End our 'multiuniversities'

This article is very difficult for me to excerpt. Just to sum up the author, David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen, wants to see an end to the public universities. He will leave alone the private universities because they aren't funding by taxpayers but only criticizes them as "'finishing schools' for the smuggest and most plausible". He accusses public universities of being job-training community colleges and wants them to be dissolved and then reverted to their true mission as "centres of true, humanistic learning". Via Instapundit!

If Historical Events Had Facebook Statuses

Courtesy of Cool Material. I cropped what I thought was the funniest statuses I could find. This just had to be it. LBJ signs the 1964 Civil Rights Act with Dr. King liking the status, however, some of the Southern states weren't too happy. Almost a reminder of when people were complaining that there wasn't a dislike function. LOL!

Via Instapundit!

Eadweard Muybridge: Man in motion

Found this article via The Economist. He was a British photographer who mainly practiced in California. His motion studies work is seen as the forerunner to the motion picture. Well if you don't understand "motion picture" it's what we call movies or film today. In fact we can even connect this to video since it's another medium of motion picture.

Muybridge is best known for his demonstration that movement could be broken down into fluid sequences of individual moments. That insight was made use of by a succession of artists, from Auguste Rodin to Francis Bacon. Muybridge’s motion studies can be fairly credited as the forerunners of the cinema. There is also evidence that in 1888 he shared with Thomas Edison some thoughts on combining a new projection system he had invented—the zoopraxiscope—with Edison’s phonograph. And the grid pattern of his bestselling books on locomotion survives in the format of comic strips.

A travelling exhibition, which began at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and has now opened in London, reveals Muybridge as much more than simply the pioneer of motion, however. Good close attention is paid to his biography, even if there are still important gaps. The very first line of the opening wall panel admits: “Where Muybridge learned his skill as a photographer remains unknown.” Other parts of his life are more familiar, in particular the fact that he coldbloodedly killed his wife’s lover. He was acquitted in part because a jury could not believe that a man who could lug the heavy and cumbersome photographic equipment of the time up into the Yosemite Valley could be entirely sane.

Muybridge did not just invent another name for himself. He excelled in a new industry, and made up more than just its technology as he went along. He was adept, for example, at marketing himself along with his photographs, and there is plenty of evidence of that in this show, from his illustrated trade cards and well-designed logos, to the many photographs of himself, quite naked, posing as a model in some of the motion studies.

For each major undertaking Muybridge invented the appropriate kind of photography to suit. His investigation of galloping horses for Leland Stanford, a California politician and racehorse owner, is well known. In each stride horses lift all four hooves off the ground at once, something that George Stubbs, the most famous horse painter of the last 300 years, had guessed at but which, until Muybridge, had never been proved. The beautiful cyanotype proofs for “Animal Locomotion” have recently been restored and are being given their first public outing in this show. There are also examples of the work Muybridge did up and down the Pacific coast for the national body in charge of lighthouses, including a sequence of unusual large-format seascapes completed in the 1870s, at precisely the time that Thomas Stevenson (father of Robert Louis) was designing his lighthouses around the coasts of Scotland.

When will this exhibit come to Chicago? I want to see this.

Oh yeah the galloping horse above well that's one of Muybridge's famous photographs.

Vegas Chapels Busy On Symmetrical Date

Hmm I wonder why 10/10/10 caused so many people to want to schedule their marriage or events on this particular date:

Megan Powell, a 26-year-old who married a nightclub and restaurant operator, said her Las Vegas wedding was "a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get married on 10/10/10."

"That day will never happen again," she added.

Her new husband, Scott Frost, called it "fun" that "we'll have something unusual in common with a big chunk of people. We'll have a much greater probability of running into couples with the same anniversary."

Tamara Tom, 28, of Fairfield, Calif., was following a tradition when she married Robert Harper at the Atlantis Casino Resort Spa in Reno. The couple said they will celebrate 10 years of being together on Dec. 10.

"We thought it would be fun to have all 10s as our anniversary," Tom told the Reno Gazette-Journal.

If there was such a rush I wonder how accommodating the various marriage license bureaus were in counties or municipalities around the state.

Oh wow, 10/10/10 has now given away to 10/11/10. :P

Instapundit says that it's 10/10/10

And I wasn't on marking 8/9/10 on the blog either so this time I'm making note of it on the very day it is. Have a wonderful Sunday. Oh and Columbus Day is Monday. Thankfully I got the day off! :)

Instapundit on 10/10/10 and 8/9/10

Car Lust: Cadillac Catera

You know my mother owned both a Catera and it's cousin the Cimarron. Over a year ago the Car Lust blog talked about the Cimarron. It was already known by me that the Cimarron was nothing more than a luxury Chevy Cavalier.

You couldn't say that so easily with the Catera. It was inspired by German designed cars, but Car Lust says that it more or less resembled similar GM autos such as the Pontiac Grand Am or the Chevy Malibu. Another issue with that car was that compared to other Cadillacs the Catera design was boring. Also it was mechanically unreliable as well.

Of course the Catera's immediate successor was the CTS. Not a lot of complaints about it from Car Lust so far, but I'm sure there is a post about CTS in its future.

My mom owned a Cimarron similar to this!

She also owned a Catera smiliar to this!

Hat-tip Instapundit!

OH YEAH! I had the pleasure of driving the Catera, but in those days I only had an instruction permit. I drove it around the city, but only very rarely. I must say however that on several occasions the car just shut down on us when we did drive it around the city. Thankfully we weren't too far away where we didn't have long to wait for a bus.

In fact one time we were just down the street from the house when the Catera broke down, although in a different neighborhood. There was some lady who may have been on something. This woman was yelling and playing ballerina on a busy street that night!

Another Recovery Act sign

Near 111th/Ashland in Morgan Park. The bridge across I-57 was out of service and being fixed up. Another Obama stimulus "campaign sign" located on Chicago's south side. A little more background from Marathon Pundit, he's been keeping an eye on these.