Boskone 43

The following will be of interest only to people who were at Boskone, or who for some reason care deeply about what I did there, so I’ll put the bulk of the text below the fold.

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Categorized as SF

Study in Contrasts

Thursday was “Founders Day” at Union, and there were two major speaking events on campus. The official Founders Day address was given at lunchtime by Rev. Peter J. Gomes, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard Divinity School. That evening, there was a second talk, not officially associated with Founders Day, by Chuck D,… Continue reading Study in Contrasts

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Categorized as Academia

You Can’t Get There From Here

Buried beneath some unseemly but justified squee-ing, Scalzi links to an article about “counterfactal computation”, an experiment in which the group of Paul Kwiat group at Illinois managed to find the results of a quantum computation without running the computer at all. Really, there’s not much to say to that other than “Whoa.” The article… Continue reading You Can’t Get There From Here

The True Purpose of the Internet

Theory 1: “The Internet exists to make me look smart.” —John Scalzi A question for folks more computer-savvy than I: Whenever I cut and paste quotes from some other page into the editing window on Movable Type, quote marks and dashes get mangled into non-standard characters. They look just fine when I’m editing, but when… Continue reading The True Purpose of the Internet

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Categorized as Blogs

Email Management

Pretty much every academic on-line has already commented on the New York Times piece on student email today. As usual, Timothy Burke says most of what I’d like to say: Much of the complaint recorded in the article also seems much ado about nothing. As Margaret Soltan observes, what’s the big deal about answering the… Continue reading Email Management

Blog Tweaking

A couple of technical notes that may affect your reading and commenting experience: 1) The site developer has tweaked the RSS feeds to include links to the full post, and to the comments section. The comments links on some posts even appear to give a comment tally, which is pretty cool. Of course, implementing this… Continue reading Blog Tweaking

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Categorized as Maintenance