(immediate outside my hotel room, first morning in Malawi)
The plurality of our waking time so far in Malawi has been in the classroom. Most of the rest of our time has been sitting in one of the three places we eat waiting for food. Most of the rest of the rest of the [...]
Lunch break of Day 2. On Monday I woke up at 3:30am and couldn’t get back to sleep. Last night, same thing, except 1:30am.
Nonetheless, I am having a great time. It’s an odd way to acquaint oneself with a country of the developing world: to be in the country teaching natives how [...]
It’s winter here and Zomba is relatively high altitude, so I’ve been told there isn’t especial reason to fear mosquitos. I slept under a mosquito net last night, more because it was hanging over the bed anyway and after starting up at it awhile I decided why not. I liked it, making me [...]
Over 41 hours from the door of my apartment to the door of my accommodations here in Malawi. And nobody else posted in all that while? Hmph.
Sal and I got to walk around London a bit in our long layover there, but we squandered a good chunk of the time watching cricket in the [...]
I cannot believe that in less than 24 hours I am going to be (1) on my way to Africa where I will (2) teach a course presumably with little/no supply of Coke Zero. Meanwhile, regarding a couple silences certain people have noticed:
1. You’ve been quiet lately about your resolution to exercise 200 days [...]
Because otherwise, I just end up doing things like cleaning out my closet. My closet has been perfectly tolerable as a disaster for the last several months, and then a day before I’m to leave for Africa, I pull everything out of it? Suddenly I’m concerned with the many dozen wire hangers I’ve [...]
Eszter reports evidence that her blind reviewer voodoo doll is working. Meanwhile, within hours of tacking mine to my bulletin board, someone I suspect of having given a paper of mine a negative review changed their Facebook status update to “PLEASE GOD LET THIS PAIN IN MY ARM SUBSIDE” and it has stayed that way [...]
I reviewed an article recently for the American Political Science Review. As part of the e-mail apprising me of the editor’s decision and the other reviews, this was attached:
Freaking out. More about all I have to do before then than anything about Malawi itself.* Still, if anybody has any advice about traveling to Africa, this would be a good time to pipe up.
* Although I did just get the dataset that we are going to be teaching in the class and it looks [...]
On xkcd (via Anomie):
If you’re so pure, why aren’t you rich? (Or, if you are so impure, why aren’t you rich? I can’t figure out which way it should go.)
Laura Beth gets her first piece of academic hate mail.
“So, if you found out you had only three months to live, would you feel greater urgency to finish the things you are working on now, or less urgency?”
“Hmm. Does my secret hobby project count?”
I spent time reading the novel The Raw Shark Texts that I will never get back, and I do not want to throw good time after bad by writing about it. I post this only to assuage my proto-guilt that one of y’all might squander some of your own preciously finite lives reading this [...]
…I’m not sure any “necessary evil” part of this job feels like a more pointless waste of time than when I’m searching on the web to find where a book publisher is located so I can fill in the [city] field in the sociology citation format. I wonder when was the last time that [...]
“I do get sick of the men in the group sometimes. They are always posturing.”
“That’s what we do! We posture. We will talk ourselves into weird extreme positions if it allows us to posture. Much of the appeal of Marxism was that it gave men an opportunity to posture. Same with postmodernism. Same with [area [...]
From article in Slate:
New research by economists Ofer Malamud and Cristian Pop-Eleches provides an answer: For many kids, computers are indeed more of a distraction than a learning opportunity. The two researchers surveyed households that applied to Euro 200, a voucher distribution program in Romania designed to help poor households defray the cost of buying [...]
I forget how good the end of the last class feels, each and every time. I wanted to hop across the threshold as I was exiting the classroom.
(Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy teaching. But I really enjoy the end of teaching.)
Sorry, posts about my Iowa hometown come in bunches, partly because they prompt exchanges with a couple of correspondents from my hometown who read Scatterplot. Anyway, my hometown is having a contest for a new slogan. The current one is “A Rose on the Prairie,” and a correspondent e-mailed thinking I might be able to come up with [...]
Drek has started his own line of blog-related merchandise. I’d been wondering what the cause was of that strange spike in Cafe Press’s stock.
Coming on the heels of my revelation of my secret hobby project: The newspaper from the small town where I grew up (Manson, Iowa) apparently is now offering back issues on CD-ROM. Someone a few years behind me in school bought it and e-mailed me an article from 1984 with this headline:
Here I am:
