doubting thom

Newsweek International Edition has published a “Global Education Special Report” with a Web Exclusive feature ranking the top 100 “global universities.” Harvard and Stanford were ranked first and second respectively, and UCSF was ranked ninth, so my household’s alma maters and current employer were quite well represented. Yale, Cal-Tech and Berkeley were ranked third, fourth, and fifth, followed by Cambridge, MIT and Oxford at sixth, seventh and eighth. Columbia rounded out the top ten, finishing below UCSF. My adopted home state of California captured four of the top ten spots, with Massachusetts and the UK tied with two each. Also further down the list than UCSF were UCLA (12), Penn (13), Duke (14), Princeton (15), Cornell (19, sorry, Peg), and Johns Hopkins (24).

The really nice thing about this evaluation is that it seems fairly rigorous; often, rankings of “best schools” (and note that this list says nothing about the value of the education from the university, only its degree of global integration) are based on interviews with university presidents and chancellors and influenced by “common wisdom.” This, however, used a series of weighted measures: fifty percent of the total score came from equal parts of 1) the number of highly cited researchers in various academic fields, 2) the number of articles published in Nature and Science, and 3) the number of articles listed in the ISI Social Sciences and Arts & Humanities indices; forty percent of the total score came from equal parts of 1) the percentage of international faculty, 2) the percentage of international students, 3) citations per faculty member, and 4) ratio of faculty to students (probably one reason we did so well); the final ten percent of the score was based on number of volumes in university libraries (and that certainly helps Harvard).

Needless to say, we’re very pleased here at the office this morning.

I got some good news from my property management company today: my condo in Arlington has finally been rented, to “two young professionals” who will be moving in this Thursday. There’s one less thing to stress about now, at least.

The past few days, after having been to Crate & Barrel over the weekend, we’ve been thinking again about the lack of furniture in the house. At Crate & Barrel we were quite taken by the Petrie sofa (as in Rob and Laura), with its tufting and retro 1960s look. Sitting on it, we found it really quite comfortable.

Some Internet research, though, determined that it was the sofa used in the recent Jennifer Aniston/Vince Vaughn movie The Break Up and is, in fact, the sofa seen in the promotional shot of the two of them sitting sullenly at opposite ends, looking straight ahead, she with her arms crossed, he with his hands in his lap. And I discovered that I wasn’t very fond of the sofa when people were sitting on it; it looked awkwardly bowed, with the cushions parting unevenly in the middle. So we went searching online for alternatives, at Room and Board and Design Within Reach (DWR), among others. The sofa that most caught our eye was DWR’s Bantam, roughly the same price and with the same midcentury aesthetic–including the same wonderful tapered wood legs–but with a much cleaner look, featuring an uninterrupted back, solitary row of buttons, and single long seat cushion.

Thursday night the DWR Studio Potrero in San Francisco is hosting an Eames film festival, and we had planned to go and to head over early to see the sofa beforehand (it turns out now that the festival is full–despite the email they sent me earlier this week mentioning nothing about needing to rsvp; I only discovered that we can no longer attend when I went again just now to get the link. Grrr.).

Today, however, I saw a posting on Apartment Therapy noting a Craigslist ad for the Bantam, at a little more than half off the retail price. The post was several days old already, so I figured the sofa had been snatched up, but I sent an email anyway. And it’s ours. Jeff took care of renting a cargo van from Budget, we each withdrew half the amount from our banks, and we drove down after work to pick up the sofa from a hottie in Menlo Park (a recent UCLA graduate who has just scored his first post-college job with an Internet company in SOMA). Our little olive Bantam is now happily ensconced in our living room, across from the fireplace and amidst the packing boxes.

This particular sofa was a floor model, though new, and as such it does have a few (very minor) scuffs; on the whole, though, its quite a nice piece of furniture, and it really fits our style and the period of the house. And, for $800 instead of $1,400, I’m very happy with it.

Speaking of birthdays, last Sunday we drove down to San Jose to celebrate Gene’s 40th birthday (his birthday really is the 14th, but he held his party on the 5th).

We had great food (munchies first, fajitas and barbecued chicken next, and a huge pink cake–I’m talking pieces the size of a person’s head–for dessert), fun music, frosty drinks, and we met an amazing number of really neat people, including Gene’s ex, Jann, and his partner, Mike; Gene’s mom and aunt (how in the world a free spirit like her survives back in Lynchburg, Virginia, I’ll never know); and the amazingly cool Sara Hickman and the equally cool husband, Lance, and daughters Lily and iolana.

Gene’s aunt lives not far from my great-uncle and aunt’s new house in Amherst, and has issued a standing invitation–nay, a demand–that we come see her when we’re out that way.

And Sara… well, I feel like I’ve known Sara forever. Meeting her was like one of those connections you make unexpectedly–at a squaredance weekend, maybe, or one afternoon at a gaming store when the guy running the D&D game comes over and starts chatting–that stays with you the rest of your life, one way or another.

Moreover, she’s a very talented singer and songwriter and a blogger and podcaster to boot. Check out her newest CD, Motherlode.

The Web turned 15 on August 6. The BBC, which offers an interactive timeline, dates the birth of the web to August 6, 1991, when “Tim Berners-Lee formally introduced his world wide web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup.” The first week of January 1995 I announced the availability of my first professional web site, for the Association of America’s Public Television Stations (APTS), hosted at http://www.universe.digex.net/~apts (it would be few months before we hosted on our own domain at http://www.apts.org/); around that time I believed it to be one of the first 10,000 sites online (seven months later, according to the BBC, there were just 18,957 sites online, with over 342,000 twelve months after that, so it seems quite likely that the APTS site was indeed well within that first 10,000 figure).

My original personal web site, back then also hosted at Digex, went online in 1994 even prior to the APTS site. A version from 1997, complete with original 1995 graphics and photos of a decade-younger me, is still available in the Wayback Machine.

I experienced my first California earthquake this evening. At 8:08 this evening, PDT, while Jeff and I were in the middle of making dinner, the house shook a little and belongings rattled for somewhere around one to two seconds; it sounded and felt a little like a large truck going by, and not much more intense than the East Coast tremors I’ve experienced in Boston and DC.

Immediately I got on the computer (conveniently set up on the kitchen table at the moment) and checked the USGS site; sure enough, it recorded an earthquake about 76 km northwest of here (epicenter 3 miles west of Glen Ellen, California, between Napa and Sonoma) of uncertain magnitude. I fired up Google Earth, and it was showing the quake at somewhere between 4 and 5; by then (this was all still within the first three minutes after the quake), the USGS site had updated to show a 4.4 magnitude. The site asked me to give my impressions of the quake, so I dutifully entered my experience with my first quake–mild shaking, pictures mildly askew, items rattling, no damage, etc.–and it noted that mine was the first response from my area code, suggesting that my experience indicated an intensity of III on a I-X scale; within minutes there were hundreds of data points from others entering their experiences and now, just an hour and a half later, over 14,000 people have recorded their impressions of this mild quake. I think this must be a California pasttime.

I must confess that I was a little exhilirated by the quake, mild that it was. I’d been carrying around a low-level anxiety about earthquakes, nothing serious at the conscious level but creating some wild and uncomfortable dreams the past month. I said on several occasions that I wished we’d just go ahead and have a quake–a small one, I was always hasty to qualify–so I could get the experience under my belt, and put this nervous anticipatory uncertainty to rest.

Granted, this was a small one; even Alex seemed completely unfazed. I told him I was a little disappointed that he didn’t give us any warning, as the common wisdom, at least, is that animals have a heightened awareness of imminent seismic activity. He yawned. He’s just not earning his keep.

It’s been cool to be able to track information about the quake online in pretty much real-time. It’s especially neat to have tools like Google Earth to really help visualize the location and relative experience of it based on distance from the epicenter. I love the Internet.

Yesterday I turned 44, still a pretty neat number if not quite as geeky cool as this past year’s 43. My birthday itself was quiet; Julie took me to lunch, and gifted me with a collection of Ursula K. LeGuin (a shared favorite author) short stories, but otherwise the day was unmarked. Jeff, who had to drive his aunt to the airport, didn’t think he’d be home until late in the evening, so I stayed at the office until 6:30 and ate some packaged paleek paneer from Trader Joe’s for dinner once I got home.

On Sunday, though, we celebrated my birthday (the queen’s observed birthday, we mused) by seeing Leslie Jordan’s (Beverley Leslie on Will & Grace, and Brother Boy in the deliciously camp Sordid Lives, with Olivia Newton-John and Delta Burke) one-man, hilarious autobiographical show, Like a Dog on Linoleum. Afterwards we walked down Market Street, enjoying the unusual San Francisco sunshine and warmth, before heading back to Daly City for dinner at the Boulevard Cafe (yelp reviews), with its great googie-style architecture. I didn’t realize until much later that they completely forgot to bring us our calamari appetizer (though they also didn’t bill us for it, so no harm no foul). Service was friendly and attentive. The “early bird” special, which included an entree, soup or salad, and a drink for $12.95 was a great deal. We both had salisbury steak with mushrooms in a red wine sauce, garlic mashed potatoes, and steamed string beans. The only complaint we had was that the entree–albeit very moist and flavorful–could have used just another tablespoon or two of sauce.

We skipped dessert at the restaurant, though, in favor of frapuccinos at the nearby Starbucks, and then we headed over to Thornton Beach Vista, a spot on the edge of the cliffs overlooking Thornton Beach State Park and the Pacific Ocean, only about a mile from our house, where we walked the trails and took lots of pictures in the golden late afternoon sunlight (and Jeff, apparently, secretly fantasized my demise). I still just can’t get over that we actually live less than a mile from the Pacific Ocean.

All in all, a very nice way to observe a birthday.

In my condo apartment back in Virginia I never had to deal with door-to-door solicitors. In five weeks here we’ve already been visited by Jehovah’s Witnesses twice and a young boy selling something.

This afternoon was the second visit by the Witnesses. The first time we just waited quietly inside until they went away; this time I thought it might be Jeff at the door, since he had driven over to his mother’s house, and wouldn’t be parking his car back inside the garage since we’d be taking mine out later to visit some friends in Mountain View. So I opened the door, and there they were.

But they seemed even more surprised to see me. “We’re looking for Filipinos,” the woman said. She laughed nervously. “You’re not…” “No,” I agreed, “I’m not.” The two then asked me if I knew which of my neighbors were Filipino; I said that I’d only just moved in, so I didn’t really know my neighbors yet. They started to move away, then the man suggested that his partner leave something with me; she reached into her bag, but then hesitated, “Ah, but you don’t read…” “Tagalog?”, I asked. “No, but my roommate does.” “Your roommate…,” she began, obviously confused, but not pressing the point. She handed me a copy of Ang Batayan, and her associate gave me the usual English version, and then they left on their search for Filipinos to proselytize. I’m confused, though; are we non-Filipinos already automatically saved, or is salvation so totally out of reach for us that they just needn’t bother trying?

Coincidentally, I’d just checked out some Tagalog instruction books from the library last weekend. When we’re just with his mother alone, we all speak English together, but when we’re with a larger group of Jeff’s family, Tagalog is used at least as often as, if not more so than, English and I’ve been wanting to try to learn it in order to be able to participate more fully. Now I’ll have some reading material with which to practice.

Now I just have to figure out how to work the word “watchtower” artfully into a conversation with Jeff’s aunts.

Oh, one more thing about the San Francisco heat wave. Saturday evening Jeff and I still were comfortable in shorts and t-shirts at 9:00 when we drove his uncle and cousin to the bus station. Afterwards, before taking his mom back home, we decided to stop at a Starbucks for refreshing frosty frappucinos. The parking lot at Starbucks was extremely busy, with dozens of people lounging around outside–pretty unusual for that suburban shopping center–but when we went inside we discovered that the unusually high temperatures had generated a run on cold drinks that evening; when we arrived, they were completely out of ice and couldn’t even make an iced coffee, much less a blended drink.

Like much of the country and all of California, we’ve been suffering through higher-than-normal temperatures the past week. In using quotes around the phrase, my intention is not to diminish the seriousness of this for so many–the triple-digit temperatures in the East Bay and elsewhere (it was 103 in San Jose, 107 in Napa, and an astonishing 112 in Gilroy) have been responsible for several deaths, for example–but I have found it amusing when my co-workers and acquaintances who live here in San Francisco or Daly City speak so seriously about this “heat wave.”

In downtown San Francisco, that phrase has now been applied to a record-breaking temperature Saturday of 87 degrees Farenheit. Yes, 87 degrees on July 23 was the hottest that day had been; the previous record was 81° sometime in the early 1900s. Back in DC, we’d have considered a July day at 87 degrees a cold snap. And let’s not forget the 30% difference in relative humidity; even 87 degrees here feels cooler than 87 degrees back east.

To be fair, no one here has air conditioning. And I’ll admit that our upstairs level has gotten hot and stuffy during this period, with inside temperatures into the 80s, which isn’t comfortable. Still, it was nice to have some fog-free days; on Sunday afternoon Jeff and I drove up along the beach (I’m still constantly amazed that we live mere minutes from the Pacific Ocean) to the Palace of the Legion of Honor at Lincoln Park, enjoying the sunshine and getting some nice photos (so far, I only have a few of the Holocaust Memorial online, but will be putting some more from Sunday up soon; Jeff has some others up already, including the beautiful one of marigolds seen above). When we got back home, we walked to the top of the hill across the street–someone was even flying a kite–to appreciate the amazing 360° view taking in San Bruno Mountain, Golden Gate Park and downtown San Francisco, the Pacific Ocean and the Marin Headlands; next clear weekend day I’m going to take my camera and tripod up there and take some panoramic photos.

Oh, and another nice aspect of the heat wave: unlike other cities (I always judged the arrival of spring in DC as much by the disappearance of shirts around Dupont Circle as by the appearance of the cherry blossoms) one otherwise so rarely has a chance to enjoy the sight of shirtless men in San Francisco in the summer.