Are They Sure?

This item at Quartz says that a survey conducted by the Hilton hotel chain shows a lot of people fall asleep during meetings. I, on the other hand, am not so sure.

I just don't believe that you can really fall asleep in the second bolgia of the Eighth Circle of Hell.

Unclear on the Concept

Companies that produce movies, music and television programs try very hard to stay ahead of the people who put their work online for free. One way to do that is to get search engines to not list the sites that make the downloads available.

But Warner Bros. may have cast their net a little too widely in asking Google to de-list a number of sites where Warner Bros. material can be viewed or downloaded. They included sites that offer legitimate streaming, such as Amazon. And they included their own site.

Yes. A media company has asked Google to stop listing its own site because doing so violates copyright laws.

And they called the duck "Daffy."

Take That, Dr. Schrödinger

When Edwin Schrödinger wanted to illustrate just how bizarre the idea of quantum superposition was, he devised a thought experiment that was based on a cat being placed in peril of its life. Although it was just a thought experiment and never carried out in any laboratory, cats were still rather miffed about the whole deal, when they bothered to care. Which, admittedly, was not very often.

Come 1975, and the cats got their chance to speak out in Dr. Schrödinger's field, as Michigan State University physics professor Jack H. Hetherington included his cat Chester as a co-author of his paper. Hetherington had written a paper for a particular journal and had, following an academic convention of the time, used what's called the "royal we" or "editorial we" to refer to himself when he described his experiments and conclusions. It's a way of speaking that says "we" but refers to the speaker or author alone.

Trouble was, the journal to which the paper was submitted only used "we" when referring to an actual plural number of authors. And further trouble was, Hetherington had the poor planning to prepare his paper in the era of typewriters rather than word processing programs that allow swift mass replacements of incorrect terms. Rather than retype the whole thing, he transformed Chester into "F. D. C. Willard," his colleague and co-author and thus justified the "we" he used.

The paper is the only work included on Chester's curriculum vitae, as most of his other experimental work -- tail chasing, napping, bothering birds and attacking unwary toes -- was not conducted in a format conducive to print.

Chester did, however, suggest an experiment in which Dr. Schrödinger would put on his shoes without checking them first, showing how there was no way to know beforehand which of them Chester had used in lieu of his litterbox. This was not carried out, as the great professor had passed away some 14 years earlier, so Chester returned to his nap.

Pot Calling the Kettle 'Over!'

What do you call it when a group of Venezuelan citizens, pushed to the bring by food shortages and rampant inflation, runs their corrupt dictator out of town by banging pots in his face?

A step in the right direction. If they'd done it to the goofball goon they had in front of this one, they might not have to walk to Colombia to buy food.

Or Just a Brilliant Disguise?

Earlier this week scientists with the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) thought they'd picked up an interesting radio signal that might have been from another star. But, it turns out, the signal was actually terrestrial in origin -- possibly a Russian military satellite.

Which could be exactly what the aliens want us to think, so I'm still skeptical. In any event, the researchers mailed the data to the Search for Terrestrial Intelligence institute so they could investigate it, but the envelope came back, "Recipient Moved -- No Forwarding Address."

Who Built This Song?

Over at GQ, Rob Tannenbaum has an "oral history" of Starship's "We Built This City," a 1985 hit that was nominated for a Grammy in its time but widely derided today.

Blender magazine may have erred in 2004 by labeling it the "worst rock and roll song of all time," at least in any universe in which John Lennon released "Imagine." Their dissection of it as corporatized synth pop masquerading as social commentary is mostly accurate, of course. And they are quite correct in saying that its lyrics are silly rhyming couplets masquerading as profound insight (although the person who has never felt "knee-deep in the hoopla" has never attended a committee meeting).

But the same things can be said about some of the best rock and roll songs of all time, too (Substitute "most favorite" and "least favorite" for "best" and "worst," if you prefer). If I had to pinpoint what I think is the reason "City" is so lousy, it's because it takes itself and its genre so seriously. Rock and roll didn't build San Francisco -- and you could make a good case that the popular culture of the '60s represented by Starship when it was still Jefferson Airplane didn't build much of anything.

It brought about some great music, yes, but the lasting achievements of the US in the 1960s -- the moon landing, civil rights legislation, increasing equality for women, and so on -- didn't come from anyone in a paisley caftan and pink sunglasses.

Anyway, the article at GQ is fun because it's interesting to see how many of the people involved with "City" don't want to be connected to it anymore. Sorry about the rant.

The Academic Jungle

Universities have been around for seven or eight hundred years, and complaints about university student behavior have been around for about the same time. Each fall, 18-year-olds are packed off to some campus somewhere with new sheets, a load of new debt and a sincere desire to only mix hedonism into their scholarship and a belief that's possible.

To aid them, adults offer guidance or even give them books written by professionals about how to succeed in this new life chapter. These too are apparently as old as the institutions, as this passage from a 1484 Leipzig University statute quoted by Ask the Past suggests:

"It is commanded to all students that none of them henceforth in the streets or ways of this town wield swords, knives, daggers, or any other arms, or wander about in costume or with faces covered in these aforementioned places, or stir up horrible clamors at nighttime in the manner of wild asses, or participate in forbidden games either in the taverns of this city or the outlying areas or villages around the city, or attempt to perpretrate there any ill deeds at all, or dare to disturb or injure the inhabitants of this city or any others, either bodily or in property, or dare to afflict them with any other injuries."

Sgt.-at-Arms Douglas C. Neidermeyer was reportedly not pleased.