NYTimes Article Are Elite Colleges Worth the Cost? basically says, "no" although underprivileged minorities that attend elite universities do wind up significantly better off than their high school peers. On average, two students with similar backgrounds and similar test scores will have similar success after college, but the one that went to a ( Read more... )

In case anyone is interested, Terry Drayman-Weisser of the Walters Art Museum is speaking at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum about the project that Winterthur, The Walters, the State Department and other partners have been working on to bring modern conservation practice to Iraqi Museum employees so they can adequately care for their art and ( Read more... )

Today is the 170th anniversary of the perfection of the Daguerreotype by Louis Daugerre and Joseph Niepce. We've come a long way from people poisoning themselves with developing wet collodion plates in mercury fumes to the ease and speed and instant gratification of digital imaging.

I feel like a lot has happened in the past week and none of it comes to mind right this second.

tristesse is coming to have lunch with me and I'm going to tour her and another Wellesley friend of hers around work quickly before going back to doing what they pay me for ( Read more... )

This is my happy find of the day: Richard Jones' Scrap book c. 1840s in the State Library of New South Wales, Australia.

It's remarkably similar (although probably not identical to) a scrapbook I'll be working on later this summer. They did a great job scanning it. Go poke through it.

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The first time I saw the Xlerator hand dryers I was in the Air and Space Museum in DC on the mall. I thought to myself, "How cute that they have the special jet-engine speed hand dryers for the Air and Space Museum! It's kinda creepy the way that they move your skin around though." It makes your hands look a little bit like a piece of chicken that ( Read more... )

Trying to decide what we wanted to do for Labor Day - we chose a bike ride, with a possible overnight...

We set out on Sunday to take the W&OD trail to Leesburg, take White's Ferry over the Potomac and the C&O towpath back homeThe Custis Trail in Arlington made me want to die, which was unfortunate that it was where we started our day (after we ( Read more... )

Wow - so in the past 48 hours, I have:

+ Toured a private conservation lab, and got another person to contact about possibly working in her shop.
+ Watched the first episode of Battlestar Galactica's Season 4 with H&C who will hopefully be my BSG buddies from here on out.
+ Walked from Mount Vernon to wzly_aggie's house, approximately 11 miles, in about 3 ( Read more... )

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