HARVARD SUCKS

[Trotsky]

[quote RichH]Personally, I get more of a Cornell vibe from the UC Berkeley campus than I do from Stanford.

The hills, the clock tower, the not looking like a Taco Bell...

Apparently Olmsted, or at least his company, did all three. The Stanfords had the idea of making the campus a utopian community, building on the California vernacular and locating buildings in an egalitarian republican way. Stanford's charter also calls for the virtues of cooperative forms of economic organization. It also was free for about the first 50 years.

Amazing how a robber baron came to seek social reform.[/quote]Deeply ironic, considering what it's become.

[Swampy]

[quote RichH]Personally, I get more of a Cornell vibe from the UC Berkeley campus than I do from Stanford.

The hills, the clock tower, the not looking like a Taco Bell...

Apparently Olmsted, or at least his company, did all three. The Stanfords had the idea of making the campus a utopian community, building on the California vernacular and locating buildings in an egalitarian republican way. Stanford's charter also calls for teaching the virtues of cooperative forms of economic organization. It also was free for about the first 50 years.

Amazing how a robber baron came to seek social reform.

Deeply ironic, considering what it's become.[/quote]

Exactly!

Then again, A. D. White wanted to create a university "free from religious influences," "free from political influences," and "free from commercial influences." Given the world we live in, I suppose one out of three is not too bad. (Think Tech Campus, in which a politician/business magnate diverted a huge chunk of alma mater to the direct service of commercial interests.)

[Swampy]

Getting back to this thread's topic, did anyone notice this article in last Sunday's Times?

Can you believe it? Cornell actually named a building after a guy who went to Harvard and didn't get all A's! In the words of the immortal Cal Worthington, "Money talks, nobody walks!"

(Bill's professor must have given him "the C⁺ at Harvard."  I remember going to see a professor at Cornell and asking why my team got an A- on a statistics paper since the graded version had not a single negative comment. He explained that another team had done equally good work but had written a computer program to calculate the statistics, so he "gave them the A." I was pretty pissed because I had spent my co-op summer doing systems programming at IBM and certainly could have written a program -- i.e., prepare a deck for BMD, as the other team had -- and saved us lots of time, but we thought we were supposed to use the clunky, microwave-sized calculating machines to compute the statistics by hand so we'd get better intuitions about the calculations.)

[Jeff Hopkins '82]

Reminds me of something in freshman year Comp Sci 100.  

We did everything through the semester in PL/C, then right at the end of the course were grudgingly taught Fortran 4 "since everyone in industry uses Fortran."   But we were taught 4 as "proof" that PL/1 was a better programming language than Fortran.  What they tried to hide was that Fortran 5 already existed and got rid of all of the clunkiness of 4 making 5 much more PL/1-like.  

But I had a friend who was an Ag-Eng who learned Fortran 5 in the Ag-Eng Comp Sci course.  He who showed me how to use 5 instead of 4.  So I did my last program assignment in 5.  It pissed off the profs, but I got off with a warning (and an A on the assignment).

[Trotsky]

Reminds me of something freshman year Comp Sci 100.  

We did everything through the semester in PL/C, then right at the end of the course were grudgingly taught Fortran 4 "since everyone in industry uses Fortran."   But we were taught 4 as "proof" that PL/1 was a better programming language than Fortran.  What they tried to hide was that Fortran 5 already existed and got rid of all of the clunkiness of 4 making 5 much more PL/1-like.  

But I had a friend who was an Ag-Eng who learned Fortran 5 in the Ag-Eng Comp Sci course.  He who showed me how to use 5 instead of 4.  So I did my last program assignment in 5.  It pissed off the profs, but I got off with a warning (and an A on the assignment).

The taught us PL/C in CS 100 in '82.  I actually really loved that stupid language and would retro-program in it in a heartbeat if I could.

[Jim Hyla]

Ken Schott on Harvard.

[Rita]

Not sure where to put this tidbit.  On Friday's (10/10) Olberman's show Worst Persons in the Sports World segment, Keith had AHL Adirondack's Flames President Brian Petrovek and the rest of the organization for their mascot selection. This year the Adirondack team is affiliated with the Calgary Flames and as such needed a new mascot...SCORCH and Keith thought the Adirondack's Flames didn't think the mascot selection (and its backstory) all the way through. Where this ties into Cornell Hockey is that Petrovek was the Harvard goalie back in the 70's and endured all sorts of taunts and humiliation at the hands of the Lynah faithful and well just maybe (as Keith speculates) it still has after effects.

[David Harding]

Not sure where to put this tidbit.  On Friday's (10/10) Olberman's show Worst Persons in the Sports World segment, Keith had AHL Adirondack's Flames President Brian Petrovek and the rest of the organization for their mascot selection. This year the Adirondack team is affiliated with the Calgary Flames and as such needed a new mascot...SCORCH and Keith thought the Adirondack's Flames didn't think the mascot selection (and its backstory) all the way through. Where this ties into Cornell Hockey is that Petrovek was the Harvard goalie back in the 70's and endured all sorts of taunts and humiliation at the hands of the Lynah faithful and well just maybe (as Keith speculates) it still has after effects.

If you don't want to listen to Keith for 8 minutes before he getes to that story, here's the Post-Star account and the Democrat and Chronicle.

[Rosey]

Not sure where to put this tidbit.  On Friday's (10/10) Olberman's show Worst Persons in the Sports World segment

Has he featured himself yet?

[Rita]

Not sure where to put this tidbit.  On Friday's (10/10) Olberman's show Worst Persons in the Sports World segment

Has he featured himself yet?

Not yet. He is too busy trying to get Roger Goodell fired and a nickname change for that NFL team in DC.

I don't mind the rants, they make the dog walks more entertaining.

[Give My Regards]

If you don't want to listen to Keith for 8 minutes before he getes to that story, here's the Post-Star account and the Democrat and Chronicle.

Even the apology statement could have benefitted from a bit more thought...

We have obviously turned something good, the launch of a mascot which we will use to entertain and encourage young fans

"...entertain and encourage young fans"?

"Hey, kids!  Play with fire!"

[Towerroad]

If you don't want to listen to Keith for 8 minutes before he getes to that story, here's the Post-Star account and the Democrat and Chronicle.

Even the apology statement could have benefitted from a bit more thought...

We have obviously turned something good, the launch of a mascot which we will use to entertain and encourage young fans

"...entertain and encourage young fans"?

"Hey, kids!  Play with fire!"

Just think, instead of free hockey puck night you could have free pack of matches night, or free road flares.

[RichH]

Normally, I wouldn't have given it two thoughts. However, I first saw the picture two days after the Hartford FD lost an on-duty firefighter for the first time in over 40 years, and there was an obvious amount of hero-coverage locally. I'm not saying I was offended, but there was an involuntary eyebrow movement.

[RichH]

http://poststar.com/news/local/flames-to-replace-controversial-mascot/article_09626962-53c1-11e4-9701-c3b8a3dac487.html

[kaelistus]

To their credit. That was a genuine apology. Not a "We're sorry you got offended" apology which is much more common. Good for them.