Brown Motion

This title refers to the business of University students hosting potential applicants to their campus.  We did the rite of passage in visiting some Southern California campuses as our kid prepares to apply for ongoing learning at one of the (esteemed) houses of education. Some observations of this endeavor we endured.  Endure perhaps is too strong a word but it does get exhausting.  Show up at appointment time and get your car parked.  Spend around $12 for that privilege.  Then get yourselves checked in to an auditorium or lecture facility on campus. Cue the arrival of docent / paid interns who have a prepared speech to provide highlights of the school.  This is the Rah-Rah moment.   All great things with amazing people - faculty, students and the like.  Bunch of metrics that start looking the same with a few schools crammed into the trip as we did. I get to ask 'what is one thing you would change', knowing it will be treated like a rh...

After depositing the child at a school in Orinda to take her Scholastic Aptitude Test or the SAT we decided to use our Sat as in Saturday to good use.  Given this part of our bay was relatively new to us we set about first on foot, then by car to browse the towns of Lafayette, Moraga, Orinda also known in the hood (or this part of the bay) as LaMoRinda for short. Since the school where the kid had to write was in Orinda we strolled its green leafy streets taking in the absence of any sort of retail.  That was then followed by a drive to a Catholic educational establishment called St. Mary's College situated in Moraga.   Situated on 400 plus lush acres it is a scenic setting on some prime real estate.  The church certainly has good taste.  A private liberal arts college surrounds the central church building, which rises on the green plateau surrounded by rolling hills. We visited the church, which always is a treat since the interiors are ple...

OR alternately it could be titled - Why I like paper books or Why I go to the library. To wit - I have enjoyed many a fall color when we lived in Michigan for many years.  During the course of this stay, at the onset of autumn we drove about four hours north of the Detroit suburb where we lived to a place known as the Upper Peninsula. For most Michiganders this was a seasonal must do.  The Upper Peninsula or UP as it was affectionately known is a largish bit of real estate, in fact about 30% of the state was the UP bordered by some of the cleanest fresh water on earth.  It juts out into three of the five large lakes otherwise called the great lakes. The point I am getting to, believe me there is one in the end - is that the landmass here was mostly forested.  With some species of birch or the other, but predominantly featuring maples.  What happened in autumn or just as summer days turned cooler was that the leaves on these maples and other deciduous tre...

A former NPR correspondent and now author, Eric Weiner a resident of Washington DC, has written this witty but sort of non conclusive body of work around what makes genius grow in certain parts of the world vs. another.  That is if you buy into the notion that genius indeed is geographically concentrated in certain lat long vs. another. His travels take him from Silicon Valley, the mother-ship of all innovation these days, to former great cities that produced masters in art, philosophy, science etc.  From Athens, Greece to Calcutta, India he travels to seek out what genius really was and is.  From some experiments done by an English fella called Galton, he starts his narrative about the Galton Box.  This dude decides to measure everything that can be statistically analyzed, including figuring out which part of England had the most comely of women. He used felt pad and pins to do this activity and came up with a map showing the Londonites were prettiest and Scott...