Pith-Helmeted Anthropological Reporting

Scott Eric Kaufman of Acephalous is blogging the MLA. (I’m sure he’s not the only one, he’s just the only one I’m reading…) As I understand it, the Modern Language Association meeting is pretty much the be-all end-all of humanities meetings. It’s sort of fascinating to read about, coming off as sort of a cross […]

The Year in Music

It’s that time of year again, when everybody who has the slightest interest in pop culture starts making “Year’s Best” lists. I’m usually at a major disadvantage when it comes to this sort of thing, as I can never really remember when any particular album was released, and I buy a lot of stuff that […]

Value Added Testing (or “Merry Christmas, Novak”)

One of the more contentious recurring topics around here over the years has been education policy, mostly centering around the question of teacher evaluation and teacher’s unions. It’s probably the subject for which there’s the biggest gap between my opinions and those of some of my regular readers. As this is a good time of […]

Why I Could Never Be a String Theorist

I’ve managed to leave string theory alone for a while, but a post came across Mixed States today that I can’t avoid commenting on. Lubos Motl points to a news article about a recent measurement at MIT and NIST, in which Dave Pritchard’s group used their cyclotron mass spectrometry technique to mesure the change in […]

Grad School Advice

It’s that time of year again, when eager undergraduates start thinking about their futures, including the possibility of graduate school. This inevitably leads to emails of the form “Hi, Professor, could you write recommendations for me for these nine schools? And by the way, they’re due Friday. Thanks!” Happily, Sean Carroll comes to the rescue […]