Tim Minchin’s College Speech
A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that ‘individuality’ is the key to success. Robert Orben Not sure why I...
View ArticleFeynman Sexist Pig!
“One of the most impressive discoveries was the origin of the energy of the stars, that makes them continue to burn. One of the men who discovered this was out with his girl friend the night after he...
View ArticleSocial Justice Parasites
The Parasite hates three things: free markets, free will, and free men. Andrew Ryan in “Bioshock: Rapture” by John Shirley (2011) An addendum to the posting quoting a chapter from Richard P. Feynman’s...
View ArticleCriticism is not a personal attack
Discipline: Do not consider painful what is good for you. Unknown One thing I have seen again and again is that certain people consider criticism — any form of criticism — as personal attack. It does...
View ArticleyEd — A free and powerful program to create diagrams like flowcharts
The weaker the math, the more elaborate the graphics need to be. Unknown There are a lot of interesting programs to create diagrams or graphs. I tried out the trail version of OmniGraffle and it was a...
View ArticleLoyalty is a two-way street — even in Academia
My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its office-holders. “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” by Mark Twain, 1889 The more I hear about dysfunctional...
View ArticleSelf-Reflective Students
Cocaine magnifies your personality. Yeah but what if your an asshole. Eddie Murphy During his “Last Lecture”, Randy Pausch had this to say about enabling students to become more self-reflective: And...
View ArticlePaying for it (Open Access in Science)
“It’s not easy to meet women. Sure I can walk into a bar and buy a lady a drink and under the pretext of a perhaps budding relationship seduce her into satisfying my sexual needs, but that goes against...
View ArticleUsing the Computer’s Text-to-Speech Feature as Proofreading Support
Too many people want to have written. Terry Pratchett Pat Thomson has written an interesting posting about proof reading tactics. While reading the list, I thought about using the computer to read your...
View ArticleRecommendation: Mac Power Users 221: Academic Workflows with Aleh Cherp
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them. Sir William Bragg If you want to know what you can do with your mac, listen to Mac...
View ArticleGoodReader iOS App is now able to easily read PDF files to you via...
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. Henry David Thoreau I’m a huge fan of GoodReader and recently became interested in the text-to-speech feature of many...
View ArticleThe Power of Silence (and the little green (wo)man)
Earlier exquisitors had shouted and ranted confessions out of people. Vorbis never did that. He just dug deep silences in front of them. “Small Gods” by Terry Pratchett The blog of “The Thesis...
View ArticleOutsourcing a Thesis
Culpam poena premit comes. [Punishment closely follows crime as its companion.] Horace When you have a blog, you get spam. When you write about academic topics, you get academic spam. Or rather,...
View ArticleFinally a(nother) paper published
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Mahatma Ghandi I’m (very likely) leaving Academia and there are a couple of ideas I wished I could have implemented....
View ArticleUsing InDesign to Layout your Dissertation Thesis
INDESIGN for PHD thesis? Mad, I tell you, MAD!! Comment on Twitter regarding the use of InDesign for a thesis Scrivener is really great software for writing, esp. longer texts like a dissertation....
View ArticleRecommendation: Aaron Clarey’s Asshole Consulting Videos, esp. Video Request...
The best advice is this: Don’t take advice and don’t give advice. Unknown It’s hard to recommend people on YouTube. There’s little editorial oversight and yeah, sometimes you have to eat your words....
View ArticleDisposable Degrees Infographic, or: With or without a PhD
A lot of fellows nowadays have a B.A., M.D., or Ph.D. Unfortunately, they don’t have a J.O.B. “Fats” Domino Kyara Tobias of Online PhD Programs helped create the following infographic and asked me to...
View ArticleSurviving Mac Accidents and Catastrophes
Being a Mac user is like being a Navy SEAL: a small, elite group of people with access to the most sophisticated technology in the world, who everyone calls on to get the really tough jobs done quickly...
View ArticleA Comment on Two Abusive and Unethical Experiments (Milgram & Stanford Prison...
You are right on target when you say that mad scientists have a total disregard for the well-being of others. We don’t want to spread evil; we just see no point in bothering to spread good. Richard M....
View ArticleRecommendation: Free Speech On Campus
“I hear you’re writing a book on theology. I hope you have a good title.” “I have the perfect title … ‘Has it Ever Occurred to You That You Might Be Wrong?'” Charlie Brown and Snoopy I recently...
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