This was the first week of Fall term classes at Union, with essentially everyone back on campus in person. I’m on sabbatical, though, so I’m not teaching, which made it really weird for me; from all reports, though, both students and faculty are happy to be back in business.
Since I wasn’t teaching, I had time to write some stuff, linked below for your convenience:
Me on Substack:
—Should I Read the Book of My Rival?: Some wibbling about my forthcoming book, and my reaction when I learned recently that somebody else has written a book on a very similar topic.
—What Makes an Ugly Experiment?: This is a follow-up to the Forbes blog post I wrote about beautiful experiments (see below). I split these up as an experiment to see what kind of traffic they’d draw in the different venues; didn’t make much difference.
— Puzzled by Advice: A thinking-out-loud sort of post about some disparate items that felt related in a weird way.
Me Elsewhere:
—What Makes A Beautiful Experiment?: The Forbes post mentioned above; pretty much what you’d guess from the title.
Links Dump:
—Beware Berkson’s Paradox by Freddie de Boer: This week in “Statistics Can Be Slippery in Subtle Ways”
—The Case Against “Excellence” at Universities by Jay Caspian Kang: Second in a series of posts about college admissions and the problems of standardized testing.
— Here is the state of America circa 2021 by Kevin Drum: A bunch of stats about current conditions and how they’ve evolved in recent years.
— How time was measured, and what it meant, across the centuries by Nick Romeo: A review of “the book of my rival” from the post above.
Pseudo-Random Photo of the Week:
The Pip is playing “sandlot” baseball this fall, so there will undoubtedly be action shots of him in future pseudo-random photos. I liked this the best of the pictures I kept from last week’s game, though: Kate and SteelyKid were set up in the shade on a hill overlooking the field, and SteelyKid was intently working on programming the spiffy new TI graphic calculator required for 8th-grade science.
Pseudo-Random Song of the Week:
A bit of a deep cut, but maybe my favorite track of theirs. There’s a kind of indirect economy to the lyrics that I really like.
So, yeah, that’s some stuff. This is coming out later than usual because The Pip is also playing rec soccer this fall, and had a game this morning. You can probably expect some soccer photos later, too… Anyway, here are some buttons:
And the comments will be open if you want to mock my preference for obscure songs.