Author: paladin1787

xkcd faves

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Long live the nerd! Computer engineers played by actors fawn over Ajay Bhatt, co-inventor of USB, in this hilarious commercial for Intel.

T-minus 18 days until school starts again. Man, I need a job. Otherwise I spend all day, as I have the past few, reading. Thoreau usually tops my list, but this time it’s been shorter bursts of stuff like Orion magazine (cover to cover, of course).

What’s that, you say? Certainly Orion hasn’t taken up the 30 hours of free time I’ve had in the past five days? You’re right. I have a new obsession. (Journalists get paid to develop short-term obsessions and then tell everyone else about how cool this thing is. I love my career path.)

Last month it was underground dinners. This month I think I’ve fallen into the world of nerdiness. Enter xkcd.

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Industry turmoil

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The Chicago Tribune sports the largest newsroom in the midwest, according to its advertising campaign. I chuckle at that choice. I wonder how many other journalists do, too. (CC Flickr photo from Alex Barth)

When I turned to the journalism field for my career, the thought that most plagued me was this: generally, to make any money, one must join a very large corporation—likely a conglomerate with lots of power.

That just never sat right with me. With lots of power comes lots of responsibility, which isn’t usually handled properly. Not that I could do better. Just that I know people are human like me.

But in the past couple years and months, the larger news corporations have fared much worse than smaller ones. …Am I the only one who’s happy about this?

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Books shed light on financial crisis

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Wall Street’s historic district, with the New York Stock Exchange on the right and the JP Morgan & Co. building on the left. (CC Photo from epicharmus’ Flickr account.)

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Simon Johnson explains what three new books about the financial crisis tell us.

(Simon Johnson is co-founder of the blog BaselineScenario, co-author of “13 Bankers,” to be published in April, and a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.)

Wall Street executives “won,” Johnson said. They “kept their jobs, their bonuses and their pensions; they benefited from unprecedented rule changes and unlimited monetary and fiscal support; and their firms became even bigger and more dangerous to the economic health of society.”

Johnson explains that Andrew Haldane, head of financial stability at the Bank of England, “has become blunt about the way our banking system interacts with (and rips off) taxpayers.” Johnson quotes Haldane in a recent paper:

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Speaking of Columbia College…

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A screenshot from “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2,” the most complex and realistic modern battle video game to date. (Creative Commons photo from the Flikr account of bigdigo)

Have you heard about the $1.6 million the Pentagon is giving us to develop, essentially, a video game to train infantry?

Two media outlets have reported it to my knowledge, a Sun-Times blog and this military blog post. But both of them simply copy-pasted from a release by the office of U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL):

The Fiscal Year (FY) 2010 defense spending bill includes funding for the following projects:
· Columbia College Chicago, Chicago. $1,600,000 in funding for the Construct Program at Columbia College Chicago, which will develop interactive simulations for military training that provide soldiers with the ability to train in computerized real world environments. The program requires users to complete training tasks as a team and allows for the tracking and recording of motions and other characteristics of each participant during each training session. This capability, along with Construct’s ability to review session data in multiple visual formats, will allow the Army to better train soldiers for military conflicts at the unit level.

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Merry Christmas!

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Take extra time and expend extra effort to hug your family or friends this fine day.

Loving other people is, supposedly, what today is about. I think the Jesus who does simply that (but not weakly, that) gets lost in the shuffle.

Here’s a poem by Russel Jaffe, who got a Poetry MFA from Columbia in 2008. It was included in our president’s creepy-cool holiday card to us.

Personal destination

This year, be generous
by cyclical, land gently,
Soar this time as yourself,
let winter lights bend around your trail