September 29. 2008 by Dick.

I don’t care what “they” say at funerals. Losing a family member or a close friend is not a cause for celebration; it’s a time to fill up the hole left in our lives when all we have are memories.

Paul Newman wanted to be remembered as a racer who supported his habit by acting. He died last Friday at 83 after a battle with cancer.

Darn it, that’s like losing a friend who really made it.

We feel that way when a popular actor dies. We invite great actors and writers into our homes and our thoughts and our lives in a way we would never do with an acquaintance down the street. We often spend more time with them and they stay in our memory longer than people we work with or even our real life friends.

“No, it IS losing a friend who really made it,” my real friend “Lido” said. “You just hadn’t seen him in the last 32 years.”

Well, sort of. We had more of a relationship with PLN than he did with us. See I started driving race cars a year or so after he did. We drove the same tracks at the same times but rarely in the same class. We rubbed elbows and he even helped push my car in the pits. We shared a favorite track (Lime Rock) where he ran some hot laps just this past August. He was always a better driver than almost anyone else I know.

But he would have known me in Nomex, not in street clothes. I would have known him anywhere.

The Oscar-winning actor was intensely private in public but he never played the part of a celebrity at the racetrack. He didn’t play any part there. He was not just there for his good looks. He was a driver

P. L. Newman drove Bob Sharp’s Datsuns in SCCA and in the under 2-liter Trans Am but he won his first race at Thompson Speedway in Connecticut in a Lotus. I may have driven that race in what was then my E-Production TR-4. I went on to muddle about in Camaros in A-Sedan and GT-1 although I came back to the Triumph a couple of times and even drove a Lotus Formula C. He went on to drive B-Sedan, C- and D-Production, and GT-1, a Porsche 935 at LeMans, an assortment of Corvettes, and a Mustang in GTS at the 24 Hours of Daytona.

“If he had started younger,” Bob Sharp said, “he would have been World Champion.” He was simply that good a driver.

It has been a bad year for racing. Phil Hill, our only American-born Formula One champion, died in August. Watkins Glen founder Cam Argetsinger died in April. Jimmy Stewart, who carried the Scottish flag against Stirling Moss, Mike Hawthorne and Juan Manuel Fangio and who inspired his little brother Jackie to go racing, died in January.

I don’t feel the same sense of personal loss about them. See, I didn’t know them.

Paul Newman was one of the good guys. My c.1974 race at Bryar (now New Hampshire Motor Speedway) was red flagged and the entire pack was diverted to sit in the pit lane. The pack inched forward but pit lane was pretty flat where I sat and I couldn’t get the Camaro to roll without starting the engine. Race cars don’t have fans and don’t idle well so no one wants to start one without reason. He was walking through the pits at the time. He grabbed a couple of other guys to push me along. It’s what everybody did.

“Can you send me that picture of you guys at Pocono?” Lido asked me.

Lido would like that photo because I was driving his car while he babysat millwrights rebuilding a chemical plant in Houston in 1976. I’m not sure anyone took any pictures although perhaps my dad did. He took a lot of photos over the years. I’ll send it if I can find it. I don’t think the car would have been in the background, though.

My whole family had come to the race. PLN was also there, driving. He won that race as well as an SCCA national D-production title that year. I introduced him to Anne and to my mom in the paddock. He stood and talked to these drooling women for quite a while, easily. That was my parents’ 30th wedding anniversary which put my dad in that “how do I top this” kind of spot.

Those are some of my memories of a genuine nice guy.

Posted in Death, Big Thoughts, Arts, Random Access | 1 Comment »

September 8. 2008 by Dick.

“It’s so much easier to suggest solutions when you don’t know too much about the problem,” Malcolm S. Forbes said a few years ago.

Hana R. Alberts, Michael Noer and David M. Ewalt, writing for Forbes Magazine, have published “an alternative” to the quality report that U.S. News & World Report has long issued about American higher education.

It is not the best ranking system I have seen.

Darn it. It could have been.

Malcolm S. Forbes died young, about 18 years ago. As an interesting (to me) aside, he was born on my grandfather’s birthday, August 19, but the same year my parents were born. As far as I know, my family and his had nothing else in common although I did read his magazine. Mr. Forbes published Forbes Magazine which his father founded and his son now runs.

He was graduated from Princeton University, active in politics and community, and strong-willed about his magazine which he grew large.

Despite the shallowness of the college report, I suspect the aphorism rags to rags in three generations will not apply to the Capitalist Tool Forbeses.

The Center for College Affordability and Productivity’s big idea seems worthwhile at first glance. Ranking the profs, career success, costs, graduation rates, and student recognition are all pretty good tests. Too bad their methodology fell apart at the starting gate. The group of mostly college students at CCAP gathered data from 7 million student evaluations of courses and instructors in a non-scientific, online, “inmates rating the asylum” poll site. That’s a quarter of the grade. Another quarter comes from Who’s Who listings. I have a Who’s Who listing along with a few million other Americans, so I’m pretty sure that’s not a great qualifier. Maybe they should use Wikipedia listings.

I find it interesting that Cal Tech is ahead of Harvard and that my mom’s alma mater, Swarthmore, is well ahead of Yale. Not to mention the fact that Dartmouth offers free tuition but is way down on the list.

OTOH, ya gotta ask yourself How does one really choose a school? I ended up at Stevens Institute of Technology almost by accident. I looked for schools that had belly button design. Webb didn’t accept me. Stevens did. Forbes ranked them number as either 127 or 565. Stevens is a Top-10 engineering school.

I taught in Vermont Colleges for several years. I even survived student rankings. With that caveat, I never thought that students should be allowed to design a curriculum even when I was a student and I have always believed that student ranking of teachers is too much Entertainment Tonight and too little NASA Tech Briefs.

Come on. Students go to school for one of four reasons: get out of the draft, get out of the house, get out of having to work for a living, OR TO LEARN SOMETHING. I can accept a student’s appraisal of courses or teachers after, say, long enough in the workplace to apply what was learned in school and to judge whether it helped her or hurt him.

Let me pose that as a question: Who do you want removing your appendix? The surgeon who has done it a few hundred times or the pre-med student who has read Appendectomies for Dummies?

At least Forbes recognized that “the sort of student who will thrive at Williams might drown at Caltech, to say nothing of West Point.”

That said, Forbes also believes that “these rankings reflect, in a very real way, the quality and cost of an undergraduate education at a wide range of American colleges and universities. And when families have to make a decision with a six-figure price tag and lifelong impact, we think they deserve all the information they can get.”

Pfui. I reckon that when families have to make that six-figure decision, they deserve better information than this. Here are the top 10 questions I would want answered plus a couple of extras:

Personal Questions
• Does the curriculum match what I need to learn?
• Do the instructors teach in a way that matches my learning style?
• Is the program rigor too much (or too little) for me?
• Does campus life help or hinder my growth?
• Will I find help from other alums in my chosen field?

Statistical Questions
• How much will it actually cost, net?
• What kind of job will I get upon graduation?
• Does my education stick me in a single track or can I branch out into whatever interests me as I grow?
• How much do employers and peers respect my school?
• How many freshmen wash out? How many graduate

Then, much lower on the list, come two questions CCAP asked:
• How many Nobel Prizes and MacArthur Genius Grants has the faculty accrued?
• How many Rhodes and Fulbright scholars come from the undergrad program?

Posted in Teaching, Society, Lists, Big Thoughts, Random Access | 2 Comments »

September 1. 2008 by Dick.

The theme of this series has been the need for some loose cannons in politics. The Democrats (almost) have one as a V.P. candidate. The Republicans (almost) have two with John McCain’s surprise pick of Sarah Palin as his V.P. candidate. More than anything he has done in the last decade, that shows he still has a maverick streak. Despite the fact that James Garner will always be Maverick.

That’s a good thing. We need a loose cannon running for President, darn it. After all, the President sets policy, not the Vice President. The President writes pardons, not the Vice President. The President vetoes bills, not the Vice President. The President gets the glory and the barbs, not the Vice President.

I doubt it is enough.

Every candidate–incumbents included–since 1792 would have you believe he is an “agent of change.”

Candidates who want to “change the system” don’t want to change the system; candidates who want to change the system actually want their own policies implemented in the system. A true loose cannon doesn’t care about the system. A true loose cannon will subvert the system and find a way to get some real work done.

Change.

I am no longer a Republican Town Chair (political parties organize committees at the township level to nominate candidates, refine platforms, and get people elected) mostly because I now vote in Florida but also because even in liberal Vermont the Republican party has gotten too impressed with its dogma and not impressed enough with accomplishing anything.

I really may join the Librarian party.

Did you know there are more Library card carriers in these United States than there are card carrying Repuglicans and Demodonkeys combined?

Not only that, the Librarians are mostly willing to stand up to those who would erode our liberties by making us declare what we read. I may feel compelled to tell you what I’m reading but I hate being compelled to tell you what I’m reading.

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States…” A Librarian taught me that.

So what offices most worry us?

Remember the five basic responsibilities of Government. That means the next president needs to (1) teach the kids, (2) build the roads, (3) share knowledge and (4) encourage growth, and (5) keep other people including the government itself from robbing or nuking us.

(1) In the wake of the current “No Child Gets Ahead” program, none of the candidates is talking much about schools. A loose cannon in the Oval would surely understand that today’s first graders will pay my children’s Social Security.

(2) In spite of the epidemic of bridge collapses none of the candidates is talking much about roads. A loose cannon in the Oval would see there is a better way to fix the roads than “borrowing” from the transportation tax revenues for the general fund.

(3) Sharing knowledge has slipped from everyone’s radar. Every administration has tried to restrict information flow, whether about government action or scientific data. A loose cannon in the Oval would see that each good, open, scientific program has moved us from rolling stones on logs to rolling Rovers on Mars.

(4) Encourage growth? The dirty secret of the economy is this: the rate of invention, the rate of production, and actual income have all fallen, year after year after year. Popularly quoted statistics show only that our population and inflation have both grown. In fact, the population has doubled since 1950. More people mean more stuff but the rate of making stuff isn’t keeping pace. A loose cannon in the Oval would see that putting people to work is far better than talking about how it’s all working.

(5) Every American has heard about the pork-barrel spending^H^H^H^H, er, the “Omnibus Spending Plan.” Doesn’t that sound like the diesel fuel spreadsheet for a public transit company? There is no spreadsheet in it. Did you know the last 40,000-page Omnibus Spending Plan was bigger than Thomas Jefferson’s entire library? A loose cannon in the Oval would see there is a better way to spend my money than with an Omnibus Spending Plan.

I’m back to Paris Hilton.

If Ms. Hilton joins the Librarian party, I’ll vote for her. Heck, if she gives us a 30-second lesson in economics, I’ll vote for her in a heartbeat.

Unfortunately, the Librarians are all whackos who keep trying to shush me.

The only other choice is to vote for me at DickHarper.com/campaign . Keep trying. The site is very popular and very busy in this campaign season and it may time out.

Posted in Throw Da Bums Out, Politics, Big Thoughts, Random Access | 1 Comment »