I found this a little silly, both the Op-ed itself and the fact that anyone thought it newsworthy to mention that Obama, like the rest of us, uses informal spoken language from time to time:
Since his election, the president has been roundly criticized by bloggers for using “I” instead of “me” in phrases like “a [...]
Posted in Culture | Tagged grammar, language |
Cambridge Physicist David MacKay has written a book on sustainable energy, and is giving it away on his website. Just shy of 400 pages, it’s an extended back-of-the-envelope calculation comparing potential sustainable energy generation capacity to likely consumption.
In case that sounds a bit boring, let me assure you that it isn’t. MacKay’s writing [...]
“There are the trees,” said the Beaver. “They’re always listening. Most of them are on our side, but there are trees that would betray us…”
A sign I passed on campus today, evidently left over from yesterday, read “Listen to the inaguration on the Stuart Collection’s Talking Trees!” Yes, hidden in the woods near the UCSD [...]
Posted in Art, Politics |
I hesitate to comment on a book I haven’t read, but this one has really thrown me for a loop. Danica McKellar, of the Wonder Years, has written a math book for teen-age girls. While the book’s jacket cover certainly exaggerates when it calls her a mathematician, McKellar does hold a undergraduate degree in math [...]
They’re the quintessential holiday food. There’s even a song about it. And although I’d never tasted them in my life, when I heard a short piece about chestnuts on local radio my mind managed to fill in the gaps with a completely fabricated sense memory of something vaguely nutty and pleasant. This fictive flavor carried [...]
I finally got around to reading Edwin Abbot Abbot’s Flatland: A Romance of many dimensions (thanks to Kevin Duke for the recommendation). It’s a fascinatingly odd little book: at once Victorian social commentary and mathematical phantasmagoria. At just over 100 pages, it’s well worth the 90 or minutes it will take you to read it. [...]
In these times of great economic tribulation it’s almost comforting to watch marketing gurus attempt to squeeze blood from a stone:
In part, the word [recessionista] reflects the efforts of fashion and beauty publicists to spin the economic downturn as an attractive retail trend. For instance, Bourjois, a moderately priced makeup line from France, sent a [...]
This article was a real eye-opener:
In broad strokes, there are three types of term paper clients. DUMB CLIENTS predominate. They should not be in college. They must buy model papers simply because they do not understand what a term paper is, much less anything going on in their assignments. I don’t believe that most of [...]
There’s an article about publication bias in this week’s Economist that anyone interested in academia, especially the sciences, should read. Here’s a little background.
Researchers in the sciences and social sciences almost always presents their results in terms of hypothesis tests. The procedure involves stating a conservative maintained hypothesis called the null, and attempting to reject [...]