Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Caltech photos 2

Dining room at the Athenaeum, where I am staying. The painting is a portrait of the astronomer George Hale, the chemist Arthur Noyes, and the physicist Robert Millikan.



Sean Carroll has Feynman's old desk.



Speaking of Feynman, here is an idolatrous shrine.



The Annenberg Center is my favorite new building, and home of the Institute of Quantum Information.





Another beautiful sunset! No palm trees at MIT or Harvard ...

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9 comments:

Albert said...

My ex-roommate went to Harvey Mudd for undergrad and Boalt for law school. The problem with Harvey Mudd is that a lot of high powered east coast law firm have not heard of it. When he went to interviews, people asked how was Harvey Mudd compared to MIT?

Does the Millikan Library still have the old red hard covered Feynman Lectures? The one I saw, back in 87 or so, was obviously donated to Caltech by a Catholic Father, who in turn received the volumes as a gift from Feynman himself as there was a hand written dedication by Feynman (To Father blah blah, .... R. Feynman), and he did not even write it right. Feynman messed up a few words, crossed them out, and rewrote them.

12:10 PM
Mr_Cholmondeley said...

America's most elite universities use criteria other than g. Despite this being UNIQUE among the world's most elite universities Steve believes it's for the best. It hasn't occurred to Steve that these additional criteria only have predictive validity WITHIN a system which selects its elite with these additional criteria. He thinks of the soft skills, leadership ability, ambition, etc. as ABSOLUTE traits of the individual which have shown themselves useful in American society a society Steve implicitly supposes is not one society among many others present and historical but itself ABSOLUTE.

12:06 AM
Mr_Cholmondeley said...

I'm not sure how broad your question is.

As far as college admissions go, the world ex-US (with the exception of Canada) does it right. The point isn't that admissions be based on the ridiculous "g", which is so often spoken of as if it were a thing, but that they be objective and transparent, a high g loading necessarily follows. Canadian unis admit based on grades alone I think. This is even worse.

6:53 AM
LondonYoung said...

What if the US provided free university education via state run universities, and these all had perfectly transparent objective admissions, but non-government-run institutions continued to play the sneaky games they do now. The libertarian in me thinks private institutions should have a right of free association (of course, we'd probably destroy them via taxation, but that's besides the philosophical point).

I think you make a strong point if you say "let universities have any criteria that they want, but force them to be honest about what they are doing else strip away all state funding and tax benefits". The main reason for their sneakiness is that they wish to hide what they are doing.

7:44 AM
LondonYoung said...

In fact, I would support legislation requiring that transparent admission criteria be a pre-req for tax exempt status ...

7:54 AM
Mr_Cholmondeley said...

I was referring to an earlier comment of yours, but if you don't remember it or never made it then I'm delusional.

9:33 AM
steve hsu said...

If I said they only rely on scores then I was incorrect. They do look at grades, letters of recommendation, etc. The goal is to find the most promising scientists, but I don't think they've accepted that scores are the single factor that best indicates that promise.

10:45 AM
LondonYoung said...

Their is no uniform standard for grading. The teacher's pet always gets an A.

3:30 PM
Mr_Cholmondeley said...

Or do you just think that existence in itself is a "bad" thing?

Perhaps you wanted a broader answer, but I'd have to write a book and it would probably be really boring.

6:43 PM

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