checked, however, including the National Trust for Historic Preservation, gives it as 1926. Let's call that question a draw.

As to the "locked doors," though -- I have no idea what John is talking about. At every meeting of the taskforce that I've been to, not only was the door unlocked, it was open throughout the meeting. The door to the building has always been unlocked at meeting time, too. And the fact that John has attended these meetings seems to run contrary to his point. In fact, I can't actually find anything in the open meetings law about locked doors.

Perhaps John would have better luck at finding out meeting-time information if he actually talked to the people at the meeting, asked a city employee, "when's the next meeting?" and requested that he be put on the notification list as the law allows.

But his modus operandi at these meetings is to walk in, type madly on his laptop through the whole thing, speak only when spoken to, and leave silently at the end. No interviews, no name-address-phone-number gathering, no . . . journalism.

I assumed at the first couple of meetings he attended that he was writing down everything that was said. But almost nothing of what actually happened at the meetings made it into print (and much of what did appear was inaccurate). So it appears to me now that he uses his time in the meetings simply to re-write the same story that he's been writing now for several years, with its simple and easy-to-follow narrative arc: shadowy, powerful, and vindictive people, led by Jim Melvin, are conniving to destroy the stadium and are duping and suborning people, or subverting legal processes, to make that happen.

He simply ignores anything and everything that doesn't fit into that neat storyline.

It's odd, because I know that John is a likeable and smart fellow, and is capable of good and lively writing. The Rhino is always a good read in that respect.

But I guess I've learned first-hand not to trust it further than I could kick an anvil in my bare feet.