Well, I’m massively behind on the 50 Book Challenge, but I did finish reading the copy of James Fallows’ Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Air Travel that I threw in for $6 with an Amazon.com order for “work” books. As Robert mentioned last month, it’s a pretty interesting look at some of the new innovations in small planes (or “general aviation”). The book slightly suffers from being dated—in particular, I think there’s a good chapter that needs to be added on the last two years of the Eclipse 500 saga.

It’s also not entirely clear how Fallows sees “air taxis” fitting in the larger aviation system; he talks a lot about the threat they pose to what most transportation folks call “legacy carriers” (e.g. American, Continental, Delta, Northwest, United, and US Airways) but not so much about how the air taxis would affect the regional jet networks associated with the legacy carriers or the “no-frills” carriers like Southwest and airTran. I suspect that, by further drying up the pool of high-revenue customers that the legacy carriers depend on to stay in business, the “hub and spoke” system will fall apart and two classes of travel will emerge in the aviation hinterlands of flyover country: on-demand “air taxi” travel for the rich (or those who can convince their company that an extra $200 in airfare is worth saving a night in the hotel) and increased once-a-day point-to-point travel to popular destinations. Of course, like any other predictions, these may be completely wrong.

Nonetheless, it’s a very interesting book and I recommend it highly for anyone with an interest in general aviation.

Stephen Karlson writes:

I expect juniors and seniors to have a basic understanding of the meanings and spellings of simple words.

An expectation, mind you, that is largely in vain. In my public opinion class last week, when talking about affect (in the public opinion context, a synonym for emotion), I ended up explaining the difference between the words affect and effect in common usage. I’m pretty sure this was the first time any of my students were made aware that these two words, in fact, are not the same.

Of course, it doesn’t help by the time students have reached me they generally have had 13–16 years of experience with teachers and professors in various fields whose reaction to shoddy grammar and usage can be summed up as “eh, it’s not my job to fix it,” rather than the proper response of whacking them over the head repeatedly with a copy of Strunk and White.

Mitch Townsend disagrees with Cathy Young’s suggestion that Thomas E. Woods’ Confederate apologia The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History has been excessively fêted in conservative circles, asking “Where’s the outrage?” On the other hand, Eric Muller still has plenty of outrage to spare.

Radley Balko has a brief interview with ex-congressman Bob Barr up at The Agitator. When in Congress, Barr was always a bit of a putz when it came to the War on Some Drugs, but in many other areas he was a strong champion of civil liberties. Anyway, it’s short, so it won’t kill you to read it if you’re at all interested.

Yearrrrrrgh!

Steve at Begging to Differ links an interesting site that lets you graph the popularity of first names over time. Shockingly, my all-time favorite girl’s name, “Latrina,” has never cracked the top 1000 names in any decade.

AP story here (and Denver Post story here), although there are no real details yet. (þ: Protein Wisdom)

I haven’t had much to say about Ward Churchill in a while, but this post by Stephen Green (þ: InstaPundit) lept out at me, mainly due to the Rocky Mountain News article Green dug up. Read it and weep.

BOULDER—Ward Churchill was rejected by two University of Colorado departments in 1991 before the communication department agreed to give him tenure. Even in the communication department, the chairman-elect was “uncomfortable” with the decision, according to documents released Friday by CU.

At the time, CU officials were shopping for a department that would accept Churchill, fearing they would lose him to another university.

In a memo to the communication faculty, Michael Pacanowsky, who was in line to become chairman, said Churchill needed to join a department, since the program that sponsored his Native American Studies courses did not have the authority to grant tenure.

“Ward’s file was circulated to sociology and political science, and they did not agree to roster him in their departments,” Pacanowsky wrote in an e-mail dated Jan. 10, 1991. “Because Ward’s graduate degree, an MA, was in communications, we were contacted next.”

The University of Colorado at Boulder is what us academics used to call a “Research I” institution (now it’s a “Doctoral-Research Extensive” institution under the Carnegie classification system, which is essentially equivalent). In other words, the job of UC-Boulder in academe is to do cutting-edge research and produce people with doctorates (and the undergraduate program is largely designed to subsidize those activities by bringing in tuition to subsidize research and giving you guinea pigs for your Ph.D. students to practice teaching on). You do that by hiring the best people with doctorates you can find. You don’t do that by hiring fake Indians who have produced questionable scholarship and don’t have terminal degrees just to engage in quota-filling exercises.

Don’t get me wrong—if Churchill’s only crime against academic society was being an offensive jackass, that might even be a qualification for granting him tenure. But shoddy scholarship and a tenure file shockingly bereft of what most academics would consider to be tenurable activity are another matter entirely.

This has got to be the quote of the day from Sunday’s Clarion-Ledger:

Tunica farmer Nolen Canon believes President Bush’s plan to slash farm subsidies could be the final straw in driving some farmers out of business.

You know, if you can’t figure out how to run your business in the black without getting $4.3 million in government handouts over a nine-year period, you probably don’t deserve to be in business in the first place.

I saw this a while ago, but after last night’s episode of NUMB3ERS I think Jeff Goldstein has nailed it as always:

Hoping to overcome what has quickly become a hackneyed premise, FBI agent Don Epps (Rob Morrow) eschews a dangerously abductive statistics-based theory offered him by his brooding mathematician brother, Charlie (David Krumholz), and instead tries doing his own fucking crime solving for a change—relying on nothing more than the vast resources available to him as a federal law enforcement official. (Co-stars Peter MacNichol, Judd Hirsch, and Sabrina Lloyd)

I have to say it’s not that bad a show, and the female FBI agent is “easy on the eyes” as they say, but the opening credits manage to somehow be both idiotic and patronizing. If I hear Krumholz’s character say “numbers are everywhere” one more time, I get this odd feeling that I’m going to bash my TV to pieces with a golf club, at least once I run out to the nearest sporting goods store and buy one.

David Janes observes in response to Ron Moore’s latest posting to his Battlestar Galactica blog:

No wonder I think this show is so good. The writer’s a fracken Libertarian.

Indeed. But it’s spelled “frakkin’.” Moore is also in quite a celebratory mood over news of the renewal, as one might expect, and gives some good answers to questions on such things as the rank structure, evolution, and what we can expect to see in Season 2 (although not really in a spoilery way).

Tonight I saw a very good production of “Lend Me a Tenor” by several Millsaps College theater students. My companions for the evening, Suzanne and Kamilla (er, Drs. Woodward and Bahbahani), both agreed with me that it was a most excellent performance.* Color me very impressed.

No well-developed thoughts on this one (yet), but there’s a bit of a go-around arising from comments by some on the right that former president Jimmy Carter is increasingly on “the other side.” Alex Knapp seconds Matthew Yglesias’ complaint that this is beyond the pale:

[I]t says something about this country that we’ve allowed discourse to slide to the point where anyone who disagrees with a position is automatically branded a traitor.

On the other hand, the Baseball Crank writes:

There’s a critical distinction here that the critics on the Left, most notably Yglesias—who’s posted on this three times now without addressing the distinction—need to grapple with. And that is this: giving speeches and the like here at home is, indeed, just “political disagreement.” It may help us or it may hurt us, but it is just speech. But that’s not what Hinderaker is talking about, although you’d never know from reading Yglesias. What he’s talking about is traveling around the world, meeting with foreign leaders and taking positions contrary to those of the United States or rendering assistance directly to hostile forces and regimes.

This is, of course, a recurring theme in conservative criticisms of a number of liberals—besides Carter’s many trips, prominent examples include John Kerry’s famous meeting with the North Vietnamese and the trip Kerry and Tom Harkin took to meet with Daniel Ortega in the 1980s. Jesse Jackson is also a master at this. To say nothing of Jane Fonda and Ramsey Clark. (I can’t think offhand of conservative examples of the same; I’m sure you can find some, but the practice has been far more pervasive on the Left, and not only because we’ve had mostly Republican presidents since the dawn of the modern Left in 1968). Time and again, whether they be legislators, state officials, ex-leaders, or private citizens, we’ve seen the spectacle of people on the Left sitting down with hostile heads of state and assuring them that the United States does not present a united front against them. They, in turn, often use such meetings for propaganda purposes, including for the purpose of telling their own people that the United States is not going to help them.

Of course, trivializing the idea of treason by applying it to Carter’s actions—a tactic of folks like Ann Coulter and the freeper nation—isn’t a good idea, but I think it’s reasonable for Americans to expect their current and former elected officials to not actively undermine U.S. diplomatic efforts while overseas, just as I think Germans would be (rightly) offended if former chancellor Helmut Kohl went to the United States and tried to undermine German diplomatic efforts. Indeed, such efforts when undertaken by U.S. citizens are technically illegal, although the law has rarely been enforced.

The Mississippi Supreme Court today decided to require 115 asbestos-suit plaintiffs to actually show they were injured by asbestos before they could join a class action against asbestos manufacturers. And, just last week, the last two of twelve plaintiffs in a 1999 fen-phen class action pled guilty to federal fraud charges.

James Joyner caught this nugget from Ms. Coulter at CPAC today:

Oddly, the woman who calls everyone who disagrees with her on international affairs a “traitor” and idiotic comments by college professors “treason,” is a big supporter of the Confederate flag. Even divorced from its civil rights era racial connotations, the flag represents treason against the Union in the most literal sense.

An interesting piece in today’s Clarion-Ledger about academic misconduct at Mississippi colleges and universities.

Funnily enough, I just talked about this topic Wednesday with my public opinion class when I handed out their take-home exam. It seems to me that honor codes and the like are just part of the puzzle; just as important is for faculty members to create circumstances in which students will be less tempted to break the rules—or, failing that, writing exams that would be very hard to effectively cheat on.

Brian J. Noggle points to news that Alanis Morissette has taken U.S. citizenship. Since the entire raison d’être of her musical career was to fill her label’s Canadian content quota, I expect her musical career (what little of it remains) to come to a screeching halt.

Todd Zywicki suggests that increased advertising for legal services has increased bankruptcy filings. I tend to think that to indicate causation, Zywicki ought to at least demonstrate whether the trend in bankruptcy filings was flat before the Supreme Court found lawyers’ commercial speech constitutionally protected in Bates v. State Bar of Arizona. Unfortunately (for him, at least), Zywicki’s graph starts in 1979, two years after the 1977 ruling in Bates.

Even if he could show that, considering that this time period also corresponds with the emergence of the consumer credit card industry it would be difficult to disentangle the two effects. Slithery D is also unimpressed.

This is my entry in today’s OTB Traffic Jam.

The Hill reports that Harold Ford, Jr. will be running for the Democratic nomination in the open-seat race for Bill Frist’s seat in the Senate in November 2006. While the article suggests that Ford’s rather controversial family may be a handicap, he’s generally stayed out of the shadow of uncle John Ford’s sleaze and his father’s alleged corruption.

James Joyner suggests that Tennessee has a “rather deep” bench of potential Republican opponents, but social conservatives like Van Hilleary, who make up most of the House delegation, haven’t fared all that well in statewide races; in recent years, successful Republican candidates have been in the moderate wing of the party, like Frist, Lamar Alexander, Don Sundquist, and Fred Thompson, and it doesn’t look like there are many of those on offer. Despite Tennessee’s generally conservative outlook, it’s a state that’s willing to elect moderate Democratic politicians like Phil Bredesen and (in his pre-veep life) Al Gore in statewide races by fairly comfortable margins, so it seems to me that Ford has a pretty good shot, particularly if the inept Hilleary gets the GOP’s nod.

By the way, Mike Hollihan has gotten a sneak peak at the campaign poster:

Fail to win reelection? Well, if you’re well-connected enough, you may get to stay on the state’s payroll.

Laura points out that better-qualified adjuncts are probably quite annoyed that lovable losers like Jim Florio, Al Gore, David Dinkins, and Ronnie Musgrove are pulling in real money to teach 1–2 classes a semester at various private and public institutions.

Everyone’s favorite piece of neoconfederate propaganda, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, continues to pile up negative reviews, this time from Max Boot in The Weekly Standard. (þ: Instapundit and Eric Muller)

Sheila O’Malley has word that one of my favorite shows when I was a kid is coming to DVD. That, the A-Team, and CHiPs had me in kid heaven.

Yes, I was a dork.

Belated congrats to Tim Sandefur on his engagement and to all those Signifying Nothing readers out there whose hot Valentine’s Day dates were not with a treadmill in the HAC.

Some interesting thoughts on the difficulty of organizing a conspiracy:

Every time [a possible conspiracy] comes up in a class I ask the students if they’ve ever tried to order a pizza for 3 people, and if yes whether it was difficult to agree about what to get on it and how to divide it up. Occassionally a light bulb goes on over one of their heads when they make the connection that if pizza is this hard than conspiracy must be damn near impossible.

Completely unrelated: has anyone noticed that the recommended serving size of virtually any frozen pizza (so far tested with DiGiorno, Tombstone, and Kroger-brand Tombstone clone) is one-fifth of a pizza? However, dividing a pizza—particularly the “thin crust” DiGiorno, which is square—into fifths is left as an exercise for the consumer. (þ: Cold Spring Shops)

Marc Cooper is rightly outraged that the Bush administration is attempting to stop former American POWs during the 1991 Gulf War from collecting damages for being tortured by Saddam Hussein’s regime.

While I’m somewhat sympathetic to the administration’s argument that the new Iraqi regime needs the money to help it get on its feet, and I recognize that the law that the POWs sued under (the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996) is designed mainly to deplete the assets of anti-American regimes like Cuba and Iran rather than for the purpose of securing any meaningful “justice,” I have to say this is an incredibly boneheaded decision, one that Congress would do well to force reconsideration of.