Newsworthy Archives – THE PAGE TURNS

October 10, 2024October 12, 2024

Go to College, If Only Because It Makes Looking at Data More Fun

Higher Education, photo of the Campanile at CAL by kajmeister.

If you had studied Economics, you would know why giving substantial tax breaks beginning in the 1990s for 4-year undergraduate degrees ultimately raised the prices of 4-year undergraduate degrees. If you had studied Communication Studies, you’d be able to spot the rhetorical fallacies of Ivy League graduates who now grouse about the decline of education. You’d know that the Wall Street Journal’s college ranking system based on ROIs uses circular logic. If you’d studied Statistics, you’d wonder why journalists only refer to data showing the last five years, and you’d quickly learn that “public confidence” is not the cause of the decline in enrollment. English major? you’d see how different motivations drive people’s choices. Gender or Multilcultural studies? You’d notice the change in who graces the mastheads of universities today. College is useful for a lot of reasons.

There has been a bunch of — academics might say a “plethora” — of articles recently whining about how people have decided college is a bad idea, how careerism is ruining college, and how it’s just no good (or fun) anymore. I beg to differ.

October 1, 2024October 1, 2024

Elegy for the Oakland A’s

…no one wants to hear from the murderer at the funeral…
Sportswriter Ann Killion, on owner John Fisher’s sham letter of regret.

Some of my lifetime of A’s paraphernalia.

Sports is not really about demigods performing super human feats, even if it sometimes is. It’s not about honoring divine beings, extolling the virtues of gentlemen athletes, or bringing about world peace, even if some claimed that was its purpose. Sports is not even about winning. Sports is about storytelling, stories which become inseparably woven into the fabric of our own lives.

There have been a lot of tears shed this past week at the funeral for the Oakland Athletics, my hometown baseball team. The final games were played last week by Oakland’s quirky, over-achieving players in its aging, industrial monolith of a stadium. Fans and players wept openly, and we’re still crying. I went to a lot of games there, by myself and with friends, wife, kids, in-laws. The A’s Bay Area tenure roughly paralleled mine, and, although I’m not going anywhere, they’re headed off to West Sacramento, to wear jerseys that have no place name on them. The team owners are dreaming of going to Vegas, but all they have so far is an architectural drawing and a hope for public funding.

I was going to write a rant, full of fury at A’s owner John Fisher, who publicly throttled this team as we were all suffered to watch. Like many of the other fans, though, I end up just thinking about my long string of experiences. Forgive me for such a long, maudlin post. Like a good wake, it goes on longer than it should because I just don’t want to tell the deceased goodbye.

The Oakland A’s have always had to play things a little differently, under weird circumstances and not always with poise or polish. They took pride in eccentricity and in showing up to contend with those who had more to begin with.

June 10, 2024June 27, 2024

The Murky View of Cloud Brightening

Ocean ships create cloud trails, stillshot from NASA video offered by geoengineering.global.

We are in a serious pickle. We can’t even agree whether we should test equipment to run experiments to make climate change better because … well… climate change affects everybody. We don’t know what we don’t know and can’t find out because we can’t even talk about it without surfacing hysteria. This is the conundrum I surmised last week, reading about a story on environmental research. The Alameda City Council, the decision-makers for a nearby local town, voted last Wednesday against allowing the continuation of an experiment to spray sea water into the ocean air to measure its effectiveness as a strategy that might lessen the effects of climate change. It made me curious.

Why was this experiment so “controversial,” as many of the headlines said? Why did Alameda “overrule its staff,” as the New York Times described it? I dug into the weeds a little and found that there’s a lot of weeds here. I did end up a bit more optimistic about the transparency of city governments, but more pessimistic about our ability to solve climate change. It’s a mess! And it’s going to get messier before it gets better, if this is any indication.

Do You Have a Permit?

The bare bones of what happened is as follows. Scientists from the University of Washington wanted to study the usefulness of a machine that would spray seawater into the air. The goal of the spraying would be to create an effect called Marine Cloud Brightening, which I’ll explain shortly. They had arranged to put their sprayer on to the deck of an old naval carrier, the U.S.S. Hornet, which is now docked and used as a tourist museum. It’s docked in Alameda, a peninsula connected to Oakland that sits in the San Francisco Bay. Alameda used to have a naval base, hence the Hornet, hence the docking facilities.