Monthly Archives: July 2012

What Has It Got In Its Pocketses?

Three movies for The Hobbit. Like a lot of other geeks, this makes me wary. (Non-geeks who know geeks are probably feeling despair instead, knowing they’re going to be dragged to all three.) Joking about the second film being a … Continue reading

Posted in Sheer Raw Geekery | 7 Comments

Hacker Job

Before I get to worrying about algebra, Andrew Hacker’s essay in the Sunday NYT made me worry about writing and research. As in, “This is poorly written” and “I don’t think he did much research”. If I were marking the … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Politics | 16 Comments

Don’t Bring Policy to a Culture Fight

E.J. Dionne suggests that gun control advocates have given up and are “rationalizing gutlessness”. I’ve moved in my own life from being intensely certain that comprehensive restrictions on gun ownership were an important political objective to being indifferent to the … Continue reading

Posted in Oh Not Again He's Going to Tell Us It's a Complex System, Politics | 6 Comments

Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads

(Army of Darkness reference for the uninitiated.) I hereby volunteer: the next pundit who talks about how MOOCs are going to save higher education some big bucks needs to meet me for drinks at the establishment of his or her … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property | 15 Comments

Tales of the Burning World

One of the hardest things for academic historians to accept is that their characteristic engagement with the past is deeply, arguably inextricably, interwoven with the very particular ways that nations and modernity use history as a tool. E.g., both nations … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Digital Humanities, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Production of History | 1 Comment