Hey, Teacher Administrator, Leave Them Undergrads Alone

I’ve been thinking a lot the past few weeks about College. Not so much the drunken memories of bad ideas from yesteryear, but rather about the sort of violence problems inherent in the system. There’s a lot sort of wrong with higher education in this country, but having a rather small sample I really can’t claim my observations are perticularly scientific. However, I do think that many of the problems could be solved with a fairly simple solution. I’ll use, oh, the not-at-all-randomly selected University of Oregon.

Now, the University of Oregon is on quarters and required 180 hours for my degree. Of those 62 hours had to be upper-division, some proportion had to be completed at the University of Oregon, 168 had to be taken for a grade (or transfer credit), 45 had to be taken at the University of Oregon for a grade, etc. The University also has, of course, general education requirements. 8 “multicultural” hours, 8 of written English, 16 of “Arts and Letters”, 16 “Social Science”, 16 “Science”, 12 hours of Mathematics for the Bachelor of Science, plus my degree requirements. I, and every other sot at the school, spent basically the first two years of his or her college experience retaking high school. Don’t believe me? The first day in WR122 (the second of two required writing courses, fortunately I’d placed out of the first) consisted of instructions in how to construct a proper thesis statement. Wait, no, excuse me, enthymeme. Yes, that’s right, they tried to teach us to construct logically unsound arguments around which to base papers. Frankly, I’d rather put all of my premises out in the open, thank-you-very-much. In any case, these are the sorts of things one should’ve learned in high school. If one didn’t, that really isn’t anyone else’s problem, and paying customers students should not be made to suffer through that sort of tripe. The same can be said for introductory World History courses, or introductory Science classes of any sort. By the time you’ve had 12 years of schooling, well, you certainly shouldn’t be unsure as to whether or not the Earth goes ’round the Sun. If you are, well, that’s your problem.

And here we have arrived at what I see as the root of the entire college problem: in order to obtain a degree, you are required to sit through what amount to another two years of high school. The material isn’t engaging, and it makes damn sure students are burned out by the time they can take the classes they’re actually interested in. So get rid of it. Instead of requiring all of that crap university wide, require 180 hours, only 30 of which can be taken pass/fail. Allow the individual departments to make whatever requirements they want: so the Journalism school might still require a bunch of the same stuff it requires, but the Mathematics department might keep the same degree requirements that they have now. Rather than “making students well-rounded” by forcing them to sample any number of the bad appetizers the university system has to offer, they would be free to take classes of their own interest and still get a degree in four years.

Runner’s Woes

Back in the before time, that is before I went to college and got lazy, I did a lot of running. I missed state in Cross Country by less than two seconds, twice, because in my league around Portland a 16:29 5k just wasn’t fast enough to get you there. I didn’t exactly do badly at track, but 4:14 in the 1500 is pretty mediocre as far as these things go and my 800 time never got under two minutes. Anyway, I used to do that whole running thing. And I liked it.

Unlike Miss Vague whose relationship with that particular beast is a little more…complicated. She suffers a pain known only to hikers, joggers, and distance runners: shin splints. Most folks think of shin splints as any form of pain on the front of the lower leg below the knee. Not true! There can be localized muscle soreness from use like with any other muscle, but shin splints are a quite specific injury. Basically, the shin muscle is coming off of the bone. As one might imagine, this hurts like hell.

WebMD suggests ice, rest, stretching and strengthening. Interestingly, they give a pretty decent explanation of everything but the last. When I had this problem, thankfully only a couple of times, the following two steps worked for me.

1) Immediately after running and cool down, take a whole cube of ice out of the freezer and run it up and down your shin until it is completely melted. Repeat for the other shin. You will want to put a towel down, probably.

2) In order to strengthen the shin so that the muscle adheres to the bone better, stand on your heels with your toes pointed up as high as possible and walkd 30-60 meters a day. We always did this as part of our warm-up just to make sure it got done, and it worked wonders. Calf-raises also help, but they don’t help nearly as much as the shin strengthening.

And that is today’s random tidbit from my wealth of random knowledge. Go forth and do this in rememberance of me. Or something.

The Plank Demonstrates Why I Don’t Have Comments

I blog purely for my own amusement, so I don’t have much to add to the whole Jerome Armstrong-Kos-Astrology-Stockpumping thing, but the comments on that linked post at TNR and this one in which Zengerle admits to making a really bone-headed mistake go fairly quickly to the dogs. Not the most vicious I’ve seen in the blogosphere, but still farily ad hominem and unfair. Of course, the interntron mixes anonomity with distance, a recipie for childish and vitriolic attacks. Then again, I put to print a magazine issue with “take a goddamn bath and get a job, you lazy, socialist fuck” as a pull-quote. What the hell do I know?

Corn Syrup and You, A User’s Guide.

Recent topics over at Hit & Run have led me to do a little bit of investigation into the exact nature of High Fructose Corn Syrup. One of the trolls commenters over there, a “Dave W” is absolutely convinced, beyond all evidence, that High Fructose Corn Syrup used to sweeten things is causing some sort of rise in diabetes. Also, that it is a conspiracy, and that scientists are too lazy to investigate his supposed causal link.

I am no scientific expert, but there are some basics that need to be gone over, and those are not that hard to understand, frankly. First of all, what’s the difference between High Fructose Corn Syrup and sucrose (table sugar)? Frankly, when it comes to soda sweetening, not all that much. The HFCS used in colas has a fructose/glucose sugar ratio of 55/45, by contrast sucrose is a disaccharide that’s 50/50. The other main difference is that in sucrose the fructose and glucose are bonded together, whereas they’re already separated in High Fructose Corn Syrup.

HFCS at that proportion can also taste sweeter than sucrose. It’s on the order of 1.3 times as sweet as sucrose at that concentration, at the 42% fructose concentration it tastes about the same and at the 90% fructose concentration it is much sweeter. The industry site linked above claims that HFCS-55 is taste-equivalent to sugar and can be substituted on a 1:1 basis.

I’ve seen the 1.3:1 number in more places than the 1:1 number, so for what follows that’s what I’m going to use. In the extended entry I will do the same sort of calculations for the 1:1 ratio of HFCS to sucrose. I’ll get along to how the nutrition would work out differently with taste-equivalent amounts of sucrose versus HFCS in a minute, but first I want to talk about the sugar proportions of a popular substitute for soda: apple juice.

As an example, Tropicana 100% apple juice has 25g of sugar per 8oz serving, 48g in the 15.2oz container that you find standard in most convienience stores. In a 100% apple juice product, there is roughly a 2:1 ratio of fructose to glucose with sucrose composing 10-20% of the total sugar, meaning that somewhere between 58% and 70% of the total sugar in a commercial 100% apple juice product will be fructose. Meaning that of the 48g of sugar in the aforementioned container of apple juice, something like 27.84g to 33.6g is fructose.

Over a 12oz serving there are 37.5g of sugar in that apple juice, which translates to about 21.75g to 26.35g of fructose per 12oz portion. If you compare this with the 39g of sugar in a Cocacola Classic 12oz can, which is 55% fructose from HFCS and thusly 21.45g of fructose, you can see that by-and-large on an equivalent serving basis the apple juice and soda have about the same amount of fructose. In some cases the juice might, in fact, have quite a bit more. Granted, the apple juice has a few nutrients that are, well, rather lacking from the soda, but on a purely sugar basis the amount of fructose in each is roughly equivalent.

In the context of banning soft drinks in schools, to replace them in the vending machines with juices, this won’t accomplish much. Even if one concedes, out of sportsmanship, that fructose is somehow worse for you than glucose, apple juice will provide the same more fructose than soda on a unit-volume basis. Citrus juices are about 50/50 fructose/glucose, and so on a unit-volume basis will provide slightly less fructose than soda. Tropicana Pure Premium Orange Juice (original), for instance, has 33g of sugar per 12oz serving, half of that is fructose, so it’s 16.5g of fructose per 12oz serving. Does a 4.95g difference? Maybe, but being that your just swapping fructose for glucose, and the metabolic processes aren’t too different, I’m going to guess not. The difference works out to about 4 lbs of fructose replaced by glucose, assuming one traded one 12oz serving of soda for one 12oz serving of OJ everyday of the year. Not really all that much, when you think about it.

Now that’s out of the way, let’s move on to examine what would happen if all of the HFCS in soda was replaced magically, overnight, by sucrose. If HFCS is 1.3 times as sweet as sucrose, that means that the 39g of sugar in Coke from HFCS will be replaced by 50.7g of sucrose to achieve a taste-equivalent level of sweetness. So, of those 50.7g of sugar, 25.35 of them would be fructose. Thusly, not only would your total sugar intake increase by 30%, but your intake of fructose would increase by 18%. If fructose is worse for you, it is hard to see how this might be an improvement*.

This all leads to one very obvious conclusion, even from a guy who only understands the basics of chemistry: that switching to sucrose from HFCS for the purposes of sweetening soft drinks is unlikely to have a large effect on the amount of fructose one consumes. Further, at worst, it could increase total sugar consumption fairly substantially. So, Dave’s of the world, please relax and have a nice cold soda. Put it on my tab.
(more…)

It’s Come To This?

In the midst of a shooting war in two different countries, a looming budget deficit problem, and any number of issues of national import, what do our beloved tolerated Congresscritters have time for? Investigating the BCS. My alma mater may be out of BCS running due to the strange voodoo running the BCS, but is this really a matter for Congress? First steroids, then videogames, now this.

We really need to dock their pay. And can all of them.

Is the New York Times Staffed By Monkeys?

That seems to be a fair question to ask, as their latest piece on the economy contains this piece of great insight:

Gasoline prices-the national average is now $2.15, according to the Energy Information Administration- have fallen because higher prices tamped down demand and supplies in the Gulf Coast have been slowly restored.

Read that sentence again. Are you blinking in pure confusion? Me too. Think about this for a second: “higher prices tamped down demand and supplies in the Gulf Coast have been slowly restored“. How else are prices going to fall? Are the magic pricing fairies going to wave their sugar-sweet pixie sticks and mystically change the market-clearing price? Have you ever even taking an economics class, Vikas Bajaj?

The activity described is exactly how all markets, everywhere, work. Gee, a decrease in demand and an increase in supply lowered the price! Shocking! That’s exactly what anyone with even the smallest amount of knowledge about economics would expect. Because, you see, prices arise from the interaction of supply and demand…when either changes, so will prices.

The post-Katrina gas prices were the product of what’s called a shock to the market: a giant hurricane destroyed most of the refining on the Gulf coast where most domestic refining is done, so prices went up, now that those facilities are coming back, prices are going down, fairly obvious. Unless you’re a reporter for the New York Times.

There Oughtn’t Be A Law

I got in a really, really silly argument with my lovely girlfriend a number of weeks ago…an argument about jam.

You see, I have a proclivity for Smucker’s Black Raspberry Jam which, for some reason or another, Amanda insists is not actually jam. In her world, apparently, the fruit product in question must contain seeds in order to be jam.

We insisted at one another that the product either was (my position) or was not (her position) certainly jam. Finally, because I am a pedant, I declared that there was likely a law about it. I wanted to be wrong, but I knew that the FDA would never let something as important as the labeling of fruit spreads to go unregulated. And, lo, 21 CFR 150 — FRUIT BUTTERS, JELLIES, PRESERVES, AND RELATED PRODUCTS.

This is the sort of world in which we live. Whether or not you’re allowed to make apple-pear jam is regulated by the federal government. The way in which you must label said jam, if you are even allowed to produce it, is regulated by the federal government. The ingredients and disclosure of same are, you guessed it, regulated by the federal government. Jumpin’ Jesus Christ on a pogo stick.

What’s All This Then?

It’s a safe bet that I’m some sort of political junky. As such, I tend to read a lot of political magazines. A lot. Well, okay, I primarily read Reason, but time permitting I’ll gladly pick up TNR, The Atlantic, and a host of others. There are also those I know about but don’t read, Washington Monthly, for instance, or American Prospect. I’ve even been known to read NRO and The Weekly Standard sometimes. Oh, and yes, National Journal.

What all these rags (and the hundreds of others I haven’t metioned) have in common, really, is that they wouldn’t exist without the strange beltway culture. WIthout the insular world of think-tanks, politicians, and various campaign committees, there wouldn’t be a market for the sorts of agenda-driven journalism mentioned above. Such obvious political slant, which is neither hidden nor apologized for, sets these publications a bit apart from what the blogosphere has dubbed the MSM.

What’s more, many of those publications are direct participants in the blogosphere, and joined long before many MSM outlets decided to give it a try. Further, those publications in the political media that participate in the blogosphere act much more like, well, bloggers than their MSM counterparts.

The practical upshot being that there really isn’t a good thing to call this class of publications. They aren’t MSM, they aren’t exclusively blogs, and “political magazine” is just clunky. I therefore propose DC Media or DCM. Yeah, that’s right, I’m proposing an acronym. Formally. In a blog post. In any case the DCM plays a pretty big role in not only blogospheric conversation, but also in conversations between beltway insiders, and I think it’s high time we have an easy way to identify them. Your papers, please, as they say.

Couldn’t Have Said It Better

Luskin On Ted “Not-Worth-A-Bullet” Kennedy:

Teddy Kennedy at today’s confirmation hearings for John Roberts:

The powerful winds and flood waters of Katrina tore away the mask that has hidden from public view the many Americans who are left out and left behind.

Yep — from a true expert on leaving people behind in flood waters.

I Don’t Even Live In New York

Go to hell, Spitzer. Go. To. Hell.

There’s a goddamn difference between, I dunno, beating your spouse/girlfriend and a couple of co-eds slapping each other for cash. If you’re too goddamn stupid to see that, well, don’t go fining radio stations. Some DJs, appealing to the lowest-common-denominator, try to give away concert tickets and you bust them for unlicensed combative sports? Are you insane? You’re the AG of New York, man, there are probably some real crimes to be wasting your time on out there. To think, this guy is a Democratic front-runner for 2008. Between him, Hillary, and McCain, I fear for the future.