Links: The Future of the Left, Tech Intellectuals, Self-Serve Gas Stations, Etc

Simon Winchester, My First Mistake. An article by Peter Beinart on the future of the left. Paul Berman argues for music lessons. Is anyone else as confused as I am about how it’s possible that a new ligament in the human knee was only just discovered? Interesting interview with literary agent Andrew Wylie. On The …

Links: Pynchon, Marissa Mayer, Larry Summers, Finance, Blogging

I have a bit of a backlog here, but really what’s so important about being timely with these things? Who cares if many of these came out in the end of August…it’s been a busy semester. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Pavlov Poke for Facebook. Slate: This browser shortcut is like ctrl-z for the entire internet An …

Wieseltier on Scientism

Leon Wieseltier offers a great sermon against scientism. The question of the place of science in knowledge, and in society, and in life, is not a scientific question. Science confers no special authority, it confers no authority at all, for the attempt to answer a nonscientific question. It is not for science to say whether …

An Update on My Math & Linguistics Freshman Writing Course

I thought I should provide a quick update on the freshman writing course I’m teaching this fall, Language, Logic and Information: Using Mathematics to Understand Writing, Communication and Argument. (For more, take a look at the website for the course, which is now full of lots of material.1 You can also check out my original …

Links: Economics, Breaking Bad, the Moon, Entrepreneurship, Albert Murray, Etc.

Shockingly, it’s difficult to keep up a blog while finishing a Ph.D., designing a new course, and looking for jobs. I have some drafts of substantive posts that I hope to polish up and publish soon. For now, some more links. Interesting article on the relationship between people’s behavior and the lunar cycle, from the …

Links: Misapplications of math, journalism, AIDS, EB White, Pricing, Gifted Students

A tremendously sad story about skewed incentives that make certain people try to get AIDS. This is a pretty outrageous misapplication of mathematics to psychology. Journalism teachers on journalism school An interesting profile of several talented students in a magnet program near DC, 20 years ago. The piece focuses on a young woman, Elizabeth Mann, …

Links: On Aaron Swartz, Nate Silver, Detroit, Grace in Teaching, A New Cancer Technology, Etc

Not sure if I will keep doing these links…perhaps will do them less frequently and with less annotation, since even this takes a surprising amount of time. Harry Lewis on MIT’s response to Aaron Swartz, contrasting it with Harvard’s response to the cheating scandal. Note the importance of moral wisdom in universities. (And note how …

On Education Studies and the Problem of High Dimensions: A Plea for Wisdom and Judgment

As I think and read about various educational approaches (in the process of preparing for the course I’m teaching in the fall about math and writing), I sometimes see studies with conclusions like this: Students who were taught using method A significantly outperformed students taught using method B. Sometimes, method A is the new and …

A Suggestion for The Economist

The wonderful magazine The Economist has a two-page spread The world this week at the beginning of each issue with very short blurbs about the week’s news. I was reading the section this week when an idea came to me. In this week’s section, there’s an entry for the horrific deaths in India: At least …

Links: SWAT Teams, Nostalgia, Lemonade Stands, Why Ice Cream Sounds Fat, Gluten Intolerance, Etc.

An interesting article by Stanford linguist Dan Jurafsky on why different sounds have different associations, e.g., why “ice cream sounds fat”. I’ve always been interested in the Saussaurean arbitrariness of sign—the notion that the sound or form of a word is independent of the meaning. (I hope to write on this in the future.) This …