The artist who created this beautiful GIF is Florian de Looij. Visit his website here.
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Sweet Spot
Via reddit, what’s your sweet spot? Ours is teaching …
Posted in Questions Rarely Asked
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77,777 miles
Our sturdy 1993 Jeep Wrangler (pictured above), built in Colorado with six cylinders and manual transmission, recently reached a milestone: 77,777 miles … Continue reading
St Patrick’s Bell
In honor of St Patrick’s Day, check out this paper “St Patrick’s Bell Shrine: Form and Layout of the Plates” written by Robert D. Stevick published in 2008 in The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland (Vol. 138, pp. 26-46). Also, via the National Museum of Ireland, here is a picture of St Patrick’s bell and its shrine:
“Yes, the song was taught to us …”
Are we born racists, or do we learn racism from others? In his letter of apology to his fellow students at the University of Oklahoma, Parker Rice–one of the students expelled from OU for singing this racist and despicable song–confesses that “the song was taught to us.” We sincerely hope his classmates will accept his apology and give him an opportunity to make amends, but this startling confession begs the question: By whom? Who taught you this song? In other words, the infamous SAE song has a history. (In fact, the song and its connection to SAE should not surprise us. Google “Sigma Alpha Epsilon” and you will learn that it was “the first national fraternity to be established in the deep south, having been founded at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, on 9 March 1856.”) … but in the meantime, do you think David Boren, the President of the University of Oklahoma (and the proverbial “adult in the room,” so to speak), is simply “scapegoating” Mr Rice for the sins of the South? Is that fair?
Visualization of outstanding IMF loans
This simple graphic, via the excellent Ada Swanson of the Washington Post, was created by Matt Mulholland to illustrate the fraction of IMF loans outstanding by member country. In summary, Greece accounts for about 60 percent of the IMF’s business ($27.26 billion), with Ukraine a distant second ($5.25 billion). By the way, this graphic begs an important question: Why did the IMF agree to place such a large bet on Greece in the first place?
What is the “optimal number” of law schools?
As the number of law school applicants in the U.S. continues to decline, rumors of impending law school mergers are swirling around many North American law school faculties. (Law professor Jeff Redding, for example, writes in this blog post, “The recent news out of Saint Paul, Minnesota that William Mitchell and Hamline are merging their law schools was intriguing in many ways, not least because of the ways that this announcement fueled speculation that Mitchell/Hamline was just the first in a series of soon-to-be-made announcements as to forthcoming law school mergers.”) But at the same time, there are “only” 205 ABA-approved law schools in the U.S.A., including three law schools in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, where we began our teaching career. (By way of comparison, there are 989 accredited engineering schools and about 220 or so graduate-level programs in economics in the U.S.) Considering that the United States is one of the most prosperous and populous countries in the world, are there too many law schools in the U.S. … or too few?
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prior probability 