Lists, lists, lists. Everywhere I turn I seem to find another list. Here are five that have caught my eye in recent days.
Best Colleges: According to the folks at Forbes, the ten "best" colleges in America are:
1. U.S. Military Academy
2. Princeton
3. California Institute of Technology
4. Williams College
5. Harvard
6. Wellesley
7. U.S. Air Force Academy
8. Amherst
9. Yale
10. Stanford
Full list here.
Road Rage. According to this survey, the cities with the most and the least "road rage" (perhaps rephrased as "least courteous drivers" and "most courteous drivers") are:
Most road rage (least courteous):
New York, Dallas / Ft. Worth, Detroit, Atlanta, Twin Cities
Least road rage (most courteous):
Portland (Oregon), Cleveland, Baltimore, Sacramento, Pittsburgh
Personal Income. From the feds in D.C. (the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis), comes this report titled "Personal Income and Per Capita Personal Income by Metropolitan Area, 2006-2008." According to the report, the ten metropolitan areas with the highest "per capita personal income" (personal income of residents of area divided by resident population of area) in 2008 were:
1. Bridgeport / Stamford / Norwalk
2. Naples / Marco Island (FL)
3. San Francisco / Oakland / Fremont
4. Sebastian/ Vero Beach (FL)
5. San Jose / Sunnyvale / Santa Clara
6. Midland, TX
7. Washington, DC / Arlington / Alexandria
8. Casper, Wyoming (I thought this was a "ghost" town — haha!)
9. Boston / Cambridge/ Quincy
10. New York / Northern New Jersey / Long Island
Supreme Court Nominees and Senate Confirmations. Last Thursday the Senate confirmed Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the United States Supreme Court by a vote of 68-31. Kristina Moore, over at ScotusBlog, reminds us of the Senate votes for Justice Sotomayor's eight new colleagues and the Justice she is replacing. I list the votes from "high" to "low." Most readers will have no trouble matching them with the nominee. But if you need help, look here.
98-0
98-0
97-0
96-3
90-9
87-9
78-22
58 – 42
52-48
College Football. USA Today has issued its preseason Top 25 college football poll, with these programs as the top ten:
1. Florida
2. Texas
3. Oklahoma
4. USC
5. Alabama
6. Ohio State (or is it THE Ohio State?)
7. Virginia Tech
8. Penn State
9. LSU
10. Mississippi
Those of us who are submitting articles to law reviews at this time of year and who don't wish to limit ourselves to traditional journal rankings as our submissions roadmap may wish to consult the entire poll here as an alternative guide on placement strategy. Perhaps a reader will tell me how past negotiations have gone with student editors at Auburn and TCU.
We're spoken about the Forbes College rankings before here at the faculty lounge. Without intending any disrespect to the schools ranked well by Forbes, the list strikes me as, at least idiosyncratic.
http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2008/09/forbes-rankings.html
Yea for Portland and courteous drivers. Of course, I also went ahead and changed my Iowa license plates to Oregon ones reasonably quickly — though nowhere near so fast as I would have done had I been coming from California!
I didn't drive that often in New York City- I didn't have a car so drove only when I rented on or borrowed one, but that wasn't terribly irregularly. I must say that I didn't find the drivers to be especially rude or aggressive. There are lots of cars and not much space, and those not used to such conditions might mistake this for aggression, but I think that's wrong. I certainly found New York drivers to be no worse, and almost certainly better, than Philadelphia drivers in terms of reasonableness and courtesy.