[neue universität] scharia-freie zone bei mekka

Es sind gerade mal 120 Kilometer Luftlinie bis Mekka, dem wichtigsten Heiligtum des Islam. Hier, am Roten Meer, unter der sengenden Sonne der saudiarabischen Wüste, in einem der reichsten und zugleich konservativsten Länder des Islam, soll eine Insel des freiheitlichen Denkens entstehen: die King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.

36 Quadratkilometer groß, 12,5 Milliarden Dollar teuer - auf dem Campus sollen 2000 Studenten, und 600 Fakultätsmitglieder aus aller Welt ab 2009 mit feinster technologischer Ausrüstung und international vernetzt Spitzenforschung betreiben.

Merkwürdig!

[blogfocus saturday] of bones and birthdays

1. While I post on irrelevancies like Liberty Dollars, Colin Campbell gets down to the meaty issues [wonder if Welshcakes could whip this up into something]:

Spotty is a great admirer of large animal bones. A bone like this keeps him busy for about a week.

2. Ross Fountain thinks the BPC wants seriously watching:

“Couch potato”. The British Potato Council wants the expression stripped from the Oxford English Dictionary and replaced in everyday speech with the term "couch slouch". It says the phrase makes the vegetable seem unhealthy and is bad for its image.

3.You remember the blog graphs? Dave Cole now explains all:

In an HTML page, the first thing you do is tell the browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera or whatever takes your fancy) that the file is written in HTML. You do this with the very first thing you write - . In the blogs as graphs pictures, that tag is represented by a black dot, and it’s where everything starts from.

4. Tiberius Gracchus has something important to announce for last Thursday [I'm always late with these things]:

Its my birthday, I'm 27 and therefore ancient! Also worth noting that today is World Philosophy Day - so everyone get those thinking caps on!

Happy birthday, Tiberius - come and blow the candle out!

[go slow] normal service soon

Downloading humungous file. All memory being used. Back soon.

[love] it excuses everything, no matter what the cost

You know the type of thing - the two young lovers with eyes only for each other. He sees a flower shop and grabs a dozen roses to thrust into her hands while the storekeeper gazes on approvingly, whispering: "L'amour, l'amour."

They waltz down the street, upsetting fruit carts, skip across the street causing a five car pile up and when the cops finally catch up with them, the kindly boys in blue smile at each other and forgive the young lovers everything.

Cambodian-born Rindy Sam told a court in Avignon that she was "overcome with passion" when she saw a painting in July.

"I just gave it a kiss. It was an act of love, when I kissed it, I wasn't thinking. I thought the artist would understand," she said.

Restorers have been unable to remove the lipstick and have unsuccessfully used 30 products to get rid of the stain.

The owner appears not to have been impressed and Ms Sam was fined 1500 euros for the desecration. Should the owner get a life or is he right that women, particularly young women, think anything's all right as long as they're young and carefree?

Do you remember that scene in Naked Gun where ketchup accidentally squirts on Leslie Nielsen's shirt when the two lovers are buying hot dogs from a stand and he jokingly squirts Priscilla Presley back, then they both squirt it all over the vendor and everyone laughs?

In love, any jolly jape is all right, don't you think, no matter what the consequences and to whom?

Or not?

[thanksgiving] that we don't get bird flu

Thanksgiving is coming.

Ian Grey reports that Bird Flu has been discovered at a Turkey Farm in Suffolk.

[higher education] free of money not free of talent

The House of Usher, otherwise known as Pollock Halls of Residence

If I read him correctly, which I might not have, I feel Doctor Vee himself misses the point here:

Proponents of free higher education miss the point of higher education. A degree is supposed to be a signal to employers that you are talented. For this signal to work, a degree has to be costly to attain.

After all, if it was easy to get a degree, any old fool could get one. This would lead to the ‘devaluation’ of degrees that people so often talk about. The point of making a degree costly is to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were.

Of course, degrees are costly anyway. Not in a monetary sense, but in a time sense.

My reading of that is that the good Doc's original usage of the term “costly” was indeed referring to money. In that situation and as I commented at his site:

Costly in effort, surely, in hours studied but not in terms of money.

IMHO, education should indeed be free in monetary terms but there should simply be high mark quotas on A levels as there were when I matriculated.

This is a fundamental principle – overall monetary cost to a family should not prevent the higher middle students, the ones who will fill most places in business and industry, from attending their selected courses.

Scholarship material will be given free entry anyway but we're not talking about those here. We're talking about the student with talent and some potential who'll eventually fill the middle to mid-upper rungs in an organization.

Sometimes that talent doesn't fully realize itself until the student actually embarks on the course. Sometimes the talent shows itself to be there but the dedication is not.

There is a self-actualizing tendency here. There are fine state schools but there are a hell of a lot who have enormous problems, at least in England and the chance of talent being developed anyway is mired in social issues and instability at staff level.

So no, I'm not arguing that the floodgates should be opened but make it difficult on the basis of matriculation marks, not money. Once you tie higher education to money, then the product is politicized.