…it doesn’t matter how much you have.
Case in point: Almost 80% of NFL players near bankruptcy two years after they retire.
Archive for the ‘Symbolism’ Category
When you don’t know how to handle money
Sunday, March 21st, 2010Laws_of_Armed_Conflict.PPT
Thursday, February 25th, 2010The pair of war crime prosecutors who indicted Charles Taylor back in 2003 have created a new firm, CW Group, that offered legal services to Guinea’s military regime. They made a 14-slide PowerPoint presentation, apparently aimed at educating the military’s officers and soldiers about the laws governing warfare (and maybe even get them to not violate them so egregiously?) [FP]
I guess if you’re going to have a military, you should teach your soldiers about the rules of war, somehow… But PowerPoint? Really?
One imagines that in the original .ppt version, these bullet points (pun intended?) “Civilians!” “Medical personnel!” and “Prisoners!” would fly in from the right side of the slide, with that car-zooming-and-screeching-to-halt sound effect.
Perhaps the excessive use of PowerPoint is the real war crime here…
Is Andrew Breitbart coming to take us down?
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010Breitbart, editor for the Drudge Report and a media figure in his own right, confronted Max Blumenthal at CPAC over Blumenthal’s article on James O’Keefe (summary: the dude who spied on ACORN maybe is somewhat of a white nationalist).
Breitbart’s not done yet. He is having so much fun he now wants to take down the “institutional left,” and he believes this will happen “within the next three weeks”:
He might be referring to his appearance on former Congressman (and radio personality!) Ernest Istook’s Harvard Institute of Politics study group, “Propaganda in American Politics.” Breitbart is scheduled to be a guest speaker next week, which falls within the deadline he gave on a Fox News show that attracts more viewers at 3AM than CNN at 8PM.
This is a must-not-miss event. What better way to take down the institutional left than to corrupt influence the minds of young Harvard intellectuals who will lead the institutions? It worked for Peggy Noonan.
(EDIT: Didn’t happen. Some anti-global warming guy came instead. The institutional left survives.)
[Media Matters via Gawker]
Wyclef Jean: Harvard Foundation Artist of the Year
Friday, February 19th, 2010The announcement comes on the heels of the Harvard for Haiti Benefit Concert, which raised over $37,000 for earthquake relief efforts. All the money from the concert will go to Partners in Health.
The Harvard Foundation and the Office for the Arts at Harvard are different entities, but wouldn’t it make sense — given that the OAH and concert organizers are using the arts to promote aid for Haiti — to donate at least part of the concert proceeds to Jean’s Yele Haiti organization?
The money will go to Partners most likely because its co-founder is Harvard professor Paul Farmer, a graduate from the med school. Or perhaps it’s due to the increasing amount of negative information coming out about Jean’s foundation.
Give Jean the voice, not the money?
Hopefully the Harvard Foundation will not have to regret its choice.
The 2010 speakers
Thursday, February 18th, 2010Commencement: Former Justice David Souter.
Class Day: CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. (General feeling in our circles: “Several seniors expressed ambivalence about the choice—a sentiment that may stem from a lack of recognition of Amanpour’s name among some individuals.” Let’s hope her speech is a good one.)
Amy Bishop, the UAH Faculty Senate, and Campus Residency
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010A memorial page has been set up for the UAH victims [Legacy].
Amy Bishop, who had problems with “noise and kids” when she lived in MA, recently opposed a policy that would require all freshmen and sophomores to live on campus. She spoke against it during one of UAH’s Faculty Senate meetings late last year [al.com].
Most of the UAH Faculty Senate website is currently inaccessible, but Google again does its job [Minutes] [Senate Journal][Resolutions Passed] [Executive Committee Reports] [Upcoming Meetings] [Bills Pending]
Bishop’s Faculty Senate involvement, bills proposed, and other things we found after the jump:
Demon Sheep
Thursday, February 4th, 2010
A newly released ad from Carly Fiorina features a red-eyed “Demon Sheep” which is a guy dressed up as a sheep. Most of the ad sucks, so if you don’t want to watch all 3 minutes of it, skip ahead to 2:25. [WP]
R.I.P. Chris Brown’s Twitter account, killer named and at large
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009CNN writes the obituary. Let us remember the short but great life of Chris Brown’s Twitter, mechanicaldummy:
Brown began using Twitter as a way to connect to his fans after he pleaded guilty and was sentenced for beating his then-girlfriend Rihanna.
Whether it was an attempt to garner favorable public relations in the wake of an image-shattering event or just a late adaptation to the microblogging craze, Brown had spent the months after the incident using his Twitter account to reach and connect with 172,366 followers.
He tweeted regularly thanking his fans for their continued support and sounding off after concerts.
It was unclear what specifically sparked Brown to delete his account, named “mechanicaldummy,” He had started the day with a normal “good morning” message to his fans.
12/14/09. NEVER FORGET.
Now they need to go back to more Tiger Woods coverage.
LONG JOHNSON for UC
Friday, November 13th, 2009This year’s official Kitsch/Posh endorsement for the presidency of the Harvard Undergraduate Council goes to the LONG JOHNSON ticket. [Long Johnson '09]
Here are some of the slogans they are running with:
Touching students everywhere.
We don’t go soft.
Servicing the student body.
Erecting a better Harvard.
Last year, the establishment managed to defeat the candidacy of Herr Michael Koenigs and that freshman chick from Alaska (McCain totally ripped that one off) by deploying an array of inside-job fake opposition tickets to split the dissenting vote. This time, however, there are only three tickets running…
But the monopoly of control over the political process has become complacent in its power and revealed its true nature: The Bowman/Hysen pair has received the endorsement of both the Democrats AND the Republicans. Showing that the two-party system is a shitshow designed to distract the masses while the powerful funnel the people’s money into their massive slush funds and distribute them to their friends, loyal supporters, and possibly prostitutes. They are so shameless that they even completely stole the web design of Long Johnson. [Bowman|Hysen for UC]
The Harvard Center for Ethics presents…Eliot Spitzer
Monday, November 9th, 2009No, really:
The title of the lecture is “From Ayn Rand to Ken Feinberg — How Quickly the Paradigm Shifts. What Should Be the Rationale for Government Participation in the Market?” We guess he will talk about how different New York would be if he could take down Wall Street and whatnot. That and/or prostitutes. [Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard] [Office of the Arts at Harvard]
The Left 4 Dead 2 Vitruvian Man
Monday, November 9th, 2009
(Click to enlarge. Excuse me for the quality of the picture, as I was running the L4D2 demo from my college laptop.)
The background: Valve recently released the Left 4 Dead 2 demo. Although the only game play mode officially offered is the standard survival bout, it took only about a week for members of the online community to figure out how to modify the files to allow people to play as the infected (zombies). This semi-versus mode is not perfect, however, and as a result every time a player switches between human and infected the system creates an extra survivor clone. This process can be repeated over a dozen times. Since there are only four character models for the survivors, continuous switching ensures that there are multiple copies of the same character. Yes, it’s awesome. The only downside is that the game still caps the total number of human players at four, which means that most of the survivor characters will be AI.
The story behind the picture: Three other players and I decided to spawn the maximum number of survivors using the mod/glitch technique so that we could fight them as infected in expert difficulty. There is a point in the second level of the Parish campaign where all the survivors must enter a trailer, close the door, and open another door that leads to a tower with an alarm that must be switched off. Sometimes the AI was unresponsive and would just stay stuck inside the trailer (they would also not stop repeating the same lines). The only way to kill them was to enter the trailer. I took this picture late in the game when only a few survivors were still alive. It shows multiple dead “Ellis” models one after another, partly covered by one of the remaining “Nick” models. We won the game shortly after.
The Mundell-Fleming GTA Hypothesis
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009Grand Theft Auto IV achievement and trophy loyalists will remember the “Impossible Trinity” reward received after completing the “Museum Piece” mission. Speculation abounded over the nature of the name and its significance, and later it was more or less revealed to be a teaser for the next two playable characters in the GTA IV episodic installments [Kotaku, Giant Bomb]
For me this discussion went by the wayside until just recently, when Professor Jeffrey Frieden lectured about the “unholy/impossible trinity” in international economics (formally derived from the Mundell-Fleming model). Basically, a country can at any time only choose two of three goals: 1) a fixed or pegged exchange rate, 2) an independent monetary policy, and 3) free capital mobility. Given a world where there is free capital mobility or capital controls can be avoided, countries will have to choose between 1 and 2. Although this is a simplistic way of looking at the model, one could argue that the US, which lets its currency float, has chosen 2. More information about this here and here.
What does this mean? Probably nothing. Maybe the person in charge of achievements had studied economics and was just having fun with the idea. Or maybe “impossible trinity” is one of those blanket terms that can refer to many things that come in 3′s, not just economics. Heck, I could write the religious hypothesis after this. But that should not stop the mass speculation! If you can only have 2 out of 3 characters, what are the GTA-specific reasons why you can’t have the 3rd? Is Niko Bellic representative of fixed exchange rates or free capital mobility?
…
Ok, it was probably just a broad term or a reference to religion. Extending economic models and hypotheses to try to interpret video game lore will just lead to a cluster****.