Columns

The Boy got a 1254 piece (honest!) milennium falcon Lego kit for Christmas. He disappeared into the basement at 2:00 on Christmas Day, and re-emerged six hours later with a fully built ship.

When my daughter was first learning geometry, she came home one day to proclaim "I know what a ray is, mom. It is a line pointing in only one direction." She then went on to tell me that math was becoming her favorite subject. Of course, this was music to my ears.

Same tired arguments against tenure. I have a slightly different response. Hint: it's about the money.

Race Against The Machine is a 67 page count-argument to Tyler Cowen's excellent (128 page) The Great Stagnation.

Some thoughts on our ability to sustain open iniatives, particularly in light of the proposed Research Works Act, legislation that would end open access requirements for federally funded research.

While I have not always agreed with some of the tenets of the phenomenon known as "personal branding," I do value the importance of certain aspects.

A correspondent pointed my attention to Dylan Walsh's NY Times green blog entry from yesterday.

Long ago, when I heard or read about the huge pressure continuously faced by serious and appreciated academics to publish as much as possible (following the overused and abused slogan “publish or perish“), I was extremely surprised – if not automatically cynical. How could an academic do anything else but write?