Hehe, those of you familiar with the UW-Madison campus may find this amusing:
“For 37 years, Union South has turned a cold shoulder to the campus. And the feeling, unfortunately, has been mutual. Unloved and underutilized, Union South’s quirky design, and uninviting Soviet-style architecture will give way to a new South Campus Union that planners expect will be a “people magnet” that will invigorate the area.
Read more: http://www.news.wisc.edu/15204 “
This New York Times story about taco trucks in LA is just brilliant. A really carefully crafted feature story that’s funny but hits on some serious socio-economic issues as it builds momentum. Any article that contains the expression “taco-loving public” should be shooting up the most-emailed list. It’s currently at number 10, I noticed.
OK, back to work, but only because I don’t have a car to go driving in search of the best carnitas. Seriously, I love carnitas.
I also love “Taco Town.”
Update: Man, I’m having a bad couple of weeks w/r/t providing promised links. Should be fixed now above, or click here.
The campus-wide e-mail servers here at UW-Madison seem to be down right now. If you’re trying to get in touch with me via my main account and have somehow found your way here, note that you can reach me via my gmail account, a link to which appears in the second box on the top RHS of this page.
First, a Sports Night scene to set the mood:
CASEY: Finish the story.
DAN: The story is, we had a conversation. Seriously. Someone had clearly briefed her on my stuff with the public schools and I told her about my opposition to secular programs that are publicly financed. I really spoke up and she seemed to listen.
CASEY: You mean non-secular.
DAN: What do you mean?
CASEY: You don’t oppose secular programs that are publicly financed. You oppose non-secular programs that are publicly financed.
DAN: Yes.
CASEY: Go on.
DAN: Wait.
CASEY: I’m right.
DAN: Are you sure?
CASEY: Non-secular means bound to religious guidelines. Secular means free of religion.
DAN: (Thinking.) Okay. I’m sure I got it right at breakfast.
CASEY: Fifty-fifty chance.
(DAN is still pondering the odds that he got it right.)
CASEY: So go on.
(A distracted DAN reaches for a change of clothes.)
DAN: I’m gonna go and change my clothes.
CASEY: Okay.
(DAN drops the clothes to the floor.)
DAN: I didn’t get it right.
CASEY: I know.
DAN: I blew it.
CASEY: Yes.
DAN: I mixed up! I inverted the definitions of secular and non-secular!
CASEY: Looks like that might be the case.
DAN: Hilary Clinton thinks I’m an idiot!
CASEY: Either that or a religious bigot.
I wanted to open with a little levity as a heads up about some decidedly non-secular programming. I’ve talked about God and science previously on this blog, but the link below steps things up a theological notch, I think.
I was asked to preach at St. Francis House a couple Sundays back, and I decided that what I came up with was too CSC-ish not to post here. Of course, this blog isn’t publicly financed, and I’m not a religious bigot (in fact, I’ve danced around some wording to avoid confronting a tough passage that one author calls “disturbing [] to our pluralistic ears,” which mine decidedly are), but I nevertheless just wanted to mention the original context of the link below.
Anyway, feel free to have a look if you’re so inclined (here).
Update: The link should be working now. Sorry, I thought I’d thoroughly tested that the place I’d posted it before was publicly accessible, but apparently it wasn’t. Thanks to whoever brought it to my attention.
It’s weird when you get news about your community from a national news source. Sadly, that happened today to this Madison, WI resident:
Reluctantly, a Daily Stops Its Presses, Living Online (New York Times)
Was I the only one who hadn’t heard about this? I’m not a very good local news consumer, so I guess I’m part of the problem at work here.
We’ll miss you, Cap Times.
Today’s lesson: not all copy is created equal.
If you have the final responsibility (or even part of it) for the copy in some publication, I submit to you that it’s a good rule of thumb to spend twice as much time copy editing the text in headlines, captions, etc. than you would on the same volume of text in some random paragraph. Why? Because everyone loves pointing out mistakes, and there’s a much greater chance of others finding them when they’re in conspicuous places. Cruelly, there’s also a decreased chance of you, the copy editor, finding them, since it’s easy to take their correctness for granted (“oh, I would have noticed an error in that cutline already”).
It’s 8:52 a.m. CST, and an online caption for a photo in the New York Times Magazine‘s “Young Gay Rites” article still has a pretty whopping error. Can you find it before they do?
My baseball partner-in-crime Matt sent me this awesome link to a New York Times story I missed about a month ago.
If you want to know how tons of nuclear engineers spend their time, look no further. We run simulations like the one in the article. Except instead of flipping these virtual weighted coins to see how simulated batters fair over the course of their careers, we’re trying to see how simulated neutrons (or x-rays, or electrons, or whatever) fair over the course of their lifetimes (from their creation in the reactor or whatever until their eventual absorption or leakage from the system). Of course, for a binary process (e.g., DiMaggio either gets a hit or he doesn’t) it’s OK to visualize coin-flipping, but I think it’s better to think of the “randomness driver” as the roll of a many, many-sided die–which is why the Men from Mars referred to this clever trick as a Monte Carlo method. (In fact, I used Monte Carlo to write this absurd little simulation, which happens to be about rolling dice.)
Man, writing baseball simulations for a living would maybe be my dream job. Hey, Baseball Prospectus: need any more modelers?
In honor of yesterday’s beautiful weather and the associated (and long overdue) first game of catch, I checked out a couple of baseball blogs today.
Perhaps I’m too much of a Turnbow apologist, but I think this guy is partially misplacing the blame for today’s Brewers loss. I was only listening to it on the radio, but it seems like base-running mistakes really cost us a chance to take the lead in the bottom of the eighth, which could have kept us in it. Nevertheless, I think Brewers Bar looks worth reading, so I’ve added it to the new Sports links at right. (Speaking of sports blogs, did you see this? I’d like to hear more about Cuban’s viewpoint, which sounds a little hypocritical but is perhaps only superficially so.)
In other news (since I’m still just getting slammed at work and need to knock at least one story off the old ToBlog queue before I lose all my momentum), congratulations to Professors McMahon and Murphy on their recent teaching awards. Watch for Insights‘ interview with Regina Murphy in the next edition. I was there for the brown bag and thought she covered some really interesting stuff.
In the meanwhile, here’s some wisdom from McMahon:
“He inspired me to think of students as ‘candles to be lit, not vessels to be filled,'” she says. “I think of myself not as a conduit for facts, but as an exuberant tour guide introducing students to the joy of problem-solving and learning about the world around them.”
We need more exuberance.
As it turns out, only this (click to enlarge):
It’s getting to be that time of the semester where scheduling and time management become both more difficult (because the time-uncertainties in end-of-semester-type activities are so much greater) and more important (because of the number and importance of said activities). Case in point: the above plot took me all day to make, and I really only had to generate the dotted line today. It turns out that every time I’ve solved this particular two-region reactor physics problem (at least twice while studying for my qualifying exam), I’ve done it wrong. It took me about two hours to realize my mistake, another two to find and fix it, and another hour to find the additional mistakes I incorporated in moving my solution from one piece of software to another. I can’t tell you how many other items were on my todo list today (including–I’m just realizing–eating lunch), which tasks of course I’m scrambling to do now (well, in about another two minutes, obviously). I’ll try to explain this problem and plot some other time, since they’re kind of interesting and have some bearing on the “What have we got to lose?” modeling question.
Anyway, I just wanted to sort of explain my absence from this space this week and see if anybody had suggestions for dealing with this problem of how you can manage your time when the tasks you’re juggling are both more important and more unpredictable in terms of how much time they take to finish. As far as I can tell, the standard answers include “sleep less” and “forget to each lunch.”
OK, back to work.
I linked to the March edition of our College of Engineering’s Teaching and Learning Insights newsletter last month, mostly because I’d written a piece for it. But it would be a shame if I didn’t pass the April link along as well. This issue rules.
In particular, check out the feature about my friend and sometime collaborator Laura Grossenbacher and her work on WAC (that’s Writing Across the Curriculum, not Western Athletic Conference) in engineering. This project’s got it all–interdisciplinarity, technical writing, authentic learning, and more. So I guess by “it all” I mean “stuff I’m interested in.” If you are too, check it out.
There’s also a write-up of our journal club‘s most recent article and a piece on using blogs for assessment. Geez, they’re productivity tools, assessment tools, brainstorming tools…makes me wonder why it took me so long to get back in the blogging game.
