To put things in perspective, in the U.S., more people die in a month from hospital-acquired bacterial infections than have been killed by terrorists in the U.S. during the last century. Which gets more play on the op-ed page?
but she’s a girl has an excellent piece in which she describes extensions and scripts she uses in the excellent TextMate editor for MacOS X to Get Things Done.
A link from LibrarianInBlack to a piece on Typographical errors in library catalogs. One wonders about the Interweb, too. Don’t one?
…when I start picking out fonts for logos. Because logos denote schemes of some sort. Branding before functionality or need, that’s me….
Nonetheless, here are some particular choices for the new Notional Slurry logo. I suspect other people may not get the associations and connotations of these fonts. I’ll never forget the online conversation with Cliff Pickover, in which he asked, “Should I use Times Roman or Palatino for my print-on-demand book?” Agh.
But typography is a dying in turns by hyperdilution, and by virtue of not being supported by web browser standards. Maybe I can do a bit, here.
I recommend very much that you, who are reading this now, go and rent or purchase a copy of The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra
This ends the transmission for today.
Take it, Ranger Brad:
They say the Next Big Thing is biology and biological engineering. I was doing those in the 1980s and early 90s, when biology was the Tired Old Pre-geomic Thing—and biological engineering was knee joints and sports medicine. I was surrounded by folks who were either the avowedly “don’t do math” class, with a smattering of those who thought perhaps there might be some benefit in statistics, for experimental analysis, now and then. But the vast majority of advanced mathematics was (and probably still is) outré and useless to any biomedical practitioner.
Which is, in hindsight, pretty dumb of them. But hey; science advances one what at a time? I forget the quote.
At any rate, my reminiscence is provoked by these two three enflamed reactionaries, with whom I firmly agree.
From Smart Mobs: “Connectivism: Rethinking Learning”, a link to an exceptional analysis of the future of academia. Go watch the whole presentation—especially academic readers. Please.
It’s actually important more if you’re a graduate student now.
[because if you're past that stage... you may already be broken]
Smart Mobs: The case for open content for learning:
Frankly, the textbook situation is wreaking havoc on teaching and learning practices on our campuses, with as many as 43 percent of students foregoing the purchase of required textbooks due to financial considerations.
An example demonstrating why I love old magazines, and why their content should be preserved. Also laying before the reader exactly what nanohistory is, and serving as a test of sorts to determine whether they understand the diverse context in which they live their lives, and the foreign and unutterably strange context in which those before them lived their lives. And while we’re at it, a further promotion of Distributed Proofreaders: Please go, sign up as a volunteer, and try your hand a few pages of lost works—help the world have the chance to remember what it could otherwise forget.
What strange world would bring together all these subjects—and more—into one volume? You’ll have to go to DP to find out.
Leeches 153
Lybia 154
Longevity, extraordinary 155
Law suit 184
Lord Thurlow 277
Locust tree, the 412
Lincoln corn pounder 220
Lycurgus, anecdote of 308
Law work, new 476
Ladies, learned ib.
Lands, public 468Moral plough boy 15, 59
Mummies 79
Miscellany 75, 115, 145, 193, 223, 274, 314, 354, 394, 433, 471
Modes of salutation 115
Mill feed for cattle 127
Mine, silver 150
Missouri, boundaries of 152
Maple Sugar, on the culture of the 164, 218
Manufactures, domestic, premiums for 174
Manner, on the importance of 177
Mortgage act 184
Maine 275
Modern inventions 278
Madeira, island of 387
Missouri, staples of 418
Marivaux 230
Microscope, beauties of the 345
Martial glory 233
Marriages, list of 155, 197
Mammoth cave in Kentucky, account of 464Nicholson’s prize essay 17, 62, 93
Natural curiosity 386
Niagara falls, route to 289
Needle, variation of the 351
Natural history, curious facts in 428
Nunneries in Rome, visit to two 454
Narrow resources, advantages of 462Otto, Joseph, decease of 117
Oil spring 145
Oilstones 276
Oxen, on the use of, &c. 309
Oranges 227
O’Groat’s, John house 430
Oil, cotton seed 470Political Economics 26
Peruvian bark, singular effect of 29
Pumpkin seed, oil of 30
Pleasure, on the pursuit of 43
Phenomenon! 147
Paint, a newly discovered 149
Potatoes, seed 151
Portugal 153
Poultry houses, method of preserving from vermin 155
Peaches, to dry 173
Plum trees, canker on 174
Poultry 196
Pickle, Frederick, decease of 197
Pennsylvania hospital 276
Prices current 239, 280, 320, 360, 400, 440
Parmesan cheese dairy 376
Punctuality 384
Prompter, the 391, 417, 466
Plaster, remarks on 223
Pear tree, on the 226
Potatoes, young, in the winter 227
Peaches, to preserve from frost 227
People, the African 325
Pompeia, present state of 341
Potatoes 338
Pyroligneous acid, antisceptic power of 456
Population in America, increase of 474Ruth, story of 125
Ralp, Elizabeth, decease of 116
Russia, 153
Republican manners 175
Rain gauge, state of, at Philadelphia 197, 239, 280, 320, 360, 400, 440, 479
Rhode Island 275
Rivers, machine for crossing 277
Rain, cattle scenting 278
Rice, wild 377
Rags, conversion of, into sugar 224
Ruta Baga, experiments 225
Rural Magazine, a friend of, to Its readers 281
Riddle, Baron Smyth’s 476
Raindeer 475Slavery, extension of 6
Sugarcane 27
Savannah, fire in 76
Straw bonnets 80
Seeds (from the plough boy’s cottage) 85
Starch, to make 115
Staughton, Don Juan, decease of 116
Sweden, latitude of, trees in 150
Spider, anecdote of ib.
Snow, red 152
Smokers, hint to 155
Shoes, wooden scaled 175
Sentiments of an old soldier 179
Shepherd’s dog 190
Snow Storm, the 253
Seeds, on 378
Salt, remarks on, as a manure 411
Speech, natural to man 419
Strawberry, improved method of cultivating 222
Spanish inquisition 232
Sullivan, O. Theodore, death of 236
Sugar, domestic, on the increase of, in the United States 330
I’m still working out the details of the “asides” category here, so in the meantime let me just dump the many links I’ve accumulated into a single post and pop them into the chamber. Some are old; all should still be of interest.
Life is also important, even beyond Valentine’s day. Figure into schedules other elements of life and be tolerant when they come up. Other elements of life often need to tolerate work’s sometimes demanding schedules.
We were chatting in the first-year graduate student bullpen the other day, and I had to stop one of my younger colleagues in her tracks. She had said something about, “When I go home, I’ll need to….”
She didn’t mean her apartment. She meant where she’s from.
Now, I remember the first time I was in graduate school, my wife lived something like 13 hours apart from one another. We saw each other as often as possible, and we both learned to like books on cassette. And also every goddamned exit on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. But she was home; I was off at school. This makes sense.
When I was a graduate student in Philadelphia, and we lived in Hanover (2 hours away), it was a toss-up. “Home” was a distributed thing, since we kept a house in Hanover and an apartment in Philadelphia. But mainly the house.
Nowadays, a dozen years later, we’ve got a house, we’ve got a garden we maintain, we’ve traded the Ikea furniture and bean-bag lifestyle for a permanence embodied by bookshelves and oriental rugs and antique furniture. Home now, definitely. But if we’d headed off somewhere else—picked up and hauled our household to Palo Alto or Saskatchewan or Honolulu or London, that would as well have been “home”. We live here, wherever we abide.
So I’m wondering: Is a graduate student typically “at home” when they’re at their graduate institution? When do they start “visiting” their home town, their parents, instead of “going home” to them? Is it the student’s age, or the nature of graduate school itself, or just some kind of attrition and growing comfort that brings about this transition?
Pontification without all the gritty gravitas
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