Singelyn’s letter based
on faulty calculations
David Singelyn’s letter (“Iraq war budget doesn’t add up,” ODE, Sept. 30) is itself based on rather dubious mathematics. In Mr. Singelyn’s letter, he questions the Bush administration’s $66 billion allocation for military action in Iraq by dividing it by the number of soldiers stationed there. This of course makes little sense, as it assumes all of the money would be going toward the soldiers’ salaries.
But what is truly spectacular about David Singelyn’s mathematics is that he somehow divides $66 billion by 150,000 and obtains “exactly” $4.4 million. The correct answer is in fact $440,000. Considering the tremendous operating costs involved in fighting a war across the Atlantic and how crudely this number estimates the cost of the war, this is probably reasonable. Dividing the total University budget by the number of faculty, for example, gives approximately $300,000 and is equivalently nonsensical when evaluating the University budget’s value.
I found this letter rather disappointing after reading the editorial editor’s declaration only one day earlier that this space would not be “where uninformed rants and ideologically incestuous nonsense run amok.”
Note to Emerald staff: You’ve been had — a trivial Google search shows that Mr. Singelyn makes a habit of sending similar “rants” pushing his ideology to college newspapers all over the country. Perhaps this is because it’s such an easy way to slip his fact-free agenda to such an impressionable audience.
David Mason
graduate student
physics
Music and energy drive
underground scene
Helen Schumacher in her “Notes from the underground” (“From minivans to Miller beer: Indie rockers are selling out,” ODE, Oct. 2) stated that kids usually get into the underground music scene because “the people that go to the shows are way hotter than the people that go to corporate shows … and that you get to be an elite member of an underground community.”
The truth is, real people from the underground who are part of an elite underground community go to shows for, number one: the music. And number two: the energy derived from the independent music at live shows. People who go to the underground shows reject the hype and fashion that comes with corporate music, MTV and artists like Britney Spears (whom some would consider to be “way hot”).
The majority of underground communities are not a part of the mainstream because they reject the promotions, advertising and marketing sold alongside music — this includes the fashion you see in magazines and on the backs of your “way hot” friends who shop at Hot Topic.
Perhaps the Emerald should look into the “selling out” of the independent music scene by writers who purport to be underground.
Autumn DePoe
Class of ’02