Category: Uncategorized

I’m trying to clean up my del.icio.us tags a bit. Here are a couple of items I wanted to pass along here:

I’ve been thinking a lot about acronyms today. For starters, I was dismayed to see that the new

Editors have Chicago. Pop music fans have Marsh. Medical Physicists have Attix. Nuclear scientists have Knoll. Chefs have…well, some book by Julia Child, according to the only chef I read:

In the end–as it so often does–it came down to Julia. Julia Child’s recipes have little snob appeal, but they also tend to work. We took a recipe for dough from her book on French cooking, and after rubbing the outside of a large lobster steamer with shortening, stretched and patched our dough around and over it.

(Turns out he doesn’t mention the actual title, which is a bummer for this little riff I’ve got going, but I spent like fifteen minutes finding the passage in Kitchen Confidential and wasn’t about to waste all that effort.)

Writing Fellows have Bruffee.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes
“The Philosophy of Niels Bohr,” Aage Petersen (in Niels Bohr: A Centenary Volume)
“Authority and American Usage,” David Foster Wallace (in Consider The Lobster)
“What Have We Got to Lose?” Douglas Adams (in The Salmon of Doubt)

While I’m no longer an editor at Wisconsin Engineer, I still try to keep abreast of its goings-on, so I wanted to mention that the February issue is now online. I was interviewed for one of the articles, which experience was a bit strange. It’s funny going from having darn-near final say on an article’s contents to none at all.

By the way, did you know that Wisconsin Engineer is three years older than the self-proclaimed “oldest technology magazine in the world” (Technology Review)? I buy their claims against Scientific American and Popular Science, but for a different reason–those are science magazines, not technology magazines. But Wisconsin Engineer, established 1896, is a technology magazine through and through. Take that MIT.