Links for 2011-03-10

"The UCLA freshman team featured Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), Lucius Allen and three other prep All-Americans. In a game to open the new Pauley Pavilion, UCLA's frosh beat the varsity by 15. The varsity was coming off back-to-back national championships and was ranked No. 1 in the nation.

Our foes trotted out not only the future NBA career scoring leader, and a future NBA star guard in Allen, but also another guy who played briefly in the NBA and a fourth player who started for UCLA's subsequent three NCAA championship teams.

So the Brubabes - as UCLA freshman teams were called - were the best college team in the nation, freshman or otherwise. The Ripplets (little Waves - get it?) were not in that discussion.

We had zero future varsity starters, and zero chance of avoiding Titanic-esque disaster."

"Note from dad: Ask my 4 year old son almost anything! I'll read him the questions and type his answers exactly as given. No coaching or translating. I reserve the right to ignore any questions that I feel are inappropriate.
We did this last year (I'm 3 years old. AMAA) and there was a lot of interest, so we thought we'd do it again now that he's a year older. I'm using the "3yearold" account name again to tie this AMA to the old one. He wants to be sure that I tell everyone that he's really FOUR now."

"I was wondering the other day why investment banking, which is in theory a competitive service industry, appears to be so insanely profitable. A notion occurred to me, but not being an expert in the field it's hard for me to evaluate its veracity. It's got a certain sinister elegance to it, though, and if you'll bear with me for a minute I just want to put this idea in your head. "

"By one of those funny coincidences, a day after we spent a science literacy class in iSci discussing some of the nuances of reading a scientific paper, Rob Weir's 'It's not Harry Potter' appears in Inside Higher Ed detailing the same thing.

In the program, students are thrown into the deep-end of information research very quickly, and are expected to begin combing scientific articles in first year. As a result, we hear cries of: "I don't know how to read this!" In response, we delivered two classes on this topic."