Check out the time signatures. The music for the 6th movement for 3rd horn is on the left; for 4th horn on the right. ;-) 3/4 or 4/4? Clearly 4/4, based on the notes, but confusing.
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Check out the time signatures. The music for the 6th movement for 3rd horn is on the left; for 4th horn on the right. ;-) 3/4 or 4/4? Clearly 4/4, based on the notes, but confusing.
Posted by EclectEcon on April 05, 2015 at 09:17 PM in Music | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted by EclectEcon on April 05, 2015 at 11:12 AM in Eclectic Miscellany, Photography | Permalink | Comments (1)
Jack's Scalloped Potatoes.
A Rich, Creamy Recipe with a Modest Aged Cheddar Kick.
(Jack sent us this recipe last year. We finally got around to trying it.)
Recipe for two. Increase proportionately.
You will need:
- two average size yellow flesh potatoes (preferred) or white russets, peeled and sliced so you get about 10-12 slices per potato.
- one medium finely diced onion and three or four finely chopped garlic cloves
- equivalent of about 4 or 5 tbsp of a sharp/old/aged cheddar, cut in small chunks
- 4 or 5 tbsp whipping cream or more if suicidal
- about a fifth of a pound of butter and two or three tbsp of good olive oil
- salt, pepper to taste.
Method
Pre-heat an oven to 350F.
place the olive oil and a generous hunk of butter in a fry pan; add the onion, pinch of salt and pepper, and sautee over medium heat until softened; add the garlic and continue the sautee until the mixture is lightly browned. Remove the onion and garlic and set aside, leaving most of the oil in the pan.
Make a roux by adding two or three tbsps of flour to the simmering oil left in the pan. With a whisk, ensure all the flour is incorporated in the buttery oil, adding more butter if necessary. Let this bubble for a couple of minutes, then start to add small amounts of milk, while whisking constantly. As this eventually starts to thin out, add the cream and continue to whisk. What you are aiming for in the end is a bubbly thin pancake batter consistency. Add the cheese pieces, and stir until incorporated. Add the set-aside onion and garlic. Add some pinches of freshly cracked black pepper and stir.
Place your potato slices, with pinches of salt and pepper , in a baking dish large enough to leave about a third or more of the dish free to add the sauce.
Add some of the sauce to the potatoes and stir, making sure all the potato pieces have some sauce, then add the rest of the sauce. This should cover all the potatoes and more, leaving sauce about half an inch - 2.5cm - or more above. [huh? 2.5cm is one inch; I think we settled on about half an inch or a bit more than one cm.]
Place, covered with aluminum foil, in the oven, for about 40 minutes. Then remove the foil and continue to bake for another 15-20 if you use white potatoes, or 20-30 if using yellow flesh ones. Check every 10 minutes to make sure they aren't getting too brown. If they are before potatoes are tender, reduce the heat and perhaps replace the foil for some minutes. Can keep in a 180F degree oven while cooking other items.
Posted by EclectEcon on April 05, 2015 at 06:31 AM in Food and Drink | Permalink | Comments (1)
More than 1% of the people who have been my Facebook friends are now dead. At least nine of the over 800 people who have been listed as my friends are dead. Eight of them still have active Facebook accounts.
It happens to people in my demographic cohort. It is to be expected. It is still unsettling.
Posted by EclectEcon on April 04, 2015 at 03:38 PM in Eclectic Miscellany | Permalink | Comments (0)
People who know me know that I curse/swear a lot. I used to swear quite a bit even in lectures when I was teaching. And I don't mind reading swearing in novels or hearing it in movies.
But I rarely if ever use swear words on EclectEcon or on Facebook. I don't know why, but it jars me when I see swearing on blogs or on Facebook.
And so it bothers me when I see things from a site such as I F*&^ing Love Science that I would like to repost (i.e. "share") on Facebook. I shared one recently and for some bizarre reason felt quite uncomfortable about it.
I guess from now on what I'll have to do is download the images from those sites and edit the sources.
What weird bundle of inconsistencies and confusions, eh?
Posted by EclectEcon on April 04, 2015 at 06:57 AM in Eclectic Miscellany | Permalink | Comments (0)
I know I have a very good life, so take this for the small grain of whatever that it's worth.
We sign my gubmnt pension cheque over to the cable company every month ... or so it seems .... to subscribe to every possible sports channel available.
So what do we get?
Four different channels showing the Yankeres baseball game and only one showing the Tigers-Rays game; but at least we have the option because we paid for the extra channels.
Worse though is that TSN has four different channels showing curling from the Men's World Championship. All four of them are showing a replay of yesterday's game between Canada and Italy. Not one -- not one frickn TSN channel -- is showing the current tie-breaker being played between the US and Finland.
WTF TSN??
Posted by EclectEcon on April 03, 2015 at 01:45 PM in Sports, Television | Permalink | Comments (0)
Very moving video from the BBC:
Posted by EclectEcon on April 03, 2015 at 07:24 AM in Anti-Semitism | Permalink | Comments (0)
I'm not always keen on things published in Townhall, but this piece by Victor Davis Hanson merits consideration. He warns that the intense desire by Obama and Kerry to get a nuclear agreement with Iran, any agreement at all, is dangerously similar to the agreement struck in Munich with Hitler by Neville Chamberlain and the West.
Most Westerners accept that the Iranian government funds terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas. It has all but taken over Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. Yet the idea of stronger sanctions, blockades or even force to stop Iranian efforts to get a bomb are considered scarier than Iran getting a bomb that it just possibly might not threaten to use.
The U.S. and its NATO partners are far stronger than Iran in every imaginable measure of military and economic strength. The Iranian economy is struggling, its government is corrupt, and its conventional military is obsolete. Iran's only chance of gaining strength is to show both its own population and the world at large that stronger Western powers backed down in fear of its threats and recklessness. ...
By reaching an agreement with Iran, John Kerry and Barack Obama hope to salvage some sort of legacy -- in the vain fashion of Chamberlain -- out of a heretofore failed foreign policy.
There are more Munich parallels. The Iranian agreement will force rich Sunni nations to get their own bombs to ensure a nuclear Middle East standoff. A deal with Iran shows callous disagreed for our close ally Israel, which is serially threatened by Iran's mullahs. The United States is distant from Iran. But our allies in the Middle East and Europe are within its missile range. ...
Finally, the Iranians, like Hitler, have only contempt for the administration that has treated them so fawningly. During the negotiations in Switzerland, the Iranians blew up a mock U.S. aircraft carrier. Their supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, did his usual "death to America" shtick before adoring crowds.
I hope Hanson is wrong; I fear he is not.
Posted by EclectEcon on April 02, 2015 at 02:04 PM in Anti-Semitism, Current Affairs, International Affairs, Middle East | Permalink | Comments (0)
I know not all Muslims are terrorists. But the continued use of terrorism by some/many Islamists is a serious threat. See this from the BBC.
Gunmen from the militant Islamist group al-Shabab have killed at least 15 people and taken students hostage at a university in north-eastern Kenya.
Reports say 65 others were wounded when gunmen stormed the campus in Garissa. Troops are engaging the gunmen.
More than 500 students were still unaccounted for, a minister said. The number of hostages is unclear.
Al-Shabab, which is linked to al-Qaeda, said it was holding Christians hostage and freeing Muslims.
Hostages from the two groups had been separated, and 15 of the Muslims had already been released, a spokesman for al-Shabab told the BBC.
Posted by EclectEcon on April 02, 2015 at 09:42 AM in Education, International Affairs, Islam | Permalink | Comments (0)
Ms Eclectic and I like to watch British mystery shows. Recently we realized (I have no idea what took us so long) that when we watch them on DVDs, we can turn on "subtitles".
We now find that we can watch the programmes with much lower volume and can understand much more than we could before.
Now to go through all the other DVDs we have to see if this option is available. I sure hope so.
Posted by EclectEcon on April 02, 2015 at 07:23 AM in Television | Permalink | Comments (0)
Earlier today I put up two posts about the prez of UWO, Amit Chakma, and how he had taken double pay in lieu of taking an administrative leave [here and here]. The pressure was strong and this afternoon, he announced he would return $440K and wouldn't exercise that option in his new contract. Further there will be an independent investigation into the situation (and I hope into the Board of Governors who approved such a contractual option for him).
From his email,
My employment contract with Western, executed in 2009, provided for payment in lieu of one year of administrative leave at the end of my five-year term. When I was reappointed, for the sake of continuity, I received payment in lieu of the administrative leave.
Although contractually sanctioned, in hindsight, I should have carried over my administrative leave to the end of my current term.
Today, Western’s Board of Governors retained the Honourable Stephen T. Goudge to conduct an independent and impartial review of my compensation. I am confident that Justice Goudge will complete a full and fair examination and I will whole heartedly cooperate. I look forward to his findings and intend to abide by his recommendations.
In the interim, as a demonstration of my commitment to Western and to address the concerns that many have expressed, I have decided voluntarily to refund the in lieu payment to the University. I have also decided not to exercise my right under the contract to receive payment in lieu of administrative leave at the end of my second term.
My prediction:
The judge will recommend that since prez Chakma returned the money, he get both the administrative leave he should have taken this year AND the administrative leave to which he is entitled at the end of the next contract. (in a sense Chakma set the stage for this saying he should have carried over the administrative leave to which he is entitled until the end of his next contract). I.e., the judge will recommend that Chakma serve as prez for 3 more years and then be paid on an administrative leave for the next two years and then not be rehired.
This is a good solution, given the mistakes that have been made already. UWO should get rid of this guy soon, and paying him for his administrative leaves would not be exorbitant or outside the terms of his contract. It would certainly be cheaper than what I proposed here. I'd just as soon see him and at least some of the members of the Board of Governors fired but that probably won't happen, so this would not be a bad solution.
At any rate, I shall be surprised if there isn't SOME form of quid pro quo for his having returned $440K.
Posted by EclectEcon on April 01, 2015 at 10:53 PM in Economics, Education | Permalink | Comments (1)
I just posted a item urging The University of Western Ontario to fire it's prez, Amit Chakma, and to get back to striving for excellence instead of incompetence. Clearly the Board of Governors must go as well.
Here is why: They renewed his contract for another five years despite a record of incompetence. From the London Free Press:
When Chakma came to Western, he promised to boost its international standing and pointed to annual rankings done by The Times of London in England.
At the time, he thought the school was well positioned to break into the top 100.
“As a first step, it would be wonderful to be among the top 100 universities that The Times of London (lists). Western is very close,” he said in 2009.
But Western has since fallen in the rankings to between 225 and 250. Those behind the ranking don’t disclose the exact placement of schools not in the top 200.
Another ranking publication that splintered off the Times ranking had Western sinking to 199 and 191 the past two years.
Even the Richard Ivey School of Business at Western slipped badly: It ranked as high as 27th in 2007, ranked in the 40s the following four years, and this year dropped to 97th, hanging by a thread to a top 100 ranking.
A university spokesperson defended the school’s standing, writing that Western ranked in the top five in Canada and top 150 globally in philosophy, psychology, economics and accounting and finance.
“As for Ivey, all Canadian business schools are seeing a downturn in global rankings . . . That said, the most notable, recent business school ranking for Ivey comes from Bloomberg Businessweek, (which) ranked Ivey as the No.1 business school for MBAs outside of the United States,” spokesperson Keith Marnoch wrote.
Note: in the 1980s, when Stan Liebowitz and I did some serious ranking of economics departments, the UWO economics department ranked somewhere between 7th and 30th in the world, depending on the criteria used. [see this: "Assessing Assessments of Economics Departments" (with S. Liebowitz), Quarterly Review of Economics and Business 28 (Summer 1988): 88-113.]
The department is now in the top 150??? Sheesh. Not all the decline is due to Chakma, for sure. But being one of the top 200 economics departments claiming to be in the top 150 is nowhere near being one of the top 30 claiming to be in the top 20.
Posted by EclectEcon on April 01, 2015 at 08:32 AM in Current Affairs, Economics, Education | Permalink | Comments (0)
Amit Chakma is the reigning Prez of The University of Western Ontario (which he induced people to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to rename as "Western"). He is clearly not the person who should be leading a major post-secondary education institution.
I really doubt that he has done anything illegal.
However, his so-called "leadership" has been incompetent, as has that of his administration.
In addition to the renaming farcical exercise, he has irritated numerous alumni, faculty members, students, and fellow administrators by having negotiated, and followed through with, a contract whereby he could draw double pay in lieu of taking an administrative leave. It turns out he did something pretty similar before coming to UWO.
As much as jaws dropped when people learned Western University paid its president nearly a million bucks last year, it wasn’t even his biggest pay day.
In 2009, Amit Chakma moved to London from the University of Waterloo, where he’d been a vice-president, and raked in $972,440 in salary and benefits, $5,000 more than last year’s total.
He did so by cashing in an unused academic sabbatical at Waterloo, raising the ire of some faculty. [EE: I haven't heard of faculty members being able to cash in unused sabbatical leaves when they change institutions. This is indeed rare.]
“There was quite a bit of alarm expressed by UW faculty over this, since if (a regular) faculty (member) resigns, they never receive anything for any unused sabbatical credit,” a retired faculty member recalled in an e-mail Wednesday to The Free Press.
Chakma was paid more than $741,000 by Waterloo in 2009 and another $229,000 in pay and benefits after his move to London. He became Western’s president in July that year.
Both he and the people who hired him need to leave UWO. As it is, his presence as prez will detract from what the university needs to be doing and will seriously hamper fund-raising efforts by the university.
Even before all these shenanigans came to light, people were raising questions about his presidency.
A person whom I respect and whose information I tend to trust told me the other day that a major donor decided not to make a massive donation to UWO. In announcing the decision, the donor raked the UWO admins over the coals and said UWO would not get a nickel of donations so long as Chakma was the prez.
He clearly has to go. Buy him off and send him away.
At the same time, get rid of the people on the Board of Governors who hired him and who (amazingly) renewed his contract. The sooner they are gone, the sooner UWO can get on with higher education.
I am so disappointed.
Posted by EclectEcon on April 01, 2015 at 08:17 AM in Current Affairs, Education | Permalink | Comments (0)
The title of this post seems like an oxymoron. Here is why (from Bryan Caplan):
If 18% of biologists believed in creationism, that would be a big deal. Why? Because creationism is nonsense. Similarly, if 18% of social scientists believe in Marxism, that too is a big deal. Why? Because Marxism is nonsense. Furthermore, if 18% of a discipline fully embrace a body of nonsense, there is also probably a large bloc of nonsense sympathizers - people who won't swallow the nonsense whole, but nevertheless see great value in it. Suppose, plausibly, that there is one fellow traveler for every true believer. That would bring the share of abject intellectual corruption to fully 35% - and 51% in sociology.
The data on which he based this remark are in his post. The comments following his post at Econlog are worth reading, too.
I worry at least as much about the infestation of higher education by planners and elitist interventionists. They all need to spend some time reading and discussin Hayek.
Posted by EclectEcon on April 01, 2015 at 07:55 AM in Economics, Education | Permalink | Comments (0)
It seems to me that April Fool's Day is little more than a socially sanctioned day during which people seem to think it is okay to tell you lies and then say "April Fool". Some of the lies are creative, interesting, and maybe even amusing, but April Fool's Day is also a time when people play games of "gotcha". I like humour, but I don't like gotcha humour.
Curmudgeonly yours,
EclectEcon
Posted by EclectEcon on April 01, 2015 at 07:27 AM in Current Affairs, Eclectic Miscellany | Permalink | Comments (0)