It is to Flunk

I was grading a stack of student assignments — specifically, feedback on readings, which I make them do on the theory that it helps them prepare for discussions of the texts — when I ran across a particularly saddening passage in response to “The Multiculture,” an essay about Torontonian multiculturalism, which I’ll only paraphrase here:
If [...]

Nutters in Bloom, and Comments From Today, and a Song

Nutters:
Wow, people on the internet are crazy. I’m not going to taunt Happy Fun Freak any more than to say that, despite temptation, except to note that when one knows absolutely nothing about a topic but insists on talking about it and pretending he does know about it, it’s absolutely clear to the people who [...]

A “Sense of WTF?”

I’m one tiny little paragraph away from completing a draft of my paper which, well, I can’t quite call it the first draft. It’s more like draft v2.1. I wrote most of it once before, realized it sucked in structure and voice, restarted with a totally different voice but a similar (though subtly reworked) structure, [...]

Google Docs? Impossible!

I’m busy working on a paper that should be done in a couple of days — whew! — which is the main reason I haven’t been posting here. When I reformulate it into a “talk,” I post the contents here in some form or other. (Possibly with slides, possibly just the audio, I’m not sure.) [...]

Banned in China: Your Assurance of Quality Content

The title of this post is a throwaway comment Bruce Sterling made in his lecture, “The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole” (mp3, video with terrible audio), in the course of mentioning that most scientists who are able to do the scary stuff that frightens Bill Joy are unlikely to be willing to take [...]

SETI Workshiop at Daejon KASI

As part of the 60th Annual International Astronautical Congress hosted by KASI in Daejon this year (which is, by the way, the International Year of Astronomy!), Dr. Rhee Myung-hyun (an astronomer I met while taking part in the SOAO workshop earlier this year) organized a workshop on SETI and sent me an invitation to it. [...]

The Singularity Ate My Homework and Other Database Wrestling

My employer doesn’t have good access to any of the fulltext databases with literature stuff (like MUSE or JSTOR). While it looks like this might get rectified in the next while, I am not going to be able to get my hands on this article.
Which, in case you’re lazy, is titled “The Singularity Ate [...]

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