Academic nerdiness

As an academic in the humanities, a great deal of my research involves tracking down 20-50 page papers published in professional journals. When I was an undergrad, this was mostly a two-step process: First, EBSCOhost and other such search engines would give you matches based on author and title names; occasionally it would also have an abstract, so you could tell whether or not it was worthwhile. Second, you would stalk through the periodicals section of the library, three-page list of citations in hand, tracking down the library's archive copies of all those journals.

By the time I got to Notre Dame, those two steps had been combined. I rarely have to go track down a physical copy of a journal to read an article -- academic search engines now include links directly to electronic archives, and I can typically read or download a PDF of the desired article within about 30 seconds. In preparing the list for my oral exam, I've had to request a handful of articles that were only published in books, one or two published in articles to which my library did not happen to have a subscription, and only one where I had to go down to the basement to get the physical copy of the journal (because the electronic version was of the wrong article).

So today my research consists largely of downloading 5-12 PDFs, skimming them for relevance, and arranging most of them into various folders and subfolders depending on which project they're relevant to. As a result, I have approximately 300 PDFs in various places on my computer. (Think about that for a second: on the order of a 10,000-page library right on my laptop. Thirty years ago, that would have required a small but very, very strudy trunk to transport. Today it all fits very comfortably in my backpack.)

This creates an archiving problem. Obviously many (most) of the projects I work on are closely related. And it would be nice to be able to be able to easily search through and arrange and re-arrange all those documents on the fly. Which is why I was really, really excited when I discovered links to Papers and iPapers.

And then really, really disappointed when I realised they're only for Macs. I guess this means I need to break down and finally buy my new laptop.

Penny Arcade

Wired just published a really interesting article on the PA guys and their powerful status in the game industry. You know, it's strange that I've internalized the presence of PA in my daily routine as much as I have. I just realized today that it's been around longer than a successful TV show run (8 years and counting). I've read the comic as both creators got married, had kids, quit day jobs, begged for donations from fans, and then turned the corner and made the comic self sufficient. I've seen them go from angry 19-20 year olds (which I certainly was as well), to more mellow 29-30 year olds (which I'm, uh, approaching). What a weird thing to care about...

Darfuri in Indiana

Fellow residents of the SB might be interested to know that we have a burgeoning refugee community:

As many as 300 people originally from Darfur are living in Fort Wayne, with others scattered across smaller Indiana cities like Elkhart, South Bend and Goshen. Together, they form one of the largest concentrations of Darfuri in the United States.

Frankly, I'm surprised, and for almost exactly the reasons the article suggests.

Despite Indiana’s reputation among Americans as a monolithic slice of the country, in parts of Africa it is known — mostly by word of mouth — as diverse, welcoming and affordable.

`Monolithic' isn't the term I would use; `homogeneous' is more appropriate. Northern Indiana is populated primarily working-class practicing Catholics of Polish and Irish descent. Deviation from that norm is much more often denominational than racial. What racial diversity we do have is, unsurprisingly, tied closely into class and geographical divisions. Near where a few of my friends live, for example, the difference between the `good' (upper middle class professionals and students, mostly white) and `bad' (much poorer, mostly black) neighbourhoods is a single street.

The politics here are right-of-centre, with the working class background checking the nasty side of American Christianity. But while there's not much support in the air for welfare or affirmative action programs, I can imagine that there's also little conscious racism. And perhaps Fort Wayne -- about two hours away, according to Google -- actually does diversity better than the SB:

Fort Wayne, for instance, has one of the largest populations of Burmese in the United States, and for a city its size — approximately 250,000 residents — it has a considerable international flair, with many families from Vietnam, Congo and Somalia. Seventy-seven languages are spoken in the Fort Wayne public school system.

I seriously doubt any immigrants will read this post. But I hope they do genuinely feel welcome here. If they're coming from a rural lifestyle in their native country, I think Northern Indiana makes a lot more sense than Chicago or New York. As one of my professors put it last week, compared to rural Iowa, the SB is `high civilization'.

I'll admit it, I'm not an aesthetician

I love art, but sometimes I just get confused:

Even though Stingel's work does not always involve paint on canvas, it continually reflects upon the fundamental questions concerning painting today -- authenticity, hierarchy, meaning, and context.

First, those are individual words, not questions. Second, `authenticity' and `hierarchy'?

Fifty-car pileup in the series of tubes

In case you haven't come across it yet, behold the glory of Conservapedia:

1984 was a book by George Orwell. 1984 describes an alternate history in which Oceania (Australia) is at war with Eurasia. It is a utopian book because it talks about a place where everyone is watched over by Big Brother, who makes sure people are doing what they are supposed to.

The protagonist is Winston Smith. Thre is something about rats at the end, but it is confusing. The end is probably supposed to be ambigous.

That's verbatim. For more fun, read up on elementary proofs:

The term "elementary proof" or "elementary techniques" in mathematics means use of only real numbers rather than complex numbers, which relies on manipulation of the imaginary square root of (-1). Elementary proofs are preferred because they are do not require additional assumptions inherent in complex analysis, such as that there is a unique square root of (-1) that will yield consistent results.

Mathematicians also consider elementary techniques to include objects, operations, and relations. Sets, sequences and geometry are not included.

The prime number theorem has long been proven using complex analysis (Riemann's zeta function), but in 1949 and 1950 an elementary proof by Paul Erdos and Atle Selberg earned Selberg the highest prize in math, the Fields medal.

And Kant:

The German Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was one of the most famous philosophers ever, and is therefore one of the best philosophers ever. In his "A Critique of Pure Reason," Kant criticizes pure reason as a guide to life, establishing several categories through which reason is able to comprehend the ultimate reality. Though Kant may not have been a Christian himself, he considered Christian values to be the best values in the world in space, due to the antimony of practical reason. Kant also established a systematic basis for critical philosophy, establishing synthetic a priori considerations as a prior necessity to analytic a priori concepts, and suggested a material origin for the solar system (prior to Kant, the origin of the solar system was considered to be immaterial and possibly even a priori). Kant's own suggestion for a moral daily life was the categorical imperative: Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. Expressed another way, an act is moral only if it works as a rule for everyone. For example, littering would be wrong because if everyone did it, then there would be an ugly mess. On the other hand, if a murderer asks you where someone is hiding, you should always tell them because lying is wrong. The categorical imperative can be contrasted with the hypothetical imperative, which says that you should act according to any maxim which might possibly be willed. Kant is taught in all college philosophy departments to this day, though not for praising Christianity! He remained a confirmed bachelor throughout his life.

OpenDNS

About two weeks ago, we decided to switch from Comcast -- heretofore our cable internet and teevee provider -- to a combination of Dish Network (for the teevee) and whatever incarnation of AT&T is around now (for DSL). The deal was quite nice, saving us about $35 a month, and Dish Network includes a DVR for free.

But switching internet providers had problems, as switching internet providers often does. I've never been able to tell whether this is a problem configuring my router or a problem getting it to work with the various modems, but Server Not Found errors are legion whenever I switch ISPs, and this most recent switch was no exception. I could, usually, load any given page by the second try, but loading more than one page at a time was right out. And that's after letting the connection `warm up' -- the first three to six attempts to load a page in the morning always failed. Calling technical support is useless, because all they ever tell you to do is turn your modem off and back on again. I've tried fiddling with router settings and Googling support fora, but so far the only fix I found was to wait for the router and modem to start playing together properly.

After starting to get seriously frustrated and wondering whether I had made a mistake this time around, I happened across a rave review for OpenDNS. It doesn't seem like anything big -- just an alternative system of DNS servers. (This is like trading one copy of the white pages for another.) But the tiny change of pointing my router at OpenDNS instead of AT&T's default fixed all my problems. Loading the eleven sites in my primary folder of blog bookmarks all at once takes a few seconds, with no DNS errors. This is faster than Comcast, and comparable to the T3 line I have access to on campus. There's also no `warm up' time when I first turn on my computer.

I'm extremely impressed, and recommend checking out OpenDNS even if you already have a fast, reliable connection.

How did giraffe necks evolve?

If you know a little bit about natural selection, you probably think it's because having a long neck enables giraffes to get food other grazers cannot. And you would be right. But you'd be non-trivially right, because, as you also know if you know a little bit more about natural selection, sexual selection (where the females choose the males with the best example of outrageous feature X) can be just as good an explanation as biological fitness.

So go read about the evolution of giraffe necks already. Via Evolving thoughts, which is in the midst of a really cool multi-post saga about Darwin's idea of `species'. This is absolutely fascinating if you're a HOPOS (History Of Philosophy Of Science) nehd like me.