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So school started and I’m sitting in an undergrad geography class. The professor mentions that unlike his peers, he has no qualms with putting his lectures online for free. He suggested that many of his colleagues are afraid that if they do that no one will attend classes. This is quite interesting as one can see how the business model for a traditional university is coming to grips with the digital world.

About a year ago, I blogged about OpenCourseWare from MIT. The goal of the project is to move all materials, tests, quizzes, examinations, notes, lectures, etc. into an easy-to-use online database for free public consumption.

Upon hearing MIT’s plans a friend of mine noted that this would bankrupt the college as their competitive advantage, trade secrets, “intellectual property” and other consumable goods and services will be distributed for free. I don’t have any hard numbers on hand, but despite the hoopla surrounding this technological transition, I doubt that applications for MIT have decreased. In fact, I can see this more as a publicity stunt (at least for them) because they not only get more media exposure, but Grade AAA students who might have otherwise gone to Stanford, Caltech or an Ivy League school can see first hand what MIT has to offer.

Of course, for the time being (and the immediate future), one notable tangible advantage that MIT has: cutting-edge laboratories and lots of them. While you might have all the coursework that an electrical engineering student has, you don’t have access to the various equipment that MIT students do.

Anyways, I’d like to talk more about this at a later time, but I am trying to sublease my apartment and find a new one.

I’m a big fan of athletic competition. Throughout junior high, high school and college I played a number of different sports including: football, baseball, basketball, track, tennis, soccer and the mind-numbing, brow-beating game of ping pong (Forrest Gump style). So I do appreciate and enjoy watching individuals and teams dedicated to accomplishing blistering goals and reckon they will continue doing so (I needed an excuse to sound Texan).

LibertarianJackass makes what I consider, a valid point regarding events that are scored by judging:

MEMO TO PAUL HAMM: Give back the Gold Medal now! Gymnastics is an event based on judging and scoring. Your score wasn’t as high as the other guy, regardless of what the scoreboard said. You don’t deserve the medal. Have the decency and respect for the art of athletic competition and give back the medal.

Note: I am not suggesting that the various events included in this category are not-a-sport or require little athleticism and training and I doubt that LJ is as well (ask him that).

The problem is that, as the Final Round in the Men’s High Bar routine showed, if the judging was based solely upon objective criteria and zero-subjective judgment was used, all the scores for each from each of the judges would be the same (and it wouldn’t be called “judging”).

A contemporary example you may be able to relate with is with college football, the BCS. The Bowl Championship Series was started with the hopes that it could eliminate multiple first place finishes. Because coaches, staff writers and analysts can and will be biased towards various teams, an objective computer-based system was implemented to do away with a chronic problem. And it still doesn’t work for a number of reasons including the fact that the system still incorporates the human-element. Last year, you had potentially three different teams claiming to be the number one team in the country: USC, LSU and OU.

I actually advocated (and still do) that the best way to have settled that dispute last year was to hand the trophy to the Aggies, a non-partisan team in the whole affair…

Anyways, the last point I wanted to make regarding the olympics: did you check out the intermission Cheerleaders for various events like Beach Volleyball? What’s the deal with them? I’m sure the games of yore had them as well (in one of my history classes we learned that during battle, the wives and lovers would stand on the sidelines of the field and expose themselves to inspire their men — I recommend that such an endeavor become a staple of the Olympics henceforth).

School starts back up tomorrow and I’m not even sure what I signed up for, so with any luck all of them will be filled with fresh nubile coeds. Oh and I’m 200+ miles away in Dallas so I’m totally ready to hit it strong.

Speaking of hitting it strong, I should get a girlfriend just so I could write break-up stories like this — bummer Bill (his last girlfriend was quite the bizatch too, hooking up with his bestfriend behind his back).

On the web front, if any of you would like to either make or point to a CSS template that would fit the personality of this blog, I’d appreciate it. I might even give you one of three gmail accounts I have.

A couple days ago, I posted a small write-up on a new program called “Who’s A Rat” which places the profile of law enforcement officials into an open online database. Bob, a friend of mine whom runs a professional mediation service out of the Houston-area, followed the link and placed nearly 100 officers into the database (he gathered the information from the public domain off the Montgomery County website).

As a result, he received a number of complaints, threats and otherwise, non-friendly responses from the Men in Blue. Additionally, he was interviewed by Stop the Drug War, an organization dedicated to raising awareness of drug prohibition:

One multi-narc contributor to Who’s A Rat is not a defendant in a criminal case, but a Texas libertarian from The Woodlands named Bob who has posted the names and personal information of dozens of law enforcement officers. “If the state is going to have databases on us,” he told DRCNet, “it seems only fair that we can have a database of agents and informers as a tool for defense attorneys and defendants. I don’t have a particular negative law enforcement experience, in fact I’ve done ride-alongs with some of these guys, but if I can open a file on them maybe people will look out for them.”

“The Woodlands is a pretty quiet place, but you’d be horrified at how many drug busts there are — it’s pretty much all they have to do,” said Bob, who after getting 9% of the vote in the 2002 race for local state representative as a Libertarian, has forsaken politics for a career as a mediator. “I know some of these guys, they are doing what they think is right, but they’re apt to do some wrong things. If somebody moves to The Woodlands, they deserve to know whether their neighbor is out there looking to arrest them. This is a resource for people looking to stay out of trouble, not just for criminal defendants and defense attorneys.”

For the record, neither Bob or I use any form of illicit drug such as marijuana nor do we encourage the use of such a chemical compound. However, just because neither of us use it does not mean we are granted some Puritanical moral authority to enforce our lifestyles onto others. It’s your body, the State does not own it nor does anyone else, feel free to consume whatever you want (why isn’t there a War on Krispy Kreme or Big Macs too, those are hardly healthy — in fact, there has not be a single medical case of a marijuana user dying from the substance, so how come cigarettes and alcohol are legal?).

As a side note, does anybody else remember the TIPS program? It’s the one where you rat on your neighbor for doing something you consider suspicious and unAmerican?

So I’m checking out at Fry’s and an item from the impulse section sticks out at me: the kitchen sink of furnishings, the duct tape of tools, the MacGyver of ingenuity:

Crazy Swiss.

Sprechen Sie ‘cuddle?’ Publisher to offer ‘german/woman’ dictionary:

BERLIN, Germany (Reuters) — A leading German dictionary publisher plans to launch a guide it says will help men translate the subtext of female conversation.

The Langenscheidt publishing group, best known for its well-respected yellow foreign language dictionaries, will launch sales of a 128-page book to translate such baffling female banter as: “Let’s just cuddle” into “No sex tonight please!.”

“Each themed chapter offers men behavioral tips and exposes hidden messages transmitted by women in everyday situations, such as on holiday or during shopping trips,” said Silke Exius, chief editor at Langenscheidt.

Other examples in the “German-Woman/Woman-German” edition due out in October include explaining why a woman asks a man to take interest in the pair of shoes she may be trying on.

She wants him to look because he’s about to pay for them.

Damn straight.

I should remind you that this is the most important part of the Holy Translation Trinity, the others of course being Baby Babble and Canine Chatter.

Via Andrew Moroz.

Being the smartass I am, I tried to at first register the classic: antidisestablishmentarianism. Apparently an even more adroit smartass thought of the same thing. When neither floccinaucinihilipilification nor honorificabilitudinitatibus were available, I was besides myself.

So I did what any other warm blooded American would do, google the longest words.

Electroencephalographically is the longest unhyphenated word in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. And since I’m all about the collegiate-kosherness of a word, it passed the stringent litmus test.

The 5-seconds of instant gratification culminates into this 90-letter email address: electroencephalographically@abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com

And yes, their main page fits the bill for Truth in Advertising. Just like Skyhigh Airlines.

Via DiVERSiONZ.

This weekend Mike Ewens is helping me move the blog from Movable Type to Word Press. Everything (knock on wood) seems to be going smoothly — the most annoying thing is having to import my staple+tape blogroll.

So in the meantime, I tried to find the worst Geocities-esque “Under Construction” picture to show off:

That one is winning because if you zoom in close enough, the creator didn’t bother chunking the hovering mouse image.

Is it just me or are more and more trial lawyers marketing themselves with wrestling monikers? Like Jim Adler, The Texas Hammer; or Brian Loncar, The Strong Arm.

Via Stephan Kinsella.

Company pulls candy bags with toy depicting 9/11 attack:

MIAMI (AP) — Small toys showing an airplane flying into the World Trade Center were packed inside more than 14,000 bags of candy and sent to small groceries around the country before being recalled.

Lisy Corp., the wholesaler that distributed the candy, said Friday that the toys were purchased in bulk from a Miami-based import company.

The toys came in an assortment purchased sight unseen from L&M Import in Miami and included the toys depicting the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the twin towers, whistles and other small toys, said Luis Pedron, Lisy’s national sales manager. The invoice said the toy was a plastic swing set.

Now I might be fussy about small details, but you know what they say, better safe than sorry.