Listen up, prospective Art History PhDs: if you’re not out of here by mid-century, you could be in for a disaster of near-Biblical proporations. From the Voice’s doomsaying coverstory, re: the Manhattanville “bathtub:”

Imagine this scenario, based on Jacob’s research: It’s the year 2065, and Columbia University’s 17-acre West Harlem expansion is abuzz with activity. Students hurry through rainfall along a tree-lined promenade overlooking the Hudson. In a biotechnology lab nearby, scientists are engineering lethal pathogens to respond to the next generation of infectious diseases and bioterrorist threats. Deep down below, engineering majors use the future version of Facebook to instant-message their friends.

Warnings, meanwhile, are steadily being broadcast about an oncoming storm. A Category 2 hurricane with 110-mile-an-hour winds is barreling down on the city—a more frequent occurrence than in decades past. New Yorkers have become familiar with the drill: They evacuate to local shelters set up by the city’s Office of Emergency Management. Over several hours, the Hudson rises 10 feet, flooding the waterfront promenade and the rest of the campus. Many, but perhaps not all, have heeded warnings to leave the deep basement. Damage will be extensive and exorbitantly expensive. And some of the sprawling labs that contain biohazardous material may become another kind of floating threat to the city.

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What could be the most mindblowing statistic in the history of mindblowing statistics appeared in last week’s New Yorker, of all places. I was so convinced that this incomprehensibly gigantic number was the figment of some paranoid Treasury Department beureacrat’s imagination that I actually had to 1) read this paragraph over a good four or five times, before succumbing to a mild panic attack, 2) actually check to see that I was reading the New Yorker, instead of that day’s New York Post and 3) consult an expert on the matter, who, terrifyingly, confirmed that this number isn’t bullshit after all:

It’s hard enough to understand credit-default swaps when you know what they are; if you don’t know, forget it. But since they are one of several inventions that may sink this city, and maybe the country, into a new era of penury and thrift, if not downright depression, let’s have a go: a credit-default swap is a financial contract between one party and another which protects against a default on a debt. The trick on Wall Street has been to negotiate and trade them like crazy; there are sixty-two trillion dollars in credit-default swaps outstanding. The question of their worth has mystified even the druids who created them, especially because, it turns out, the swaps haven’t really insured against anything.

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Today’s Opinion section of the Spec features an article about the importance and value of taking risks. Basically, the author owes much of his success here at Columbia to the fact that he’s taken some risks along the way. Taking risks can go very well or it can go very badly – it just depends on what is at stake.

Not to beat a dead horse but… many would argue that the financial crisis right now is happening because of some high-risk activity that went on in the past. In politics: Obama wants voters to take a chance with him and put him in the White House – this is another type of risk language. We hear this word all the time but we don’t really take a step back and consider what type of risk-taking behavior we each engage in.

There is always the risk option and the safe option. Right now, in college, we are in a unique point in our lives where we are pretty much safe from much of the real world. This little college bubble lets us imagine that we are taking risks when we do not-so-risky things. There is some value to this. Sometimes, regardless of the outcome, taking a risk has some value in it of itself. The decision to do it, dealing with the outcome, and being able to do it again even if it didn’t go as planned. College is the perfect time to indulge in this type of behavior. Later in life, it won’t be so easy.

It seems as though Butler is the place to go if you want to get peeved. The first part of the series actually occurred right here in Butler.

This time, we have a serious health and safety violation in Room 210. It’s well and truly past midnight, and I have a paper due tomorrow. I am very prone to getting peeved. A few nerds away from me sits a guy whose face, for some reason, screams, “I’m an inconsiderate asshole.” He’s sitting there, sweating, an oily shine all over his face, and letting out an earth-shattering cough—smothering “Everything in Its Right Place,” which I am blasting to try to fight against the bellowing sounds of his sporadic coughing that is echoing through the room. He’s not even covering his cough with his arm or mouth. Which sub-par parents raised this kid?

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