Junior Faculty

Our cousins across the quad at Rochester's renowned Simon School of Business (ranked 3rd globally for finance) have a pair of new hires:

Angela Kniazeva and her younger sister Diana [are] due to take up their new positions in September at the University of Rochester, where half of their students will likely be older than them.

The pair, who already have masters degrees in international policy from Stanford University in California, were picking up their doctorates from New York University's Stern business school on Wednesday after five years of study.

So they're smart and they've stuck together as sisters. Why is this special? Because they'll be too young to date most of their students:

The duo were home-schooled by their parents and earned the equivalent of their US high-school diploma at the ages of 10 and 11 before graduating college in Russia at the ages of 13 and 14. They graduated from Stanford in 2002.

[Now] they are only 19 and 21.

Wow. Kudos to the Simon School for taking the leap.

Hat tip to Drudge.

Self-Fulfilling Prophetess

As Global Review mentioned yesterday, defeated French Socialist prophesied a few days before the presidential election that a win for center-right candidate Nicolas Sarkozy would spark violence and riots. She was right, in a sense:

In the Place de la Bastille in Paris riot police fired tear gas and at least one burst of water cannon after hundreds of rioters – some wearing masks – began throwing bottles, stones and other missiles.

They also set fire to cars and burned Mr. Sarkozy in effigy.

So the Socialist was right! She had said that the banlieues - depressed immigrant suburbs - might explode in violence if she lost the election. But wait... la Place de la Bastille n'est pas un banlieue. The News sheds a bit more light on the location of the rioting:

About 5000 supporters of defeated Socialist party candidate Segolene Royal had gathered in the square to await the election results.

So when Royal said there would be rioting, it wasn't so much a prediction (after all, the banlieues stayed peaceful) as a command to her followers. I hope the irony of this political and social malfeasance is not lost on the French.

Hat tip to Drudge.

BREAKING NEWS: Clemens is a Yankee

It was just announced on the DiamondVision board at Yankee Stadium: Roger Clemens is a New York Yankee. Save your tears over their April pitching woes; the Yankees will be just fine in September.

A Thousand Words

WaPo has a clever graphic that succinctly summarizes the first debates in the respective primary campaigns.

Sarkozy Wins

Despite blackmail by Segolene Royal (who prophecied, not unhappily, that riots would ensue if French voters chose her opponent), the French have chosen "Sarko l'Americain" as their next president. He represents a hopeful future of France: a child of immigrants, pro-growth, in favor of strong relationships with other democracies, and unwilling to buy into leftist or rightist hysteria.

Runner-up Royal is said to be preparing a concession speech with references to her impending death by guillotine.

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

Hat tip to my sister Ploy for this link: the internet (ah, don't you love the internet) is home not only to the Name of the Year competition but also to the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

--Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

This text is the inspiration, nay, the father of the Fiction Contest. The website states: Since 1982 the English Department at San Jose State University has sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.

Last year's results are just in. A runner-up:

The victim said her attacker was nondescript -- 5' 10 and 3/4", 163 pounds, with Clairol #83N hair (a hint of #84N at his temples) -- and last seen wearing Acuvue2 contacts, a white Hanes 65/35% poly-cotton t-shirt with a 3mm round Grey Poupon stain on the neckband, Levi's 501s missing the second button, and Nike Crosstrainers with muddy aglets.

Linda Fields, Framingham, MA

And a few past winners:

The camel died quite suddenly on the second day, and Selena fretted sulkily and, buffing her already impeccable nails--not for the first time since the journey began--pondered snidely if this would dissolve into a vignette of minor inconveniences like all the other holidays spent with Basil.

--Gail Cain, San Francisco, California (1983 Winner)

She wasn't really my type, a hard-looking but untalented reporter from the local cat box liner, but the first second that the third-rate representative of the fourth estate cracked open a new fifth of old Scotch, my sixth sense said seventh heaven was as close as an eighth note from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, so, nervous as a tenth grader drowning in eleventh-hour cramming for a physics exam, I swept her into my longing arms, and, humming "The Twelfth of Never," I got lucky on Friday the thirteenth.

--Wm. W. "Buddy" Ocheltree, Port Townsend, Washington (1993 Winner)

The corpse exuded the irresistible aroma of a piquant, ancho chili glaze enticingly enhanced with a hint of fresh cilantro as it lay before him, coyly garnished by a garland of variegated radicchio and caramelized onions, and impishly drizzled with glistening rivulets of vintage balsamic vinegar and roasted garlic oil; yes, as he surveyed the body of the slain food critic slumped on the floor of the cozy, but nearly empty, bistro, a quick inventory of his senses told corpulent Inspector Moreau that this was, in all likelihood, an inside job.

--Bob Perry, Milton, Massachusetts (1998 Winner)

Truly, art is alive in America.

Evolution is a god

Every time evolutionists see something new in nature, they point to it as evidence of evolution. This sometimes flies in the face of reason, not to mention Ockham's Razor. Generally, the tipoff to this religious evolutionism is the personification of evolution, endowing it with feelings and intentions, much as ancient pagans endowed the heavenly bodies and natural forces with personalities and mercurial (there you go!) wills.

NYTimes reports on the latest piece of data to come out of anatidine biology:

Part of the answer, [Dr. Patricia Brennan] has discovered, has gone overlooked for decades. Male ducks may have such extreme genitals because the females do too. The birds are locked in an evolutionary struggle for reproductive success.

Wait a sec'! There is an intraspecies struggle for survival? Here's Reuters:

An exception is ducks -- especially mallards. Although mallards pair off to mate, females are often raped by stray males. Yet studies show that these rapes do not pay off for the males. "Even in a species where 40 percent of the copulations are forced copulations, the ducklings still are mostly sired by the mates," Brennan said. "That implies the females may have some kind of mechanism that allows them to keep control of the paternity."

Brennan believes females evolved convoluted oviducts to foil the male rapists.

"You can envision an evolutionary scenario that, as the male phallus increases in size, the female creates more barriers. You get this evolutionary arms race," Brennan said.

Evolution is not like women's liberation: it can't be planned by the participants. So suppose a she-mallard is born with a particular complex oviduct. What are the odds that this bird passes down her genes? Unless there's another layer of complexity (say, if bastards were considered ugly ducklings), good evolutionary sense dictates that such mutations would be quickly exorcised.

According to evolutionist religion, there is an intrinsic desire on the part of each species (or the god behind each species) willing its survival. Brennan wants to split that god into male and female halves which, instead of cooperating for the survival of the species, are fighting over how to do it. What's more, her female ducks care more about spiting rapists and preserving the bloodline of their husbands than preserving their own. What do the she-ducks gain from this? They still get raped and they are less likely to reproduce than their hypothetical kin with simpler oviducts.

But for the true believer, it's not the evidence that matters - it's the ideology. To Brennan, this shows that her god - evolution - is a feminist, presumably like herself. That's an important theological result.

Hat tip to James Taranto. Also, not to be crude, but look at the main photo in the Times article. Who exactly is examining whose phallus?