Archive for January 1st, 2003

Squids . . . of the Future!

Posted January 1, 2003 By Earl Green

So, over the holidays, did anyone else endure the bizarre Discovery Channel / Animal Planet special The Future Is Wild? According to that little show about the evolution of life on Earth 100-200 million years from now, everything’s going to turn into some kind of squid. Squids on land, squids in the sea, squids for you and squids for me. I kid you not, the whole show really seemed to be steered by unnamed “experts” who have a tentacle fetish.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the production values were amazing – a deceptively slick-looking mix of CGI, live-action, and simple shots of stuff like churning water to suggest the movement of giant squids, all earnestly narrated as though we’re pretty sure that Earth’s ecosystem is, even now, gearing itself toward squid. (And what of humanity? Oh, we ditched this mudball centuries ago, establishing colonies elsewhere, and we sent a probe back, through whose eyes all these multifarious squid-descendants are seen for the purposes of this special. Silly…don’t they know we’re going to evolve into Vorlons or something?)

With that in mind, I have some predictions of my own. Call it an inkling of our squid-filled future, with predictions aplenty of calamari calamity: Read the remainder of this entry »

My Little Hang-Ups

Posted January 1, 2003 By Earl Green

It has now been almost two years since my wife and I moved into the rental house we now occupy. Owned by her family, this house was formerly her grandmother’s, and so the utilities and other bills have been in the same name for some fifty years now. And so has the phone number. We are forbidden to change the phone number in the event that any of her grandmother’s friends call up for the first time in years to check on her. And this presents a problem.

For the past 21 months – actually, I suspect, for much longer than that – we have been innundated with calls for Cintas, the local uniform vendor. When we got our first phone book not long after moving in, we discovered to our horror that our phone number was printed in Cintas’ Yellow Pages listing for all to see.

And so it begins, every morning at about eight, the phone starts ringing off the hook. Read the remainder of this entry »

Just Desserts?

Posted January 1, 2003 By Dave Thomer

The Bush Administration recently filed a brief with the Supreme Court stating its opposition to the University of Michigan’s affirmative action admissions policy. One of the rhetorical points quickly made by the administration’s critics is that Bush himself benefited from affirmative action in his academic applications, using his geographical location and status as a ‘legacy’ student to help him get into Andover and Yale. It’s a pretty effective debating technique, highlighting the fact that – especially when it comes to education – strict ‘merit’ rarely completely wins the day. What I’ve wondered more and more since the stories started hitting the press is, is that such a bad thing?

The idea of a meritocracy appeals to everyone’s innate sense of fairness, I think. We like to see other people get what they deserve, and we like to think that whatever we have, we have because we’ve earned it. In its idealized form, it’s a terrific guiding principle. But when you put it into practice, it becomes pretty mushy. Sticking with education, how do you determine academic merit? Grades? But different schools have different grading systems, not to mention different curricula and standards. Just an example – my high school worked on a 4.0-scale, and didn’t give extra weight to As from honors classes. The guy with the highest GPA in my graduating class didn’t take many – if any – honors math or English classes, while the guy right behind him did. (I am neither of the people in this example, for anyone who might think I’m bitter or anything.) Standardized test might help smooth out the comparisons – but studies have shown that they don’t nearly as good a job predicting future academic performance as our current reliance on them would suggest. Read the remainder of this entry »

The Virtue of Patience

Posted January 1, 2003 By Dave Thomer

One of Not News’ central tenets is that by providing a forum for discussion of current social problems, we can help build a truly democratic society. In that discussion, however, it’s sometimes easy to ignore the question of what a ‘truly democratic society’ is, or how we should go about building it. I’d like to use the next few Philosophy slots in the article rotation to discuss some of these issues, starting this time out with the question of how far into the future reformers can look in good conscience.

Even when a group of people agree that a system or society must change, the question of how fast it should change can be extremely divisive – as is the related but often overlooked question of how fast it can change. Some of this division can be traced to conflicting agendas, a lack of clearly articulated ideals, or a poor decision-making structure within a reform movement, but in and of itself the timing issue is contentious. Reformers often target those elements of the social order that pose an immediate threat to the physical and mental well-being of large segments of the population, many of which are rooted in longstanding traditions such that any delay in addressing them only compounds the injustice. However, while ‘When do we want it? Now!’ might be an effective rallying cry, and an expression of the optimal turn of events, a truly pragmatic reformer must inevitably accept compromise and look to the future, setting timeframes not in terms of months or even years, but in generations.
Read the remainder of this entry »