1-800-TBIRDS

Video blocked on copyright grounds, codystarbuck. Was it a Gerry Anderson video?

On this day 100 years ago, the Flying Scotsman went into service. Some details and pics here:

www.railwaymuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/history-flying-scotsman

While I don’t follow trains/railway history, that is an iconic machine, with a lot more character than some modern trains.

You know, I don't think I really needed evidence to accept that idea as fact.  Just kind of seems logical.  Now, if they can come up with evidence that a paleolithic horse was talking to some guy named Wul-brr, I'd like to see it.  Of course, of course.

I find a lot of academic research falls into the "Duh!" category.  I know people have to come up with a thesis for a PhD; but, sometimes you think they are taking the mickey and you wonder why column inches in a newspaper or news website are being wasted on it, let alone grant money.  Certainly, you can come up with interesting details about the history of things that people already accept; but, you can just as easily spend time studying molecules with one oxygen atom and two hydrogen to discover that water is wet.

My degree is in economics (which taught me, after 4 years, that it is all smoke and mirrors and a particular line of BS) and I took a class in Urban Economics.  We spent an inordinate amount of time writing long analyses of various problems to come to the bleeding obvious conclusion.  Things like studying freeway congestion to come up with the answer that there are too many cars on the road (isn't that self-evident in the problem?)  I hated that class as it was an obvious attempt to justify one's existence through academic BS.  It didn't help that I had class on Friday morning and was, occasionally, still hung over from Battalion Happy Hour, from Thursday night.

I didn't quite have the same level of frustration with a class on Labor economics, dealing with unions and collective bargaining, though it was equally a joke.  The professor presented a world vision of labor and management always bargaining in good faith; but, I grew up near Decatur, IL, which was decimated by the shift of manufacturing offshore and the 1980s battles between Freidman's Supply Side Economics and plummeting real wages.  I saw first hand that management lied through their teeth to the rank and file to maximize their share price and give themselves bonuses, while Labor leaders had become professional negotiators, divorced from the rank and file, making secret deals to maintain their power and get kickbacks, from management, bringing back deals which took away the union jobs, or made it easier to send them to Mexico.  You couldn't argue either situation with the professor; so, I threw up my hands, regurgitated his lecture notes on the exam, and took a B in the course.

If only I had read more Galbraith, before I spent 4 years drawing Supply and Demand Curves.  “THE only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."  It's no surprise that the only business books I found of value, in my 20 years at Barnes and Noble, were by his son, arguing that the US economy is not subject to free market forces, as he provides detailed proof that corporations can manipulate demand for their product and set their own prices, rather than the intersection of supply and demand.  I could have just read that stuff and studied history, instead, like I really wanted to.  I only became a business major because that was what I was told I should be doing, by my mother, teachers, the media and everyone else.  I liked my history classes, because I could argue with the professors and present evidence that they were full of it, like the time I called out a professor for claiming John F Kennedy created the Green Berets by presenting a memoir by Col. Aaron Bank, the founder of US Army Special Forces, in 1955, under the Eisenhower Administration.  Kennedy signed an executive order, authorizing the wearing of the distinctive beret, when the Army outlawed it, and threw support behind their mission, in Vietnam.  They rewarded him by naming the Special Warfare Center after him and provided an honor guard, at his state funeral, where one of the members removed his beret and placed it on his grave, a tradition that has been carried out ever since.

Would have been so much more fun that banging my head against walls arguing the reality of business with business academics, who never owned or operated a business, or worked in a corporate environment.

Well, that is the thing.  I respect the work done in archeology and paleontology, even if some of the conclusions sound more like supposition that established fact.  I don't mean to sound like I am mocking the look at human and horse history.  Just that the surface title had one of those "This just in; scientists determine that water is wet" elements to it that make me chuckle.

The beauty of history is that you can just survey things, generally, or you can focus on a particular subject and go in deep and find fascinating things, either way.  The problem I find, is within the academic world, where too much time is spent on form, rather than content, and speaking to a narrow audience in a language designed to keep others out, vs those who can speak authoritatively, without having to sound like they are speaking Martian, to seem important.  I used to butt heads with certain professors (like that Urban Economics guy) about the length of my analysis.  Ironically, I tended to keep it short and concise (no evidence of that here, on this board); mainly because I didn't want to spend all day writing this stuff for an exam.  I never took more than an hour of the allotted 3 hours of a final exam to complete it and most of mine were essay questions, because I wasn't in a hard science major, with heavy math.  I used the newspaper approach of Who, What, Where When and Why, in the necessary detail and moved on to the next question, until I was done; then got up, handed in my test booklet and left while everyone looked at me, stunned.  Didn't hurt my grades any, because I knew the professors didn't want to read all that crap and would instruct the TAs to look for key words and phrases.  Helps to have grown up with a parent, who was a teacher.  You learn to cut through the BS to what is important and likely to be tested.

My dad was curious about the world and would read up on anything that caught his interest and he passed that trait on to me.  Luckily, I was blessed with a good memory for what I have read, especially if I read more than one work on the subject.

I once explained economic theory to a co-worker, in 5 minutes and they understood it better than when they had taken an entire semester course, because the professor couldn't break it down to its essence, which was personal need vs available supply.  For me, that was always the problem of a lot of Education, as a profession; too many people who couldn't teach the essence of the subject and were more caught up by the form, making the subject dull, to their students.  It's one of the reasons I liked the movie Teachers, with Nick Nolte, which my dad also greatly enjoyed.  It features examples of both poor teaching and excellent teaching.  My favorites are the character Ditto, who cranks out questions on a ditto machine, which his students spend the entire class period answering, in silence, while he reads his paper and falls asleep (then has a heart attack and dies and no one notices); and, Robert Mulligan, as a mental patient, who wanders into an apartment and answers the phone, when the school calls for a substitute teacher, then goes to the school and teaches history, by putting on costumes and bringing the events to life.

Needs a sammich....