Category: et cetera

Book week, day 1

Over on Facebook, Quentin May tagged me in a kind of internet chain letter. The challenge is to post 7 books I love (1 per day). No explanations, no reviews. Just covers.

I’m also supposed to nominate a friends to take up the challenge, but I won’t be calling out anyone by name. If you’d like to participate, consider yourself challenged.

Let’s promote literacy and a book list. (Does this promote literacy? You are, even now, reading words.)

“No Comment” by Shirvanian

Presuming that money is like bread

A relative of mine recently shared a gif on Facebook of ‘Five Best Sentences’. I try not to post whenever somebody is wrong on the internet, but responding to the list made me realize something about so-called economic conservatives:

Many conservative truisms only make sense if you assume money is like bread and that anything of value is like money.

Continue reading “Presuming that money is like bread”

Phriday phishing

I’ve heard from several students and former students today who got suspicious e-mail claiming to be from me. Maybe you got one, too?

The body of the messages mostly just said “Hello, are you available?” However, one student received a message which went on to ask if he could pick up something at the store.

The e-mail sig said “Dr. P.D. Magnus”, but I don’t think I ever write my name that way. It also gave my UAlbany rank and information, which I only do in e-mails that need to sound official and heavy-hitting.

The from line on these e-mails was tapperrea.maxwell.syr@gmail.com — To be clear, that’s not me. If they contact you, don’t pick up anything at the store for them.

Education by any other name would still be next to Humanities

When the UAlbany uptown campus was built, all the buildings were given functional names. The Philosophy department is in the Humanities building, on the podium next to Education and across from Business Administration.

Here’s the rub: The actual school of ed was moved downtown long ago and so doesn’t have anything to do with the Education building. The business school got a shiny new building several years ago, and so we’ve had to awkwardly distinguish the new business building from the old business building (which hasn’t actually housed any of the business classes).

Continue reading “Education by any other name would still be next to Humanities”

An intermediate case between agent and double agent

This is a post I wrote back in November but for some reason didn’t post. I had learned from a then-recent episode of Citation Needed about Juan Pujol, a Spaniard who served as a double agent in WW II.

The beginning of Pujol’s career as a spy vexes the usual connotation of “double agent.” He wanted to help the Allied cause, but the British repeatedly declined his offer. So he reached out to the Nazis and offered to help them, with no intention of doing so. Instead of going to the UK and reporting back to the Nazis, he went to Portugal and lied to the Nazis about what was going on in the UK. He made up a network of contacts and things that he had learned from them. He bodged together these reports based on reference books and magazines.

British intelligence became aware of these reports going to Berlin and tried to track down this mysterious agent. Pujol was finally able to convince them of his usefulness, and they brought him to London. There he worked to create a whole fictional network of spies who systematically misled Nazi intelligence about things in the lead up to D-Day.

Clearly Pujol was a double agent in the latter part of the story, but what kind of agent was he in the first part? It would be wrong to say flat-footedly that he was a Nazi agent, because he was deliberately sending them rubbish. But he wasn’t coordinating with the British, either. Because he wasn’t a British agent, he lacked the second agency required for being a double agent.

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