The BBC reports on the development of maggot-substitutes for wound healing. There's a great picture in the article if you aren't of a queasy nature.

It's amazing how much faster it is to do your dishes if you accidentally drop a glass into the sink and shatter half of them.

I'm happy to welcome our newest permanent Cres-Cat, Beth Plocharczyk to the blog. Beth has been our guest here several times before, and probably needs no further introduction than that. This permanent status means she'll finally get to abandon "guest-blogger blue" for a color of her choice.

If you're in or around Notre Dame this Thursday or Friday consider checking out their Fall Symposium on The Changing Laws of War: Do We Need a New Legal Regime After 9/11?. Panelists will include Professor Patrick Baude and Saikrishna Prakash, a member of The Right Coast.

Professor Bainbridge's blog is one of the more conservative that I read an enjoy daily, but the more I read it, the more I fail to understand--what do conservatives have against judicial activism? For example, Bainbridge writes:

Politicians of all parties increasingly leave hard issues to courts. Doing so allows the politicians to pass laws they know are unconstitutional, so as to please interest groups, while expecting courts to clean up their mess. This tendency is predictable to anybody steeped in public choice theory, but is nevertheless deplorable.

It's true that in practice, judicial activism has tended to favor liberal causes, but as an institution, it strikes me as remarkably conservative. Conservative thinkers from Aristotle on down to Burke have all warned of the dangers of placing too much power in the hands of the people, or their directly elected representatives. (If my library were here with me in New York, I'd insert a particularly trenchant quotation on the lack of wisdom so often demonstrated by the many.) Judicial review is this country's only remaining brake on government purely by popular will.

Wise legistators are a nice thing for which to hope, but quite frankly the American people do not seem to have demonstrated much of a capacity to recognize or reward wisdom. Honestly, I'd like to see us return to indirect election of senators, but since that's vanishingly unlikely, judicial legislation seems like the next best solution.

I think one of the things that scares many otherwise intelligent religious conservatives about gay marriage is the fear that once gay marriage is legal, it will only be a matter of time before someone things to sue a church on the basis of gender discrimination because they won't marry a gay couple. It is, I think, a somewhat valid fear, given the unpopularity in this country of a robust freedom of association. (Remember the Boy Scouts a few years back?) And sad to say, I think we're but a few liberal presidents away from a Supreme Court that would entertain such a claim, or would at least be willing to revoke federal benefits such as tax-exempt status to churches that discriminated on the basis of sex in their hiring practices or marriage ceremonies.

Therefore, I'd like to propose an alternate constitutional amendment for those who are on the fence about gay marriage--one that explicitly states that freedom of association includes freedom to exclude others from association. While I doubt that this would turn opponents of gay marriage into proponents, it would perhaps reduce the virulence of their opposition enough to avoid turning the gay marriage debate into another abortion fight. And for those who want to see liberal courts slapped for activism, just think of the realms of possible discrimination suits this would take away from them.

However, liberals might also note that such an amendment would provide explicit constitutional protection for all affirmative action programs not run by the government, making this an amendment that might actually have a hope of passing.

Ever-vigilant reader Ben Glatstein sends along a link to this article by Richard Epstein about British higher education, and asks whether I agree with it. I do, and I'm glad Ben sent me the article, because I was about to write something very similar myself. How unsurprising that somebody smarter than me thought of it first.

Epstein's argument is that (at least at Oxford and Cambridge) education suffers relative to that at elite American Universities for two reasons. First, public funding and a lack of intranational competition work to keep tuition and academic salaries low, which means that many star factulties depart the U.K. for the states, where the life of a superstar academic can be so much more (economically) rewarding. Second, because students are evaluated only by department-wide exams (and the colleges and faculties care deeply about how well their students fare on these exams) there's a strong incentive to standardize one's teaching.

I couldn't agree more. At first I was struck by the lack of superstar faculty members here(Amartya Sen and James Mirlees not withstanding, as they only come near students when inviting them for dinner).

But as the term progressed, I was struck even more by the effects of standardization. Students react to new and slightly irrelevant and offbeat inquiries not with interest, but with "will that be on the test?" This has always saddened me, but it's nothing new. What was new (to me) here is that now this wasn't just a student reaction but also a faculty reaction.

When, in supervision (a 1-3 person meeting with a faculty member) I asked my professor about the Devil's coin toss, his reaction was "that won't be on the test." Only one of my supervisors really liked to engage this irrelevant stuff, and he always apologized for doing so afterward, since he knew that grade-wise, he'd just wasted his time and ours (but we didn't mind).

At Chicago, at least, the econ teachers I've had(whether Professor or Grad. student) mostly ran each class as their own personal fiefdom. My first economics professor took a week-long digression to deal with the economics of cocaine markets; my second one interjected some of her own research and theories about the nature of pollution and traffic congestion; my game theory professor decided to shed light on the Palestinian peace process and was a force of nature. None of this stuff ever prepared me for another econ course I had to take, and none of it's ever come up in class again, but it's stuff I'm glad I know. Indeed, as somebody who plans to abandon the study of economics next year, this is the stuff that made econ worth knowing.

[UPDATE: I should note that my own feelings on this are predicated, as they must be, on a certain view of the "Aims of Education". Mine, I guess, turn out to be in line with Andrew Abbott's-- "The phrase 'aims of education' is nonsensical; education is not a thing of which aims can be predicated. It has no aim other than itself."]

[This is to say nothing of the other problem-- unusual course availability.] As Epstein says, "in the long term, this static system is utterly disastrous for intellectual innovation, for by knocking out the bottom rung, it also knocks out the top."

[This week's Economist has a similar and related indictment of British education (in the print edition only, alas) but focus only on the monetary issues, not on the wholly separate problem of standardized testing. The APs were silly enough in high school, when we all had the confidence not to take them seriously, and no guilt (and plenty of time) about pursuing our own separate intellectual (and unintellectual) interests, entirely separate from anything going on in school. Importing them to college, and taking them so much more seriously, is throwing good teaching after bad.]

What's Bill Watterson (of Calvin and Hobbes fame) doing now?

An industry source who wishes to remain anonymous says Watterson paints oil-on-canvas landscapes, but sets fire to each as soon as it's finished.

Oh, come, art cannot hurt.
It can and how!

Eugene Volokh notes that the New York Times confusedly calls "'Eugene Onegin,' Pushkin's poem about a friendship between Russian aristocrats."

Somewhere in Switzerland, Vladimir Nabokov is turning over in his grave.