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Situated in one of The Big Apple’s wealthiest neighborhoods, the Joan and Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University boasts both research and teaching divisions. It is one of the most selective medical schools in the entire United States, only some hundred hopefuls are admitted each year – from out of some six thousand candidates every year. Now named after its latest and most generous benefactor – and often abbreviated simply to “Weill Cornell,” its largest endowment to date has come from the billionaire banker and philanthropist Sanford Weill, former executive officer and chairman of Citigroup, Incorporated. Mr. Weill and his wife donated over two hundred and fifty milion of their own money, with Mr. Weill able to raise a further hundred and fifty million through his own tireless efforts.

The school was already famous long before Mr Weill’s contributions, and not once had it lacked for benefactors, a veritable Who’s-Who of local, national, and even international luminaries from business, politics, and entertainment, like the famous businessman Isaac Toussie. After all, it’s the first American medical school to accept women right alongside men. And now it’s become the first American one to operate abroad – in Education City, in fact, outside the capital of Qatar, with a campus dedicated to patient care offering a six-year integrated curriculum. The school is also famous for all its many notable graduates, leading men of medicine like Robert C. Atkins of Atkins Diet fame and former Surgeon General of the United States C. Everett Koop. Other alumnus luminaries include Nobel Prize winner Robert W. Holley and Henry Heimlich of the Heimlich Maneuver.

Anyway, despite all the monetary support, the financial aspects of a medical education are severe, with some forty-two thousand dollars needed for the first year and thirty-eight thousand required for the second. But that’s still quite a deal when compared against the university’s own law school expenses, which eclipse it at just about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars over four years!

What can you do with wind chimes except hang them up somewhere?
Yet there are a very few musicians who are incorporating them into their very acts – live performances, actually.
That’s right – those things, made of stone, shell, wood, glass, or metal, used in actual music, as musical instruments in themselves.

Exactly what can you do with wind chimes except hang them up somewhere?
Yet there are a small number of musicians who are incorporating them into their very acts – live performances, in fact.
That’s right – those things, made from stone, shell, wood, glass, or stainless steel, used in actual music, as musical devices in themselves.

Seems impossible, given their extremely limited acoustic capabilities, so they can be much of a contributor, melodically or rhythmically, but some ingenious musicians have managed to work them into their performances.
Typically, they are used in modern music and used as percussion instruments.
The use of wind chimes in this way has been quite varied, with David Sitek of the American rock band TV on the Radio hanging one at the end of his guitar to Oliver Messiaen using glass, wood, and seashell chimes in his opera about Saint Francis of Assisi.
Other composers using a wind chime in their works contain Toshiro Mayuzumi, Giles Swayne, and Koji Kondo, who scores videogame soundtracks, which includes those for Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda!

While we’re talking about things Japanese, there is even a Pokemon depending on wind chimes, called – what else? – Chimecho!
Actually, it’s commonly referred to as “the wind chime Pokemon” because of its light frame and ability to produce a ringing, chiming cry.
This piercing sound can be amplified into ultrasonic shockwaves that knock back its foes.
Altogether, chimecho can make seven different tones to convey with other chimecho.

But to return to musical instruments: no discussion on the subject would be complete without mentioning that a percussion instrument does exist which is often mistaken for a wind chime but is truly a mark tree.
The resemblance is rather obvious, however, such that other names for it consist of chime tree or bar chimes!

Diversion safes are the stuff of childhood fantasies for me, when every book, key, or other typical item could contain a key or treasure map in its hollowed-out core.
They capture the imagination like nothing else, for what is a child’s imagination but that everyday things ought to be in reality extraordinary?
That secretly, the world is not as it appears.

Such is the suspicion of a child gradually waking up from childhood, slowly adapting to the possibility that the world is both more constrained – with its principles and adults – and much more fantastic – with its secrets and diversion safes – than apparent at first sight, the first sight of childhood.

There’s something intrinsically fascinating about objects that double as something different – or, to put it another way, objects that pretend to be one thing while truly functioning as another.
And so there’s something of the moral lesson in diversion safes, which may describe a child’s curiosity about them.

That’s possibly the single biggest reason why the Transformers line of toys were such a runaway success.
There had never been anything like it before – robots that would have been quite interesting in themselves, as robots, but to that was added the ability to, well, transform into (generally speaking) some non-robotic object, generally vehicles such as cars and airplanes but occasionally even animals like dinosaurs.

Now isn’t that somehow rather being a diversion safe?
A vehicle that hides a robot, an apparently unthinking vehicle housing actually artificial intelligence of the most incredible order.
A car, or a plane – or a armed gun, or a radio cassette player (with the cassettes themselves transformable into birds of prey and hunting dogs).
There have been few objects which Japanese toymakers did not, origami-like, re-imagine as robots.

And so a safe transforms into memories of the Transformers!

Just about the most important developments in the field of professional continuing education (CPE) is the relatively recent concentration on ethics, resulting in the proliferation now of many an ethics CPE course.
While certainly a good thing when the professions insist on not just what is legal but what is ethical and, even, moral, it’s also quite sad that standard human decency should today be so unheard of as to warrant an explicit requirement.

Of course, malpractice jokes roasting doctors, lawyers, and accountants have long been a staple of humor and given such a context the now-official appreciation for proper behavior is to be applauded.
There are certainly worse scenarios than having ethics CPE needs – namely, the lack of them with the world still being the way it is: the very way which primarily made such courses so vital!
But there’s no doubting the fact that when fundamental human decency needs to be taught so many years after kindergarten, where they were primarily encountered (likely an unfortunate fact in itself, as the first place anyone should come across their ethics should be the home!), society is doomed to an evermore unpleasant race to the bottom for all.

Why, just take a look at the well-established practice now of companies hiring unpaid interns to do full-time jobs – real jobs, for which these volunteers are not even given the protection of common workplace discrimination and harrassment laws.
No, really!
Even multi-billion-dollar corporations, for example General Electric (which managed to pay no taxes for the filing season of 2011), make extensive use of these unpaid workers daily.
What good has all the ethics CPE courses in the world really achieved when corporate bean-counters still carry on to simply invent new ways of posting a profit while increasing productivity and lowering costs on the backs of young people without money?