net127

The Pill to End Crime

WASHINGTON - The genetic revolution made possible by mapping the human genome may include new cures for drug addiction, restoring health to the mentally ill and, perhaps, one day replacing prisons with pills, experts say. . . . "Some physicians already regard criminality as a disease," Dr. McGuffin said. Treating crime with pills "is a possibility" if researchers can find a genetic basis for some of the human impulses that underlie some crimes, he said.
---Cincinnati Post, Feb. 11, 2001

TV is the Alien

College Fun: Helsinki Park Benches

Another good HUT prank involved park benches in Helsinki. I don't remember what year this was, but the story goes somewhat like this:

First off, students at HUT (and other Finnish universities) have distinctive coveralls which they (we :) wear when they want to distinguish themselves as students during various student- oriented occasions. These coveralls have different colors, and Finns are quite used to associating people in colored coveralls with "a bunch of students doing some weird student stuff. This is not something that students wear as everyday wear, mind you, it's reserved for certain occasions.

Anyway, during this caper some students went out and (with great difficulty) purchased a park bench from the city/park authorities. They got a receipt, and then proceeded to carry this park bench across town. It didn't take long for some police to stop them, with the assumption that the guys had stolen the bench. The students showed the police the receipt, and complained that they were getting stopped by the police all the time and could the police do something about it Finnish police being generally quite helpful, the policemen radioed out a notice that there were a couple of students (in coveralls) carrying a legal bench across town and that they should not be harassed.

Naturally, as soon as this was done a lot of students in identical coveralls proceeded to grab most of the park benches in central Helsinki and carry them to a pre-arranged location. Rumor has it that they managed to stack up hundreds of park benches into an "artistic" formation before anyone else got a clue that something strange was going on :)

Re:Other schools with geek tradition (Score:5, Funny)
by Orava () on Tuesday February 06, @04:33AM CST (#72)
(/. User #21071 Info) http://www.akumiitti.fi/~orava/

Making It Clear

"Of course, the whole house of cards would have come falling to the ground if Derrida had just come out with it plainly in the first place, and the rest of the money could have been spent on something worthwhile like bread and circuses."
---Johnny Deadman

Date: Mon, 05 Feb 2001 10:56:22 -0500
To:
From: Johnny Deadman
Subject: Re: [SP] umberto eco et al

[...]

I do think that deconstruction is a phenomenally powerful tool for understanding how works of communication achieve their effects but unfortunately its proponents tend to obfuscate it. Also it gets mired in with stuff like Derrida. I remember poring over OF GRAMMATOLOGY for weeks (it was the trendiest book you could own for about five minutes in 1983) before I put it down with the same sense of wonder with which I put down GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, realising in the case of both that under the mesmerising web of words were a set of banal and half-baked concepts, and that the astonishingly audacious author had got away with it!

I do think that deconstruction is a phenomenally powerful tool for understanding how works of communication achieve their effects but unfortunately its proponents tend to obfuscate it. Also it gets mired in with stuff like Derrida. I remember poring over OF GRAMMATOLOGY for weeks (it was the trendiest book you could own for about five minutes in 1983) before I put it down with the same sense of wonder with which I put down GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, realising in the case of both that under the mesmerising web of words were a set of banal and half-baked concepts, and that the astonishingly audacious author had got away with it!

The best metaphor I ever happened upon for this stuff is from (someone will correct me no doubt) Adam Smith, who suggested that the problem of unemployment could be solved if half the unemployed miners were set to work burying bottles deep underground and the other half digging them up again. In the case of the post-structuralists, it seemed that they had gone one better because otherwise unemployable men like Derrida got paid very well for burying and entangling nuggets of theory in mountains of verbiage, and otherwise unemployable students like me were via by the taxpayer to laboriously unearth them, smelt, reduce, alchemise and restate.

Of course, the whole house of cards would have come falling to the ground if Derrida had just come out with it plainly in the first place, and the rest of the money could have been spent on something worthwhile like bread and circuses.

No wonder at the end of their college years my fellow students bought suits and went into accountancy and advertising. I went to America.

--
Johnny Deadman

http://www.pinkheadedbug.com