Unrelated, yet true (I think)

This past Thursday, scientists from the J. Craig Venter Institute announced that they’d engineered a self-replicating bacterial cell using “off the shelf” chemicals and entirely synthetic ingredients. In the words of the Washington Post, they “creat[ed] life from scratch.” Zounds!

On its face, this seems pretty exciting (science! wow!), but it apparently poses a few ethical concerns – skeptics say that this new process presents new opportunities for a super-potent new set of biological weapons. Even though many have already written off the potential for a major threat, this crappy, mean use could possibly weigh out the associated benefits of, say, providing manufactured bacteria to “digest pollutants or produce fuels.” But where’s the Penn connection? Find out after the jump.

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In case you haven’t been checking any listerv you’re on, ever, we’d advise you to check The Real World (on MTV, not to be confused with the actual real world) tonight at 10 p.m. You may or may not get a glimpse of some of our fellow Quakers keeping it classy… and by classy, we mean not at all. We won’t drop names, but you can pretty much just ask around.

Can’t wait/have something better to do than watch Real World? There’s a sneak peak here.

This is not Keith Flaherty.

Once upon a time, we set up a Google alert to let us know whenever good ol’ Penn was mentioned in the news. About five minutes later, we turned said alert off because, well, most of the stuff is pret-ty lame. But an article in today’s New York Times makes us (almost) wish we had reconsidered. We knew Penn had some talented people, but this is fo’ real.

Dr. Keith Flaherty, a Penn oncologist, has spent the last few years leading a team of doctors in researching and creating a melanoma drug that actually appears to work. The drug targets a specific genetic mutation that typically drives the disease. The latest trial significantly shrunk tumors in 11 out of 13 patients, the unlucky two not having matched the genetic mutation for which the gene was developed. The drug still needs to go through many tests and trials before it is determined to be safe for widespread use, but it just goes to show (despite evidence to the contrary) that there are some things going on in our little University City bubble people actually get right!

This just in: Penn Police Detective Supervisor Ted Farrell reached the $25,000 mark yesterday on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”

Last we heard, he had no life-lines left but is guaranteed to walk away with at least $25,000. The officer of 24 years will be back for his second round in the hot seat later today.

The million dollar question? Whether he used the “phone-a-friend” hotline to call A. Gutt or 898-WALK—that’s a tough one.

We know you all were probably glued to your TVs last night watching Glenn Beck, so forgive us if this is old news. But for the miniscule number of students that missed it, a crazy person Glenn Beck openly trash-talked Penn on air! Rude.

Amidst a ramble about Joe Klein, C’68, of Time Magazine he threw in a totally unnecessary low blow at our dear school.

“Not only did Joe attend an Ivy League school, the University of Pennsylvania — OK, yes, that’s probably the trailer park of the Ivy League, but still it is, technically, Ivy League… so it would be like a double-wide trailer.”

Why such hostility from Glenn? Maybe it stems from the one class he took, then dropped out of, at Yale.

Ever wonder what’s going on in the real world? You know, the one that exits after college with jobs and grown-ups and the like. Believe it or not, Penn affiliates have more going for them than their style or romantic lives. On occassion, we like to burst the Penn bubble and take a peek.

First, we heard via Penn Current that Penn Museum Curator Joyce C. White is leading an excavation in Laos from now until January 17. And the best part? You can follow the project on a daily blog written by Penn Museum’s Amy Elisworth. We dig it! (Get it? Like archaeology?)

But that’s not all! The Office of University Communications reports that Penn Law Prof Stephanos Bibas and lecturer Stephen Kinnaird are assisting in Supreme Court Case Abott v. Abott on January 12. The case involves a parent taking a child out of the country without the other parent’s consent. Bibas’ students have assisted with his researching, strategizing and writing briefs.

See folks? There is hope for us after graduation!

What a world we live in. One day, Life is calling our mascot creepy, and the very next, Jon Stewart is saying “Go Quakers” on The Daily Show. Twice! The second time, using an imitation straight out of Fiddler on the Roof. It’s the classic American tale.

Here’s the clip:

We know that most of you voted on March 28th (talk about an intense and drama-filled evening!) and weren’t planning on getting out to the polls again until this Spring. However, on behalf of Penn freshman Jason Merrin, a finalist in the 2009 Nickelodeon Animation Festival, we ask you to reconsider.

The Office of University Communications reports:

[Merrin's] experimental film, “The History of an Animation,” takes the audience through the process of how an animator learns to animate, from doodles all the way through computer animation. He made the movie by combining live footage with animation done in Adobe Flash. He used music by Eno Freedman Brodmann.

“The History of an Animation” is swell and makes us want to make lots of flip books, but we’re concerned about how it will stand up against titles like “Barfy the Pig: Episode 6” and “Oakley and Bud in ‘Rogue UFO.’” Less worrisome is “Some Facts About Owls.”

The future is in your hands! Vote online before Nov. 29. Also be sure to check out the film on Nicktoons this Thursday at 4:37 p.m., when we know you’ll be watching Danny Phantom anyway.

Check out the video after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

We are the champions! The football team brought home a 17-7 win over Harvard on Saturday, which guarantees Penn at least a share of the Ivy League Championship. Perhaps more importantly, the team (and Penn football’s six-year championship dry spell) was profiled by the New York Times on Friday. The story delves into the emotional hurdles the team has faced since Al Bagnoli took over as coach (grab some Kleenex), but it seems to us that – as of Saturday – the football boys are nothing but cigars and smiles.

More photos of that post-victory glow after the jump.

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For the past month or so we’ve been hearing just how clever Penn is when it comes to investments. Amy filled us in on the numbers before we even got to school, and every news source in the country has been yammering on about how awesome it is that Penn’s endowment only went down 15.7%.

This week Fortune investigated this “Ivy League upset” in which we all of the sudden have the top-performing Ivy endowment. While our endowment was down just under 16%, Harvard was down 27% and every other Ivy (except Columbia, who saw a loss of around 16%) was down 25%. Let us not forget that we started out with $5.2 billion… and Harvard started off with $26 billion.

Regardless, we guess it’s cool that we did the least bad (or something like that). Fortune was impressed too, so they sat down and talked shop with Penn chief investment officer Kristin Gilbertson. Read the rest of this entry »

Via the Inquirer, we hear that Joan Rivers is already lobbying to get her tween grandson into Penn.

“Melissa went to Penn, you know.”

We know, Joan. We know how proud you are. You tell us every time we meet. “Melissa works hard for Penn. She’s a big member of the Penn family, planning meetings, raising money. Make sure you put that in. We’ve got to get Cooper into Penn, and we’ve only got 10 years. . . . If my grandson doesn’t get in, I’m coming after you.”

Not only did Melissa go to Penn, but she famously founded The Tabard Society.  So her son will obviously join the one of the secret society’s manly counterparts, such as Oz, when he (inevitably) gets here.  We sure hope he’s smart!  If not, we’re looking at a serendipitously-timed Rivers family addition to the gym.  If he’s a dunce though, we could use a new yoga studio…

Exhibit A: Penn yarmulke.

This is your midday Penn-in-the-news roundup. Because we love reading about ourselves.

• The Penn Club is probably going to become a New York landmark. Yale owned it first, but Penn bought it 20 years ago. And it’s 11 stories tall, which apparently is a big deal. [NY Observer]
• Penn grads rank 10th as far as mid-career salary is concerned, with a $118,000 median, and 8th for starting salary with a $60,400 median. While that’s nice to hear, we think it gives us liberal arts kids false hope. [Economix]
• Jews love Penn because the school didn’t discriminate against them back in the day. Also, Penn is all about legacy admissions. But Yale is sometimes more Jewish than Penn anyway. [The Daily Beast]

About this time last year, we were WTF-ing at the news that Logan had been rechristened “Cohen Hall.” You’ll recall that it even made the Styles section! We’ve had a year for the news to sink in, and you know, whatever, Penn has dollar signs in its eyes, did we really expect the university to behave like anything other than the higher ed hustler we all know and love?

The truly weird thing about the whole Logan-Cohen switcheroo, in our eyes, was always the fact that billionaire-playboy-trustee Ron Perelman insisted on naming the building for his ex-wife, Claudia Cohen. Like, can we imagine Madonna naming a building after Guy Ritchie now that she’s divorced his ass? Nuh uh. With this in mind, we were checking out a little New York magazine write-up on Perelman from a few weeks ago, and we were once again baffled by his Claudia Cohen name droppage. Witness:

After years of being considered one of the city’s best restaurant customers, the billionaire investor (and occasional tabloid fixture) Ron Perelman has gone into the hospitality business, much to his apparent surprise … “My best friend in the world, other than Claudia Cohen”—his ex-wife, who died of cancer in 2007—“was my associate, Howard Gittis,” who also passed away that year. [emphasis ours]

Yeah, we totally stayed BFF with our second wives despite a messy divorce. We’re just good friends with our third wife, though, and we hardly ever see our fourth wife these days, except for the Tuesday night divorced couple bowling league we play in, of course. They’re all getting buildings when they die. It’s just like, common courtesy, ya know?

According to Daily Intel, Linguistics prof Mark Liberman has been trying to decode the statements of South Carolina’s scandal-ridden governor, Mark Sanford. Daily Intel writes: “For instance, Liberman suggests that when Sanford talked about ‘doing stupid,’ he may have been channeling the New International Version of the Bible — which refers to ‘doing good’ and ‘doing wrong’ — when he nominalized the adjective.”

We dug a little further and found that on Language Log, Liberman draws an interesting comparison between Sanford’s statement that “the biggest self of self is indeed self” and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ unfinished fragment On the Portrait of Two Beautiful Young People.

Here’s an excerpt: ”Man lives that list, that leaning in the will/ No wisdom can forecast by gauge or guess,/The selfless self of self, most strange, most still,/ Fast furled and all foredrawn to No or Yes.”

Liberman doubts Sanford is “familiar” with the fragment, but hey, it’s a cool parallel. And Linguistics professors teaching us how to excuse awkward syntax — that’s kinda cool too.