Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
Oakland wants to tax medical marijuana.  It still has to go to voters, but if approved I predict that this tax would entrench the legal status of medical pot in a way that no other measure possibly could.  If this raises revenue then presumably other cities will follow suit, then states, and next thing [...]

By Thoreau
I just went through Customs screening at the Vancouver airport.  As you can see, I still have my laptop.  Supposedly there are no more searches after this, but if you don’t hear from me by this evening you can assume that my laptop was sent to Ft. Meade and I’m on my way to [...]

By Thoreau
So, somebody from a science funding agency was giving me very positive feedback on the possibility of applying for a prestigious award for early career investigators, so I was all fired up. But then I talked to another person who’s a bit closer to certain aspects of the process, and got brought down [...]

By Thoreau
It’s looking like Chinatown won’t happen tonight.  The people I’m hanging out with heard it’s ghetto and want to do something else, and hanging out alone in a ghetto doesn’t sound fun (and even if it isn’t ghetto, networking is the point).  So maybe a seafood restaurant along the waterfront.
There was a poster describing [...]

By Thoreau
So, while talking to somebody about techniques for building up molecule-by-molecule images of a cell, we realized that in all of our discussions of the math and the instruments, we had no idea what the best way is for actually turning these molecular positions and brightnesses into an image.  It may seem obvious:  Put [...]

By Thoreau
While you guys were busy figuring out whether somebody is a poopyhead for saying something about what somebody else said about trains, I was giving a talk, getting an excellent response, and having fun with people whose papers I’ve been reading. A nice bull session after the talks helped me work through the [...]

By Thoreau
Despite being a libertarian who mouths off on the internet and on cell phones, I had no problem clearing customs in a country whose intelligence services supposedly share info with the US. So maybe political malcontents aren’t being tracked. Or maybe they just want to see who I might meet with while [...]

By Thoreau
I found the hotel I want to vacation at.

By Thoreau
Commenter dhex has observed to me that IOZ is a national treasure.  Ladies and gentlemen, IOZ’s latest masterpiece:
But honestly, the left-wing of the sixties, as distinct from “liberal-minded intellectuals” and the Democratic Party, counted among its radical claims the notion that black people were not sub-human, women not property, consensual sex not criminal nor [...]

By Thoreau
I have no particular opinion on why there is a gender gap in certain fields of science.  I have a lot of skepticism for various theories offered, but I have no theory of my own.  And it isn’t just because it’s a hot potato issue where it would be easy to put a foot [...]