By Steve Rhodes
1. Structural Errors In Proteins Responsible For Complex Life.
I knew it! We’re a mistake.
2. Notre Dame Pays $6.6 Million And Counting To Get Rid Of Charlie Weis.
See what I mean?
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If Charlie Weis had a shred of conscience, he’d either demand a more reasonable severance or funnel nearly all of that money back to the school to fund scholarships for the needy.
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It would be easy to fall back on the cliche that the amount of money we pay to college football coaches exemplifies our society’s perverted values system. But what it really demonstrates is a failure of barely restrained market economics. A market economist, for example, would say that society has deemed college football coaches more valuable than, say, cancer researcher, and if that’s a perverted value system, so be it. But society is not saying that at all. Do you know anyone who would deem a college football coach more worthy of reward than a cancer researcher?
This is a question of pure economics unattached from other realities of life. You can’t pack 100,000 people into a stadium to watch a cancer researcher do his or her job once a week because it would not only be boring, but unproductive. Folks who attend Notre Dame games, though, are not making a value choice. Not everything is a commodity, nor can everything be priced. Diverting the revenue from a football game to cancer research might even be a choice most people would desire, but if that choice is left up to individual coaches and their immediate, highly rewarded supervisors, self-interest will prevail if that is what we as a society think our economic structure ought to be based upon.
Of course, that’s what those with the most to gain from self-interest want you to think.
I’m not saying wealth redistribution should be forced at each and every strata, but that the collective choice of we the people might be to at least voluntarily do that exact thing. Whose values are really being reflected, then, when only those with something (big) to gain are the ones making the choices?
3. Oprah’s Mystical Power So Strong It Makes Richard Roeper Smarter Than Roger Ebert.
Structural errors in protein involved.
4. Cubs Return To Scene Of Alleged Crime.
Structural errors in fabric of space-time involved.
5. “It’s being widely reported in the media that the FBI’s Chicago bureau sent someone to the Supermax prison in Colorado to obtain a DNA sample from my brother,” David Kaczynksi writes for the Albany Times-Union. “The purpose: to see if my brother’s DNA matches evidence collected in the 1982 Tylenol poisoning case in which 7 people were murdered.
“I find this odd because the FBI already has my brother’s DNA from its investigation of the Unabomber case.”
Structural errors in FBI chain of command alleged.
6. “Trampoline parks have started springing up around the Chicago area, and that’s causing some concerns about safety issues.”
Cool! Structural errors! Beachwood field trip?
7. “Back in February, when Rahm was still just a candidate for mayor, he reminded city workers that they were ‘actually public servants,'” our very own Ed Hammer writes in Signs of Change. “I am glad some of the workers were able to serve the public this week by letting us know who their new boss is. We might otherwise have been in left the dark. Who says government workers are lazy?”
Structural errors in Rahm’s PR involved.
8. NBA 2K11 Simulation Predicts Bulls Over Mavs.
Somehow that sounds like a structural error.
9. “Oprah has left,” our very own David Rutter in This Week in WTF. “We’re still here. Sort of like Saturday’s Rapture.”
Back to the protein thing.
10. The Cars, Tower of Power, Echo & The Bunnymen and more in This Week in Chicago Rock.
Unstructured.
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The Beachwood Tip Line: Structual.
Posted on May 20, 2011