5CENE

Have you ever walked into Collins and overheard a bit of an intriguing story? Have you been left wondering what your fellow CMCers are up to? Introducing CMC Celeb, a new weekly feature profiling your often accomplished, sometimes underrated classmates and even the occasional alum. Whether we’re riding on the tops of trains in Bangladesh, fighting a life threatening disease, or auditioning for Jeopardy!, CMCers have experiences of every kind and the Forum’s CMC Celeb section is here to share them with...
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Eric Barker links to a paper showing that good experiences become more pleasurable (and bad experiences less pleasurable) when they are interrupted.

Showering in India means filling a bucket with (thankfully) hot water and scooping it over your head, pausing to rub in shampoo and soap. It isn’t that bad, probably in large part because of the effect stated above. Each scoop of hot water is a mini-rush of relief.

I am wondering whether user control has an effect. For instance, interrupting the flow of a continuous tap may make the experience more pleasurable but you also may get annoyed with yourself for not leaving the tap on all the time. Constructing an unreliable faucet, that would stay on between ten and twenty seconds and shut off at random intervals of one to five seconds, so that the water is running around 75% of the time, would lead to the optimal showering experience.

This suggests we could probably...
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I have recently joined the staff of Big Government. Behold my first piece, titled, "'Access to Guns,' Not Jihad, To Blame for Ft. Hood, Says Noted Islamic Scholar."

Many thanks to the Muslim Student Association and the Arabic Department for bringing this radical to campus and giving me such a wealth of things to comment on.

The Daily Bulletin's Wes Woods II says that the Claremont Unified School District has voted 4-1 to hire a consultant to conduct a public survey to test the waters for a new parcel tax or bond. According to the Bulletin, the lone "No" vote was Steve Llanusa, who thought it wasn't the right time for such ballot...
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Saturday was a big day for CMS Athletics — swimmers and track runners gathered simultaneously (but separately) to compete. Couldn’t come out in the rain to support your teams? Enjoy this slideshow:

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It’s raining in Claremont. This isn’t just a winter sprinkle; we’re talking soggy syllabi, umbrellas blown inside-out, and frantic messages from your grandma in Ohio who seems convinced that you have drowned in the Great California Monsoon of 2010. Your shoes are so wet, you half-wonder if you showered in them after TNC. “I want my Cali sunshineee,” you whine via Facebook status updates, lamenting the months of rain this weather surely...
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In an attempt to fight corruption, a local NGO in Chennai has begun to print zero-rupee bills. When public officials demand a bribe in exchange for a service, the people hand over a zero-rupee bill as a protest against petty bribery and corruption. The bills have proven so popular that the NGO has had to make a second, much bigger printing run of the bills.
Currently, everyone pays bribes and the people are worse off, overall and relative to the government officials. If I want to protest and choose not to pay a bribe, the government official will laugh in my face. Everyone else is paying bribes, so he doesn?t really need...
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The January 19 Claremont Courier had a Tony Krickl article about Claremont Community Services Director Scott Carroll leaving Claremont to take a job as general manager for the Costa Mesa Sanitation District.

(Sorry, no link to the actual article, which is archived behind the Courier's paywall.)

December 31...
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Some Claremont Courier copy editor sure has a sense of humor:
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We are just hours away from the biggest day in American sports. Make no mistake about it, the Super Bowl is huge — even here. At the 5Cs, where professional sports rarely seem to make their way into “the bubble” and are replaced instead by more important things and Read more...

CMCers may get the reputation of being more frequent party goers but it’s hard to make the argument we throw better parties than our neighbors to the north. Whether they feature a crowd of co-eds under a waterfall or snow on the ground in Southern California, Harvey Mudd’s parties always seem to push the envelope. In the fall semester, the mainstays of the Mudd party circuit were highly successful, with the Foam Party, Long Tall Glasses, and Casemas all drawing hundreds of students from all five colleges, making them some of the premier events of the social calendar. Now, North Dorm hopes to bring the same scale and resources to a new event: Mudd Goes Madd.

The plan? Deck the North Dorm courtyard out like the lair of a mad scientist. With a host of science themed decorations and music provided by perennial favorite DJ, Mixed Reactions, the...
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