Woo-Hoo!

If you go to the California Bar home page, you will see that only 56.1% of the applicants who took the bar exam this year passed. If you poke around a little, you can find the list of those who passed, and on that list, you’ll find my sister’s name. She graduated law school back… Continue reading Woo-Hoo!

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Categorized as Personal

Death of the Hit Parade?

I’ve been thinking off and on all day about the Jon Sobel post I mentioned in the previous post. I think he’s got a point, but something about it strikes me as slightly off. To get this out of my system, I’m going to babble about it a bit here, and see if anything coherent… Continue reading Death of the Hit Parade?

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Categorized as Music

Year’s Best Music: Candidates

Following on yesterday’s post about books, I started thinking about the best pop music for the year. Since getting iTunes, I’ve been able to do this quasi-scientifically, by putting together playlists of the top-rated songs for the year, which provides an easy guide to what I liked best. My first impression, thinking back, was that… Continue reading Year’s Best Music: Candidates

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Categorized as Music

links for 2007-11-18

Backreaction: Universal Scaling at Deadlines “[Physicists] have analysed the distribution of registrations for two conferences…[and] they can describe this distribution by a simple model, assuming that the ‘pressure to register’ is inversely proportional to the time left before the deadline.” (tags: science silly physics meetings) Dinosaur Interactive – National Geographic Magazine An interactive guide to… Continue reading links for 2007-11-18

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Categorized as Links Dump

“Year’s Best” Season Arrives: Amazon’s “Best Books of 2007”

An email from Amazon arrived yesterday announcing their Best Books of 2007 lists. This is an earlier-than usual opening of the “Year’s Best” season, in which every publication in the universe produces a list of the N best Whatever of the past year, but with the Christmas shopping season now starting before Halloween, I suppose… Continue reading “Year’s Best” Season Arrives: Amazon’s “Best Books of 2007”

Simple Answers to Needlessly Complicated Questions

Kevin Drum is thinking about debate formats: Now, there’s nothing wrong with a few beachballs. Giving every candidate a couple of minutes to simply explain their healthcare plan — or whatever — without interruption is fine. But then what? Do we really want several months of “debates” in which candidates do nothing but rattle off… Continue reading Simple Answers to Needlessly Complicated Questions

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Categorized as Politics

links for 2007-11-17

Court Rejects Fuel Standards on Trucks – New York Times The decision is not what I expected, given that headline, but hey, it’s the Ninth Circuit… (tags: environment news politics) YouTube – Not The Daily Show, With Some Writer “What do the writers of the Daily Show think of the ongoing writers’ strike? If only… Continue reading links for 2007-11-17

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Categorized as Links Dump

Blogpost for Bangladesh

As you’re probably aware, a cyclone hit Bangladesh yesterday, and has wreaked a good deal of havoc on what is already a fairly fragile country. Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum have been all over this, and are urging people to contribute to relief efforts in both text and video. So, well, consider this an extra… Continue reading Blogpost for Bangladesh

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Categorized as Environment

The Pipeline Problem

Inside Higher Ed has an article on yet another study of why there aren’t more conservatives in academia: Colleges have been increasingly competing to offer “family friendly” policies — in the hopes of attracting the best academic talent from a pool of Ph.D.’s that includes both more women than ever before as well as many… Continue reading The Pipeline Problem