I am … unhindered by talent

Our Dear Friends in the Minnesota legislature have just sent a higher ed funding bill to our Beloved “Governor”, who has promised to veto it the moment it hits his desk. Oh, joy.

What’s really depressing is that the bill going forward is hardly impressive.

“Over three bienniums, we are still 6 percent below what would we would have been if we had just been doing an inflationary increase,” [Sen. Sandy] Pappas said. “So this is not a generous budget.” [Source]

“Governor” Pawlenty essentially held the legislature hostage with his veto threats, which did nothing to generate enthusiasm for the process:

“We took a bill that was 110 percent likely to get vetoed and reduced it to 100 percent,� Sen. Ray Vandeveer. [Source]

Golly Neds, that sure makes me want to play.

What ticks me off, though, is the hypocrisy and/or stupidity of the players, especially all those “fiscal conservatives” who just can’t seem to grasp the idea of a public investment in the future of our state and region. Our “Governor” and the Republican dominated legislature of the past several years has led a gutting of the state’s education system from K-12 through to higher ed. The Morris Area School District is struggling to keep some of their best (but unfortunately junior) teachers, in significant part because of failure to appropriately fund at the state level, and the U of M has been forced to balance cuts on the backs of student tuition.

Sadly typical of the process has been the continuing tuition debacle. Drastic cuts to the U’s budgets have led to significant increases in tuition; there were hopes that some budget increases this year could help end the double digit percentage tuition increases, but it’s clear that Our “Governor” and his Repubs aren’t genuinely interested making education broadly available to the state’s citizens. This is hardly rocket science - the U’s two main sources of funding are the state and tuition, and if you slash one, you have to increase the other to stay in business. And still some our elected representatives have the nerve to whine about the tuition increases they directly helped bring about:

Rep. Mark Buesgens, R-Jordan, mocked the bill’s language informing college administrators the Legislature expects them to keep tuitions down.

“Just the expectation — Just the, ‘Would you pretty please not raise tuition so gosh darn high?’” Buesgens said. [Source]

What’s this guy want? He could try slashing the U’s budget again and see if that lowers tuition…

I really want to rant about the textbook cost nonsense, but that needs to wait - papers must be graded.

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House Poem, originally uploaded by Hryckowian.

This wonderful photograph is of Huang Xiang’s house in Pittsburgh. Quoting Hryckowian’s description of the image:

Huang Xiang is a poet from the Hunan Province of China. While he has been likened to Walt Whitman, the majority of his countrymen do not know his work, his poetry, or his plight. His work has been banned in China and he was imprisoned for 12 years of his life for simply trying to live a life of creativity. Fortunately, through the City of Asylum program, he and his family were brought to the United States and to Pittsburgh, where he has been living since 2004.

As you can see on the right (Huang Xiang: House Poem/Dream Nest, originally uploaded by simonk), the poet has quite literally covered his Pittsburgh home with his writing. To quote Hryckowian again:

…the entire house is covered in characters, poetry, words he would be tortured for in China, but he can share with the world and anyone who cares to pass by here. His words reach from his roof to the foundation, and defy anyone who would try to silence him.

Kind of makes me wish I could read Chinese.

I’d never heard of the City of Asylum program, but it sounds very cool. I wonder if we could ever pull together the resources for Morris to act as a host city? It wouldn’t be a trivial thing (a two year stay would easily cost over $100K), but I could imagine that there might be authors out there who would find time in a quiet rural community very useful.

The other rub, of course, is that much of America (and certainly lots of homogeneous, small town America) is all for free speech as long as you don’t say too many things we don’t want to hear. Bringing a powerful, outspoken writer with that kind of history into a small community could certainly have some unexpected consequences. But I suspect that could be a good thing, and likely a story worth telling.

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Hero of the guitar, originally uploaded by Unhindered by Talent.

Each year UMM’s computer science folks have a end-of-the-year picnic called the Byte Bash. This year’s bash was Saturday passed, and unfortunately upheld the recent tradition of icky weather, being cool, damp, and dreary. Consequently we had it inside in the lab again.

Thus instead of frisbee and hacky sack, the afternoon was devoted to highly geeky pursuits, including Sub-Evil Boy playing way too much “Guitar Hero” (pictured above). We also ended up grilling large numbers of brats and burgers on little indoor electric grills, which just isn’t the same as charcoal outside :-).

Still, fun was had, food was eaten, officers for next year were elected, and inflatable Mazda balls were juggled. If you want to see too many pictures, head over to my photo set from the event.

(Back under quarters classes didn’t end until June, and we usually had great weather for the Byte Bash. Since switching to semesters, however, and ending in early May, the track record has become much spottier.)

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Tomorrow resting on yesterday, originally uploaded by Unhindered by Talent.

Shot a bunch of stuff yesterday (5 May) in part because I was hoping to get something useful for the 24 hours of Flickr project. (Ego is a wonderful thing :-)!)

I’ll be cleaning up and posting some of these over the next few days, but I confess that this is one of my favorites. This was taken in the wildflower garden out front. That’s a tree seed resting on a leaf from last year; it looks all pretty and green there, but those darn tree seeds are possibly my most annoying source of weeds :-(.

This shot is also an annoying reminder of how much cleaning needs to be done in the gardens now that Spring is full upon us. I’m currently using grading and the blustery wet weather as my excuse for puttin git off, but eventually I’ll have to buck up and get out there…

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Popu, originally uploaded by fraud_art.

The Flickr folks are finally getting around to doing a “Day in the life of Flickr” sort of event called “24 Hours of Flickr“. (It seems like such an obvious idea, I’m really surprised they haven’t done it earlier.)

Today (5 May) is the big day, and the photos are already collecting with enthusiasm, with nearly 500 photos there now. (I’d expect many thousands before it’s all over - there are over 22K people that have joined the group.) So go take some cool shots and add them to this record of the day on the planet. If you’re lucky (and good) they may include your image in a book they’ll be producing later.

It’s all wet and dreary here (but we needed the rain!), so I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do. We have the annual Byte Bash (UMM computer science club picnic) this afternoon, and I was hoping for some cool shots there, but the weather makes that less clear. We’ll see, though. Unfortunately the business of both the day and the end of the year (grading! grading! grading!) mean that I can’t go out on a photo safari of any consequence. Such is life.

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PeeZed has already righteously outraged over the insansity of letting a schmuck like Behe write the Dawkins profile for the Time 100. I’ll simply point out that the tone of his “profile” is wildly out of line with the others that I’ve looked over, and someone on Time’s editorial board should be in for a serious smacking.

Time’s “Alt 100” is in many ways just as perceptive as their official list. While the whole American Idol silliness is deeply depressing to me, and while the idea of Idol judges being among the 25 most important people in the country makes me want to cry, it’s hard to argue with their analysis:

More people vote on American Idol than the Presidential elections, Xzibit pointed out. And almost as much is written about it.

Sigh.

And then there’s this gem:

25. Osama Bin Laden, head of Al Qeda
The panel pointed out that he’s likely to outlast Bush as head of an organization.

Oh, joy. Makes me proud to be an American.

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Apparently a woman in Maine dropped and broke a fluorescent bulb in her daughter’s bedroom and was (legitimately) concerned about exposure to the mercury in the bulb. She called various state offices to find out what to do, and ended up with an estimate of over $2K to have experts come and clean up, which is clearly absurd. Not surprisingly, members of the loony contingent raced to use this as an argument for why fluorescent bulbs are a Bad Idea, and presumably chalking up yet another piece of evidence for why this whole global climate thing is a conspiracy of treehugging wackos like myself.

Fortunately, as PeeZed and others have pointed out, the EPA has a nice factsheet (pdf) on fluorescent bulbs, that includes straightforward (and affordable) advice on how to handle broken bulbs. Basically, you sweep the stuff up carefully, put it in a plastic bag, and take it to a local disposal site if there is one in your area, or put it in your regular trash if not. Much like I might do with any caustic household chemical. Or, in fact, a bunch of broken glass from a pop bottle.

So clearly she got bad advice from her state offices, and there was definitely some whacked reporting of the incident, both of which were unfortunate. Neither, however, is a reason not to use fluorescent bulbs, just a reason to think carefully about what you read.

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OK - total ego post here; feel free to look the other way. But this photo got used in a blog post on Wired’s web site! Not quite as cool as having it in the magazine, but still pretty darn spiffy :-).

The piece in question briefly discusses two bills currently making their way (fairly easily) through Congress that would beef up support for both scientific research, and science and math education in the U.S.

The bit I really loved (in the worst sort of way), was this quote from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget’s response (pdf):

Especially problematic are the dramatic increases in authorization levels, particularly for programs too new to have been rigorously evaluated for success in meeting their stated goals. The Administration also strongly objects to the provision of the bill that creates a pilot program that would fund construction and maintenance of high school science laboratories, an activity that is not an appropriate role of the Federal government.

Wow. The idea that this administration could have any credibility in “rigorous evaluation” just boggles the mind. Like WMDs were a sure thing, and climate change wasn’t happening, and evolution is “just a theory”. Not that I object to careful analysis of the value of programs, I’m just not convinced that this administration has the first clue what those words mean.

I’m also pretty amazed that the Federal government isn’t supposed to be helping schools build science labs. Federal funds support all sorts of infrastructure initiatives, from highways to Head Start (and Halliburton, but that’s another story), so what’s the problem here? I can imagine having concerns about the administration of such a program (just as one needs to be concerned about the administration of any such program), but the basic idea of supporting learning facilities in areas vital to the intellectual (and, ultimately, economic) health of the country hardly seems like rocket science.

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