Timely Snow

I’m in D.C. for a couple of days to consult on a mathematics curriculum study. This the third meeting of our group, so the study is actually in good shape. They put us up at the Willard Hotel, which is about a block from the White House.

I’d stayed here once as child, when my father [...]

New York Times article about the North Country trail

I’ve thought, off and on, that it would be interesting to hike the Appalachian trail. Yesterday I learned that there is a longer trail, the North Country trail, that goes from New York through North Dakota. It isn’t complete yet, but big sections of it go through [...]

Mexico Shuts Some Schools Amid Deadly Flu Outbreak – NYTimes.com

My condolences to everyone in Mexico. The pictures look eerily similar to what we saw in Beijing in 2003 during the SARS outbreak. It looks like this has already spread to the Southwest U.S. I’m hoping that it will, like most such things (including SARS) be [...]

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Internet-Age Writing Syllabus and Course Overview.
This was cute. That is all.

One of the cultural differences that puzzles me about China and the U.S. is the way that their news is relentlessly upbeat (ours, not so much) while our movies almost always have happy endings (theirs, not so much). But there are certainly exceptions.

As I’ve written about before, one of the big movies when my wife [...]

Transcriptions

Geoffrey Pullum has a very nice discussion of one of my least favorite books, Strunk & White’s Elements of Style, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. This captures the tone of the review, I thought:

Some of the claims about syntax are plainly false despite being respected by the authors. For example, Chapter IV, in [...]

Five years ago AERA (American Educational Research Association) met in San Diego, and now it’s meeting there again. At that time, I was contemplating moving to the University of Michigan and thinking about what that would mean for the people I hold dear, a number of whom were with me at the conference. A lot’s [...]

Transcriptions

Transcriptions looks a lot like Inqscribe, except for being free. Their website is all in German, so I don’t know if it has advantages over what we’re doing now.

VLC media player – Overview

VLC is the great free cross-platform media player (and which supports AVCHD).  Time to upgrade—it promises improved performance on Intel-based macs, among other things.

If you run Windows, you should open this “eye chart” every so often, or use it to test a shared computer. Very cute idea—depending on what you see, you might be infected by Conficker.