Not sure if I will keep doing these links\u2026perhaps will do them less frequently and with less annotation, since even this takes a surprising amount of time.<\/p>\n
Harry Lewis<\/a> 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 this is precisely the sort of wisdom that overzealous prosecutors did not show.)<\/p>\n<\/li>\n An interesting article<\/a> by Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair<\/em> about the prosecution of a programmer from the finance world. I won’t comment one way or the other besides saying that, as with the Swartz affair, there are lots of grays; extreme advocates of either side are often missing important points. But this certainly provides some interesting background on the case (even if I disagree at times with Lewis’s tone and the analysis he provides).<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Francis Su on grace in teaching<\/a>. This fits in with the professor-as-a-moral-force in Harry Lewis’s Excellence Without a Soul<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Take a look at this tumblr: Pictures of People Scanning QR-Codes<\/a>. This is so great—I admit I’ve fallen for it twice in the past few months.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n The Economist<\/em> on Detroit<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n An excellent article<\/a> by Matt Yglesias on Nate Silver. I’ve got much more to say about this sort of stuff, in future posts.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Anyone else like Jordan Ellenberg and me in terms of not understanding those how-to-swipe credit card diagrams<\/a>? (Ditto for public transit tickets.) I should note that this aspect of spatial reasoning is very different from the quality of one’s sense of direction—I have an excellent sense of direction, but I’m really bad at this.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Renewing your passport in NY<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n On a new approach to fighting cancer<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n Unhappy Truckers and Other Algorithmic Problems<\/a> An interesting bit suggesting that the human perceptual system automatically guides towards more optimal solutions to traveling-salesman type problems.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Patricia Marx is always fun—this time Workouts at the brain gym<\/a> (paywall). A favorite sentence: “Similarly, a study of six-hundred and seventy-eight elderly nuns analyzed essays they’d written in their twenties and found that the sisters who had used the most linguistically complex sentences tended to have the lowest incidence of Alzheimer’s, which is why I’ve added this unnecessary subordinate clause even though it’s been a long time since I was in my twenties.”<\/p>\n<\/li>\n On the Harvard report on the humanities<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n Matt Yglesias on a 99-year-old custodian<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n