Jacob Christensen

As seen at the HQ of the Swedish Social Democrats. Will Thomas Östros make it to the finals of xFactor?

Via Scott McLemee who, bravely, avoided the lure of graduate school, we are lead to Thomas H. Benton (alias William Pannapacker) who takes a dim view of the entire affair:

Graduate school in the humanities is a trap. It is designed that way. It is structurally based on limiting the options of students and socializing them into believing that it is shameful to abandon “the life of the mind.” That’s why most graduate programs resist reducing the numbers of admitted students or providing them with skills and networks that could enable them to do anything but join the ever-growing ranks of impoverished, demoralized, and damaged graduate students and adjuncts for whom most of academe denies any responsibility.

Topic for discussion: Consider similarities and differences between the humanities, social science and science.

PS: You may also want to follow SML’s advice and take a look at comment #75. Is there “a life of the mind” outside of academia. Yes or no?

The controls on my mobile camera occasionally make for some weird colour effects.

And lots of it:

So, there is an EU summit coming up? Who’d have thunk – the good thing about these things being held in Brussels is that nobody except the EU correspondents and the Eurocrats have to care. But thanks to Caroline de Cock aka Linotherhino, we too can have a piece of the action.

Yes, it’s the (almost) official European Council Summit Buzzword Bingo – readily available as a PDF for printing. It even has flexicurity!

PS: Just in case you wonder what a buzzword bingo is, here’s Wikipedia to the rescue.

Many thanks to Chris Bertram for pointing us to this and to Esben Thomsen for finding a version which fits the template.

Edited: YouTube version of the clip inserted.

Listen, it could have been worse. It could have been … Helge Sander.

HT: Kosmopolito.

Lisa Simpson still has a few tricks to learn, but with a little work on her performance she’ll get there eventually:

HT: PSW.

I probably owe some kind of commentary on the year in Danish politics but for the moment you will have to make do with my reflections about the gadgets that were added to my earthly possessions this year.

As it is, they were not too many: Only a SonyEricsson C905 (that’s a mobile phone, in case you wonder), an iPod Touch and a SAGEM decoder/HDD recorder.

To be perfectly honest, I blame Nikolaj Sonne – and the fact that I bought the phone before the presentation of the iPhone 3GS or the Android handsets – for the phone. It’s quite okay for my uses, so I don’t really have any regrets here if the thing is viewed in isolation. Syncing it with a Mac works very well indeed. I don’t understand the pre-installed browser so I fetched Opera Mini. Not perfect, but okay. The operating system hasn’t screwed up. Yet.

The TV decoder/recorder does what I want it to. End of story. Well, mainly.

And then there is the iPod Touch. You see, as it was I bought it because I was interested in watching movies and TV shows when I was travelling and a big screen iPod seemed a practical device. It hasn’t happened yet, and I doubt if it ever will. Bad buy. In fact, a total failure. Not that there has been anything wrong with the iPod – except that my inner cheapskate didn’t listen to reason: I should have gone for the 64GB model.

That said, the iPod was a brilliant buy. You see, it lacks the phone functions but has just about everything else an iPhone will give you – and the iPod is a bit cheaper. So once you have access to a wifi network, you have full access to the internet. You know: Facebook, Twitter, browser, e-mail, the works. It even serves as a remote control for my AppleTV (Fanboi? Moi? No way…). I do wonder, though, how long the battery will last – my 2007 iPod Classic is still alive and well (which is slightly frustrating as I would like a 160GB model) but the Touch goes through more loading cycles. Other than that, it is one of the cleverest devices, I have ever seen or owned.

So: The winner and the loser of the 2009 contest is – the iPod Touch.

Bonus: The second best thing gadget-wise was installing Ubuntu Linux on the eeePC I bought last December. Ubuntu is much more potent and flexible than the stripped down system Linux eeePCs came with. And no: You do not have to be a software engineer to perform the operation.

I hope Fred Bass and “The Editors” will forgive me for lifting his advice about getting rid of books:

My advice is to first clean out duplicates and books with repetitive information — why do you need six dictionaries? Next, remove all books with out-of-date information, like atlases and reference books. Political, economic and topical books should be the next category to sort through; you don’t really need that copy of Richard Simmons’ “Never-Say-Diet Book” (a 1981 best-seller), or a book on the future of the Democratic or Republican parties, written 20 years ago.¹

One should eliminate books that are in poor condition unless they hold sentimental value and remove those you never intend to read again.

Once you have weeded out the duplicates, the out-of-date material and those moldy, unreadable tomes, make sure to note any first editions or autographed books, as they could be valuable if they are in good condition. Put them aside and store them properly — away from direct sunlight and humidity. You might consider investing in some Mylar, as that is the only proven way to keep a valuable book in perfect condition.

I went through the pain last summer (2008, that is) and I’m more or less trying to figure out what to do with the different parts of my library in about a year’s time. Getting rid of old textbooks and books bought for a specific project is the easy bit, weeding out fiction and stuff bought for personal entertainment is much, much trickier. Still, there is something comforting in reading that other people make the same mistakes as I do when it comes to buying books.

1. For “Democratic or Republican parties, insert relevant European party or “the European Union” [↩]