"No one is very happy with the Miers nomination."

But "the odds are we will soon be saying 'Justice Harriet Miers' and something along the lines of: How did that happen?" My op-ed in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Ecstatic.

My son John has been putting a lot of pictures into his Flickr photostream, including this one of me, looking ecstatic. I no longer remember why!



Companion photo, showing the whole context. Empty wine glass noted, but it's insufficient to explain the mood:

The educational gender gap.

David Brooks writes about the accelerating disparity between males and females in education. (Unfortunately, this link will take you to TimesSelect, which requires payment to enter.)

Women are more likely to enroll in college and they are more likely to have better applications, so now there are hundreds of schools where the female-male ratio is 60 to 40. About 80 percent of the majors in public administration, psychology and education are female. And here's the most important piece of data: Until 1985 or so, male college graduates outnumbered female college graduates. But in the mid-80's, women drew even, and ever since they have been pulling away at a phenomenal rate.

This year, 133 women will graduate from college for every 100 men. By decade's end, according to Department of Education projections, there will be 142 female graduates for every 100 male graduates. Among African-Americans, there are 200 female grads for every 100 male grads.

The social consequences are bound to be profound. The upside is that by sheer force of numbers, women will be holding more and more leadership jobs. On the negative side, they will have a harder and harder time finding marriageable men with comparable education levels....

For 30 years, attention has focused on feminine equality. During that time honest discussion of innate differences has been stifled (ask Larry Summers). It's time to look at the other half.

Women have jumped ahead of men so quickly. It's important to take account of the situation and do something about it before the gap gets worse. Unfortunately, it's risky even to bring up the subject, though it should be remembered that Larry Summers got slammed for speculating about why women were achieving less than men. Is male underachievement a less or more touchy topic?

Coined word: shrediting.

Shrediting: shredding someone through editing, as typically seen in a reality TV show, where a film editor, to create a story line, selects clips from hours of footage to give a very negative impression of a person. See "The Apprentice," Season 4, Episode 4 (character: Toral). See also, "The Comeback" (a sitcom in which the central character is filming a reality show without realizing when she is unwittingly providing the material that will be used in the final edit to shred her).

Talking back to fortune cookies.

Fortune Cookie #1: "Suffering is caused by attachment to impermanent things."

Althouse response: "So is pleasure."

Fortune Cookie #2: "Kind words cost nothing."

Althouse response: "Kind words are worth nothing."

General comment: The fortune cookies did not contain fortunes.

Fortune Cookie #1: "Suffering is caused by attachment to impermanent things."

Translation into a fortune: "You will attach yourself to impermanent things and suffer for it."

Fortune Cookie #2: "Kind words cost nothing."

Translation into a fortune: "Without expending a single dollar, you will achieve your goals through flattery."

Vienna.

Nina's in Vienna for the weekend, and she just got a new SLR camera. Beautiful!

New ways to get lost in Amazon.

Have you noticed the new features in Amazon? I haven't seen any announcements on their main page, but if you go to an individual book, now, you can find all kinds of new, cool things. I'm not finding it for every book, and it seems as though it wouldn't be possible for books that are not open to the "search inside" function. But take, for example, "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim." Let's look at the SIPs -- or "statistically improbable phrases":

Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases, or "SIPs", are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.

SIPs are not necessarily improbable within a particular book, but they are improbable relative to all books in Search Inside!. For example, most SIPs for a book on taxes are tax related. But because we display SIPs in order of their improbability score, the first SIPs will be on tax topics that this book mentions more often than other tax books. For works of fiction, SIPs tend to be distinctive word combinations that often hint at important plot elements.

For "Dress Your Family," they've only come up with: "eight black men." If you've read the book, you know what that refers to. If you click on the phrase, you get all the other books with that phrase: here. Useful? Possibly not in this case, though still interesting, in a rather random way.

Then there are the CAPs (capitalized phrases):

Aunt Monie, Monie Changes Everything, Baby Einstein, The Girl Next Door, The Ship Shape, Full House, Nuit of the Living Dead, Blood Work, North Carolina, Slumus Lordicus, Kwik Pik, Great Dane, Puta Lid, Saint Nicholas, Anne Frank, The End of the Affair, Royal Pavilion, Who's the Chef, Apple Pan, The Empire

Each is clickable. You can then see other books that frequently use that capitalized phrase. Well, no one else is using Slumus Lordicus yet, but here are the Anne Frank references.

Then there's the concordance:

Concordance is an alphabetized list of the most frequently occurring words in a book, excluding common words such as "of" and "it." The font size of a word is proportional to the number of times it occurs in the book. Hover your mouse over a word to see how many times it occurs, or click on a word to see a list of book excerpts containing that word.

There are also "text stats," showing you how easy or hard the book is to read. Sedaris, it turns out, is awfully easy to read -- 7th grade level. Doesn't say how funny he is, though.

Let me check another, similarly funny, but much darker book I like, "Running With Scissors." Hey, that's even easier to read! Let's try "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time." Oh, that's easy too. Hmmmm.... that's got a SIP of "bloody dog," so who else is SIP-ing "bloody dog"?

James Joyce! All right, then. Let's get the text stats for "Ulysses." I see that's easy to read too, so they say. According to the Flesch-Kinkaid analysis, it's written at less than a 7th grade level, so if you're not ready to tackle "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim"...

UPDATE: You can check text stats for blogs at this website. In case you're wondering, this blog has the following numbers:

Gunning Fog Index 10.31
Flesch Reading Ease 66.29 (higher is easier, with 100 being the easiest)
Flesch-Kincaid Grade 7.13

The numbers for "Ulysses" are: 9.0, 68.1, 6.8. Do you find this confusing? Generally, I think it's a good sign if your ease-of-reading stats seem low for the difficulty of the material.

Eavesdropping for nerds.

What hot gossip were you overhearing when you just couldn't resist breaking in and joining a private conversation? Or perhaps you were sitting near people who were discussing a logic problem, maybe this one:

Someone has prepared two envelopes containing money. One contains twice as much money as the other. You have decided to pick one envelope, but then the following argument occurs to you: Suppose my chosen envelope contains $X, then the other envelope either contains $X/2 or $2X. Both cases are equally likely, so my expectation if I take the other envelope is .5 * $X/2 + .5 * $2X = $1.25X, which is higher than my current $X, so I should change my mind and take the other envelope. But then I can apply the argument all over again. Something is wrong here! Where did I go wrong? In a variant of this problem, you are allowed to peek into the envelope you chose before finally settling on it. Suppose that when you peek you see $100. Should you switch now?

Would you become so intrigued that you would ask to join the conversation?

(Here's the solution to the problem.)

ADDED: Let me be clear: I was not the eavesdropper! I was one of the original conversationalists, but I was not the person who introduced the topic. Of the three persons described here, I was the one demonstrating the least nerd cred.

What keeps conservatives out of academia?

John Tierney has another column (behind TimesSelect) about the lack of conservatives in academia. He paraphrases the justifications various professors have offered:

1. Conservatives do not value knowledge for its own sake.

2. Conservatives do not care about the social good.

3. Conservatives are too greedy to work for professors' wages.

4. Conservatives are too dumb to get tenure.

Tierney rejects all of that, and blames the disparity on "the structure of academia, where decisions about hiring are made by small independent groups of scholars":

They're subject to the law of group polarization, derived from studies of juries and other groups.

"If people are engaged in deliberation with like-minded others, they end up more confident, more homogenous and more extreme in their beliefs," said Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago. "If you have an English or history department that leans left, their interactions will push them further left."

Once liberals dominate a department, they can increase their majority by voting to award tenure to like-minded scholars. As liberals dominate a field, conservatives' work comes to be seen as fringe scholarship.

"The filtering out of conservatives in the job pipeline rarely works by outright blackballing," said Mark Bauerlein, a conservative who is an English professor at Emory. "It doesn't have to. The intellectual focus of the disciplines does that by itself."

Suppose, he said, you were a conservative who wanted to do a sociology dissertation on the debilitating effects of the European welfare state, or an English dissertation arguing that anticommunist literature from the mid-20th century was as valuable as the procommunist literature.

"You'd have a hard time finding a dissertation adviser, an interested publisher and a receptive hiring committee," Bauerlein said. "Your work just wouldn't look like relevant scholarship, and would be quietly set aside."

That sounds accurate to me.

Tierney concludes that the phenomenon ultimately hurts liberals in the political sphere because they can't draw on the ideas of liberals in academia, who have veered too far left to produce ideas that are appealing to American voters.

"I came to vote for Iraq."

The polls have closed in Iraq. Yesterday's blackout in Baghdad is said to have had no effect on today's voting, and I've seen no reports of significant violence today. Security was effective -- in NYT literary style, "helicopters buzzed low over dun-colored rooftops."

UPDATE: Now, have I seen reports of significant violence? WaPo has this:

The worst violence Saturday morning was in Ramadi, an insurgent and Sunni Arab stronghold about 55 miles west of the capital, where prolonged clashes between militants and U.S. soldiers forced three of the city's main polling centers to close shortly after they opened at 7 a.m. Hospital officials said that at least seven people seeking to vote were killed by insurgents early in the day, and the continuous crackle of gunfire kept streets empty.

The WaPo also reports, however, that "[i]n other Sunni areas, turnout was described as surprisingly brisk" (though those interviewed all said they voted "no").

Squirrels! -- an Althouse obsession.

I love squirrels out in yard. They're entertaining, scampering around, looking for love in the spring, furiously burying acorns in the fall. Yesterday, I walked right next to one that was burying an acorn, and I was impressed by the efficient technique and the impressive musculature of the upper back and forelegs under sleek gray fur. When podcasting, I am easily distracted by the skittering of a squirrel across my roof. And, as you know, I've had this ongoing mystery about whether a squirrel has been in my house. I'm not as nervous about that as I once was. There have been no more stray cracked shells on the carpet.

But now, there's this! (Via Metafilter.) Squirrels on crack! Crack dealers/users bury rocks of crack in people's yards and the squirrels dig them up and come back for more.

"I was chatting with my neighbour who told me that crack users and dealers sometimes use my front garden to hide bits of their stash.

"An hour earlier I'd seen a squirrel wandering round the garden, digging in the flowerbeds.

"It looked like it knew what it was looking for.

"It was ill-looking and its eyes looked bloodshot but it kept on desperately digging.

"It was almost as if it was trying to find hidden crack rocks."

Is this for real? This Guardian article notes: "According to internet legend, crack squirrels have terrorised residents in New York and Washington." Yes, it does sound awfully urban legendary. But still...

Some miscellaneous things about blogging.

1. I love Blogger! Nothing has malfunctioned around here since last May, and it's free. There must be a lot of people who left Blogger and regret it. How irritating it must be to have more traffic cost more. On Blogger, more traffic is unalloyed fun.

2. I really have meant all along to redo my template into something more distinctive, but lately, clicking around and seeing other blogs using Minima, I've started to feel that we have a kind of kinship. We are the Minimalists.

3. I must confess I've never understood trackbacks. I'm fairly sure Blogger blogs can't receive them, and I have no idea how to give them. I just quite simply regard trackbacks as something other people do.

4. I don't understand Blogshares, and I don't want to understand it. My interest in understanding it did not increase when I read this on the page about my blog:

Althouse suffered a huge setback with several analysts urging their clients to ditch the stock as it suffered a public relations disaster. The exact nature of customer dissatisfaction was not known but Txapulín was rumoured to have had a hand in it. Industry insiders suspect a Judge (artefact) was involved. Althouse share price dropped from B$7,667.73 to B$3,373.8.

The hell?

Suddenly class is a lame reality show.

And the richest man in the world plays substitute teacher for your little seminar:

The class burst out in laughter as the founder of Microsoft and the richest man in the United States dropped by the University of Wisconsin-Madison class unannounced as part of his tour of college campuses.

The 13 students were five minutes into a review for their exam next week when [Bill] Gates walked in.

Jaws dropped as cameras for mtvU, a 24-hour college TV network, filmed the surprise as a part of a series that features celebrity drop-ins on campuses.

The interpretation of deadlines.

If you've got a deadline on Friday, and you email about whether it would be okay to take until Monday, and they don't answer the email right away, that means they aren't sitting around waiting for it today, and it's the same as an extension until Monday. Right?

Yesterday, I had a deadline that was "the close of business Thursday." I sent the draft at 5:59 p.m. Did I meet the deadline? It's more business-y to work late, isn't it? It's a slackerish businessperson who leaves at 5. And don't you love the 59? It makes it look as though I was all briskly focused on 6 as "the close of business." And what's with "the close of business" as a deadline anyway? If you're clocking out at the end of the work day, why not say "before the open of business Friday"? Why deprive me of the evening if I might happen to have writing habits of that sort?

"What else is there to say, in any case, about a middling bureaucrat and yes-woman than that she attends some mediocre place of worship?"

Who hasn't been waiting for a nicely pissy Christopher Hitchens rant about Harriet Miers?

George Washington + Baked Communications Professor on Graduation Day + Jessica's Grandpa.

Go Fug Yourself finally gets around to Michael Stipe. (What I don't get is: are those his ears?)