BrownStudies » Link Harvest

Assorted links

brownstudy — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 20:51:40 +0000

Steve reviews Robert Graves’ The Anger of Achilles, and finds more ways to say that Graves is one can short of a six-pack than I could imagine.
Bookshelf Porn: “A collection of all the best bookshelf photos for people who *heart* bookshelves.”
The illustrated guide to a PhD. Check out the other articles on his site if you’re into programming and time management. Good stuff.
“Past the Cemetery,” a poem by Charles Simic. I wonder what I’d have thought of the poem if it had been titled differently.
A cultural historian on Batman: “Here’s a character with massive financial resources and considerable technical and intellectual knowledge whose main response to crime is to dress up in a costume and beat up street-level thugs.” Please. Batman is only as mixed-up as his super-villains.
Yiddish Theater talk-rendering of “Old Man River” (from the Mary Tyler Moore blooper reel)

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Assorted links

brownstudy — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 15:17:42 +0000

“The truth is dancers and musicians live in two different worlds.”
For academic writers, the Rule of 200. Writing 200 words/day is rather like writing for 15 minutes/day — it sets an objective, emotionally neutral goal. Getting that first draft squeezed out is most important; quality can be layered in later. Also, this raises the task from a “special project” (I only write when I’m inspired or when I think I have time) to a routine that one doesn’t have to think about doing — you just sit down to do it. I would like to find a similar metric for editing a document, but maybe minutes per day is the best metric there.

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Science is boring!

brownstudy — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 15:24:10 +0000

Interesting confluence of views from today’s feeds:

Let’s face it, science is boring – science-in-society – 21 December 2009 – New Scientist
“Science is not a whirlwind dance of excitement, illuminated by the brilliant strobe light of insight. It is a long, plodding journey through a dim maze of dead ends. It is painstaking data collection followed by repetitious calculation. It is revision, confusion, frustration, bureaucracy and bad coffee. In a word, science can be boring.”

Medical Hypotheses: Why are modern scientists so dull?
“How science selects for perseverance and sociability at the expense of intelligence and creativity”

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Links harvest

brownstudy — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 13:00:52 +0000

Susie Bright asks: What makes a person change the course of their life?
Why bother learning stuff?
Social Media Venn diagram
As he turns in his dissertation, Cal Newport (of Study Hacks blog fame) reflects on his grad-school experience
A thought on the university as “an ethically superior institution”
James Fallows is back in the US after several years reporting in China, and has this priceless quote in his blog post about the healthcare “debate”:

Pretty soon I will lay off the “As a Rip van Winkle returnee to your country, what I notice is….” approach. But I have to say that it is striking to come back — from the world of controlled media and not-always-accurate “official truth” in China — and see the world’s most mature democracy, informed by the world’s dominant media system, at a time of perceived economic crisis and under brand new political leadership, getting tied up by manufactured misinformation. No matter what party you belong to, you can’t think this is a sign of health for the Republic.

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Link harvest

brownstudy — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 02:40:09 +0000

James Fallows on the China Xinjiang / Uighur controversy: “The point about separate fact-universes is one of the sobering marvels of the modern info-age. It’s true within the United States, as discussed long ago here; and it’s true between countries, as China, Turkey, and the rest of the world all digest different versions of the Xinjiang ‘truth.’ Main point: the internet, mobile phones, and other info technology, far from eliminating the country-by-country differences in information and belief, in some ways may increase them, as each little info-sphere is able to reinforce its own view of the world.”
Wonderful account of a man remaking his life as a pen-and-ink artist of theater rehearsals. I’m officially jealous.
Garden path sentences.
Personal informatics.
The fate of the Neanderthals. Modern humans have driven thousands of species to extinction without exerting itself; this explanation makes perfect sense to me.
Funny, rueful poem: “Rereading Jane Austen’s Novels“.
Evan Dorkin‘s you-were-there account of seeing Monty Python’s stage show at NYC’s City Center in April 1976 (complete with some Playbill scans). Now that is a birthday gift worth remembering.

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Assorted links

brownstudy — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 01:14:40 +0000

“A comparison of the 2008 population — using data from a variety of sources — with the first census in 1881 shows that the number of Cocks has shrunk by 75 per cent…” Read the rest for the context.
How to e-mail a professor. They may not notice, but then again, they do notice.
Saaien Tist on processing research literature, a topic that is becoming of increasing interest to me and that everyone has a different solution for.
Wonderful poem by B.H. Fairchild about “On the Waterfront,” a small-town movie theater, and waiting to come of age.
I’ve always liked Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies. (More here, here, and here.) Now someone has created a Twitter feed for them (I think with new or homemade ones added, too): Oblique_Chirps.

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Assorted links

brownstudy — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 03:31:08 +0000

Haunting poem.

Leddy on academic entitlement.

Why I don’t use “lol” in emails. Example 2 is the killer.

Brooks on the benevolent power of institutional thinking.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if a nuclear bomb goes off in your city? Wonder no more with the Ground Zero Calculator. [via Librarian of Fortune]

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brownstudy — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 05:17:56 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

Doomsday for 2009 is … Saturday.
Mary Ellen Bates says goodbye to several Google apps, and ponders Microsoft’s persistent relevance. I’ll miss Google Notebook, myself.
Better ways to run a workshop. And some damn fine YouTube examples of Patrick McGoohan at work.
Chris Blattman summarizes Rapture indicators from The Rapture Index site: “The prophetic speedometer of end-time activity”. And no, I sure as hell ain’t linking to that site. Chris does that so I don’t have to.
Michael Leddy at Orange Crate Art excerpts a neat paragraph on why a long, inefficient search can yield better results in the long-term than instant retrieval.
Man decorates basement with $10 worth of Sharpie. Sorry, can’t remember where I got this. I love the 360-degree view of his newly decorated basement. If I could draw that well, and had his nerve, this world would be a different place. Update: But Liz says it makes the walls look like cardboard.

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Links Harvest

brownstudy — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 03:37:12 +0000

Economic downturn hitting public libraries. Also, library fines.
Another popularly focused article on the digital dark age; it proposes using open-source rather than proprietary file formats.
The best suit for your body type.
Proto-scholar learns the hard way to ask the right people for process advice. No one would blame her for feeling angry and bitter about this mess-up. Her dilemma reminds me of the importance of grad skool rulez #1 and #2.
All sorts of reasons why British readers get reader’s block.

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Links Harvest: novels, narrative, BAE

brownstudy — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 03:46:05 +0000

Narrative and novels as models for social relations and as simulations of economic approaches.
First in a series of BBC4 radio programs on what the novelist’s imagination can offer sociological research on place. Settings: the rural idyll, the city, and the suburb.
“Once you’ve restricted yourself to information that turns up in Google searches, you begin having a very distorted view of the world…A book is not 150 successive blog entries, just like a novel isn’t 150 character sketches, descriptions, and scraps of dialog. ” A narrative, even in a computer book, helps to order experience. Computer book author Charles Petzold on the grim economics and reality of book authorship.
Grim? Grim. Writer and editor Susie Bright explains why she’s stopped editing the Best American Erotica Series, laments the collapse of the short-story market (no readers=no markets), and predicts what could happen next. (Her blog is NSFW, if you need to know that sort of thing.) One of many money quotes: “Book reading is not in vogue any longer, it’s eccentric. No one would even bother to have an obscenity fight over text, because so few people would be in ‘danger’ of reading it.”

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