theodicy, politics, basketball, and progress

A year ago, we had recently inaugurated an African-American president who ran on a visionary, if not radical, platform. Health care reform looked truly within reach. And the Heels had just won the NCAA national championship. A year later, that president is in hot water, health care reform passed only by being an essentially Republican […]

demotivational posters

A colleague let me know about the demotivational products–some really hilarious–at despair.com. My favorite:

navigating graduate school as a (single) parent.

I’m a tremendously disorganized electronic file-keeper. While this has proven disastrous at times, it makes it fun when I stumble across gems as I’m searching for particular items. Today, while on the hunt for teaching tips I might have written, I  rediscovered an unrelated presentation I made at last year’s ASA meetings.  I thought it […]

you are scatterplot’s 1,000,000th visitor!!!

Well, probably not. But someone today is. Kinda crazy, no? Think of all that time spent here, of all places.

perspective.

Sometimes, xkcd really does put my professional life into perspective. And, as I’m sure you’ve all noticed, my response to this perspective is to use said metal rectangle of lights to tell other people about the metal rectangle of lights. I’m fairly sure there’s a definition of insanity in there somewhere.

quote of the week

In a political science dissertation for which I was on the committee, I came across the following quote from Aristotle’s Poetics. I freely confess to never having read this or virtually any other of the Classical canon, so I had not seen it before. I liked it, and reproduce it here – more comment, perhaps, […]