A few months ago, gaussjordan loaned me the DVDs for the show Slings & Arrows. It's a show about a Shakespearean theatre in Canada. Each season is about their performance of one show, and the plot of the season (in broad outline) mirrors the plot of the show they're performing. The first season, about Hamlet, involves the death of the theatre's artistic ( Read more... )

A paper I'm reading right now featured the following quote with respect to boys' and girls' mathematics performance:

Moreover, the variability of female identification and participation across countries changes over time and is significantly correlated with national indicators of gender inequality (Hyde & Mertz, 2009).

So I looked up Hyde & Mertz ( Read more... )

I have just finished The Temporal Void, the second book in Peter F. Hamilton's "Void" series, which featured the following rather staggeringly unexpected description of a creature that seems to live in space (mild spoiler warning that is unlikely to affect your enjoyment of the book):

With the sensors able to penetrate the haze of the vacuum wings ( Read more... )

In the "you scratch my back, I scratch yours" category --- GoGo in-flight wifi (available on most flights) is offering me a free wifi session for each person to whom I give a free wifi session! (Assuming you haven't used GoGo before.) If you are interested in getting free wifi on your next domestic flight, let me know!

A really fascinating article on the process that the White House used to make the decision to go into Afghanistan. Two thoughts:

1) Having been through long, arduous, difficult strategy decision processes with Learning Unlimited (the nonprofit I am starting), I understand what went into this much better-the difficulties, the openness, the strong ( Read more... )

I've been super-busy and haven't had time for virtually anything. However, I'll be visiting the Bay Area from this coming Tuesday through next Monday, so if you're around and want to get together, let me know.

I've written before --- in an entry that, embarrassingly enough, I cannot find --- about how a classroom might be different if students were pursuing reading because they loved reading, rather than because the reading was required for class. It's an interesting question: is it worth sacrificing the exposure to established great literature in order ( Read more... )

A delightful NPR story today (now yesterday) on mathematical models of zombie attacks (although hardly the only news story about this). It conveyed a sense of fun in doing mathematics that somehow isn't conveyed by... well, stories about mathematics that seems more "serious." Other amusing observations include that Mathcamp is apparently not the ( Read more... )

This summer, I visited Mathcamp for two weeks. It was the first time in ten years that I haven't been there for the full five weeks; the first time in thirteen years that I have not been to an academic summer camp for its full duration. In my previous ten summers of Mathcamp, I missed a grand total of two days that I was eligible to attend (for a ( Read more... )

The battle between choosing a career that pays well and choosing a career that is rewarding for what you do --- "do what you love" --- is so rehashed as to be trite. Because it has entered the pantheon of truisms, of expected conflicts, everyone thinks about it within an established context. It's the "should I pursue a career on Wall Street or ( Read more... )