Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
1)  Though I complain about the veal not being able to do math, I somehow skipped installment 10 in the Diary of An Academic Nomad series.  I’ll just pretend that it’s the secret lost chapter, only available with the DVD extras.
2)  With the worst students, their reports are full of unnecessary words added for [...]

By Thoreau
Matt Yglesias can relate ANYTHING to the issue of density and development.  Recently, he noted that if the President is concerned about his daughter getting in a car with somebody who’s been drinking, then the problem is car culture, which is promoted by low-density development.  Furthermore, there was a suburban real estate developer in [...]

By Thoreau
Lest you think that all this professorial traveling and presenting is purely for personal glory and not for my students, today I visited a lab that showed me a really, really cool microscope that’s now in clinical use.  I realized that the ideas behind this are simple enough to explain that I will build [...]

By Thoreau
Lunch with Jim Henley, commenter Kolohe, and a few other internet friends.
Now hanging out at dhex’s place discussing organizational culture.
It is a good day.

By Thoreau
I admit, I have my moments of irrational exuberance on this issue, but I think John Payne goes too far when he says:
And there’s good reason to think that this shift in opinion among pundits will (eventually) change policy. George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan reports here on research that [...]

By Thoreau
An academic nomad can leave the office, but the workload, the email over-load, and the deadlines do not go away.  Such is life for the non-mediocre on the road.

By Thoreau
Sometimes an organization has to make a decision that will have long-term effects.  In these decisions, the mediocre have the advantage, if there’s a critical mass who are either mediocre or at least want to be fair to the mediocre.  If the people with standards insist on fighting, they might prevail over the mediocre [...]

By Thoreau
While I love all my left-libertarian-anarchist peeps, this seems like it could be incredibly drama-prone:
His main focus in organizing the business was eradicating all forms of hierarchy. “Anarchism,” he says, “is about turning all relationships of domination into relationships of cooperation.”
Unfortunately, the classical anarchist texts don’t address the dominance inherent [...]

By Thoreau
Yesterday on the Metro, I overheard a conversation between the two people sitting behind me, and quickly realized that one of them was a human rights lawyer working on very important cases related to the issues that have motivated many blog posts.  I turned around, apologized for interrupting, shook his hand, and thanked him [...]

By Thoreau
I never realized how much I rely on fast intertubez until I went to stay with relatives who lack a fast connection.  The Crackberry isn’t enough for keeping up with journals and professorial email overload.  I visited one institute yesterday, another today, and came away with more good projects and ideas to make papers [...]