Daily Archives: March 17, 2013

Is parking a right?

Campus architect Chris Cocallas dropped a bombshell during the recent discussion of the Mines Master Plan and parking. In response to student criticism about the deteriorating parking situation, Cocallas asked if parking is a right. This would be a fair question if Mines were an urban campus in a city with excellent public transportation. However, as a realistic examination of the alternatives available reveals, this question is tantamount to asking if students have a right to attend their classes and faculty have the right to get to work.

Too many uses for duct tape

Everyone knows about that wonderful grey tape that can repair everything from shoes to furniture, but lately the household staple has been under fire. From teachers using the stuff to quiet children to cowards using it to fake their own kidnappings, one must wonder if the creator of duct tape realized what his invention would do for society.

The Common Canada Goose

You may have noticed that in the winter and early spring there always seems to be a little extra something sitting on the ground in Colorado. I am talking of course about the large quantities of goose droppings that seem to litter the Colorado cityscape in the wintertime. These goose dropping stick to slackliners’ feet, athlete’s shoes, and bike’s wheels.

Ethical Reasoning

Experimental philosophers and sociologists have become interested in the way in which people attempt to reason about ethical choices. Some of their studies have found that people, and especially Americans, think about ethical choices from a relativistic framework. Such people are called ethical relativists. In short, ethical relativists believe that ethical standards are a matter of personal opinion or taste. So, for example, when one says that it is wrong to cheat or lie, one is simply expressing their opinion with respect to cheating or lying in a particular context.

World news: 3/18/13

The presence of American special operations troops in Wardak Province, Afghanistan, against the wishes of the Afghan government, brought protesters to the capital on Saturday. Afghan president Hamid Karzai had given the Americans until March 10 to remove all special operations troops from the province after complaints about night raids. Top American commander, general Joseph F. Dunford Jr., said that despite public demands by the Afghan president, the United States does not plan to remove the special operations forces anytime soon, but rather is trying to hand over authority to Afghan officials as quickly as possible.

USG and GSA discuss parking

The undergraduate and graduate student governments recently passed a resolution requesting that the Mines administration change the way that they work regarding parking on campus. The resolution had two primary requests. First, that the campus administration forgive a portion of an internal loan to parking services equal to the cost of replacing parking spaces being eliminated due to the new dorm and welcome center construction. Second, the resolution requested that the cost of replacing parking spaces be incorporated into future construction projects.

Student Debt

Students nationwide noticed recently that the price of college is increasing faster than inflation. Mines has attempted to keep costs down with a hiring freeze and pay freeze that are still partially in effect. However, as students know, this has not been enough to offset increasing costs and declining state support. To find out how students are coping, “The Oredigger” interviewed Jill Robertson, the head of financial aid at Mines.

Scientific discoveries this week: 3/18/13

Berkeley, California
Researchers from UC Berkeley have developed a new experiment that simulates conditions in deep space. The experiment revealed that the complex building blocks of life may have been created on icy interplanetary dust and then carried to earth by a comet or meteor. They showed that conditions in space can create complex dipeptides, or linked pairs of amino acids, the building blocks of life.

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