Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
Bruce Schneier outlines one of those great moments in TSA capers.

By Thoreau
A blogger who grew up in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is rather mystified by the way that many North Americans use “socialism” to mean “like Western Europe.”
As long as we’re going over strange usages, consider “republic” and “democracy.”  I won’t presume to put words in Clarissa’s mouth, but I somehow doubt that [...]

By Thoreau
I’m reading freshman essays.  That should tell you everything you need to know about my mood.
Despite that, I concur with the statement offered by academics at schools of every tier:  “A lot of our undergrads are much better than our grad students.”*  I am teaching an advanced course that has at least one grad [...]

By Thoreau
The President of Yemen has officially left.  His deputy is of course in charge, and in the interests of looking forward rather than backward he is immune from prosecution.  Still, he’s out of power.  Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy.  Good to know that the Arab Spring continues in some form.
Here’s hoping [...]

By Thoreau
One theme of Weis and Hickman fantasy novels, one that carries into much of D&D, is that there must be a balance between good and evil.  Inevitably, those who seek to eradicate evil become overly proud and power-hungry and try to purify the world by force.  This is of course a very important point, [...]

By Thoreau
I have believed, perhaps naively, that frequent televised debates are a good thing for political campaigns.  All of this air time given to the candidates should at least partially (no, not wholly) mitigate the advantages of those with more campaign funds.  And since I believe that it is a bad thing to have candidates [...]

By Thoreau
The Navy, in collaboration with Northrop Grumman, is testing a drone that will fly and make decisions without a pilot. There’s nothing that could possibly go wrong with this scenario.
So far they insist that the drone will not make lethal decisions on its own, but you know it’s only a matter of time.  Am [...]

By Thoreau
Today in biophysics we talked about minimum principles.  Mostly it involved entropy and free energy.  In the last part, though, I switched gears and presented some of the ideas from this paper on minimum principles in neurobiology.  The short version is that if an engineer were to sit down and design a brain, he [...]

By Thoreau
Sometimes the award tells you something about the winner.  Other times, the winner tells you something about the award.
I’m thinking about more than one situation.

By Thoreau
I usually use Mathematica as my calculator, especially when explaining homework in office hours.  I can refer back to variables and quickly make graphs or manipulate symbols.  So while going over homework with students in my biophysics class, I pull up Mathematica and one of them says “Is that just like Matlab?”  My eyes [...]