Catching up from travel back to NC tonight. Here are a few random links.

* Why aren’t universities spending their endowments?

* 'Sci-Fi Writer Attributes Everything Mysterious To "Quantum Flux."'

A reading of Gabriel Fournier's The Eclipse Of Infinity reveals that the new science-fiction novel makes more than 80 separate references to "quantum flux," a vaguely defined force the author uses to advance the plot, resolve conflict as needed, and account for dozens of glaring inconsistencies.

* Ten things we don't understand about humans.

* The world's oldest map?

* Jared Diamond has lunch with the Financial Times.

With a nod to the feast before us, I say there seems little chance that Chinese or Indians will forgo the opportunity to live a western-style existence. Why should they? It is even more improbable that westerners will give up their resource-hungry lifestyles. Diamond, for example, is not a vegetarian, though he knows a vegetable diet is less hard on the planet. “I’m inconsistent,” he shrugs. But if we can’t supply more or consume less, doesn’t that mean that, like the Easter Islander who chopped down the last tree, thus condemning his civilisation to extinction, we are doomed to drain our oceans of fish and empty our soil of nutrients?

“No. It is our choice,” he replies, perhaps subconsciously answering his critics again. “If we continue to operate non-sustainably, then in 50 or 60 years, the US and Japan and Europe will be in bad shape. But my friends in the highlands of New Guinea will be fine. Some of my friends made stone tools when they were children and they could just go back to what their ancestors were doing for 46,000 years. New Guinea highlanders are not doomed,” he says, draining his pomegranate juice. “The first world lifestyle will be doomed if we don’t learn to operate sustainably.”

* And the line between fake news and real news continues to blur.

Out of college , money spent / see no future , pay no rent / all the money's gone, nowhere to go. I wrote a little bit about hard times at Harvard in that review of How the University Works for Polygraph; now here's a whole piece in Vanity Fair on the subject. Via Infectious Greed.

Incensed, one member of the board of Harvard Management Company, the fund that manages Harvard’s endowment, told me, “This story is about leadership. It isn’t about money.” He may be right. At some point in the last five years, the men and women who run Harvard convinced themselves that the endowment would grow at double-digit rates forever. If Harvard were a publicly traded company, those people would have been fired by now.

“Apparently nobody in our financial office has read the story in Genesis about Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dream—you know, during the seven good years you save for the seven lean years,” remarked Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School since 1967. “And now they’re coming hat in hand, pleading to the faculty and students to bear the burden of cutbacks. It’s a scandal! It’s an absolute scandal, the way Harvard has handled this financial crisis.”

Sunday!

* Great Archie comics experiments of 1989-1990.

* This ruling of Sotomayor's, it must be said, was a little douchebaggy.

* "You almost get the sense guys like Thiessen are hoping for an attack so that they can blame Obama when it happens." Almost?

* Republicans who happily sat through three-and-a-half years of Bush vacations are outraged! that Obama took a night off.

* Tough times at Harvard U.

* Non-Whedon directors for the Buffy reboot. Wes Anderson snubbed again, though I bet Tarantino could do a good job with it.

Duke and the downturn.

As of early December, the market value of the endowment was approximately 19% lower than it was on July 1. This is a serious concern, but the news could be worse. First, Duke’s investments have been skillfully managed. Over the past ten years, only one university endowment has outperformed Duke’s, and the decline we have experienced this fall has not been as sharp as many of our peers have reported. Second, it is important to remember that spending from the endowment has historically made up about 15% of the University’s annual operating budget - again, a lower proportion than many of our peer institutions. And finally, the impact of this decline on our activities will be tempered by our spending policy, which calls for paying out 5.5% of the average value of the endowment over a three-year period. This policy has kept us from overspending in years when the endowment earned large returns, and lessens our exposure to a sharp downturn now.