If this is not the only post you read this year comparing Beatrix Potter‘s books to Sex in the City, please share your blogroll with the rest of the group. Why is fiction always about people and relationships? I started thinking and talking about this question a few years ago. (I labeled it a “personal-intellectual
This one speaks for itself. Hat tip to my brother Jared for the link. Puzzled by the intricate structure of the M-PMV retroviral protein… scientists have striven to find its chemical key for ten years now. Each enzyme has millions of possible combination in which it can fold its atom bonds, and determining its
A shout-out to HRSFAN Aaron J. Dinkin, linguist of the dialectological variety, who appeared as a Major Quoted Someone for Slate last month in an article on the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCVS aka NCS). The article is raising awareness of some recent (~our lifetime) re-jiggering of “linguistic turf” for short vowels (cat, cot, caught,
I just ran across this description of the Daniel Bartlett Memorial Mathematics Lectures. Hosted at the University of Arizona, they honor Dan Bartlett ’03, a HRSFAlum who passed away in 2006. This isn’t particularly timely, I realize, but I thought others might be interested to know about it regardless. While news of Dan’s death did
I just ran across Law and the Multiverse, a blog which tackles legal issues raised in superhero comics. I’m not a comics enthusiast or a lawyer myself, so I have little expertise with which to judge its quality, but I’d be curious to hear the opinions of those who know more about either of these
Kevin Gold has got two very thought-provoking articles on the jeopardy match-up between human jeopardy champions and IBM’s AI “Watson”, up on Tor’s website. Check them out here and here.
This Washington Post article discusses the story of a Tolkien scholar whose strategy of producing podcasts about Tolkien’s novels for public consumption seems to have won him some success in academia, not to mention a large online following. The hub of his online activities is a website called The Tolkien Professor, which includes the aforementioned
At the intersection of current affairs and computational linguistics, Language Log’s Philip Resnik has written a thought-provoking piece about how events in Egypt are fueling a shift in computational linguistics. He calls it the “social media revolution”, and main idea is that whereas current computation techniques are good at dealing with large, clean data sets
Returning to a "slow-burning" personal-intellectual project I first mentioned here in October, I consider the questions raised in my mind by a friend who does not read non-fiction (except for academic work). My case study is Henry VIII of England the break from his first marriage.
Probably dozens of you noticed Charles Murray‘s recent Washington Post essay days before I did. I came across it yesterday, looking over my husband’s shoulder as he chuckled at one of the (no doubt legion) bemused/snarky response weblog posts, one that block-quotes the several paragraphs listing examples of cultural touchstones that “members of the New
