coitical mass
E-mail from a special JFW correspondent:Just had tea with friends who were at this week's Moynihan Conference at Harvard. Among the speakers at the conference was Karl Zinsmeister, Bush's assistant for...
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overheard (or, i know this much is pru)
(the Prudential building in Boston and the building next to it that one of my friends thinks is supposed to look like a chess queen)"That the Pru and the building next to it are supposed to look like...
View Articleam i the only one who did not know this?
When you snap your fingers, almost all of the snapping sound comes from the contact of your middle finger with your palm, not from the release of your middle finger from your thumb. (If there is anyone...
View Articleinside the sociologists' studio
I'm on the schedule to speak at the proseminar Northwestern has for its first-year graduate students. According to the e-mail, in addition to discussing research projects, thoughts about graduate...
View Articleturns out all along that pi was just a hip shorthand for 'pisces'
So, I have an immediate answer whenever the paparazzi ask what most puzzles me about the gender I am not: "The whole horoscope thing." Of course, I understand that there are many women who reject...
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even without the special scatologically-themed exhibit...
Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry is substantially cooler than the don't-get-me-wrong-it's-cool-in-its-own-right Boston Museum of Science. Regarding feces of a more masculo-bovine sort, I wanted...
View Articlemuncholesen by proxy
ESPN.com story about a woman who "possibly" has fabricated stories of hitting 16 holes-in-one in six months:She's practically a neophyte, new to the game five years ago, and now at age 47 has reported...
View Articlethe five things i hate most (not in order)
1. Wicker furniture2. Coconut3. Bats4. War criminals or SPSS (tied)5. The New York YankeesThe Yankees are six outs away from being out of the playoffs. My hopes are up, and yet I have this dismal,...
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blink
Prompted by, of all things, a colleague, I have resumed playing 5-minutes-per-side Scrabble with random strangers over the Internet (user jfreese on ISC). No offense, but you probably don't want any...
View Articlebull
I haven't been feeling very bloggy lately. It hasn't been due to my being a tornado of productivity on professional fronts. Indeed, between moving, getting settled in, having a friend visit, and...
View Articlealas, poor bucky
Via Tom, a story by Madison's alternative newspaper here is enough to make a former UW faculty member melancholy about what UW has to contend with in the Wisconsin legislature. Some...
View Articleit's seems wrong that something with a 31.8% chance of not happening should...
Current market-based estimates of the probability of candidates winning the 2008 Democratic nomination:Clinton: 68.6%Gore: 11.5%Obama: 11.2%Edwards: 3.5%So, Obama has fallen behind someone who has...
View Articleyen for ham fighting
To ask why I would be looking at the Wikipedia entry for "Professional Baseball in Japan" is to fundamentally misunderstand how I use Wikipedia, but anyway here is a quote from it:For almost 30 years,...
View Articleacademic freedom doesn't mean very much if it doesn't extend to stuff we...
I belong to a perhaps dwindling group of academics who self-identify as liberal but also believe that it is a sad day whenever a fellow academic loses a job for saying something out loud that they...
View Articlein case I was under any delusions that graduate school was something other...
Jay uses the example in his sociology class of Radiohead letting fans choose how much to pay for their new album and discovers that no one in his class appears to have heard of them.Completely...
View Articlei am trying to imagining the sioux city officials response when the faa told...
From AP [HT: MS]: SIOUX CITY, Iowa (AP) — City leaders have scrapped plans to do away with the Sioux Gateway Airport's unflattering three-letter identifier — SUX— and instead have made it the...
View Articleone little boy detective playing a pc game; before long it was morning, and...
Out of some perverse desire to screw up any hope of getting my sleep onto a proper schedule, I was up until almost 3 last night finishing a computer game, And Then There Were None, based on the Agatha...
View Articlemy very slow adventures settling in, virtual edition
Today, I switched my professional webpage so as to list my Northwestern affiliation rather than my Harvard/Wisconsin one. I had forgotten all about this until an NU student apologetically sent a...
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correlation, or causality?
Above is a graph of the predicted probabilities over the past year of Barack Obama being the Democratic nominee for president, as available on intrade.com. The red line corresponds to when I officially...
View Articleplanes, trains, automobiles, and beavers
I'm giving a talk at Yale tomorrow. For this, I am taking the first flight out tomorrow to Boston, and then taking the train from Boston to New Haven, so that Friday I can take the train back up to...
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