A couple months ago I watched the first episode of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, in which Sagan introduced the series.

Some of Sagan’s statements stand out to me. He says “because the cosmos is also within us we’re made of star stuff.” He also says the “same laws of physics apply everywhere throughout the cosmos.”  [My quotations from the show are paraphrases, but I’ve tried to relate them as accurately as possible]. Toward the end of the episode, he warns us:

We can enhance life and come to know the universe that made us or we can squander our 15 billion year heritage in meaningless self-destruction.

Those statements represent to me a faith-like or religious-like approach to the universe. He employs a metaphor that is probably meant to inspire awe. We are made of matter–atoms and other things–but he renders “matter” as “star stuff.” The same laws apply everywhere. The corollary is that if they do not appear to apply everywhere, then we just haven’t discovered the right laws, or we haven’t discovered all the laws, or we have formulated the laws incorrectly. Life is assumed to be a good thing. It is a “heritage,” 15 billion years in the making, much richer than if it had been merely 10,000 years in the making. It’s possible for us to “squander” those good things and if we do, then the resulting self-destruction is “meaningless,” much worse, I guess, than a self-destruction that is meaningful.

Those statements represent certain values and starting assumptions that are not easily answered by Sagan’s approach to the Cosmos. He has to make certain leaps–not “leaps of faith” exactly but leaps nonetheless–to assume that “the same laws of physics” apply everywhere. He entertains certain values about what causes wonder and awe and expresses those values through the “star stuff” metaphors. And he also has certain values about good (“life” and “our” 15-billion year “heritage”) and about what is meaningful and meaningless, presuming that meaninglessness itself is a bad, or at least discomfiting (and therefore bad) thing.

I risk committing an error here. It’s one thing to point out that awe exists, that people speak in metaphors, that people have values, even values not easily reducible to a materialistic view of the universe or values not testable by a process we can call “scientific.” It’s another thing to take it too far, to say that because those statements are “faith-like” or “religious-like” in some ways, they are therefore expressions of something that can be answered only by or derived from faith or religion. The error is to say “gotcha” when all Sagan is guilty of is holding complicated views.

And yet there is a disjuncture in Cosmos among the scientific values, the materialist values, and the set of values that are not testable by science or not easily reducible to Sagan’s materialist assumptions. It’s worth pointing out that disjuncture if only to understand why some people are uneasy about Sagan’s project and to understand that this discomfort is not merely an expression of anti-scientific or anti-intellectual angst.

What can the rest of the country learn from the educational success of Texas and Florida? Uncle Steve isn’t buying it.

Isolation rooms: Schools like prisons.

RAND writes about the Department of Education taking another look at Zero Tolerance.

Scott Shackford seeks to set the record straight on Germany’s free college.

Ole Miss is now (likely) the only state university that will no longer fly its state flag on campus. Here’s hoping that the state changes the flag into something the university will fly proudly.

What happens when the world’s driest desert gets some rain? This happens. Wow.

Puerto Rico’s solution to its debt problem may be to just stop paying.

This is a pretty heartwarming story.

GNC is accused of spiking their dietary supplements with Russian drugs.

Seduced by a teacher’s aide, a British school boy says he was scarred for life.

Waze is a great app, but it does ask you to navigate some pretty difficult maneuvers. Fortunately, this may be coming to an end.

David Kirby believes that SeaWorld needs to be held into account for their role in depleting the orca population. Trumwill-favorite Jonathan Last, who is not exactly an animal rights activist, found himself critical of SeaWorld in 2012 (and 2010).

More money is made from vinyl record sales than ad-supported streaming.

When our moral instincts fail, should we turn to pills and brain zaps?

This article on Texas Instruments’ “staggering monopoly” in high school mathematics is interesting, but I can’t see through the nostalgia. I never had a TI-8x because my parents got me a Casio, which I am still bitter about to this day. (All of the good games were on the TI.)

Conor Friedersdorf’s Atlantic essay focuses on the Christakises and how they and eventually their would-be defenders have been treated, and also briefly takes into account the assertion linked by Nevermoor below that “it’s not about Halloween costumes.”

The common demand that the accused individual recite a statement confessing to crimes against the just society, including the crime of being born to the wrong class and race, before or in the process of accepting punishment, repeats this demotion of the individual to mere symbol. What’s important is not what the person might freely come to think, or for that matter what happens to him or her, but that he or she publicly submit to the new power.–CK MacLeod

I’m going to go out on a limb right now and predict that everyone is just going to line up without waiting to hear what that history is, pick a side that fits a narrative they already have going in their head about college kids today or PC or SJW or The Man or whatever, and run with it. I mean, just run the s**t out of it. –Tod Kelly

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Over There, I did a linkchain post about the situation in Missouri:

Black players on the University of Missouri football team say they will boycott practices, meetings and games until the university dismisses its president or he quits, contending he has not responded adequately to concerns about racism on campus.

The move comes as a hunger strike staged by a graduate student to protest racism enters a second week. A majority of the 35,000 students at the university in Columbia, about 125 miles (200 km) west of St. Louis, are white.

“The athletes of color on the University of Missouri football team truly believe ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,’” the university’s Legion of Black Collegians said in a statement on Twitter.

“We will no longer participate in any football-related activities until President Tim Wolfe resigns or is removed due to his negligence toward marginalized students’ experience,” it said. More than 30 players were in a photograph linked to the statement posted on Saturday night.

In a statement released on Sunday afternoon, Wolfe indicated no intention to resign but said solutions to the students’ concerns were being discussed.

Wolfe did, in fact resign. The system chancellor also announced his departure, though unlike Wolfe, his will not be immediate.

The lesson? Don’t mess with football! Actually, that’s both correct and incorrect. While some are saying this shows the awesome power of football, it’s not clear whether it was the decisive factor when it came to the outcome. Wolfe had lost the confidence of just about everybody. What the football program did do was deprive Wolfe of his only change of staying. Absent what the football players did, it seems likely Wolfe would have tried to wait it out. His success would have been improbably, but possible. However, if the football team isn’t practicing and paying, you go from having nothing to lose by holding off a few weeks (on the unlikely chance that his fortunes could reverse) to the enmity of the entire state.

But besides putting Wolfe on a clock, the main thing that football program did was make the situation very distinct from what’s going on at Yale University. For those of you that are not familiar with the situation at Yale, the convergence of a few events (a fraternity allegedly saying “white girls only” and an email from a house administrator regarding Halloween costumes) has lead to a series of protests and rallies about how the university and its students treat its minority (and particularly black) students.

Relatively few seem especially impressed by the Yale students. Most of the debate is whether it is indicative of the downfall of civilization, or just kids being kids. I consider it something close to the latter myself. Which may sound generous, but is actually a bit condescending. But I have taken the strategy of not freaking out about kids in college lacking the sense of perspective and overreacting to crap.

Also, protesting and holding rallies can be really gratifying. Writing long-winded pieces about justice and righteousness is fun and interesting. I’m not a protester or rally sort, but I am a “write long-winded piece” sort of person. When it comes to these activities, they often exist in search of a cause to latch on to. And when you’re young, everything can be a grand battle. There is also the high of being a part of a movement, perhaps the largest distinction with that and a mob being the clear-eyed justice of the cause.

So people who who want to gather and spontaneously rally and write op-eds can pretty easily get wound up on things in a volume out of proportion with that clear-eyed view.

But while protesting, writing op-eds, and yelling at authority figures can be fun, one thing that isn’t fun is sitting out a sporting event if you’re an athlete. That was, to me, why the Missouri football team really got my attention. These kids have been working most of their lives to play football at the college level. Their refusal to do so isn’t just latching on to a cause aligned with something they are predisposed to do anyway. If they’re doing this in saying that the president has got to go, I’m inclined to think that the environment is bad enough that the president does, in fact, got to go.

That’s not the only distinction between the two. At the risk of being a classist, this plays a role. Not so much (though partly) in the privilege of Yale youth (even those with darker skin), but because of how… realistic, for lack of a better term… accusations of a hostile environment sound to me. This is superficial and obviously not scientific, but while a part of me would actually really like to believe that Yale is essentially no different than the University of Mississippi or the University of Missouri*… I have difficulty. Maybe that’s not right and it’s not fair (either to Missouri or to minority students at Yale), it is nonetheless an impression I have. Not that the people of Yale are enlightened, exactly, but that even the renegade fraternities have more sense than to loudly proclaim “White girls only” at a party.

None of this is to excuse some of the excesses of the Missouri protesters and their faculty allies. There are some doubts being raised about the incident that kicked all of this off may be a hoax**, possibly fanned on by an opportunistic faculty or just an activist in search of a cause. And… it may be. It certainly wouldn’t be the first. These are questions to be asked. But on the question of whether I think Missouri has issues that I am less sure Yale does, I definitely find myself more open to hearing of a hostile environment necessitating a response.

Which, of course, could leave me in the position of “Dude, never believe college students ever.” Or perhaps more generously, “any valiant cause is likely to be infiltrated by bad actors.”

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It’s not clear how much the specifics of the original charge matter, if Wolfe’s termination was a product more of the response to the original incidents. On the other hand, it is also entirely possible that the leadership did look them, determine that there was no real “there” there, but that engaging the kids by calling them liars or opening themselves up to further misinterpretation was the bad bet for the university (not just its leadership) overall. That turned out to be a bad bet, but making a bad bet is different from being indifferent to Hate on Campus.

Subsequent events have almost uniformly undermined the Mizzou movement. There was the communications professor who wanted to get muscle to kick out photographers. While Yale had the student with the op-ed about not wanting debate, Missouri has the student vice president questioning the First Amendment. A professor who declined to cancel exams was harassed to the point of resignation (which was rejected by the university). All of these can be explained or isolated to be condemned. The actions of a communications professor are not the actions of a movement. The words of a student council vice president might be more indicative of sentiment, but that takes us back to Dreznerianism that there’s only so much account we can hold to young people stretching their intellectual legs. And with regard to the resigning professor, I heard a couple rumors that one of his tormentors was a high school kid in Houston. Which is maybe not the case, but it would stand to reason that there were a lot of outsiders piling on.

And nothing we have seen tells us that there are no racial problems on Mizzou, or problems so bad to warrant such a response. It doesn’t follow from the above that the students don’t have a reason to be anxious and aren’t victims of everyday racism and harassment. It doesn’t follow that actual events haven’t occurred on the micro and macro level, even if they’re harder to isolate or identify. The increased attention and scrutiny makes it hard to determine in the midst of the fever pitch. While not as bad as being fired, stripping the communications professor of her honorary title in the heat of current tensions seems like a bad idea. Professors resigning seems like a bad idea. The best idea, to me, is to calm down. Which is not only off the menu, but a suggestion itself that is offensive to some.

Meanwhile, things seem to have calmed down at Yale. That may be because Yale happened first. More disturbingly, it may be because at Yale the protesters never drew blood while, at Missouri, having done so, they are only more energized. While I don’t object to the resolutions in New Haven of Columbia specifically, the lessons drawn from this may not be what the students want. Next time it may put my theory about the football team not necessarily being necessary to the test, except with added incentive for everyone to rally around the administration.

* – Admittedly, this is partially because of regionalism. But also because “Large state school versus Ivy League private school.” I’d probably approach UMass (northern state school) and SMU (southern private one) with more of a Missouri perspective.

** – There evidently was a police report where the poop swastika was observed. That part seems settled. Whether that swastika was intended hate speech or a hoax intended to raise awareness of hate speech, though, is unclear.

I had intended to include this in my Sick, Sad World Halloween post, but time got the better of me. So here it is, a collection of the “Sick, Sad World” promos on Daria:

Kate Iselin is sick of the predators and approval-seekers calling themselves feminist to get her attention.

Arrested johns are being sent to class to ask how they would feel if their loved ones were prostitutes. Relatedly, Noah Smith tweetbombs an explanation for why he opposes the legalization of prostitution.

Lyman Stone points out that interstate migration is mostly going not to super-deep red states, but to purple states. The definition of purpose is sufficiently broad so as to include Texas, but interesting all of the same.

One county in Alabama has abducted as many children as all of the strangers in the country combined. Relatedly, The Nation’s Michelle Goldberg takes a skeptical look at the CPS.

Watch some drones build a bridge.

If Firefox is worried about staying relevant in a mobile world, they ought to think less about having their own OS and more on making an Android browser that’s awesome. There are some good Android browsers out there, but no great ones. Make it happen, Firefox. (Or don’t worry about it, and make your desktop browser better.)

Filed under “Regulation for the sake of regulation being a thing”, Robert Reich and Matt Rosoff square off on whether or not the tech industry needs more regulation.

Hamilton Nolan reports that fidgeters don’t need standing desks.

Tom Rogan looks at the Tory political implications of the British class system.
The designer of the labradoodle would like to apologize. Meanwhile, in Japan…

The tears of a suicide bomber.

Democrats and Republicans tweet differently.

Don’t just start school later… also start work later.

Daniel Hertz writes about zoning and the education gap.

The commenters at Greater Greater Washington argue that of course the less fortunate need housing, just elsewhere.

Someday, I’m going to find out what this guy is talking about (NSFW):

It reminds me of the famous English-gibberish song/video, which you have maybe already seen. Here’s a short film in fake English that you may not have seen (I hadn’t):

This is primarily an Ordinary Times post, but I think it might be amusing even without some of the meta…

KELLY: Welcome to the Ordinary Sport Halftime Report. This is Tod Kelly in the studio with Will Truman and Malcolm Blue. As you may know, this is a special game here in the Ordinary studios because Will here went to Southern Tech, while Mal attended St Roche.

BLUE: Happy to be here, Tod.

TRUMAN: Likewise.

KELLY: So it’s another week of Eastern Metro Conference action against these two longtime rivals and it has been an exciting thirty minutes of play. The thing that stands out most from the stats sheets are turnovers. Ball control has been a serious issue all aro-

TRUMAN: Let me stop you right there, Tod. You act like “turnovers” have been a “general issue” with the implication that they are evenly distributed between teams. But if you look at the stat sheet, you will notice that St Roche has three turnovers compared to two turnovers. Further, from those three turnovers, the Packers have scored twice while the Buccaneers have only scored once. So there hasn’t been a general problem with “both sides” having turnovers in a “general” sense and I don’t think you’re actively portraying the game as it has been played with that implication.

KELLY: I understand that, Will. I’m simply saying that both sides have had some issue…

TRUMAN: There you go again, Tod. “Both sides”? It’s been a problem for St Roche. You can’t look at this game as one with “a lot of turnovers” when it’s the Buccaneers that are having serious problems with ball control.

KELLY: Two turnovers in a half with one being converted into a touchdown is a problem no matter…

TRUMAN: They have three. Do you understand that, Kelly? Are you actually going to look at the stat sheet or are you going to persist with this fiction that everybody has a lot of turnovers so oh well I guess it doesn’t matter.

KELLY: I never said it doesn’t matter, Will. I simply said that there have been a lot of turnovers. If you’d let me finish, I would have said that it’s particularly been a problem for St Roche.

TRUMAN: That still implies that it’s been a problem for Southern Tech, which if you look at things, it really hasn’t. There have been two turnovers, from which seven points were made. That’s simply not comparable to three turnovers from which ten points were made. Not comparable at all.

BLUE: If I could interject here, if you notice at that second turnover, there was an uncalled defensive pass interference that occurred prior to that. So in reality, that shouldn’t have counted. So really, there have been only two turnovers. The third doesn’t count.

KELLY: Doesn’t count, Mal? The “pass interference” you cite was hardly pass interference, and it was on the other side of the field. And your quarterback threw it right into the defender’s hands. There wasn’t even a Packer anywhere in site. The interference had nothing to do with the…

BLUE: Oh, I get it. You argued with him so now you have to argue with me.

KELLY: That’s not what this is about. But fine, let’s move on from turnovers. The score is 27-17. Can we at least agree on that?

BLUE: Only technically, Tod. First, as I mentioned, the pick-six shouldn’t have counted. That brings the score down to 20-17. There was an additional three points scored off that fumble on the sixteen yard line. And a kickoff return that was scored for a touchdown. So if you look at actual offensive points, it’s 17-10 and we’re winning.

TRUMAN: The field goal was scored by the offense, Malcolm. So that’s 17-13. But even setting that aside, it’s not as though only offensive points count. That’s ridiculous.

KELLY: Can’t argue with that. And the score is 27-17. It’s right there on the scoreboard.

BLUE: You can point to your “scoreboard” all you want. The stat sheet is less skewed, and if you look at the stat sheet we have 273 yards to their 212…

TRUMAN: We couldn’t get the yards because you kept giving us the ball and penalty yardarge!

BLUE: Let’s be clear here, both sides have turnovers in this game. So we really shouldn’t be counting those points. We’re winning this game.

KELLY & TRUMAN: YOU ARE NOT WINNING THIS GAME!

BLUE: So of all of the metrics you could be looking at, you’re just going to be fixated on the scoreboard?

KELLY: Sigh. Yes, we are. But let’s move on. Another factor in this game has been penalties. While both sides have six penalties…

TRUMAN: There you go again, Tod, both sides. We have six penalties for 40 yards. And they’re barely penalties like “offsides” and “delay of game”. Meanwhile, they’ve committed several holding and pass interference penalties for 78 yards!

BLUE: 83 yards. Also, to go back to the missed pass interference call…

KELLY & TRUMAN: THAT HAD NO BEARING ON THE OUTCOME OF THE PLAY!

BLUE: A penalty is a penalty, and as long as we’re going to get all high and mighty about who is body-slamming whom in the backfield…

TRUMAN: Look, I’m just saying that you can’t really talk about “penalties” in a general sense because only one of these teams has been having a persist problem breaking the rules in a meaningful way.

KELLY: I know you hate the term, but both teams…

TRUMAN: Ugh!

KELLY: Both teams have had a lot of penalties called on them. You’re right that they haven’t resulted in equal yardage, but…

TRUMAN: So you’re just going to fixate on the one statistic that makes each side look equally bad. Got it.

KELLY: Sigh. No, I never said it was equally bad. But let’s move on to offense. With the exception of that interception, Teddy Barton has been ripping Southern Tech’s secondary apart with 229 total yards and fourteen completions out of 21 attempts…

TRUMAN: Grunt.

KELLY: Now what?

TRUMAN: I know it’s your job to pretend that this game is exciting and that there are things going for both sides, but you really need to be more honest about it. Barton has only 195 passing yards. An additional 36 rushing yards doesn’t necessarily say anything one way or the other about the secondary and in fact could be indicative of scrambling due to the lack of an open receiver. I know you said “229 ‘total’ yards, but that seems pretty clearly an attempt to exaggerate the performance of a quarterback with a scurrilous accusation against our secondary, which has held them to under 200 yards.

KELLY: Which is impressive, I guess?

TRUMAN: It seems telling to me how fixated we are about who has thrown the ball more than whom. In case you missed in, Tod, the Packers are winning this game 27-17. I know it’s inconvenient for you to acknowledge that one team has more points than the other, but you can’t just dance around it talking about unimportant statistics. Reality has a Packer bias here and it’s time we stop pretending otherwise.

BLUE: You’re just fixated on the score because that’s the one place – other than penalties and turnovers – where Southern Tech is doing better than St Roche. Offensive yards really do matter here. As does the fact that we are more highly ranked.

TRUMAN: What does that have to do with anything?

BLUE: We are clearly the better team. We have more quality wins this year. We won far more games – and the EMC title – last year. You cling to that scoreboard as though it is the only thing that matters when, if you look at a deeper level, you’re losing.

TRUMAN: A deeper level like the fact that we are winning the division this year and have a better record? That we have beaten you the last five times we’ve played?

BLUE: We beat you the three before that, but that’s not the point. Earlier in the year we beat Temple Hill and Ole Tex and we were projected to possibly even be in the playoffs!

TRUMAN: You can latch on to those things all you want, but at the end of the day the entrance requirements to get into Southern Tech blow those of St Roche out of the water, with our school having an average SAT score of 1260 compared to theirs of 1220. US World and News Report puts us in the top tier while you are stuck in the second tier. The crime rate at St Roche…

KELLY: Guys, I think we’re getting off-track here. What do you think we can we expect to see in the second half?

BLUE: We will continue to win and the scoreboard will stop being so skewed.

TRUMAN: We’re going to kick their ass because that’s what Carnegie rated Very High Research Universities do to lowly High Research University schools.

KELLY: And with that, thank god, it’s back to Mary on the sidelines…

{Mr Blue assisted with this post.}

Megan McArdle’s review of ‘Truth’ makes me wish they had made it in the style of The Informant, an underrated movie.

I hope that Anonymous might consider leaving UK than the medical profession. Montana and Idaho need you!

Peter Beinart argues that Jeb Bush’s tumble is proof that democracy is winning. I think the most underreported story this cycle is that campaign finance reform has worked so impressively this cycle.

My smartphone’s battery life has plummeted. I don’t have an iPhone, but is maybe Facebook responsible?

CVS is (at least temporarily) is scaling back its experiment with self-checkout. Virginia Postrel outlines why self-checkout is going to be an uphill climb.

I’m not gonna lie, a McDonald’s burger with a grey bun sounds intriguing to me.

In an interview with Russian astronauts, of course you ask how they will cope without men and makeup because that’s the important thing.

Former Alabama Democrat turn Virginia Republican turn Alabama Independent Artur Davis is not eligible to become an Alabama Democrat again right away.

Will electoral reform come to Canada? Trudeau favors it, but its time may have passed.

Hillary Clinton is fun.

Rugby… a game that makes soldiers, can honor indigenous culture, and has limited prospects in the US.

All he could say is that his life was pretty lame. I’m not sure any song captured the moment better than that one.

Raising Baby Hitler.

It looks like we will have Phil Collins to kick around again soon.

Woohoo! This is what the economy has long needed.

When I was growing up, it was pretty much conventional wisdom that you had to worry about people giving out (chemically of physically) spiked candy on Halloween. It wasn’t thought to be common or anything, but parents started doing the whole “No accepting trick or treat candy from strangers” thing as I was going through.

These are the things you only find out much later are almost entirely mythical. Or absolutely, entirely so.

But everything persists as if this isn’t the case. As if this is something that we genuinely need to be worried about. It speaks to something more than mere gullibility. It speaks to what I can only see as an investment in the notion that the world is a sick place. The need for affirmation that all of our fears are justified. That those who are afraid are not so much afraid as aware and those saying otherwise are at best naive, and at worst indifferent to evil.

And so it happened again this year. A razorblade in Auburn, Massachusetts, that turned out to be a criminal prank. Then some needles in Pennsylvania. I briefly got taken in by the second one, in large part because there were (allegedly) multiple reports. My thinking was not so much that some sicko was trying to hurt children, but that some parent might actually put needs in candy as a warning to people to be way of candy. Because that’s the sort of investment I’m talking about. A sick place about being a sick place, or something. You know, like cops stealing stuff from people’s cars to teach them a lesson about securing their cars.

Turns out, I was partially right:

Then, after detectives spoke with Ledrew, “They discovered upon questioning the male that he indeed made up the story.”

Minossse says Ledrew actually put the needles in himself, and the reason he gives them is that he was trying to teach his kids a lesson to be careful with their candy.

Ledrew was arrested and charged with making a false police report, Minosse says his lesson continues in court at a future date.

Meanwhile, at least four have died from automobile accidents while trick-or-treating.

But keep your eyes on that candy, parents. There are a lot of sickos out there.

The student’s mother died last week. Her grandfather had died earlier this year. She has previously lost her father, and her only sibling. Her mother didn’t have life insurance, and she’s trying to figure out how to pay the funeral expenses.

I can’t comprehend what she’s going through. I can only stretch my imagination and recognize that I’m still coming up short.

She’s a tough kid, hard-working, motivated, an excellent student, and genuinely nice. She came back to school right away because it was easier than being all alone. And she’s the “I never ask for help” type.

So I asked her to come to my office so I could go over what she missed that one day–the only day she’s missed all term. And so I could talk to her, make sure she did have some support (two uncles, and her boyfriend’s family has “been great,” fortunately), let her know that I wasn’t concerned about whether she was on-time with the assignment inconveniently due today, and give her some “grown up” reassurance that her grief was normal and she shouldn’t feel guilty or stressed if it interfered with normal life for a while.

I didn’t tell her, but I’m going to work on getting donations from colleagues to help out with the funeral expenses.

But I’m an emotional wreck now.