What the fuck? A quick rundown of this article’s numerous weird facts/revelations: 1) David Helfand is Forbes’ go-to astronomical expert, 2) an astronomy degree will help you in finance, 3) there are astronomers and “astronomers,” and, lastly and most flabberghastingly: 4) post-docs make $40,000 a year. Hey, nice PhD you got there, over-educated mid-to-lower income earner!

New at the business school: kindness?

First Kissinger, now this. Columbia’s Week of Right-Wing Political Icons Who Visit Campus Without Anyone Finding Out About It continues!

And, in case this blog didn’t give you enough Columbia-pegged intelligent commentary on last night’s presidential debate.

Michael Sheetz and fellow buddies at Columbia University have discovered that gonorrhea bacterium is the strongest organism alive. According to an article in the New Scientist, “these tiny creatures can pull with a force equal to 100,000 times their body weight – as though a human could drag a million kilos.” Sounds good, kinda. The average bacterium weighs approximately 9.5×10^-13 grams. 100,000 times that is 9.5×10^-8 grams. Now when you look at it that way, that ain’t shit. See? Gonorrhea ain’t so mean and nasty no more. Or is it?

Meanwhile, Columbia has yet again taken the numero uno spot, according to The National Law Journal’s annual survey of the nation’s largest law firms. The Law school slots away almost 75 percent of its graduating class to the nation’s largest law firms. The list of the top 20 law schools went down to Boston College Law School with 36.8 percent, which seems somewhat low. But let’s not forget that not everyone who goes to law school wants to end up at a law firm, either, and so demographics come into play considerably here.

And thanks to research at the Columbia University Medical Center, I, although not an intensive athlete, can now empathize with heart failure patients (after running for an hour or so) and give them the reassuring “I-know-how-you-feel” look and response. The main difference of course is that, sadly (or happily, depending on how you look at it), I will live longer than them.

Starting today, The Commentariat brings you a daily round-up of Columbia in the news (or in the crosshairs, as the case may be). Enjoy!

City Journal is occupied by Columbia’s ‘68 anniversary line-up. (Har har.)

Oh well. E-Publishing was never much of a boxer to begin with.

Columbia Law alums sound off about being shut out of improvements to the school’s debt relief system. They’ve got a petition, too.

Ring any bells?

Columbia researchers discover that Amino acids are left-handed. So does that make protein gauche?

And in case you missed it, Yale’s resident fraudster spent a few semesters hoodwinking Columbia, too.

Since they apparently have nothing better to do, NASA decided to broadcast Beatles song, Across the Universe, to the North Star last week. However, some scientists have rebuked NASA’s hasty intergalactic broadcast raising concerns that such activities may be misinterpreted by aliens as a battle cry. The last thing our little planet needs is an intergalactic crisis and Professor Barrie Jones of Open University explains that:

“the chances are slight, but the consequences would be huge — the end of life on Earth… if they have the technology to cross interstellar space to reach us, they will be so much in advance of us humans that there is nothing we could do to resist them.”

Barrie raises a good frickin’ point. But if they could cross interstellar space, wouldn’t they have kicked our pathetic asses off the planet anyway? Would they even bother since we’d be seen as pathetic relative to them? It’d be like a bashing a little kid. But would they even care to have a basic honor system that discourages them from beating up a minor? Oh, god damn aliens and the number of questions they leave unanswered! Well, I’ll have those aliens know that the basic knowledge I acquired in Frontiers of Science gives me the confidence to say that they won’t be hearing our battle cry any time soon.

The news for Biofuels just keeps getting worse. Bad enough that turning food crops like soy and palm oil into fuel has raised the price of foodstuffs, severely impacting the world’s most impoverished residents, recent studies show that biofuels are a greenhouse threat, releasing more carbon than fossil fuels. Damn!

One of the main culprits is land use. Slashing forests or clearing natural vegitation to grow biofuel crops produces higher amounts of carbon than the offset of using the biofuel. Cropland also absorbs far less carbon than the scrubland or rain forest it has replaced. According to the article published yesterday in The New York Times,

The clearance of grassland releases 93 times the amount of greenhouse gas that would be saved by the fuel made annually on that land, said Joseph Fargione, lead author of the second paper, and a scientist at the Nature Conservancy. “So for the next 93 years you’re making climate change worse, just at the time when we need to be bringing down carbon emissions.”

The article equates the much-touted benefits from biofuels as an accounting error, because creating biofuels is not as simple as just turning plants into fuel.

Nicholas Nuttal is a spokesman for the United Nations Environment Program and he had this to say,

There was an unfortunate effort to dress up biofuels as the silver bullet of climate change,” he said. “We fully believe that if biofuels are to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem, there urgently needs to be better sustainability criterion.

The one ray of hope in all this mess comes from Brazil, where they have been turning sugar can into ethanol without all the muss and fuss, but Brazilian farmers are also clear cutting rain forests to produce soy, as food and fuel.

As a big proponent of bicycles, “sustainability” and environmentalism, I’m saddened by the news, even if it should come as no surprise. Biofuels are the end product of a whole process and we rarely think of all the steps involved. On the other hand, I may have found just the reason I need to finally move to Brazil.

As I was sitting in my Frontiers discussion section today, I started copying the (slightly altered) lyrics of the Lamb Chop song along the margins of my notebook.

This, as it turns out, was a mistake – the song wasn’t kidding when it said that it never ends! I didn’t mind at the time – I was kind of bored and found it amusing (this probably says something about my mental prowess, but we’ll gloss over that). In retrospect, however, I realize what a shame it was. I wasted two hours of priceless instruction time. I realized as I glanced through my notes that this class is extremely valuable. Why should I complain? I need to be paying attention! Frontiers is as good as it gets! Read the rest of this entry »

I assume you’ve all heard by now that our beloved Pluto has been slated–demoted to the lowly KBO status (short for “Kuiper belt objects”). However, Pluto did leave on a good note–the ex-planet redefined the definition of “planet”. The nature of the new definition classifies planets based on their location or the way they interact within their orbits, rather than basing it on physical properties such as size, shape and composition.

As a recent breakthrough and with so many god-damn textbooks to adjust, controversy continues to surround this new definition. Kids revolt and refuse to banish Pluto into the realm of non-planethood, and name their dogs “Pluto” in true tributary fashion, while Kindergarten teachers demand an increase in educational funds to help replace all those models and posters of the solar system.

In an article in the January 2007 edition of Scientific American, Steven Soter explains that:

“A prominent objection to any definition of this kind is the contention that astronomical objects should be classified only by their intrinsic properties, such as size, shape or composition, and not by their location or dynamical context.”

As a prominent objection, this one really sucks. The above argument ignores the fact that some moons are larger than some planets. Surely moons are not planets based on a primitive reason like “I’m bigger than you, therefore I’m more of a planet than you are???”

Another ridiculous objection is that one class of ignoramuses argue that “culture and tradition are sufficient grounds to leave it that way”, referring to Pluto as a planet.

Oh yeah, sure. Might as well just tell everyone that we still consider the earth a square because so-and-so thought so for such-and-such years. How could anyone possibly bring up an objection so short-sighted and plain stupid? Let us be bogged down by old dogma, rather than appreciating the fascinating discoveries science offers us over time. Sheesh.

Meanwhile, NASA hasn’t been too quick on the uptake.