Beloit College's Mindset List has me thinking: what will future lists look like? Some ideas:
The 2024 List
- The Class of 2024 were born in 2002.
- They never saw Captain Kangaroo or Mr. Rogers on live TV.
- The World Trade Center has never existed.
- There has always been an American military presence in Afghanistan.
- Monica Lewinsky means as much to them as Christine Keeler meant to their parents.
The 2034 List
- The Class of 2034 were born in 2012.
- Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson, John Hughes, and Brittany Murphy died before they were born.
- The President has always been black, Latino, or a woman.
- They have never heard their parents worry about providing health insurance.
- Their classmates could include Samuel Affleck and Blue Ivy Knowles.
The 2059 List
- The Class of 2059 were born in 2037.
- The Mississippi River has always flowed through Morgan City, Louisiana.
- Scotland, Catalunya, Kurdistan, and Wallonia have always been independent countries; West Sahara, Nepal, and North Korea have never been.
- To them, an iPad seems as quaint as a Selectric was to their parents.
The 2102 List
- The Class of 2102 were born in 2079.
- They are the 100th class to have their own List.
- Incoming first-year classes have always spent the previous year in the military or in public service.
- Beloit College's campus has always had palm trees, and the surrounding area has always had orange groves.
- New York City has always had a seawall; New Orleans and Miami have always been islands; Greenland has always been green.
- Trains from Chicago to New York, Atlanta, and Kansas City have always been faster and less expensive than airplanes.
- They have always needed a passport to visit Dallas, and never needed one to visit Toronto.
- People have always walked on Mars, and there has always been a permanent base on the moon.
Any other ideas?
Clearing out the ballast:
- Despite the initial forecasts, Hurricane Isaac's remnants missed Chicago.
- Beloit College, just outside Rockford, Ill., has published its Class of 2016 Mindset. Since 1998 they've published a list of facts about the way incoming first-years think. This year's list includes "Women have always piloted war planes and space shuttles" and "A bit of the late Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, has always existed in space."
- The Economist's Gulliver blog bemoans Tampa's and Charlotte's piss-poor walkability, and how Tampa especially repudiates the loony-right conspiracy theory about Agenda 21.
- The wackos also got on NPR this morning with a story about yet more efforts to forbid Sharia law, which ended with the vacuous understatement "The proposals are a solution in search of a problem, according to many." Apparently NPR just wanted to shine a light on the crazy without correcting it.
- Speaking of crazy, with just four weeks left in the season, the Cincinnati Reds are the best team in baseball right now, with the Washington Nationals just behind them. The Cubs, now 51-82, earned their "E" just yesterday, fully two weeks after the Houston Astros (41-93) became the first team to earn mathematical elimination this season.
Updates as conditions warrant.
This morning I installed Microsoft Windows 8 on my laptop. As a professional geek, getting software after it's released to manufacturing but before the general public is a favorite part of my job.
It took almost no effort to set up, and I figured out the interface in just a few minutes. I like the new look, especially the active content on the Start screen. It definitely has a more mobile-computing look than previous Windows versions, with larger click targets (optimized for touch screens) and tons of integration with Windows Accounts. I haven't linked much to my LiveID yet, as I don't really want to share that much with Microsoft, but I'll need it to use SkyDrive and to rate and review the new features.
I also did laundry, vacuumed, cleaned out all my old programming books (anyone want a copy of Inside C# 2 from 2002?), and will now go shopping. And I promise never to share that level of picayune personal detail again on this blog.
Goose Island beer will start distributing to all 50 states by November:
The move will continue remarkable growth for what began as a small brewpub in its current Clybourn Avenue location in 1988, and has arguably become the beer most synonymous with Chicago. But a national reach also seemed inevitable once brewery founder John Hall sold the company to AB at a time when craft beer sales were soaring and macro breweries were struggling to enter the marketplace.
Production of Goose Island's biggest-selling and highest-produced beers — 312 Urban Wheat Ale, Honker's Ale, India Pale Ale and seasonal brews like Mild Winter — will expand to AB's Ft. Collins, Colo. brewery. The beers will also continue to be made at an AB plant in Baldwinsville, N.Y., as well as in smaller amounts at the Red Hook brewery in Portsmouth, N.H. and Chicago.
Colorado water? I don't think Colorado has the right amount of lead, arsenic, or radon to give it the proper flavor.
Fortunately, the high-end beers like Sofie will stay in Chicago, and presumably the brewpubs on Clybourn and in Wrigleyville will continue to make beer with proper Chicago water. We'll see.
Stephen Wizenburg, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, bemoans his students' lack of boundaries:
Posting and tweeting intimate life details are now so normal for them that they think nothing of cavalierly giving too much information to surprised professors.
Allison walked into my classroom apologizing for missing two weeks of classes by saying she had been in rehab for alcoholism. Stan's excuse, stated in front of the class, was that drugs he was taking for a psychological disorder had caused him to oversleep. Greg said he didn't have his assignment done because he had to go to court after being arrested for punching a guy in a bar fight. Carly texted me that she couldn't make it to class that day because she was in the hospital after having a miscarriage.
A new advisee, Amy, was in tears as she asked if she could shut my office door. It was her first semester, and she had always had a bright smile on her face in the classroom. But in my office, she told me her grades were suffering because she was having an affair with a local married TV reporter.
Such intimate details used to be considered too embarrassing to share. But with Facebook and Twitter, young people think nothing of confiding in strangers. Often the less the students know the person they are communicating with the more willing they are to spill. And they do it bluntly, now that they are used to summarizing life in 140 characters.
To some extent it sounds like the usual narcissism of children. I wonder, though: what will happen to expectations of privacy 20 or 30 years from now, when these kids grow up?
From the Atlantic, an explanation of how dogs dry themselves:
A dog can shake roughly 70 percent of the water from its fur in four seconds. Nearly three quarters of the moisture in the time it took you to read that last paragraph. Pretty amazing stuff.
But that champion efficacy raises more questions than it answers.
First, why does it work so well? How long does it take your socks to dry a comparable amount if you get them wet? How are they generating all that force? Second, many mammals are capable of the shake. Is how your dog does the same way that a mouse or a lion does? Third, why do animals do the shake at all? What's the evolutionary advantage that it confers?
It tickles me that part of the research involved dumping water on mammals of different sizes. If you're going to use animal subjects, annoying them is probably not the worst thing you could do.
From the annals of "why didn't I think of that?", an app that keeps track of where you've been so you can go somewhere else instead:
[Art student Tom] Loois’s final project ended up being a smartphone app called BlankWays, which charts your progress through the city, noting which paths you’ve come down before and suggesting itineraries to cover new ground. The app indicates and measures which parts of the city you’ve traveled, and which you haven't.
Loois isn’t the first person to meticulously chart his travel through the city. There’s a guy in New York who has made it his goal to walk every single block in the five boroughs. (It’s supposed to take him two years.) And technology corporations like Google and Apple regularly keep track of their clients’ movements. But Loois’ app will make it easy for everyone to do so, on a street by street scale, just for fun. He claims that he's not consistently late as a result of the detours, but we're not so sure - filling in those white spaces looks like it could become an obsession.
This also explains why people with Asperger's will take over the world soon...
Via Sullivan, Gotye has assembled a "YouTube orchestra" of people covering his song "Somebody That I Used To Know:"
Says Mashable's Neha Prakash:
Looks like even Gotye knows his song, “Somebody That I Used to Know,” is an overplayed, viral sensation that has spawned an entire genre of YouTube covers. So the singer decided to acknowledge the hundreds of piano-playing, harp-plucking, and guitar-strumming fans who paid tribute to the catchy tune.
Gotye explained: "All audio and video in Somebodies is from the YouTube user videos featured, each of them a cover or parody of Somebody That I Used To Know. No extra sounds were added to the mix, but I used some EQ, filtering, pitch-shifting and time-stretching to make the music.
"
Very cool.
Update: Gotye listed all the covers he used on his blog.
I'm in San Diego for tonight's Cubs game. Both teams are near the bottom of their divisions, and both have had solid losing streaks lately, so this should be a fascinating game.
While here, I took the advice of one of my oldest-surviving friends—really, she'd inflict violence if I said how long we've known each other—and went over to Coronado for lunch at Alexander's Pizza. Good advice; it was one of the best slices of pie I've had in years.
Coming back, I couldn't help notice this passing by:
That is littorally huge an amphibious transport dock, the USS Green Bay, designed to carry a battalion of 800 marines hither and yon. Apparently it's heading home, to Naval Base San Diego.