A Ku Indeed!

If you’re like me, you like to keep up on what’s going on in the political world, but a lot of times you just don’t have the time to read all the books required to truly understand some of the wonk-oriented policy disagreements. For me, one of those areas is economics. Is Obama’s stimulus a good thing? Bad thing? Much the argument comes down to a fight between Keynes (it’s good!) and Hayek (it’s bad!) and their outlooks on markets and governments.

I don’t have the time to read their books, but I do want to have an informed viewpoint. When the modern world is so busy, you need simplifying tools that can get the information you need without the need for massive time investment. No, I’m not talking about Wikipedia (though there’s that too). I’m talking about rap. See below.

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Yglesias has an interesting piece about the race (particularly China’s) to compete with world class Western universities. I can attest to this: I did get the impression when I was teaching in China that Tsinghua (which is arguably one of the best in China), wants to quickly become not just the best in the nation, but a top university in the world. I’m not sure about the state of other Chinese universities, but I think that if becoming world competitive will require attracting international faculty and international students, the Chinese will need to make quite a few improvements to their universities before that happens (in a variety of areas; even at Tsinghua there’s still a sense of “roughing it” that will deter many potential teachers/students). The Yglesias piece is good and provides some decent links.

In one place Yglesias wonders how you would even measure whether a university is any good, and how much should be even taken from the fact that a university can attract world-famous talent. Money quote from Yglesias:

The fact that our very best universities are world-famous and attract talent and interest for all around the globe is nice, but it can lead people to just assume that everything’s fine throughout the sector when the reality is that we actually have no idea.

Surely a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one?

I was soundly defeated this weekend by bread-making. It was a sad and pathetic attempt. However, not everything was so bad in the Goombah’s Bakery! As I’ve detailed elsewhere, I had a lot of success recently with New York style cheesecake. There were just a few little issues with it, but I knew I was close to really making an excellent one. So I did it again (to give away – jeez I can’t eat all this) and succeeded. I think I’ve made the perfect cheesecake. I now consider cheesecake pwned. I have scratched another notch into my Kitchen Aid mixer. See below for the proof.

UPDATE: Presentation, 10; Goombaliciousness, 8

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This week I set myself the (overly ambitious) challenge of making some Italian bread. The immediate reason is obvious: the bread made by the local indigenous population — they call it “Italian Bread” too — is really a loaf of Wonder Bread pulled out to look more oval shaped. It’s so damn awful I have a hard time coming up with the right words to describe it. So it’s no surprise that it’s on my Goombah Gourmet list. However, try as I did to reconstruct Italian Bread this weekend, I failed. Miserably. Three times. I have clearly met the enemy in baking bread. I may have gone down in flames this time, but three battles doesn’t decide a war. I’ll be back after I’ve licked my wounds (and read some decent material on baking Italian bread).  I outline the disaster below.

RESULTS: Presentation – 2; Goombaliciousness – 3

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I realize that this post was supposed to be about bread. Let’s just say that my bread escapades did not go so well yesterday, so I’ll be returning to that tomorrow after I get another crack at it. In the meantime, on Friday night I made (among other things) chicken parmigiana, and it’s a great Italian meal that needs to be added to the Goombah’s bag of culinary tricks. We’ll talk about the bread thing later on (if I am not soundly defeated again, that is, and then I might just act as though it never happened).

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I just saw this story at CNN about the ethical dilemma of cruise ships stopping in Haiti while in the capital there is such sheer devastation due to the earthquake. The article (and the ethics professor quoted) suggest that there’s no ethical problem, but the reasoning is very clearly utilitarian (cruise ships = money = trickle down effects for Haiti). Anyone have any opinions on this? Trickle down or not, I can assure you I wouldn’t be vacationing in Haiti at the moment. There are other ways to contribute to the trickle down effect there, if that’s your concern.

I was watching the recent interview on CNN between Christine Amanpour and Mark Theissen on the subject of dealing with terrorist suspects and detainees and at one point Theissen’s reasoning left me frantically scratching my head as I tried to fathom his logic. More specifically, in the clip Amanpour takes Theissen to task for supporting waterboarding and so for supporting torture as a consequence. Theissen’s denies that water boarding is torture (it’s merely an EIT). Fine, the “arguments” for this position are commonly known at this point, but Theissen’s specific way of refuting Amanpour’s argument was a new one and it really let me shaking my head. Check below.

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Thomas Benton is the pseudonym of a liberal arts professor in Michigan. I know his name because a few years ago he penned a pretty depressing – but realistic – letter to undergraduates urging them to consider some centrally grim economic realities about the academic world before making the decision to go to graduate school for anything within the Humanities. I typically recommend that my students read it as they ponder graduate study. I can assure you that no student walks away from it feeling optimistic. Well, Benton’s at it again with this piece in the recent edition of the Chronicle. This time he’s even more sobering and negative, moving from what was an earlier “think first before doing this” position to a “you’ve got to be completely crazy if you do this” stance.

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When I told my daughter Parker that I was going to made pasta (okay, maybe gnocchi isn’t technically pasta), she looked at me with a strange confused look. “You’re going to make pasta?” she asked. Offering me what was apparently a tip, she then threw in, “pasta comes in a box, you just have to add it to water.”

I sighed. It’s just this kind of stuff that is driving the whole Goombah Gourmet project. If my daughters grow up thinking that pasta is what comes in a box, or that good pizza is what comes from Domino’s, or that good Italian food comes from Olive Garden, I’ll hang my head in shame, a failure of my cultural and regional upbringing. I just can’t let it happen.

That comment gave me even more determination to continue on. So that means it’s time to move on to mission 4 — home made gnocchi.

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The Italian Cheesecake (from Mission I) that I made last time was not that big a success. Bah — let’s call it was it was — a failure. It looked real good on the outside, but it didn’t have much going on inside (sort of like the Saturn Sky sports coupe). However, I don’t like being defeated, so I had to return to the scene of the (culinary) crime and take this challenge on again in order to secure some respect. This time, however, I’m jumping over to a NY style cheesecake. Besides, my wife is a fan of the NY cheesecake and I need to maintain at least some modicum of harmony in my castle. So I get to kill two birds with one stone with this one.

Of course, there’s a third reason too. A budding Goombah has to have a successful cheesecake recipe up his sleeve. It’s the baking version of a sauce, so it’s a fundamental part of a Goombah’s repertoire (at some point, you need to add Italian bread too, but first things first). So until you get the basics down, there’s just no sense moving on to anything else. So back to the cheesecake we go.

UPDATED RESULTS: Presentation: 7, Goombaliciousness: 9.5

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The prospect of learning Chinese in your forties is…well…a bit intimidating.  Of the four languages I’ve taken on (achieving various levels of success), this one is the most fun and the most challenging.  For me, the hardest part of Chinese is listening comprehension. The coolest is learning all the hanzi (written characters) and reading.  In the beginning, when I started my formal tutoring in China, I found this part to be murder even though I was surrounded by Chinese everywhere I looked. I just couldn’t remember the damn things. Somewhere along the way, I figured out that I was doing it the wrong way. I was making a newbie green mistake apparently.

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Now that my long sabbatical is effectively over (sigh), it’s time to start thinking about school again and about issues that haven’t crossed my mind in a while. As I was putting together my syllabi, one of them struck me: the issue of how to write a proper email to a professor. Perhaps it’s just me, but I get the distinct impression that with respect to emails the writing skills of many of my students has degraded to an almost embarrassing level. The problem is so bad at times that I keep reminding myself to put some policy about it into my syllabus, but I never get around to doing it (which is why I thought of it while crafting a syllabus). The main reason it never makes it into the syllabus is that I’m not convinced yet that this is just a personal problem that I have with email correspondence, or if this is really a problem that lots of people see and think needs to be addressed. Moreover, I’m not sure it’s my job to combat it.

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One of my many projects over sabbatical was to rethink my Asian Ethics course. The main population of this course consists not of philosophy majors (though they enroll too, but I teach a more specific and directed course for them), but rather two main groups of students: first, and foremost, those seeking to fulfill the Ethics component of our general education requirements at my university and secondly, students enrolled in Asian studies.

A major source of weakness in the course before, as I saw it, was that it focused a bit too heavily just on seeing texts from a philosophical point of view. Students enjoyed the course, but I personally found it a bit stiff. I felt that students didn’t really come away appreciating the Asian component as much as they could have. Instead, they got a course in ethics using Asian texts. To fix this, I though, I needed to make the course more interdisciplinary. So I’ve made some changes. Not huge ones, but I’ve made a start.

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