What’s the edge representation for a nasty breakup?
I love it – it’s movie seating charts as a variation on traveling salesman. xkcd has become my favorite comic on the web.
Author: AMH
But from whence the five minute rule?
If I could afford to add any more books to my to-read list, I would pick up a copy of Clark’s Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University, reviewed here by The New Yorker [via Arts & Letters Daily] Tracing the history of modern academia and its traditions forward from their roots in 18th century Germany (including the ancient roots of faculty balking at oversight and bureaucratic instrusion, such as early requirements that faculty publically list what courses they are taking in a course catalog), Clark uses the idea of charisma to talk about the sources of authority … Continue reading But from whence the five minute rule?
Watch out for nanoids!
The newly popular Warning Signs for Tomorrow are half hilarious and half thought provoking. On the one hand, there are signs I’m tempted to hang on my office door, and on the other hand there are warning signs that, ethically speaking, we ought to have right now. I think, given the point in the semester we’re at right now, that Cognitive Hazard is resonating with me the most closely.
Your father’s social networking site?
After the rash of articles about how “young people” don’t use e-mail anymore (and, by the way, how in the world does that work??? IM is a nice tool and I use it too, but it can’t seriously be an e-mail replacement, can it?) it is now being reporrted that the majority of MySpace visitors and a significant portion of visitors to other social networking sites are over 35 [via Clicked]. First, I spent some time poking around the comScore website trying to figure out exactly how they determine the demograpics they claim to be measuring with their Mdia Metrix … Continue reading Your father’s social networking site?
Get some culture!
Tomorrow is Museum Day. What is Museum Day? Started by the Smithsonian Institution, it is a day when a number of museums across the country offer free admission to visitors who present the Museum Day Card available on the page I just linked to. For those in Western PA, the Carnegie is participating, so this is a great opportunity to check it out if you haven’t been before.
New Knitty!
New Knitty! New Knitty! Curl up with a cup of coffee and plan your projects for the next couple of months! (That’s what I’m doing!) Ivy is a gorgeous wrap sweater with amazing cable details at the waist and cuffs. On the sock front, Red Herring have a nice herringbone pattern and is the pattern from this collection I’m most likely to actually make. Little slip of a thing is a great-looking felted bag that – very cool – only uses one strand of yarn throughout but supposedly still has fairly robust structure. Intolerable cruelty is also drawing my attention, … Continue reading New Knitty!
Not BASIC Enough
David Brin laments the lack of simple built-in programming environments on personal comptuters [via Slashdot]. I too remember learning to program on my Apple IIe – if you turned on the computer without a programmed disk in the drive, you fell into BASIC, and I copied many listigs out of magaziines or books and played around with their functionality. Brin is entirely right – this type of built-in, no-fuss programming environment got a lot of us started. Now, there are still command-line options. My programming students download Java off the Sun website and compile and run from the DOS prompt, … Continue reading Not BASIC Enough
On the internet,, everybody knows you’re a dog.
The latest Craigslist kerfluffle described here at Slashdot reminds me of the case from about a year and a half ago of someone posting their chat sessions with a plagiarist soliciting them for an essay. In both cases, you have people assuming that their one-on-one conversations will be kept private and sharing information with a complete stranger that they would not want made public. Clearly, this is not a nice thing to do. I think it is also unethical – unlike the plagiarism case where the recipient of the advances was able to check that such behavior was prohibited at … Continue reading On the internet,, everybody knows you’re a dog.
Design of Text Documents
The latest post at India, Ink about using templates in document formatting software made me feel a little guilty, but reminded me why I actually miss LaTeX a little bit. I really don’t understand styles and templates in MSWord, which I used to format my most recent couple of papers, and while it is nice to throw together a handout without having to wrestle with LaTeX, I missed its clarity of structure when dealing with sub-sub-sections and captioning figures and including citations (BibTeX, I miss you so….) The point at that we ought to learn to use our tools is … Continue reading Design of Text Documents
My most recently completed knitting project is this beaded mohair shawl, my first attempt at knitting with beads. I followed the “Patagonian Night Sky Shawl” pattern from Knit and Crochet with Beads by Lily Chen, though I included more repeats than the book called for since I wanted a slightly larger shawl. the yarn was a remaindered machine knitting cone that I got cheap a few years ago and had been looking for a purpose for; the beads are iridescent black glass beads – see the detail photo below. It turns out that knitting with beads is fairly easy, though … Continue reading