Yearly Archives: 2019

Haverford College

Colleges

Small size, high quality.

For an alphabetical index of the New England College series of pieces, click here.

The extended hiatus for this blog was caused by the author’s dedication to helping his son with preparation for the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). This shakedown scheme sees hundreds of thousands of students studying millions of hours annually for a test which addresses very little taught in high school. Comprising 96 English and 58 Math questions, all but 13 multiple choice with severe time limits, it’s the key to getting an offer from a good college.

With Winston’s SAT polished off last Saturday, Tuesday found us at beautiful Haverford College just northwest of Philadelphia. The pristine setting of this Little Ivy comprises an arboretum of 216 acres, open to all. The school was founded by Quakers in 1833 and admits just 1350 undergraduates. That’s a fraction of that of the Big 8 Ivies yet there are no concessions to academic standards, with just eight students per faculty member. There are no teachers’ assistants instructing classes – you get the real thing for your tuition dollar. 5 Nobel laureates, 6 Pulitzer Prize winners, 20 Rhodes and 104 Fulbright scholars hail from Haverford, where the most popular majors are English Literature, Biology and Economics. All students live on campus, testifying to the tightly knit undergraduate body …. and the less than impressive Philadelphia surroundings.



Our tour begins. WInston is wearing the hat.


Campus housing may not look great but it’s clean and modern inside. All dorms are co-ed.


Arboretum abstract.


Study areas did not look like this when I was a kid.


Our guide is a philosophy Junior.


Arboretum setting.


Beautiful interior of the Marion E. Koshland Integrated Natural Sciences Center.


Classic northeastern architecture. The campus is in superb repair throughout.


Exquisite balustrade inside Founders’ Hall.


Quaker roots. Haverford is now a secular school – alumni include former Goldman Sachs co-chair John Whitehead.


As befits a truly civilized school, Haverford students play cricket.


An academic setting – no Greek life, no wild parties. You are here to learn.


In gorgeous Founders’ Hall. Note the Chippendale pediment.


The dining hall – sushi, vegetarian, Kosher and Halal options are all available.


Another part of the arboretum setting.


The Memorial Chapel.


The same stone is used throughout, making for an integrated whole.


Dogs – and non-students – are welcome to enjoy the grounds.


In the woodworking shop. I have seen better dovetail joints!


Flowers galore.


No academic featherbed, this.


James House is a non-curricular space for students to express their artistic drive.


Attending the informational session – conducted by a Swarthmore grad!


Haverford is well endowed at $522 million or $385,000 a student. A frequent shuttle service connects students with Bryn Mawr and Swarthmore. You can take your major at these schools while a student at Haverford, which speaks to leverage of the brainpower of three academic exemplars. Unsurprisingly, admission requirements are similar for all three.

Apple. Stupid.

Mac Pro

Greed redefined.

You can get a top quality BenQ 27″ monitor, with stand for $600:


The 27″ calibrated BenQ monitor.

Apple however Thinks Different and has determined that not only will its new monitor sell for $5000 (likely using a regular LG panel) but wants you to pony up an extra $1000 for the stand ….


The $1000 stand for the $5000 monitor.

Either Apple has concluded that their professional customers base is, you know, stoopid, or they need a new CEO. Heck, they have needed a new CEO, someone who occasionally has an original idea, since Steve passed.

As for myself, I use a 30″ Apple LCD monitor in its elegant aluminum case which I bought used 5 years ago for $400. It calibrates nicely using a puck and is a joy to behold. And yes, it came with a stand included.


The elegant 30″ Apple LCD monitor.

Mac Pro 2019

Mac Pro

Function over form returns.

For an index of all my Mac Pro articles, click here.


Meet the new Mac Pro, same as the old Mac Pro.

Solidly aiming at their right foot, Apple managed to disenfranchise a huge chunk of its professional user base with the idiotic ‘form over function’ Mac Pro 2013 which looked like a trash can. Designed to show off your fingerprints and collect dust and detritus in its open cylindrical center, the ads showed this wonder unconnected to any peripherals, devoid of the clutter of wires that so spoils the work aesthetic of the modern hipster. Of course once you added the required external storage and so on, the thing started looking like the mess it was:


2012 vs. 2013.

The result of this design disaster saw two results. AV and music pros started abandoning the Mac Pro for competent HP workstations running newly reliable versions of Windows. Those trying to stick with the Mac Pro applied a variety of upgrades to this wonderful modular chassis. These included faster CPUs, more and faster memory, fast SSD boot and system drives, and tons of storage, the latter easily accommodated inside the Mac Pro’s big box. The truly masochistic even upgraded wi-fi from 802.11b to 802.11n, masochism being the required mindset in securing those minuscule antenna wires. I have done many and the 50th is no easier than the first. The results were fine, the machine newly speedy and every bit as bog reliable. And in the event something failed, a rare occurrence, the bad part was easily replaced in minutes. The massive 980 watt power supply saw to it that there was always ample current available for all those internals and the truly enormous CPU heatsinks made for the most reliable computing platform ever.

So Apple determined they should throw away their base and the attendant goodwill in place of the joke that is the Trash Can Mac Pro. Of course there was always the overpriced MacBook Pro for ‘power users’, the only problem being that when real computing power was required the notebook would throttle back its CPUs lest they melt under the strain. The MacBook’s cooling was never its forte compared with the myriad fans in the big Mac Pro.

Now, after a 6 year hiatus with an offering that was never updated and had already obsolete graphics when it came to market, Apple has realized the error of its ways and introduced a large, modular Mac Pro chassis. Or is that ‘reintroduced’, for sticking with the original box with later CPUs and memory would have been trivial to do, and that large base of power user advocates would not have been largely lost?

You get faster CPUs with more cores and lots of options, faster memory and vast capacity, and a bill for some $10,000 if you max it out.

But, for heaven’s sake, why did they make that grate so ugly?

Everything that is wrong with America

Photography

In one chart.


Who makes the money off the taxpayer.

This startling chart graphically illustrates one of the greatest crimes in public education in the United States. It shows the highest paid public employees by occupation for every state. It does not require a sharp eyed observer to spot that ‘Football Coach’ outnumbers ‘College Dean’ by a huge margin.

And when you see the truly offensive compensation these geniuses of education earn, you had better not just have ingested a large meal:


Obscenity, redefined.

By contrast, the highest paid professor in the U.S. is Dean Takahashi, who is Adjunct Professor in the Practice of Finance at the Yale School of Management, and Senior Director of Investments at Yale University. He earns a paltry $2.6mm annually.

Takahashi creates wealth every time he steps in front of a whiteboard. His sports equivalent at a public college makes Takahashi’s income in just 4 months and creates future Alzheimer’s cases as all the battered brains he has so cruelly exploited become basket cases in their early 30s. And while he is pulling down $8 million annually his charges earn precisely nothing and have an infinitesimal chance of making big money in pro sports before their brains explode. Yet each one of these morons on a sports scholarship is denying a space to an aspiring scientist or artist and denying that individual a decent education.

And the biggest crime is that almost all of these sports coaches work at public colleges, meaning it’s the taxpayer who is footing the bill.

Karl Marx postulated that capitalism will hang itself using a rope of its own making. That process is well advanced in higher public education in the U.S. I always thought you attended college to improve your brain, yet the highest paid at public colleges are in the business of destroying brains.

Roy Stryker

Photographers

Bringing the message home.


Roy Emerson Stryker

FDR’s cousin Teddy Roosevelt saw to it that through Jacob Riis’s pictures of the poor of New York the awful poverty of the lower classes was brought into Americans’ homes. FDR did something similar in appointing Roy Stryker, a Columbia trained economist and amateur photographer, to head the Farm Security Administration in 1935. The goal was to document and expose the plight of the poor in ‘fly over country’ to the affluent, coastal masses, and Stryker did so with aplomb.

The photographers he hired to execute this massive task read like a who’s who of the best reportage picture makers of the era: Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, John Vachon, Marion Post Wolcott, Russell Lee, Jack Delano (no relation to FDR), Gordon Parks, John Collier and Carl Mydans. Each went on to fame and fortune and if I was forced to make choices I would have to single out Dorothea Lange and Marion Post Wolcott.

In the same way that a pre-television age saw FDR come into Americans’ living rooms through the medium of his Fireside Chats on the radio, the work of Stryker’s team of photographers brought the images of the Depression into their homes along with the daily paper. FDR never managed to turn the economy around from the Great Depression which arguably started with the Wall Street crash of 1929 but he showed that he was trying mightily hard. The Japanese solved the problem, putting Americans back to work on December 7, 1941. It was called Pearl Harbor and the economy took off on the back of government military spending that the isolationists had prevented for over a decade. Yes, they were Republicans, as cruel and grasping then as now.

The FSA was eventually folded into the War Department and Stryker moved on. But his accomplishment remains one of the most fertile in documentary photography.