Timely Snow

University of Michigan China Visit 2005
I want U-M students and faculty to be at the fore of this new world with their ideas and their leadership, and our partnerships with Chinese universities will take us in that direction.
from a nice report by the U of M Prez on her trip to China. Needless, to say, [...]

To the left of the athletic fields, on the top of the field with two converging paths, is an apartment building where my wife and I lived for the first half of 2003. What makes this worth noting is that 1) it’s in Beijing, and 2) the image comes from Google Earth, which is out today.

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Critter Country (Bonsai Kittens)
Snopes.com is the best place for all your urban legend debunking needs.

Writing Systems

Poynter Online - E-Media Tidbits
So, do iPods really improve academic life and performance? That was the question that Duke University’s Center for Instructional Technology tracked over the past academic year after distributing the popular digital-music players to all of its 1,650 incoming freshmen — much to the envy of students everywhere (and probably quite [...]

Technically, speaking I suppose that New York City in 1 Year isn’t a copy cat, since he started before I did. He’s also including biking, though, which detracts from the inherent purity of mapping your town on foot.

Since moving to Ann Arbor, I’ve noticed that occasionally there’s a strange Morse codelike static on radios or speakers. It made me wonder about the electrical system on the campus where I work and the town where I live. What it did not make me wonder about is the cellphone that I carry. When I [...]

With apologies for a bad pun
I’ve been considering ways of putting together secure accessible backed-up storage of our growing video archive. We have an older Dell server, which is fast and adequate for many purposes, but limited in storage (I’m not sure, but perhaps 100 gigabytes on SCSI drives).
Given that we do have that fast [...]

The past few weeks have been notable for the number of people I know who have died or are about to. A colleague yesterday recollected having heard that there’s a peak time of death in the early 50s and that if you live past that, then you’re likely to live for a relatively long time. I decided to check it out as best I could.

One of my favorite people, one of those rare individuals who combine mathematics and cabaret performance. When I was very young, he was part of a TV show called “That was the week that was” that was a precursor of the Daily Show and similar ventures. Courtesy of the Internet Archive. Internet Archive: Details: Tom [...]