The Messenger – Ta-Nehisi Coates – Politics – The Atlantic I’ve thought a lot about Farrakhan, recently, watching Ron Paul’s backers twist themselves in knots to defend what they have now euphemistically label as “baggage.” I don’t think it makes much sense to try to rebut the charges here. No minds will be changed. Still […]
Month: January 2012
Course Report: A Brief History of Timekeeping 01
As mentioned a few times previously, the class I’m teaching this term is a “Scholars Research Seminar” on time and timekeeping. As this is an entirely new course, and will be consuming a lot of my mental energy, I plan to post occasional reports on what I’m doing to the blog. Today was the first […]
Academic Poll: Day One
It’s the first day of class today (for me, anyway– classes technically started yesterday, but I don’t teach on Tuesdays this term). This, of course, means that something will go horribly wrong. The question is, what? What will go wrong on the first day of class today? This is a class for first-year students, so […]
2011: The Year in Blog
I’m a little late to the Most Popular Posts of the Year list party, partly because I wanted to wait until the year was actually over, and partly because Google Analytics was being Difficult, and I had to switch back to the “old” version to get actual numbers out. Having sorted that out, though, here […]
Links for 2012-01-03
Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us | Magazine For “Science” read “Medical Science” throughout, but other than that, it’s a good discussion of the problem of biological complexity. Teach For America: A Review of the Evidence | National Education Policy Center Teach For America (TFA) aims to address teacher shortages by sending graduates […]
The Test(ing) of Time: The Surprisingly Good Hourglass
My class this term is a “Scholars Research Seminar” with the title “A Brief History of Timekeeping,” looking at the science and technology of timekeeping from prehistory through modern atomic clocks. This is nominally an introduction to “research methods,” though the class operates under a lot of constraints that fully justify the scare quotes, at […]