Weekend mornings are sacred. Really strong coffee, a fast internet feed, and whatever music I was dreaming about when I woke.
Breakfast is the only meal of the day that I tend to view with the same kind of traditionalized reverence that most people associate with Lunch and Dinner.
I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas or at home - and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed - breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned beef hash with diced chiles, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of Key lime pie, two margaritas, and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert.... Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours and at least one source of good music.... All of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.
Breakfast with Hunter. A documentary about the good doctor. If anyone is pressed for a random gift for me, that would do nicely. It doesn’t seem to be on NetFlix.
Moving from the biographical to the philosophical, the NYT has an interesting article on the NSA looking into data mining techniques.
by fundamentally changing the nature of surveillance, high-tech data mining raises privacy concerns that are only beginning to be debated widely. That is because to find illicit activities it is necessary to turn loose software sentinels to examine all digital behavior whether it is innocent or not.
"The theory is that the automated tool that is conducting the search is not violating the law," said Mark D. Rasch, the former head of computer-crime investigations for the Justice Department and now the senior vice president of Solutionary, a computer security company. But "anytime a tool or a human is looking at the content of your communication, it invades your privacy."
This sums up nicely the current state of things, and the growing divide between our legal protections and our technical capabilities. These techniques are completely legal, and also disturbingly invasive.
Finally, there is a nice editorial in the Times Select section reaming Harvard for firing Larry Summers:
Now that Lawrence Summers has resigned, it's time for the editor of The Harvard Crimson to follow his example. There is no excuse for the paper's decision to publish a poll showing that students, by a three to one margin, wanted Summers to remain the president of Harvard.
Telling Harvard professors their opinions are not shared by everyone can only further disrupt the "collegial" atmosphere required by their delicate psyches. And it was so unnecessary. Since when should the opinions of students make any difference in choosing Harvard's president?
Harvard is an institution run for the benefit of the tenured faculty, as Summers discovered too late. His attempts to shake it up appealed to students and the junior faculty, but tenured professors were appalled when he told them to work harder. He dared to suggest that professors teach survey courses geared to undergraduates' needs — an onerous idea to academics accustomed to teaching whatever's in their latest book.
...
His great gaffe on campus was suggesting that bias by patriarchal white men might not be the only reason for the shortage of women professors in science and math. After making the ritual genuflections to discrimination, he dared to note that there are many more men who score at the upper extreme (and the lower extreme) on math tests.
This will come as no surprise to the high school students who have taken the math part of the SAT, a test in which there are three boys in the top percentile for every girl. Perhaps a few of these students will now wonder how much intellectual stimulation they'll get at a university where inconvenient facts are taboo. But most of them will probably be happy to go there just because it's Harvard"
And now, off to work in my garden.
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