February 2012
2 posts
Bell System Technical Journal Archives →
If you have a lot of time and inclination for the history of 20th science and engineering, here are the archives for the Bell System Technical Journal. From 1922 to the demise of the Bell System monopoly at the end of 1983, the BSTJ was the the in-house journal. Besides the obvious articles about telephony and telecommunications, there are articles about information theory (the classic paper by...
A Flat Budget for NIH in 2013 - ScienceInsider →
simplystatistics:
The President’s budget proposal would hold the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) budget at the current level of $30.86 billion.
In order to squeeze more grants out of the flat budget—the target is an 8% increase in new grants, to 672, for a total of 9415—NIH will put in place new grant management policies. Continuing grants will be cut 1% below the 2012 level, competing...
January 2011
1 post
3 tags
clearing the dust
I have not written here in a couple of months now, and certainly I have not done more than some reblogging. I think I fell off the tumblr track.
In any case, I’ve been in Philadelphia since the beginning of October. At some point I will write more about how I feel about Philly, but for now I think it’s safe to say that I generally like it here. It’s different than Chicago,...
November 2010
2 posts
3 tags
NO BLASTERS!: You Don't Need to See His... →
noblasters:
On November 21, 2010, I was allowed to enter the U.S. through an airport security checkpoint without being x-rayed or touched by a TSA officer. This post explains how.
Edit: This is a rough draft, but I wanted to get it up sooner than later. For now, the quotes below are paraphrases. I have…
I would not try this at home, especially if time is of the essence. But it is...
October 2010
1 post
September 2010
3 posts
5 tags
4 tags
liquid pencil review
I enjoy writing utensils. I have a couple of fountain pens, a multitude of disposable pens (my favorite these days is the Pilot G2, 0.38mm), the occasional mechanical pencil. I enjoy writing with them more than I tend to enjoy the things I write. At this point, that mostly consists of grocery lists, basic to-do notes, scribblings about my current research. That is, I write a ton of crap with...
August 2010
6 posts
3 tags
4 tags
3 tags
5 tags
transferring place to place
Changing jobs is a difficult process, even in the best of economic times. This goes double when my career is changing as well. Most of my professional life, my work has been in system administration and network analysis. (There were a few jobs as business analyst, research assistant, and so forth, but they take up a small part of my job history.) While I still have the basic skills, I...
July 2010
3 posts
changing my feasible region
In my previous post, I mentioned that this is a period of several transitions. I will endeavor to discuss them in various posts. For now, I will write about my impending shift from a graduate student to…someone who is not a graduate student, for lack of a more precise description.
As I write this, I am still a graduate student in an economics department. In a few months, I will no longer...
like a tanker changing direction
(photo of Lake Michigan from outside my apartment in Chicago)
Transitions are a good time to start a blog.
I have moved and changed careers before. Except for some notes scattered to the wind here and there, there are lots of things I do not remember, sharp sensations and images surrounded by ever-expanding lacunae. I would prefer to not make this mistake again in the next phase of my life.
...
