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May
18, 2000
CAMPUS BUZZ BY SANDY SMITH Tomorrow’s U-City today: First, a little off-campus buzz. Starting tonight at 5, you will be able to see the future of University City all in one place: a special exhibit in the south arcade of 30th Street Station titled “The Future of University City.” Tonight’s opening — the last of this season’s “Go West! 3rd Thursday” feature events — showcases the many projects, plans and initiatives that will further transform the face of U-City over the next 10 years, including the new Sundance Cinema Center set to open this fall, the University of Pennsylvania Museum’s Mainwaring Wing and the new pre-K-8 public school to be built at 42nd and Spruce streets. If you can’t make tonight’s opening, the exhibit will be on display through June 30. Who wants to be…a lawyer? It looks as if Dan Blonsky (L’90) still does, even after becoming the second person ever to win the whole million bucks on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” Jan. 18. A Knight-Ridder reporter caught up with him late last month, and as the story she wrote — which ran in The Philadelphia Inquirer April 30 — makes clear, he’s neither quit his day job nor gone hog wild with his winnings. As his father Joseph put it, “Daniel has never rushed headlong into anything, except trying to get on this program.” Now serving God — and Mammon: Those of you whose Penn memories go back to the Sheldon Hackney administration may remember a tall, gracious, unfailingly courteous fellow who served as President Hackney’s right-hand man. Now, Joseph Watkins (C’75) is finally following his heart, serving as pastor of Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church, to whose pulpit he was recommended by church President Glenn Bryan, director of community relations. But since (as he told the Inquirer May 11) he felt he needed to have some money in order to serve others as he wished, he also has a day job — as a partner and chief marketing officer of MDL Capital, which manages $2 billion in pension funds for a number of large private and public agencies.
Penn in ink: Now that some physicists have shown that, as quantum theory posits, atoms can be in two places at once, others are arguing that this means people really can will, say, a golf ball into the cup. Assistant Professor of Physics Max Tegmark isn’t one of them. The brain would have to function as a quantum computer, he told USA Today May 3, but a quantum state in the human brain would collapse in 0.000000000001 second. “I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I don’t think that fast.”…If the national headlines are a guide, youth violence is a growing nationwide problem. In fact, it isn’t. As a May 1 Los Angeles Times story reports, youth violence is actually falling dramatically. And most of it is concentrated in a handful of big cities. However, said Fels Center of Government Director Lawrence Sherman, “We’ve responded with a whole series of programs that spread the money around where the votes are, not where the problems are.” What's the buzz? Tell us what's happening! Call us at 215-898-1426, send e-mail to current@ pobox.upenn.edu or drop a line to the Current at 200 Sansom East/6106.
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