Category: Links Dump

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Why experimentalists hate theorists. (tags: science silly cartoons comics) YouTube – Hitler and P = NP Why the hell am I paying you morons to use a f&#$*% brute force algorithm?! That blasted Russian Perelman can solve the Poincare conjecture. Why can’t you dimwits solve something as simple as finding the… Continue reading Links for 2010-08-30

dirtcandy : HOME The third part of a series (with links to parts 1 and 2) on the making of an episode of Iron Chef America that will air Sunday night. (tags: food television blogs culture) Liberal Arts Chemistry: If Hemingway were a Chemist … There is a reason why some reagents and some chemical… Continue reading Links for 2010-08-29

Williams College – The Purple Cow goes national: ESPN College Football GameDay commercial looms “In 2007, when I was but a wee sophomore at Williams College, ESPN College GameDay visited our campus marking the first and possibly last time they visit a Division III school. I thought that would also be the last Williams College… Continue reading Links for 2010-08-28

6 Baffling Flaws in Famous Sci-Fi Technology | Cracked.com “For instance, when the main reactor fails in Star Trek they call it a “warp core breech” and it happens so often there’s an entire page listing times it has happened on the Star Trek wiki. Seriously, it was like every third episode. Their only safety… Continue reading Links for 2010-08-27

“Mumble mumble shoulder something”: R.E.M., Guided By Voices, Ghostface, and the pleasures of lyrical ambiguity | Music | The A.V. Club Blog | The A.V. Club “The Stipe of R.E.M.’s early recordings uses words to create abstract compositions. It’s not the only way to approach lyric-writing in rock music, or even the best way. Some… Continue reading Links for 2010-08-26

Streets of the optical scientists! | Skulls in the Stars “[While a post-doc in Amsterdam] I would take the bus to the rink from my apartment, and every day would travel down Maxwellstraat and past Lorentzlaan, but it didn’t occur to me until near the end of my time in The Netherlands that these streets… Continue reading Links for 2010-08-25

The mismeasure of education « Confused at a higher level “Put simply, it makes just about as much sense to obsess over these numerical rankings as it does to try to numerically rank favorite restaurants, or jazz songs, or single malt scotches, or … you get the point. It is a false quantitative-ness about unquantifiable… Continue reading Links for 2010-08-24

Washington, We Have a Problem | Politics | Vanity Fair “It’s Obama’s conviction–you hear this from the most senior White House aides again and again, because it reflects the thinking at the top–that by keeping his head down and doing his job he can also pursue a different strategy, one that doesn’t aim to win… Continue reading Links for 2010-08-23

News: A Graphic Text – Inside Higher Ed A bunch of professors in MBA programs have written a textbook in graphic novel form. I’d make a joke here about what this says about our future captains of industry, but, really, do I need to? (tags: education comics business academia books) slacktivist: A bank run in… Continue reading Links for 2010-08-22

Swans on Tea » Politics and the Star Trek Effect “There are a couple of episodes of Star Trek that I can recall having some fundamental physics failures, which would lead one to believe that in the Star Trek universe, one cannot do an integral over time. The episodes that come to mind (and it’s… Continue reading Links for 2010-08-21