Unqualified Offerings

Couple of recent Batman critiques that mix the commonplace with the misconceived. Allen Varney’s article isn’t all wrong, and in fact the more I pick at it the less I find that’s irrefutably silly. Except for . . .

This genius psychologist and criminologist, who has repeatedly out-thought every other superhero in the DC Universe, still [...]

By Thoreau
So, I stopped by the posters when one of the talks that I wanted to attend was so packed that people were standing in the hallway and straining to hear.  Screw that, I can read the paper.  In the “Biophysics Education” section there were 4 posters.  3 described people doing interesting educational things (I’ll [...]

By Thoreau
Now, I am admittedly not a lawyer, but I do work in a job where I sometimes have to give advice to people relying on my (allegedly) superior knowledge of rules and standards and ethical norms in the profession and whatnot.  If I advised my students to do something blatantly unethical and illegal, it [...]

By Thoreau
My student’s invited talk went well. Nobody could believe he’s an undergrad and two people came up afterward and offered to collaborate. Pretty cool.
We celebrated with friends at a Mexican bistro on Geary street but I can’t remember the name. Tonight we’re going to try for either seafood or Chinese since [...]

Doctor (Pending) David Wong of cracked.com blames The Karate Kid for everything:

It seems so obvious that it actually feels insulting to point it out. But it’s not obvious; every adult I know–or at least the ones who are depressed–continually suffers from something like sticker shock (that is, when you go shopping for something for the [...]

Over at Outside the Beltway, Alex Knapp goes all grammarian on a tea-partier’s fantasies about Senator Patty Murray.

I realize that the Tea Party crowd will no doubt use this as an excuse to tar me as an “elitist”, but I can’t let this go by. The proper way to say the sentence I highlighted in [...]

By Thoreau
I’m going to be in SF for a few days for the Biophysical Society meeting.  It’s at the Moscone Convention Center in downtown (Howard Street) and we’re staying about a mile away by Geary St. and Jones St.  Can anybody recommend a nice place to have dinner?  Nothing TOO expensive, but we have some [...]

I should blog more. The psychologists say that if you do something 21 days in a row, it becomes a habit. Let’s try!
As to the title, I was late to Beatles fanaticism – as in, when the remasters came out last fall. Back in the day, Joe Strummer’s insistence that “Phony Beatlemania has bitten the [...]

By Thoreau
This guy is of course innocent until proven guilty, but for what it’s worth, when I was in grad school he went around campus putting up flyers about his gubernatorial candidacy during the 2003 recall of Gray Davis.   (Write-in, though.  He couldn’t get the 100 signatures or whatever was required for that circus.)  [...]

By Thoreau
Double your kittens, double your fun.
And if we ever re-instate Monkey Tuesday at UO, this will be on the rotation.