• Victory!

    If you were at all wondering about the appearance of the Northwestern Wildcat at the top right of the dahlbergcentral home page, I think the letter pictured here will clear up any confusion. (and thanks, big bro, for the tribute.)

    Staying true to my feline roots–from Bobcat to Wildcat–I’m poised to pounce on Evanston!

    Let the debt begin!

  • The Rock Show and What Happened After

    Casey gave me a copy of this last night before we headed out to the movies. I think this is post-Wilco, back in February.

  • Light at the End of the Tunnel

    Digital composite of images of a solar eclipse, all taken in Antarctica, November 2003.

    (found via the Astronomy Picture of the Day archive)

  • Speeding Bullet / Locomotive / Tall Building

    Look at what I watched over lunch:

  • Carl and Beckett

    Carl and Beckett

    Carl and Beckett Wiswell at Beckett’s first birthday party, April 9, 2005.

  • No Man, No Problem?

    Offered without comment:

    And the Verdict on Justice Kennedy Is: Guilty

    …Next, Michael P. Farris, chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association, said Kennedy “should be the poster boy for impeachment” for citing international norms in his opinions. “If our congressmen and senators do not have the courage to impeach and remove from office Justice Kennedy, they ought to be impeached as well.”

    Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, “upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law.”

    Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his “bottom line” for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. “He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: ‘no man, no problem,’ ” Vieira said.

    The full Stalin quote, for those who don’t recognize it, is “Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.” Presumably, Vieira had in mind something less extreme than Stalin did and was not actually advocating violence. But then, these are scary times for the judiciary.

    [more]

  • Where’s the “Search” Button?

    There they were, 11 college students, lined up like some alien species before a curious group of about 50 college and university librarians.

    One University of Minnesota student had a bagful of electronics with him: iPod, PalmPilot, cell phone. He was bright, opinionated, well-spoken.

    And when was the last time he was in the U’s library?

    “Last year,” he said.

    The collective intake of breath nearly turned the room into a vacuum. What’s a university librarian to do with this generation of college students?

    In one of the kickoff sessions of the national conference of the Association of College and Research Libraries, the group spent seven hours Thursday at the Minneapolis Convention Center puzzling over the habits of the so-called millennial generation.

    Confident, sophisticated, tolerant and practical, they are “Internet natives” who are more likely to use Google to research a paper than go to the library.

    Accustomed to getting information at the click of a mouse button, they are impatient with the slower, word-based searches and single-use computers that many libraries use.

    One librarian said that at her college, students filled the large reading room but never approached the librarian behind the reference desk. When someone finally asked why, a student said, “I thought you were there to watch us.”

    ###

    More in the link, obviously. Definitely something I think about every now and then, at least in the general sense of technology in everyday life. Carl will always have Sesame Street at his beck and call because of the TiVo, for instance, instead of having to wait patiently until it’s on. When I was a kid, it was a big deal if you typed your paper for school on a computer; now, it’s expected. And we’ve always been the generation that was comfortable with new technology — what about the generation that doesn’t know anything but the New?

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