When religious beliefs are placed into the sphere of scientific test, scientific criticism of those beliefs is fair game. All questions put under the framework of the scientific method enjoy the same scrutiny, and it is imperative to approach the question with the same critical toolkit as one would approach […]
The first month of being a faculty member was one of the most difficult months of my life. Changing jobs is always hard, but going from post-doc to faculty is a promotion without a well-defined manual. The federal government made things extra special by creating a new DOE young investigator […]
Well . . . sort of. I took a long vacation from personal things this summer to work in Geneva, Switzerland, at the CERN laboratory. I posted lots of things in the SMU CERN blog [1] and mirrored those posts in my own professional blog [2]. If you missed those […]
Apparently, each year the SMU Provost hands out a book for the faculty to read. Last year, that book was Timothy Egan’s “The Worst Hard Time,” a collection of stories (including diary entries) about surviving the worst environmental disaster in American history: the dust bowl. The dust bowl was an […]
I’ve commented on how much I love my MythTV box, “Stevo.” I’ve found another reason to love it more: streaming recordings from my home in Texas to my laptop in France. Fundamentally, all MythTV does is take output from a TV tuner card and convert it to MPEG, writing it […]
When I was a kid, I got used to the idea that summers were my own. That’s thanks to the way the U.S. school system works, starting in August and ending in June of the next year. Summers were a time for play in my youth, yard work and play […]
The oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico is an immediate crisis, getting immediate attention. It poses long-term effects for sea life, coastal life, and human economics (fishing, tourism, etc.). That oil leak represents a major release of carbon into the Gulf; oil in its crude form is a thick […]
I’m nursing a cold. Laying about on the couch has given me some time to think, and I’ve been thinking about aerosols. The recent eruption of an Icelandic volcano has brought air traffic over Europe to a grinding halt. When this same thing happened after the 9/11 attacks in the […]
An independent review of the climate research at East Anglia University has turned up no malfeasance [1]. The center of the Climate-gate controversy, I’ve been waiting patiently to see how this review went. Importantly, the report concludes that researchers need to spend more time working closely with statisticians to make […]
Ever since moving to Texas, we’ve had a lawn. I had spent months looking forward to the opportunity to take care of the lawn, even though we’re renting the house. Lawncare seems silly – a caricature of suburban American life. It’s important to me for two reasons. The first is […]
The music player Songbird has been a project I’ve been excited about for a long time [1]. When Songbird first appeared, it wasn’t great on Linux but it brought a promising feature into the music player mix: a built-in web browser, allowing you to surf to music blogs and grab […]
In the first two parts of the “Hypothesis of Big Government” series, I got my hands on federal employment and employee income data, and also on median family income data, from about 1947 to 2007. A commenter on the second part of the series noted that ” . . . […]