Tuesday, March 27, 2007

marmosets

Today I pretty much only have one thing to say. marmosets are very cute.

Monday, March 26, 2007

random

link

people are so stupid.

favorite quote:
"A bunch of people come here and put peace on you. a fluffy peace thing. a fluffy children thing. you know, there's no reason for this kind of stuff. it's wrong wrong wrong."

also? the "communist" UN declaration of human rights? put together by an American.

just saying.

in happier news, Panda Poop.

oh, also Small resigned. It's about freaking time.

this post is so typically washington. there's inside the beltway political snobbery, fixation on pandas, and bitching about the Smithsonian.

Friday, March 23, 2007

feminism

So I was going to ridicule this NYT review of a show of feminist art. It starts out pretty terribly. What kind of sentence is this:
The false idea is that there really is such a thing as feminist art, as opposed to art that intentionally or by osmosis reflects or is influenced by feminist thought, of which there is plenty.


You know what I call art influenced by feminism? Feminist art. easy to say, easy to understand, very straightforward.

Anyway, I had a lot more to say on it, and of course I wanted to mention this lovely little sentence,
Study “The Dinner Party” close enough and your bra, if you’re wearing one, may spontaneously combust.

Yes. because feminists burn bras.

But slowly, throughout the review, she started to redeem herself. Don't get me wrong, I still think her writing is unclear, and she did a poor job of articulating any central idea. Still, I couldn't stay too mad, because I fell in love with her last sentence:

The word feminism will be around as long as it is necessary for women to put a name on the sense of assertiveness, confidence and equality that, unnamed, has always been granted men.

Monday, March 19, 2007

Smithsonian

2 days ago
yesterday
today

So, the Smithsonian has been in the news a lot lately.
Before the current secretary, Larry Small, got there, the Smithsonian was this sort of large, disorganized, somewhat dysfunctional nonprofit. The board of regents wanted a good fundraiser who could run the place more like a business, probably to help stem the endless seas of bureaucracy, so they hired someone from the corporate world. But, according to many people within the organization, Small has had sort of a tin ear about what practices are worth bringing over from the corporate world and which ones really harmfully dilute the entire mission of the organization. For the record, the Smithsonian was founded for the "increase and diffusion of knowledge among men." So clearly, scholarship was meant to be a big part of what the institution does. But it's been clear from the beginning that it was not one of Small's priorities. In fact, it's becoming increasingly clear that Small's priorties pretty much started and ended with providing a very nice lifestyle for himself and his cronies. But that's not what I want to talk about. The Washington Post is doing a fine job of that.

I want to talk about his attitude towards research. I think his position reflects something common in the general public that is really sort of troubling. I'll start out by saying that I don't think I've thought through this issue completely, so I may revisit it in a later post, but here are my preliminary thoughts:

First of all, museums have two broad goals that can sometimes come into conflict: to learn and to teach (or as SI puts it, to increase and diffuse knowledge). I suppose in this way they're sort of like universities. Both hire scholars with PhDs and expect them to do original research (learn) but both also expect them to impart some of their knowledge to other people (teach). Universities (even small liberal arts colleges) can focus more on the research, because the people they're teaching have already expressed some interest in being taught (after all, they've enrolled), and so on average, professors are probably expected to learn (publish) more. Also, in universities, academics are teaching the next generation of academics, so the new research (learning) they do is more easily translated to teaching.

Museums, on the other hand, must focus more on the teaching. In an ideal world, their audience is "Joe Sixpack" off the street. And if you're going to try to teach to someone that didn't even sign up to learn, your biggest challenge is just getting that person through your doors. So instead of just having a lecturer with a slideshow, museums organize shows. They try to be heavy on images and somewhat light on wall text, because honestly, as a frequent museum goer myself, I can tell you that people have a certain "museum stamina." It doesn't seem like it would, but a couple of hours standing around gazing at works of art really tires you out. To further induce people to go through those doors, museums try extra incentives. The Smithsonian has a particularly good one: its shows are free. Other incentives include multimedia displays (people are endlessly fascinated with dumb games on touch screen computers) and blockbuster shows (people never ever ever get tired of impressionists).

So you have two major problems. One is that an outsider like Small is really only familiar with the "teaching" side of museums. Granted, this is the bigger side, but research cannot be ignored, especially since at a minimum, someone should be verifying that what's being taught is correct. Curators are more than glorified fact-checkers, but they're also not just show-organizers. The other is that in solving the "getting people through the door" problem, museums can lose sight of the reason they wanted to get people through the door in the first place. If there's too much superficial fluff (both in terms of popular, but overdone shows, and in terms of stupid multimedia presentations) there's not enough teaching going on. An additional problem, not as much for the Smithsonian, but for almost every other museum out there, is that getting people through the door isn't only what allows you to teach, it's also what allows you to exist. Museums survive in part off of ticket sales and gift shop purchases.

These problems are worse because Small is from the business world. He was brought in to run the organization efficiently but he had no idea of what a amount of research spending would be efficient. So while he was off spending thousands of dollars on limo services and first class airplane flights, museum curators sometimes didn't have the budgets to even travel to see collections whose works they might borrow, or visit archives that they needed for research. Also, as a businessman, he was used to very concrete ways of measuring success. But the problem is, there's just not a good way to do that with museums. Is it better to have 5 million people walk in your doors to be able to say they've seen the Mona Lisa and buy a post card, or 5,000 people to walk through your doors and gain a deeper understanding of the Dada movement and discover for the first time, DuChamp's L.H.O.O.Q. A museum's goal is to teach, right? But you can't measure how much people have learned. What you *can* measure is how many people have gone through the museum's doors and how much they've spent. So that's what Small's been measuring. And the result? The one set of museums best situated to actually focus on original learning and teaching because of their unique position as a publicly funded institution have become increasingly less able to do what they were designed to do.

Sunday, March 18, 2007

shazza

Oh, I thought I'd share one more thing about my amazing haircut. When I asked for an appointment, I had to give them my name: Sasha. Not a terribly common name, but definitely not unique. The lady asked me to spell it, so I did: s-a-s-h-a. Exactly like it sounds. which somehow on her piece of paper became s-h-a-z-z-a. That is an unbelievably awesome name, but if you're going to ask me for the spelling, why don't you listen to my response?

Saturday, March 17, 2007

so the big jeopardy news wasn't scores of zero. instead, for the first time in jeopardy history, there was a three way tie for first place. Which was awesome. And exactly what I would have done if I'd been in the position of the computer science professor who engineered it.

in other news, there is a cardinal rule of hairstyling that I discovered years ago, but continue to fail to put into practice:
do not get your haircut by someone whose hairstyle you do not like. that person clearly does not share your taste.
unfortunately, today's version of breaking that rule meant I got mousse, some type of serum, plus, I think, aquanet, put in my hair, and it got teased & blowdried for about half an hour. It literally stuck out 4 inches from my head. Which is pretty damn impressive when you realize my hair is only like 5 inches long. Anyway, the cut itself seems to be acceptable, but next time I need a stylist who is not stuck in 1982.

Friday, March 16, 2007

rumor...

so I just heard a rumor from a not at all reliable source that on tonight's jeopardy, we'll see the first ever game where all the contestants finish with $0 or negative money. now I have to watch! and tape. just in case.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

common knowledge?

So, I've watched about 10 minutes of "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader," and I can safely say that it is an incredibly dumb show. Happily, there was an article in the Washington Post today agreeing with me. (and commending a quiz show of which I am an alumna. so thumbs up: washington post!) I'm especially happy to see this article because every other mention I've seen of the show has been positive. I can't exactly put my finger on why I dislike the show, since I tend to like dumb reality shows as a rule. But it's something along the lines of: I like watching dumb pretty people in shows with lots of drama. This is why "America's Next Top Model" and "Beauty and the Geek" are such awesome shows. "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader" (AYSTA5G?) lacks the pretty factor and the drama. When you just see normal people being dumb, there's no schadenfreude, just amazement at how these people are able to make it through life.

But then, I was trying to explain to people how dumb this show was. I used the example of a question that one of the contestants got wrong: "How many teaspoons are there in five tablespoons?" The responses ranged from, "Well, how many teaspoons are there in a tablespoon?" (my boss) To, "Five times two is ten. So the answer is ten, right?" (my mom). For the record, there are 3 teaspoons in a tablespoon. I learned this fact in school (somewhere around 4th or 5th grade, actually) and I distinctly remember feeling dumb at the time for not having known it before. It just seemed like such a common knowledge thing. How are you ever going to be able to cook or bake without knowing how many teaspoons there are in a tablespoon? Apparently, it's not such common knowledge after all.

Monday, March 12, 2007

helicopter parents

Okay, so I read parenting blogs. I'm not really sure why, since I am not a parent, but they are often talking about kids not too much younger than I am, and it's sort of fun to hear what they have to say. Anyway, one of them linked to this helpful little article on the college board website: Are You a Helicopter Parent? This article has the most delightfully self-selecting audience. Pretty much by definition if you go to the college board website and spend more time on it than it takes to find out the date of the next SAT, you are a helicopter parent. But, if you've spent enough time on the site not only to find the date of the next SATs, but also print out sample practice essays for your kid, write up a list of all the APs they offer so you can lobby your high school to start offering them, and decide which SAT IIs your kid should take this June, and you've *still* stuck around to read the dumb little articles? Then you will somehow decide you're not a helicopter parent. Because a helicopter parent wouldn't be self aware enough to even consider the possibility that she were one.

Thursday, March 8, 2007

two things

I was reading over my past blog entries, and I've discovered that many of my entries revolve around two themes: genitalia and grammar. in an effort to continue these themes, I offer the following:

1. This Article. It's about lice. Specifically, about how humans host 3 different species of lice, while most species host just one. There are head lice (similar to the lice that live on chimps), body lice (they live on clothing and are apparently related to head lice), and pubic lice (similar to the lice that live on gorillas). Apparently the existence of these 3 different species provides clues to the evolution of the human species. Scientists can figure out when humans lost their body hair and when they started wearing clothes. This is really cool. But that's not why I'm posting this article. No, the reason I'm posting this article is that despite the scientists' reluctance to talk about it, there's one particularly good explanation for why human pubic lice are similar to lice found on gorillas. It is: Humans had sex with gorillas. a lot.

2. I'm just going to post this verbatim:
Losing the war on bad grammar: "Irregardless." Someone used that word in a meeting this morning. I calmly spoke up, explaining that by using the word in the same sense as "regardless," and considering that "irrational" is the opposite of "rational," they in fact stated the exact opposite of what you really meant. Even then you still have to make the leap and assume that "irregardless" is legitimately a word. Everyone in the room applauded, hoisted me on their shoulders and carried me out the door to celebrate. Never again will I hear that word in the office!

HA! That's how things went in my little fantasy world. My usual reward for resistance is a blank stare. So I just sat there, mute, shuddering with discomfort usually reserved for scratching fingernails on a blackboard.

It's just not worth the effort anymore.

Marc Fisher: Oh, no, you had me going there. I was ready to stand up and cheer for you. Don't let yourself be cowed by ignoramuses (ignoramusii?)--do as your grammar teacher would want you to do and stand tall for the right word.

There are two incredibly awesome things about this post. The first is that "irregardless" has absolutely nothing do do with DC politics, the purported subject of the chat where I read it. I'm kind of in love with people who manage to get their completely random thoughts inserted into washington post chats about completely unrelated subjects. Especially since I've lately aspired to become one of those people. The second incredibly awesome thing about this post is Marc Fisher's response. ignoramusii? yeah, that's a word all right. you are the grammar king.