CapitalistImperialistPig

Via Arun , this WaPo story from a Venezuelan Chavez victim: How to let a populist beat you, over and over again. By Andrés Miguel Rondón January 27 Andrés Miguel Rondón is an economist living in Madrid. He is a Venezuelan citizen who was born and raised there. Hugo Chavez was a populist, too. His opponents never figured out how to beat him. (AP Photo/Jorge Santo) Donald Trump is an avowed capitalist; Hugo Chávez was a socialist with communist dreams. One builds skyscrapers, the other expropriated them. But politics is only one-half policy: The other, darker half is rhetoric. Sometimes the rhetoric takes over. Such has been our lot in Venezuela for the past two decades — and such is yours now, Americans. Because in one regard, Trump and Chávez are identical. They are both masters of populism. The recipe for populism is universal. Find a wound common to many, find someone to blame for it, and make up a good story to tell. Mix it all together. Tell the wounded you know how they fee...

The failure to mention Jews, or any other group targeted by the Nazis, was not accidental according to the Administration. Josh Marshall writes: It is true that millions died under the Nazis who were not Jews. They included targeted ethnic groups like Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, left-wing dissidents, people with disabilities, etc. But it has long been a trope of Holocaust deniers and white nationalists to insist that Jews were only incidentally targeted. In any case, there are no word limits in presidential statements. A more logical and worthwhile approach would be to note the various groups who were victimized. This isn't accidental. The new administration is riddled with anti-Semites and those who want to cater to anti-Semites. Marshall blames alt-right godfather Steve Bannon.

While being registered to vote in two states is not illegal, voting in both probably is: Reports: Bannon, Kushner, Tiffany Trump Registered to Vote in Two States

A top Russian FSB agent has been arrested and charged with treason, accused of being a US asset. He was high in the chain of command of those accused of running the hacking operation against the US. Is there anything odd about this happening just after Trump and his top aides, some with deep Russian links, got the classified briefing on the details of how the Russian hacking operation was revealed? Josh Marshall: From the Moscow Times ... A top cybersecurity specialist in Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) was arrested on Wednesday reportedly on suspicion of leaking information to the U.S. intelligence community — a bombshell accusation that, if true, would mean Washington had a spy in the heart of Russia’s national defense infrastructure. Here's the additional detail ... According to the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, the FSB believes Sergei Mikhailov tipped off U.S. officials to information about Vladimir Fomenko and his server rental company “King Servers,” w...

Trump has apparently ordered silence from government employees on climate and other matters. George Orwell's 1984 is climbing the best seller lists.

When Trump, speaking to lawmakers, again repeated the falsehood that he had lost the popular vote due to "millions of illegals" voting, the NYT had had enough - it called the lie a lie. However, that suggested a scarier possibility to me. The man is actually, clinically, delusional. He really believes that millions of illegals voted against him, and that the "real" unemployment rate is 42%.

India's experiment in taking cash out of the economy is having the bad effects that some, or perhaps many, predicted. The supposed anti-corruption measure is hurting the poor badly. Much of the damage appears to stem from the failure of the government to prepare by printing enough of the new currency. Geeta Anand and Hari Kumar report in the NYT: NEW DELHI — First, Yashpal Singh Rathore’s marriage was delayed by his future in-laws, who, like most Indians, ran short of cash after Prime Minister Narendra Modi banned the country’s largest currency notes in November. Then the 29-year-old lost his job when the ensuing cash crunch hit demand for motorcycles and scooters sold by the company where he worked, Hero MotoCorp Ltd. After that, the prospective in-laws refused to let the wedding go forward until he found another job. “So I lost my job and I lost my marriage,” he said in an interview at a protest, where he shouted slogans with more than 100 red-flag-waving workers let go by...

Any performer will tell you that nothing kills a live show like an audience that sits stony faced through your best lines. That's why many or most studio audience shows have paid audiences, people paid a few bucks to laugh and cheer - a claque, to use the term borrowed from French. A TV pro like Donald Trump knows this, which is why he paid actors to cheer at some of his campaign speeches, and why, apparently, he brought a few dozen of his guys to pack the front rows for his speech to the CIA. The CIA wasn't amused, which is probably why this story is in the press today.

Trump has gotten off to a pretty bad start to his presidency, but I'm not sure further protest is appropriate now. It's probably not good to provoke him to policies motivated purely by spite. I suggest that it may be appropriate to see what he is actually planning to do and then pick our battles judiciously.

Presidential inaugurations draw big crowds.  Donald Trump's was no exception.  If one looks at time matched photos, though, it's pretty clear that there is a bunch of empty space at Trump's that was filled for Obama's.  See, e.g.,  http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/315494-white-house-spokesman-blasts-media-over-crowd-sizes-in-first It was a cold rainy day, so that doesn't prove much, but Trump's reaction was bizarre.  He goes over to talk with the CIA, and spends most of the time complaining about the media faking pictures of his "biggest crowd to ever attend" an inaugural.  Then he sends his press secretary out to yell at the press for not reporting an obvious falsehood. As somebody put it, this is a man at war, not with the media, but with the truth.  Unfortunately we have seen this movie before, and it doesn't end well. Josh Marshall: 5:46 PM: Verbatim quote: "This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration....

Vintage Feynman:

The New York Times collected reactions from here and abroad to Trump's speech. A common theme of writers from third world dictatorships was that he reminded them of home. Here is Mohammed Hanif: KARACHI, Pakistan — Did President Donald J. Trump just say “America First”? It’s kind of worrying that American presidents have to steal slogans from third-world dictators. In Pakistan, we had a military ruler named Gen. Pervez Musharraf. He made lots of friends in Washington, D.C., after taking over in a bloodless coup in 1999. On his return from his first visit to Washington, he proclaimed “Pakistan First.” He was such a great buddy of President George W. Bush that he got the latter to endorse his book on television. These buddies started new wars, rekindled old ones. Lots of people died, lots more fell into new depths of poverty. When you say America first or Pakistan first — or whatever unlucky country it is that allows a pampered old man to say those things — it always means me ...

A speech as redolent of grievance as it was devoid of detail.

And I'm not talking about Trump's inauguration yet. Well, maybe that's part of it. My actual subject is my reaction when I saw the first homework assignment in my Astronomy class in Dynamics and Hydrodynamics. Of course it wasn't based on the class material, since there wasn't any yet. Instead it was more of a basic math pretest: Differential equations, analyzing the behavior of integrals and deriving vector identities - stuff I hadn't done, for the most part, in fifty years. I panicked when I couldn't see how to get the inhomogeneous solution to the very elementary first differential equation. It reminded me of the feeling I had when I first saw the problem set on my PhD comprehensive and realized that there was not a single problem on it that I knew how to solve. However, just as on that long ago comprehensive, once I pondered the problems a bit I gradually realized that I did have the tools, in this case rusted, dull, and buried deep, for solving ...

People argue all the time about what, if anything, can be learned from the study of history, but I have reached one pretty definite conclusion: People, including or perhaps especially leaders, make a hell of alot of catastrophic mistakes. By catastrophic, I mean mistakes that get them personally and frequently entire populations, slaughtered.

Every self-respecting rapper, so I hear, has his posse of friends or hangers on. Taylor Swift too. Central Eurasian bigshots took the concept further: In the early form of the Central Eurasian Culture Complex, the highly trained warrior members of a lord’s comitatus— a guard corps loyal not to the government but to the lord personally— took an oath to defend him to the death. The core members of the comitatus, his sworn friends, committed suicide, or were ritually executed, in order to be buried with him if he happened to predecease them. The peripheral cultures’ historical sources explicitly say so, time and again, as Ibn Faḍlân remarks about the Vikings on the Volga, who were known as Rus: One of the customs of the king of the Rus is that with him in his palace he has four hundred men from among his most valiant and trusted men. They die when he dies and are killed for his sake. Beckwith, Christopher I.. Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze A...

Sasha Abramsky, writing in El Haaretz : The United States, that most grand of human political experiments, is, in early 2017, hurtling toward a catastrophe. Trumpism is ascendant, and Trump, narcissist, bigot, totalitarian thug, stands triumphant, the entire American political and military apparatus at his disposal. It is, by any measure, a revolutionary moment. And, like all revolutions, it privileges extreme personalities over more mundane, middle-of-the-road, technocrats. In the year 2017, the American Republic – founded by Washington, Jefferson and other Enlightenment luminaries, saved by Lincoln, brought to its modern pre-eminence by Roosevelt – is being handed over to an unholy alliance-of-convenience made up of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, Islamophobes, Russophiles, supporters of the ultranationalist wing of Israeli politics, billionaire plutocrats and conspiracists. They use social media to bully and to intimidate, and they threaten violence, with increasing frequency, ag...

Provoked by Luboš Motl, AKA, Lumo, the Lumonator, I have been digging into the genomic history of Spain. I found this very nice article. Two excerpts: A wide range of peoples have settled in Iberia since the end of the last Ice Age. Phoenicians, Celts, Greeks, Jews, Romans, Goths, Suebi, Franks, Arabs and Berbers. All have left their genetic print on the populations of the regions where they settled. This page attempts to identify their genetic markers through the use of Y-chromosomal (Y-DNA) haplogroups, which are passed on nearly unaltered from father to son, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is inherited only from one's mother, and genome-wide studies. The modern Iberian gene pool is overwhelmingly Mediterranean, and yet the sequencing of a 7,000 year-old hunter-gatherer from La Braña in Asturias, revealed that Mesolithic Iberian shared much closer genetic affinities to modern Northeast Europeans (apart from having dark skin). This shows just how much the genetic landscape o...

One thing - possibly the only thing - I learned in my long ago course in Philosophy of Science, is that it's fruitless to argue about definitions. Nonetheless, it is useful to see how various people use a word. Here are the ways some people define the word "Hispanic:" Wikipedia: The term Hispanic (Spanish: hispano or hispánico, Galician: hispánico, Asturian: hispanu, Basque: hispaniar, Catalan: hispà,[1][2] hispàno[3]) broadly refers to the people, nations, and cultures that have a historical link to Spain. It commonly applies to countries once colonized by the Spanish Empire in the Americas (see Spanish colonization of the Americas) and Asia, particularly the countries of Latin America and the Philippines. It could be argued that the term should apply to all Spanish-speaking cultures or countries, as the historical roots of the word specifically pertain to the Iberian region. It is difficult to label a nation or culture with one term, such as Hispanic, as the ethnic...

This post is provoked by a steady stream of genetic nonsense coming from a couple of prolific commentators. As it happens, this is an area I have recently studied and I have a modest familiarity with the literature. Modern Europeans derive most of their ancestry from at least three waves of settlement, ultimately from Africa, via the Middle East. The first wave or waves consisted of hunter gatherers who interbred with Neandertals. They were pushed back into a few refugia (Spain, Italy, Greece) during the peak of the last ice age, but spread out again after the ice retreated 11,000 years or so ago. About eight millennia ago, a second wave, neolithic farmers from the Middle East, spread through Europe, and mixed with remnants of the hunter-gatherer populations. The Basques of Spain seem to retain relatively unmixed genetics from these farmers. A three or four millennia later, Central Asian pastoralists speaking Indo-European invaded and mixed to various extents with the preceding ...

Paul Wood of the BBC reports on the sources of the story. There seem to be four of them, but its not clear that they are independent. H/T Kevin Drum : Claims about a Russian blackmail tape were made in one of a series of reports written by a former British intelligence agent. As a member of MI6, he had been posted to the UK's embassy in Moscow and now runs a consultancy giving advice on doing business in Russia. He spoke to a number of his old contacts in the FSB, the successor to the KGB, paying some of them for information. ....The former MI6 agent is not the only source for the claim about Russian kompromat on the president-elect. Back in August, a retired spy told me he had been informed of its existence by "the head of an East European intelligence agency". Later, I used an intermediary to pass some questions to active duty CIA officers dealing with the case file — they would not speak to me directly. I got a message back that there was "more than one tape...

(1)By (Insert date)____________ the (insert tribal name) ________ had settled in the valley of the (insert name)____________ and developed agriculture and cities like __________. The ruler _____________, who styled himself (pick one: Khan, QaKhan, Emir, King, Ataliq, Beg, other) endowed glorious (pick one: Madrassas, Mosques, Churches, Buddhist Temples) and the culture thrived. At that point, they were invaded and conquered by steppe warriors who were (Turks, Mongols, Others) of the (insert name)___________ tribal confederation organized by the great leader (insert name)____________. After his death he was succeeded by his (pick one or more: son, nephew, brother, brother-in-law, general) (insert name)____________ who was subsequently murdered by his (see previous list, pick one or more). (2)Return to (1), rinse, repeat.

H/T to Lumo , who sent me to the Wikipedia page for Las Cruces: Census 2010 data[edit] As of the 2010 census Las Cruces had a population of 97,618.[2] The ethnic and racial makeup of the population was:[14] 34.3% White American 2.4% African American or Black 1.7% Native Americans 1.6% Asian 0.1% Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander 3.5% Two or more races 56.8% Hispanic and Latino Americans (Hispanics may be of any race) As of the census of 2000, there were 74,267 people, 29,184 households, and 18,123 families residing in the city. The population density was 1,425.7 people per square mile (550.5/km²). There were 31,682 housing units at an average density of 608.2 per square mile (234.8/km²). The racial makeup of the city was 69.01% White, 2.34% African American, 1.74% Native American, 1.16% Asian, 0.07% Pacific Islander, 21.59% from other races, and 4.10% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 51.73% of the population. From this one might suspect that Las...

Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer... Richard III, Act I, Scene 1 OK, maybe not quite, but it is 68 F (16 C) right now and a lot of confused trees are budding and sprouting leaves, and those clouds that lour'd on our house have gone somewhere else.

Apparently the intelligence services unearthed stories about the Russians having compromising information on Trump, including a possible sex tape. I have no idea about the veracity of this, but I think it's far more likely (and serious) that any compromising information they have is financial - he has a number of financial links with Russia. Naturally, the sensational sex rumors get most of the attention, but why would Trump go to Russia just to get pissed on? Lots of people here would do it for free.

History is one damn thing after another.......Arnold Toynbee. I signed up for a history course this term, and I have to say that one of the textbooks occasionally exhibits that trait in mind numbing detail: The founder of one of these dynasties was Ahmad Khwajagi Kasani, also known as "Makhdum-i Azam" ("The Great Master"; 1461-1542). As his nisba suggests, he hailed from Kasan, a town in northern Fergana near present-day Chust. He left it for Tashkent, presumably in order to become a murid of Muhammad Qazi Burhan al-Din (d. 1515), one of Khwaja Ubaydallah Ahrar's khalifas . Svat Soucek. A History of Inner Asia (Kindle Locations 2219-2221). Kindle Edition. The shrine, which came to be known as Char Bakr, grew into a complex that included a khangah, a mosque, a madrasa, and the endowments supporting it dramatically increased after the Janibegid victory in 1557. The Juyharis too increased their wealth by becoming involved in commerce, manufacturing, and ag...

I don't recall having previously heard of Kevin D. Williamson, and I have precisely one reason for thinking he is a scumbag. It is the first two sentences of his recent column: It has long been rumored that Paul Krugman does not write the New York Times column that appears under his name. I have no reason to believe that that is true, but I hope it is. Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443696/deficits-matter-always-not-just-when-republicans-occupy-white-house I can't think of any honest reason to repeat a scurrilous "rumor" that you don't believe is true. Can you? In any case, the rumor seems absurd, since Krugman is a prolific and indeed almost compulsive writer. Also, Google doesn't seem to have heard of it.

It's not even remotely plausible that Arctic sea ice has reached a winter maximum, but it is odd that it has decreased for the past several days. There should still be one month of rapid growth and at least another of slow growth.

Besides providing us with means necessary to pay for our survival, jobs provide us satisfaction and a sense of purpose in life. Much of the angst in the US that led to the election of DT seems to be associated with the disappearance of good paying factory jobs, and the feeling that those jobs went abroad or to immigrants willing to work cheap. I wouldn't be surprised if similar factors are at work in the rise of right-wing and neo-fascist parties in Europe as well. Of course many of those jobs went not abroad but to machines. Many domestic industries (like coal mining) produce just as much as they did twenty years ago, but with a small fraction of the number of workers. Many smart people, and dumber people like myself, have been thinking about what happens over the next decade and a half when a huge fraction of jobs still requiring humans disappears. Our new Secretary of Labor designate is on record as opposing any minimum wage, mainly, I suppose, because it would squeeze his...

Speaking of gone: Arctic and Antarctic sea ice extents are each at historic lows for the date - still.

From Steve Hsu: and the WSJ: WSJ: A mysterious character named “Master” has swept through China, defeating many of the world’s top players in the ancient strategy game of Go. Master played with inhuman speed, barely pausing to think. With a wide-eyed cartoon fox as an avatar, Master made moves that seemed foolish but inevitably led to victory this week over the world’s reigning Go champion, Ke Jie of China. ... Master revealed itself Wednesday as an updated version of AlphaGo, an artificial-intelligence program designed by the DeepMind unit of Alphabet Inc.’s Google. AlphaGo made history in March by beating South Korea’s top Go player in four of five games in Seoul. Now, under the guise of a friendly fox, it has defeated the world champion. It was dramatic theater, and the latest sign that artificial intelligence is peerless in solving complex but defined problems. AI scientists predict computers will increasingly be able to search through thickets of alternatives to find patter...

Michael Lewis is one of our finest non-fiction writers, and any book of his is well worth reading. His subjects are drawn from areas one might not suspect of being of general interest - markets and sports. He has the ability to find the telling human detail and combine that with deep insight into general phenomena. Three of his books have been made into successful movies: Moneyball , The Blind Side , and The Big Short . Not bad for books ostensibly about, respectively, baseball statistics, the importance of offensive left tackles in football, and the great crash of 2007. Lewis's latest book, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds , was inspired, he says, by a review of Moneyball by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein , two University of Chicago colleagues of President Obama who led the introduction into economics and law of the ideas originating from two Israeli psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. He begins with a story about basketball and the kind...

This NYT story on the declassified version of the intelligence report on Putin's intervention on behalf of Trump doesn't have many new solid details, but here is one that caught my eye: The role of RT — the Russian English-language news organization that American intelligence says is a Kremlin propaganda operation — in the Kremlin’s effort to influence the election is covered in far more detail by the report than any other aspect of the Russian campaign. An annex in the report on RT, which was first written in 2012 but not previously made public, takes up eight pages of the report’s 14-page main section. The report’s unequivocal assessment of RT presents an awkward development for Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who is Mr. Trump’s choice to serve as national security adviser. Mr. Flynn has appeared repeatedly on RT’s news programs and in December 2015 was paid by the network to give a speech in Russia and attend its lavish anniversary party, where he sat at the elbow of Mr. Putin....

It seems that GRE takers intending to major in Philosophy have the highest scores in two of the three tested areas verbal reasoning and analytical writing. Of course physics and astronomy majors dominate the mathematical reasoning and also do quite well in the other two, but how do we explain why so many modern philosophers turn out to be dumb asses? I have a theory: the smart ones usually decide to do something more worthwhile while those who go on to tenured positions get frustrated when they figure out that they really aren't equipped to understand anything important. I found an example in this book about the Nobel prize winning work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky on the kinds of mental errors all people commonly make: At a conference back in the early 1970s, Danny was introduced to a prominent philosopher named Max Black and tried to explain to the great man his work with Amos. “I’m not interested in the psychology of stupid people,” said Black, and walked away. Danny...

Paul Krugman: In 2015 the city of Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, was graced with a new public monument: a giant gold-plated sculpture portraying the country’s president on horseback. This may strike you as a bit excessive. But cults of personality are actually the norm in the “stans,” the Central Asian countries that emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union, all of which are ruled by strongmen who surround themselves with tiny cliques of wealthy crony capitalists. Americans used to find the antics of these regimes, with their tinpot dictators, funny. But who’s laughing now? We are, after all, about to hand over power to a man who has spent his whole adult life trying to build a cult of personality around himself; remember, his “charitable” foundation spent a lot of money buying a six-foot portrait of its founder. Meanwhile, one look at his Twitter account is enough to show that victory has done nothing to slake his thirst for ego gratification. So we can expect lots of se...

Wang Yang-ti, an emissary of the Sung emperor of China visited the Uighur King at Qocho, in 982. A fragment of his report: There are no destitute people in the kingdom: those who cannot provide for themselves are cared for by public welfare. Many people reach advanced age. Svat Soucek. A History of Inner Asia (Kindle Locations 1167-1169). Kindle Edition.

In the Summer of 751, Chinese and Arabs fought a defining battle for domination of Central Asia. Kao Hsien-chih marched in with his troops and Qarluq auxiliaries as well as a contingent gent from Fergana. As the two adversaries met in battle at the end of July near Taraz, the Qarluq switched sides. The Chinese were crushed, and Kao Hsien-chih barely escaped. The Arabs' victory had more lasting and far-reaching consequences than this relatively obscure battle seemed to promise, for China never again ventured to claim mastery over territories beyond Sinkiang - with minor exceptions during the rule of the last dynasty to rule China, that of the Ching (Manchus), as we shall relate in due course. Svat Soucek. A History of Inner Asia (Kindle Locations 1027-1030). Kindle Edition. Aside from the obvious geopolitical consequences: The Arab victory of 751 had yet another consequence: the victors captured a certain number of Chinese, some of whom were expert at manufacturing paper, an ar...

Lisa Randall, writing in the NYT, on why Vera Rubin deserved a Nobel Prize . Rubin was not the only deserving woman who was denied the prize. Physics remains one of the most male dominated professions, but there are several other women who seem to have been systematically overlooked. Besides those mentioned by Randall, Lise Meitner and Jocelyn Bell come to mind. CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — As we look back on 2016, and perhaps fret about 2017, we can take some solace in the remarkable things we know and continue to learn about the universe. In addition to a better understanding of the 5 percent of matter that has been well studied and understood, scientists are unlocking mysteries about the rest — 25 percent of it dark matter, and the remaining 70 percent dark energy. Dark matter interacts gravitationally the way that ordinary matter does — clumping into galaxies and galaxy clusters, for example — but we call it “dark” because it doesn’t interact, in any perceptible way, with light. So 85 p...

Dark Matter and Dark Energy are inventions intended to solve certain bedevilling problems in cosmology and galaxy dynamics. The experimental evidence for them is somewhat circumstantial, but has generally been considered compelling. Dark matter, in particular particulate dark matter is generally considered to be on somewhat more solid ground, both because there are plausible additions to the standard model that seemingly fit the bill, but also because of its apparently crucial roles in the early universe and galaxy formation. The hypothetical particles that constitute it have remained stubbornly unobserved, however, despite extensive searches. This has led to new interest in so-called Modified Newtonian Dynamics, or MOND. This old idea tinkers with gravity itself, but has not convinced many because it's not so hot at dealing with the early universe, and, IMHO, ugly as a bullfrog flattened by a semi.. Anyway, Sabine of Backreaction has a new post out arguing that a classic ...

Republican House leaders made a typical scumbag deal by killing the House independent ethics panel in a sneak move. Many called them out, but the deciding factor in getting them to renege was probably the Tweetmaster General. Good Job!

That is the question. Whether tis nobler in the mind... Whatever. What I do seem to be reading is: The Palgrave Concise Historical Atlas of Central Asia A History of Inner Asia The Undoing Project, by Michael Lewis Empires of the Silk Road The English and Their History by Robert Tombs Listen Liberal Why Nations Fail Principles of Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics by Clarke and Carswell Not that these seem appropriate. Suggestions solicited.

Via NEW , a fascinating perspective on grad school in Physics theory: Have you ever been happy?” My girlfriend asked me that question, after work over drinks at some shiny Manhattan bar, after another stressful day on the trading floor. How to answer that? I knew she was talking about work, but how unhappy did she think I was? I took a sip of single malt scotch and scrolled back through time in my mind until I had it. It was the spring of ’93, 16 years earlier, at the University of Rochester, where I went to graduate school for physics. An afternoon that I can play back like a home movie. It’s a bright sunny day in the wake of one of Rochester, New York’s typically brutal winters. The sky is blue, the clouds are cotton balls, and sunlight shimmers off the deep green leaves of the grass, bushes, and oak trees of campus, all freshly nourished by the recently melted snow. Undergraduates are out in shorts on the quad, some gathered on steps, others tossing Frisbees, all surrounded by ...