ANOTHER BEAUTIFUL DAY ON CAMPUS, with me once again stuck inside. I did manage my usual half-hour nice-day constitutional, though, so here are a few pictures. Lots of students are enjoying the outdoors. As they should be — it’s in the 80s now, and spring has definitely spring. There’s a lot of frisbee-tossing and studying under trees, as you can see. I don’t think that the Aquatic Center’s outdoor pool is open, but it might as well be. It’s that kind of day. It’s more like summer than Spring, really, except that the trees are just now leafing out.

April really is the cruellest month here. The weather is wonderful, but since classes end in just over three weeks, students have to study. But at least it’s possible to sit outside, and get a tan while you do. (Can you spot the geeks by their excellent tans? Er, probably not, but I like the thought.)

But the big item this week is student elections. As you can see (er, or actually can’t as the crowd is in the way), free pizza draws a crowd:

But when it comes to politics, there’s no substitute for passing out pork, as this grilling operation demonstrates:

Anyway, I’ve been stuck in the office proofreading a forthcoming law review article and, beginning shortly, preparing for class. Then I have a committee meeting to look forward to after that. But I can, at least, take vicarious pleasure in the way other people are enjoying the nice weather. And there’s always tomorrow, I suppose. And, of course, I managed to enjoy the nice weather and the outdoors yesterday.

But it all seems that much more appealing when you have work to do!

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS is up, with lots of interesting business and economics-related posts.

DAVID BERNSTEIN WRITES on “hostile environment blowback:”

Now comes word, via John Rosenberg, that the University of North Carolina professor in question, Elyse Crystall, is, along with UNC, being investigated by the Department of Education for violating federal civil rights law by creating a hostile environment for white, male, Christian students. A conservative Republican Congressman, Rep. Walter Jones, helped instigate the investigation.

I don’t approve of such things, but there’s no better way to put an end to this asinine speech-suppressing body of law than to start enforcing it evenhandledly.

ANDREW SULLIVAN is back blogging.

LAST WEEK, I linked to an old photo of Doug Weinstein. Now he returns the favor with an even older one of me. (And if you follow the link on the second photo, you can see me in the background, at the soundboard of the old Longbranch Saloon on Cumberland Ave. It was a Peavey, as I recall, featuring 12 channels. Which, judging by my appearance in that photo, is also my age at the time. . . .)

UPDATE: Heh. Here’s another one of Doug. And, by the way, here’s a lesson in life: the woman I’m sitting with in the picture Doug links, who I was dating at the time, is also the woman through whom I met my wife. Be nice to your girlfriends, and your ex-girlfriends. It pays!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Scott Kent emails: “OMG, that second pic of Doug you posted (he’s wearing the Mork suspenders), his nose and beard make him look like Pete Townshend, circa 1973!”

In other respects, he’s more like Keith Moon.

KERRY QUOTES SCRIPTURE: LaShawn Barber comments: “Using taxpayers’ money isn’t a work of faith.”

LARRY LESSIG is guest-blogging over at GlennReynolds.com.

BEYOND THE BLOGOSPHERE: William Safire writes: “Never has there been a financial rip-off of the magnitude of the U.N. oil-for-food scandal.”

Yes. More:

Responding to a harangue in this space on March 17, the spokesman for Kofi Annan confirmed that the secretary general’s soft-spoken son, Kojo, was on the payroll of Cotecna Inspections of Switzerland until December 1998. In that very month, the U.N. awarded Cotecna the contract to monitor and authenticate the goods shipped to Iraq.

Prices were inflated to allow for 10 percent kickbacks, and the goods were often shoddy and unusable. As the lax Cotecna made a lot of corporate friends, Iraqi children suffered from rotted food and diluted medicines.

The U.N. press agent also revealed that Benon Sevan, Annan’s longtime right-hand man in charge of the flow of billions, was advised by U.N. lawyers that the names of companies receiving the contracts were “privileged commercial information, which could not be made public.” Mr. Sevan had stonewalling help.

Funny, isn’t it, that while people were accusing the United States of starving Iraqi children, it was actually the U.N. that was doing it? “Funny,” that is, in the sense that the crimes and hypocrisies of the international political classes are peculiarly unnoted, not funny in the sense of actually amusing.

Meanwhile Roger Simon has more, and observes:

While the Congress is playing the blame game with their 9/11 hearings… telling us all what we already knew (that no one did much about terrorism before 9/11–duh!)… the real investigation is beginning on 44th Street with potential information that can tell us a hundred times more about the terror game… no make that a thousand times more… than the partisan sniping going on on (where else?) Capitol Hill.

Leave no stone unturned. Or un-flung, at guilty UN officials and their co-conspirators.

IN A STRATEGY I’VE CRITICIZED AS SHORTSIGHTED, THE NANOTECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY, scared of backlash from Michael Crichtonesque scenarios involving molecular robots, has been pooh-poohing the possibility of advanced nanotechnology and stressing lower-tech nanomaterials.

The payoff? Articles like this one from the Washington Post: Nanotechnology Linked to Organ Damage — Study. The study isn’t about genuine molecular nanotechnology, but about nanomaterials of the sort that industry boosters would prefer the press to focus on. Oops.

In truth, these fears are rather overstated — as I noted in my report from the EPA’s Science Advisory Board meeting a few months back, this seems to be more of a workplace-safety issue than an environmental issue and toxicologists seem to feel they have a pretty good handle on these questions. It’s also true that (as is often the case with stories on technological risk) the “study” trumpeted by the Post isn’t exactly hard science yet: “The study, described at a scientific meeting Sunday, was small and has yet to be peer reviewed or published in a scientific journal.” And most nanotechnology enthusiasts wouldn’t consider “buckyballs” — the actual subject of the study — to be true nanotechnology at all, despite what the industry says.

Nonetheless, because of its worries about science-fiction-based fears where mature nanotechnology is concerned, the nanotechnology industry has mostly succeeded in exaggerating concern about shorter-term fears. Afraid that nanotechnology might be associated with lethal (and implausible) sci-fi robots in the public mind, it has produced a situation in which nanotechnology may come to be associated with lethal (and more plausible) toxic buckyballs instead. Call me crazy, but that seems worse. This ham-handed approach to public relations has the potential to do real harm to the industry, and in the process to a technology that the world desperately needs.

UPDATE: Howard Lovy notes that the Post story has a lot of other problems, too, and offers some very useful perspective.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Phil Bowermaster has advice for the nanotechnology industry.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Daniel Moore has comments.

LEE HARRIS WRITES on the uses of failure.

MICKEY KAUS: “Democrats demand more elective surgery for Kerry!”

SOFTBALL AND EGGS: A reader emails:

I’m wondering how long it will take for the scathing reproachments that are all over the blogosphere to start showing up as egg on the faces of the interviewers of such programs as Meet The Press. I was absolutely disgusted with the ‘free’ pass Clarke was given on that program this morning. If they had an audience and I had been in it, it wouldn’t have taken long for the egg to show up. As I would have been throwing them right then.

I didn’t see the show, but here’s a report characterizing their Clarke interview as soft as a baby’s bottom.

UPDATE: Reader Dan Chattos observes that Sixty Minutes dropped the ball:

I suppose I am naive, but is there any indication that the folks at “60 Minutes” are the least bit embarrassed by their interview with Dick Clarke?

Leaving aside Clarke’s assessment of the Bush administration, his claims on behalf of the Clinton administration (that fighting al-Qa’eda was an urgent priority) were obviously false (or at best spin).

Clarke acknowledged that Yugoslavia(!) was a higher priority for Clinton and thinks that was ok, but finds Bush’s concern with Iraq proof that Bush was not serious in fighting terrorism despite the fact that Clarke, himself, had made statements linking Iraq and al-Qa’eda.

Bottom line, much of what Clarke said over the last 10 years or alleged more recently was secret, insider information. It took most bloggers less that 24 hours to begin raising issues about Clarke’s credibility, yet “60 minutes” with Clarke’s book in hand, were apparently unable to identify any of these issues on their own prior to the interview.

I seems that a little preparation on the part of “60 Minutes” would have allowed them to encapsulated the entire debate of the last week within the context of a single show. Now that would have been investigative journalism at its finest…

Good point. And maybe the Sixty Minutes conflict-of-interest problem where Clarke’s book was concerned did some real harm, both to their program and to the national debate.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here on Clarke’s statements about Iraq.

ROD DREHER EMAILS:

If you’re the prayerful sort, please offer one up for our friend Stuart Buck. I have the privilege of knowing Stuart personally, but he’s got a lot of readers and fans in the blogosphere who will no doubt be grieved to hear what’s happened to him. He suffered two strokes over the weekend, and is in the hospital in Arkansas near his folks. Lawyer Stuart had just moved with his wife and two small children from Dallas to his Arkansas hometown last week … and now this. I don’t have any specifics on his condition, except that I’m told he can speak. Stuart is all of 29. He’s a good man, and he and his wife and kids need all the prayers or good wishes we can muster. Pass it on.

Jeez, that’s terrible news. Please send him your best wishes for a full recovery. I don’t know any more (and there’s nothing on his blog), but I’ll see what I can find out.