NASA's exoplanet travel posters

 Winter suns, anyone? 

NASA produces vintage travel posters for newly discovered planets

the velvet undergound &nico - Femme Fatale

Free community college

Short-Lived Transfer Degrees (Inside Higher Ed)
     Drexel University last January earned praise for expanding a transfer program that brings the university’s faculty members to local community colleges. But Drexel is phasing out the program less than a year later.
     As The Philadelphia Inquirer first reported, the university will no longer offer bachelor’s degrees on the campuses of two Pennsylvania community colleges and one located across the Delaware River, in New Jersey.
     Drexel issued a written statement explaining the decision. … “We now believe that students are best served by completing their degree on Drexel’s campus,” the written statement said, “where they will have access to the full Drexel experience, including interactions with a wide range of faculty and other students and to all of the resources available on campus.”….

The rising voice of adjunct faculty

California colleges see surge in efforts to unionize adjunct faculty (LA Times)
     A wave of union organizing at college campuses across California and the nation in recent months is being fueled by part-time faculty who are increasingly discontented over working conditions and a lack of job security.
     At nearly a dozen private colleges in California, adjunct professors are holding first-time contract negotiations or are campaigning to win the right to do so. Those instructors complain of working semester to semester without knowing whether they will be kept on, lacking health benefits and in some cases having to commute among several campuses to make a living.
     While union activists say they look forward to better working terms and a greater voice in how campuses are governed, many college administrators say they are worried that such union contracts could mean less flexibility in academic hiring and higher tuition costs.
     Service Employees International Union chapters in the Los Angeles area and in Northern California this week won faculty elections to represent part-time professors at Otis College of Art and Design in Westchester and Dominican University of California in San Rafael, and part-timers and non-permanent full-timers at St. Mary's College of California in Moraga. In recent months, the union succeeded in hard-fought votes among part-time faculty at Whittier College, Mills College and California College of the Arts in Oakland, San Francisco Art Institute and Laguna College of Art and Design.
. . .
     Even as unions lose membership in other industries, they have found friendlier turf in academia. Outside California, organized labor has won recent elections at several large private institutions, including Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and Tufts in the Boston area.
     New contracts for part-time faculty at those schools boost pay and, without guarantees, contain formal rules about notifying instructors in advance about teaching assignments and the length of contracts. Colleges seeking to avoid unionization contend those pacts are no better than what could be obtained without the unions. (Part-time and untenured faculty at many public universities, including UC and Cal State, long have been represented by unions.)
     The unusual number of union campaigns springs from the use of more part-time instructors as a way to reduce the hiring of tenure-track faculty, said William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, at Hunter College in New York.
     The pro-union response is coming from adjuncts who, he said, constitute "a large group of people who are highly educated, highly motivated and highly experienced."
     About half of U.S. college and university faculty were full-time in 2011, down from 77% 40 years before that, U.S. Department of Education data show. Part-time instructors teach about a fourth of all classes at research universities and more than a third of courses at community colleges, according to a study by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, a group of education and research associations….

90-year-old postcard

1889: first official OC map

Objects in my house: 55 minute timers, etc.

Yes, a cheap 55-minute timer. Very cool.

My sister bought me this one. It was also cheap, but good.
I was timing the cooking of my pasta when I took this pic.
Six and a half minutes to go.

A gift: some kind of aircraft navigation equipment, perhaps indicating the degree of level flight.
I just did a little research. I do believe that it is a "turn and bank indicator." Similar instruments
were used by WW II fighters such as the P-51

Here's what it says on the back.
It's pretty old, I think.

Burning Chinatown

     Our pal Gustavo Arellano has written a fascinating/disturbing account of OC racism against Chinese residents in 1906: Santa Ana Deliberately Burned Down Its Chinatown in 1906—And Let a Man Die to Do It.
     I recommend it.
     In a DtB post three years ago (A century-old "History of Orange County"…), I touched on the topic of anti-Chinese racism in OC, coming across an interesting account of violence against Chinese workers thirteen years before the event that Gustavo relates:

     The relevant passages of Street’s book are here: Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769-1913. Check it out.
     As I'm sure you know, Gustavo has published a great deal on the influence of the KKK in Orange County over the years. OC has been a hotbed of racism going way back.
     Luckily, OC has been changing mostly for the better in this regard in recent decades.
     Let's not forget, however, that, only 15 years ago, one of the trustees of the SOCCCD Board of Trustees was a Holocaust denier who enjoyed the support of thousands of Orange Countians.
     And then there's Villa Park Councilwoman Deborah Pauly's more recent anti-Muslim views and actions. And San Juan Capistrano Councilman Derek Reeve's anti-Muslim remarks. And OC Republican Party official Marilyn Davenport's notorious "Apegate" incident. And Los Alamitos Mayor Dean Grose's "watermelon" email. And so on, and so on.