Light Weight for Distance

I’m training for my third Heavy Games competition (also known as the Scottish Highland Games). The light weight for distance is a 28 lb. implement, thrown after accelerating it a couple of times with spins in a 9 ft. trig. I’m up around 50 ft. in practice this week – but check out these international competitors launching it in France:

Manhood, Modesty, and Pandemics

The World Health Organization has reported that the death rate of the new MERS virus is higher than SARS (50%) but slower-spreading. Only 90 cases have been reported since last September, most of them in Saudi Arabia. Oddly, 80% of the cases from the past year were men.

Dr. Christian Drosten from the University of Bonn was quoted in The Times of India saying it probably has less to do with manhood and more to do with standards for female modesty.

MERS also appears to be mainly affecting men; nearly 80 percent of the cases in the new study were men. Drosten said there might be a cultural explanation for that. “Women in the [Middle East] region tend to have their mouths covered with at least two layers of cloth,” he said, referring to the veils worn by women in Saudi Arabia. “If the coronavirus is being spread by droplets, [the veils] should give women some protection.”

Blackboard saviors

It’s not every day that I read something that inspires me. I’m inspiration-resistant, you might say. But Matthew Pratt Guterl’s argument for funding the humanities at colleges got me with this paragraph:

My saviors weren’t clerics or wardens or coaches. They were teachers. They wore mismatched socks, drank coffee by the gallon, and loved ideas, evidence, and debate. They weren’t generalists but specialists, with hard-earned knowledge about medical science in Scotland, or library readership in the early Republic. I couldn’t tell you anything about their politics, but I could paint you a richly detailed portrait of their presence at the head of the classroom. From what I could see, they lived cheaply, responsibly, and haphazardly, drawing sustenance from the material of their research, which they shared, twice or three times a week, with a group of 35 or so history majors, mouth-breathers all. These strange masters of the blackboard, drove cars just like mine, except that theirs were filled with random slips of paper and wildly strewn books and file folders. They gave extraordinary, dazzling lectures, even though much of the time, I could not understand anything they were saying. They were a live cliché.

For the whole deal, visit Inside Higher Ed.