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I am enjoying BLDGBLOG and Flavorwire's pics of the day.
This is probably old news among the blogerati, but I recently started reading through some art and architecture blogs, and found Flavorwire and BLDGBLOG quite engaging.
Flavorwire gives nice samples of work from photographers and artists, often constructing interesting scenes from everyday objects (e.g., Kevin van Aelst), or documenting ( Read more... ) -
mathoverflow.net - better than video games.
I recently joined this web site, put up by some Berkeley friends, with funding provided by Ravi Vakil. It is a shockingly addictive glimpse of the future. I need to take a break from it so I can get my job application materials in. -
New death toll figure: 45,000/year from lack of health insurance.
Apparently, there was an estimate published in 2006 giving 22,000/year, but a more recent study by Harvard medical school (abstract) seems to make the figure substantially larger ( Read more... ) -
The Play (sportball)
Somehow, I made it through grad school at Cal without ever hearing about this crazy football game (1 minute video). Short version: Berkeley makes a desperate run with 4 seconds left on the clock, while the Stanford marching band storms the field, thinking the game is over and that they have won. Some guy successfully scores and wins for Berkeley ( Read more... ) -
History curricula and genocide
My former officemate's boyfriend is from Russia, and one striking thing I learned from him is that students in Russia never hear about the Holocaust in school. In fact, he never heard about it until he came to grad school in the US. As far as I can tell, World War II is told as a story of Germany attacking Russia by surprise, and through the ( Read more... ) -
Running on treadmills
Since I came to MIT, most of my aerobic exercise has been in the form of treadmill running at the fitness center. Running indoors has some obvious advantages over road-running, like weather-independence and safety from cars, but there are some benefits that I hadn't anticipated. The treadmill has a lot more give than a typical road or sidewalk, ( Read more... ) -
Crooked Timber on Jared Diamond
There was an interesting post on Crooked Timber a couple months ago, concerning Jared Diamond (author of Guns, Germs, and Steel), and by the time I read it, it had accumulated almost 300 comments. I finally read the whole conversation, and while I learned a lot from it, the signal-to-noise ratio is low enough that I can't recommend a full read. ( Read more... ) -
Stuff Geeks Love
I forget where I heard about this. The word "geek" here seems to be a broad label applied to whatever arbitrary segment of counterculture the author chooses to mock. I guess someone was inspired by the way Stuff White People Like lumps all white people into a yuppie box (people who fall outside this pigeonhole are dismissed as the "wrong kind of ( Read more... ) -
volcanic lightning
Apparently, volcanos create lots of lightning, in rather bizarre formations. Here are some pictures. Some researchers at UIUC have suggested a mechanism for the cyclonic motion of the ash clouds, and they recently published an article in Nature.
While I was poking around the web for useful links, I noticed that there are a lot of sites that ( Read more... )
