Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
Greenwald points out that Thomas Friedman, who calls violent  Muslims “crazy”, used to say that the important reason to invade Iraq was to go to a Muslim country and have armed government employees breaking down doors and messing people up.  I vaguely recall that some people used to tell us that Thomas Friedman was [...]

By Thoreau
I may complain a lot about my students and the strange things they ask me, but at least I try to work with them.  This guy doesn’t even bother.  Oh, and he considers himself a supportive ally who wants to help everyone succeed.  There’s love, there’s tough love, there’s no love at all, and [...]

By Thoreau
Three observations on the layman’s understanding of physics from this holiday weekend:
1)  At Thanksgiving dinner, an in-law of an in-law has a son who’s a high school sophomore.  He was asking me questions about studying science in college since I studied at one of the schools he’s considering and I teach at the sister [...]

By Thoreau
The other day I blogged about a Thanksgiving conversation with a clinical psychologist who confessed to hating diversity seminars because they are useless.  She admitted that she never questions what’s said at these seminars for the obvious reason that she’d look bad if she did.
So, I followed up with an analogous experience:  I don’t [...]

By Thoreau
I have noticed that when somebody is preaching on how to get more students who are [circle all that apply:  female, male if the speaker is concerned with declining male enrollments, minority, American if the speaker is concerned about those darn furriners, international if the speaker is concerned with making our universities globally competitive, [...]

It sure doesn’t seem to me like Lincoln really truly acknowledges the troops in his first Proclamation of Thanksgiving.

Last week Radley Balko had the brief announcement that Mississippi was granting Cory Maye a new trial. Now his weekly crime column gives more detail on the Court of Appeals’ decision.
The Cory Maye case remains, to me, the best example of The Blogosphere doing tangible good in the world, as opposed to winning points in [...]

I’m really just testing Qumana on my new Macbook here. I thought I would write about how I increasingly believe the nation is fvcked, and in a way that will make it hard even for anyone else to feel sorry for us. We blew it all on pointless wars and military hardware and our official [...]

By Thoreau
While I may criticize the policy of only trying terrorism suspects when they’re certain they can get a conviction (keeping the rest detained in Kafka Land), I am certainly not in the same camp as those who criticize terrorism trials as somehow threatening our safety.  As has been pointed out elsewhere, when the boot [...]

By Thoreau
There are sophomore physics majors in my lab class who, after 8 experiments, still have to ask how to calculate a percentage uncertainty.  If they take several measurements and determine (1) the average of those measurements and (2) the uncertainty (either from a standard deviation or characterizing the instrument’s precision or whatever) then the [...]