the Sam Jackson College Experience

I’ve explained before that my current education plan is to do something very interdisciplinary blending science with public policy.

I then point to the desperate need for this sort of “pro-earth, reason & science” presence in Washington. Well, Chris Mooney over at The Intersection (on ScienceBlogs–Chris is the Washington correspondent for Seed and senior correspondent for The American Prospect) had some really nice (in the awful sense) clippings from Scalia in a recent hearing where something science-related came along. This is judicial review which affects policy, so it still counts. Mooney has picked out some pretty nasty pieces from the transcript, and I looked at the transcript itself and there is indeed much worse. All the same…

[below excerpt lifted from Mooney, thanks!]

JUSTICE SCALIA: Mr. Milkey, I had — my problem is precisely on the impermissible grounds. To be sure, carbon dioxide is a pollutant, and it can be an air pollutant. If we fill this room with carbon dioxide, it could be an air pollutant that endangers health. But I always thought an air pollutant was something different from a stratospheric pollutant, and your claim here is not that the pollution of what we normally call “air” is endangering health. That isn’t, that isn’t — your assertion is that after the pollutant leaves the air and goes up into the stratosphere it is contributing to global warming.

MR. MILKEY: Respectfully, Your Honor, it is not the stratosphere. It’s the troposphere.

JUSTICE SCALIA: Troposphere, whatever. I told you before I’m not a scientist.

(Laughter.)

JUSTICE SCALIA: That’s why I don’t want to have to deal with global warming, to tell you the truth.

These are things that we learned about in middle school, for the record. At least in Newton, Massachusetts. And straightforward, relevant science with which I would hope the Supreme Court Justices could take the time to familiarize themselves. Continued excerpt after the break.

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Remember how before Thanksgiving break I said I had to do all my essays and applications for every school on my list? I had two essays written then: one common application essay and one generic ’supplement open response’ essay. Fourteen schools left for which I had not yet prepared applications. Where do I stand now?

No farther along.

Or, untrue: I know now exactly how much I have to do, which is a lot. Not unimaginably-much, but still a significant amount of work.

I was supposed to have a) written all my essays and b) pared down my college list from 15 to something less than that over break. I did neither!

It’s b there which annoys me the most. I don’t have any legitimate reasons to take any school off my list right now, and reasons to keep them all. I don’t think of it as risk containment or choice-enabling, just as “these are all places that I could be happy attending.” If you have arguments FOR a particular school which might make me more inclined to favor it over the others (no negatives attacks here!) feel free to share them. I know lots of you go to school at places on my list, or at least work there–I can see you through the internet. So feel free to speak up.

In the meantime, I have essays to write. Sorry to abandon all you readers to the inhospitable wastelands of non-updated blogs, but it’s purely temporary. If I write my goal of two essays by tomorrow lunchtime, I should be back on track. As it is, most of my essays for these schools (those that remain unwritten, that is) are of the short-response variety. Could be worse!

For very sad reasons, I don’t get to do very much art here at Exeter (my first and only course will be next term, Painting 204) but that doesn’t mean I’m not an artistic person! Even my creativity is more generally expressed through words, I’m not completely hopeless when it comes to graphic arts. I have to know my way around Photoshop to do you know, normal-life stuff, and I saw a neat little inspiration the other day from this tutorial at Lifehacker.

I quickly whipped up this fake ad for Julbo sunglasses, the brand I am wearing in this photo–it’s from Academy Life Day at the beach. I thought some of my readers might be interested in having a vague approximation of what I look like, since not everyone has gone and visited the extensive photo gallery I have hosted which better answers the question. Flickr be damned.

Click on the photo to go to the other site and a bigger version of this picture. 5 minutes in photoshop produced a good new Facebook profile picture, so I’m satisfied (and cropped!).

[Original photo]

Sorry, dear audience, for my absence of late. I’m currently trying to get as much relaxation out of my thanksgiving break as possible, which means sleeping and reading books. And not blogging since I don’t have all that much at hand to write about.

I was looking forward to this vacation quite a bit a few weeks ago until I heard from the college counselling office that “the bulk of [your] essay writing will be done over thanksgiving break.” I have two general purpose essays written right now, but many of the schools I’m applying to ask for more specific essays. The creative prompts I appreciate (UChicago, looking at you), but some are a little bit boring. I hope this means I have finished the “bulk of my essay writing” but I haven’t in fact mustered up the courage to check across my entire list all at once. So far my task doesn’t look too bad, but we will see…

I have to get up very early tomorrow morning to drive to see relatives 10 hours away-it will be good to see them for thanksgiving, especially since we are bringing our dog, but I just wish everyone else wasn’t trying to visit their relatives the same day so as to create such large amounts of evil traffic.

Have a nice thanksgiving, everyone! Visit Plymouth plantation if you’re in the Boston area, it’s lots of fun.

I found an explanation for why Jian Li might have expected to be admitted to Princeton and all those other schools which waitlisted him: perhaps he went and used Michelle Hernandez’s Academic Index Calculator? Michelle Hernandez is “America’s premiere college consultant,” according to her website.

Hernandez invites us to calculate our own academic indices using this calculator: “Want to calculate your own Academic Index and give yourself a baseline for your chances of admission to top colleges? Enter your SAT I, SAT II and rank information below.” This Academic Index is analogous to the “numbers” that readers give to applicants on the basis of academics; apparently, this calculator approximates the ‘formula’ that all these top schools use.
There are some words of warning about the incomplete nature of this calculator as a tool, but it still reads a (lot) bit deceptive to the unwary:

Obviously admissions offices that use the AI use it along with all the subjective information and make informed decisions about how to understand the most complex part of the formula, the CRS. Why then does the AI matter? Most importantly, it will help you gage your chances for admission since there is a very high correlation between high AI’s and high acceptance rates.

Uh oh! ‘Correlation’ –that’s always dangerous, because people are so quick to leap from correlation to causation and assume dependency. Anyways, I put in Jian Li’s stats and played around with them a little bit since we don’t have a complete picture.

So how’d Jian Li fare?

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