Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
Somebody is now plagiarizing my posts and modifying the writing to make it even worse than the original. Since the worst sin is stupidity, in my opinion, my main complaint is that if they are going to do this they should at least try to sell some repl!ca watches or C!@l!$.  As it stands [...]

By Thoreau
The fire marshal has decided that office doors should never be propped open.  Consequently, doorstops were confiscated in the middle of Sunday night, much to our surprise Monday morning.  Apparently they have a stick up their ass about open doors, and they bluster about it a lot, and every few years they go on [...]

By Thoreau
Suppose that we want to look for real-world hints of what sort of products a true free market for education might provide.  We can’t look at colleges and universities–most of them, even the for-profit trade schools, either receive federal funds or have students getting federal financial aid and student loans.  Strangely enough, we have [...]

By Thoreau
An older relative was asking my wife what I think about the “nanoparticle” that goes faster than light.  Leaving aside the fact that it’s a neutrino, not a nanoparticle, I think it’s almost certainly NOT going faster than light.  However, this person gets easily excited, so I must say this:
Suppose, for the sake of [...]

By Thoreau
Generation Veal is in grad school now. You guys always tell me that I’m being too harsh, that I’m holding your typical undergrad at a non-elite school to the standards of a guy who was a science geek from early on and went to good schools and ultimately became a professor.  OK, but these [...]

By Thoreau
I still don’t believe that neutrinos go faster than light.  I do, however, concede that this result, if valid, brings us one step closer to figuring out what is going on.  They’ve ruled out one substantial category of systematic errors (but, I hasten to add, hardly the only category of errors), which means they’ll [...]

By Thoreau
I’ve been asked to make an appetizer for Thanksgiving.  I want to do something creative.  So I thought, what if I were to make something savory (instead of sweet) with pumpkin and pecans?  Maybe a dip?
I figure I’ll puree the pumpkin, treat it like a butternut squash, add some cream cheese and pepper and [...]

By Thoreau
The law, in its majesty, bars the individual and the corporation alike from camping out while assembling for redress of grievances.
The law, in its majesty, allows the individual and the corporation alike to spend money on political ads.

By Thoreau
A week and a half ago neo-Nazis held a rally in a nearby LA suburb. There was no violence, and the hateful pieces of trash were able to say what they wanted to say in accordance with the First Amendment.  For once, I have no complaints about my country.  I am pleased to live [...]

By Thoreau
Tomorrow in my freshman seminar class, one thing I’ll be going over is what to trust or not trust on the internet.  Some of it is easy:  Look for sites that cite sources, sources with experience and expertise relevant to the topic (though this is hardly a sufficient guarantee against crackpottery, it doesn’t hurt), [...]