Awesome tribute to our first Secretary of the Treasury. Compares favorably to 99 Problems but a Bitch ain’t One: Geek rap is so sexy. h/t James Fallows.
The Stoakes-Whibley Natural Index of Supernatural Collective Nouns. I can’t decide if I like better a vexation of zombies or an itself of Yahwehs. Or a percussion of giants. Or a nervousness of AIs. Delightful, delightful, delightful.
November 3, 2009 – 11:29 am
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By Peter
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Posted in Ramble
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It’s that time of year again, when I first got freaked out about emergency preparedness by watching 28 Days Later. And it’s the time when I review and renew my emergency go kit. For peace of mind, this is the fanny pack that you can walk out of your house in 10 seconds with. It …
One of the founders of string theory in physics made the case this week that the Large Hadron Collider will fail to produce/discover the Higgs boson because its very existence is so abhorrent to nature that the attempt to create it sabotages itself. The upshot is that we can expect seemingly strange delays and chronic …
Shouldn’t there be some kind of Mario Kart sociology meetup again sometime soon? It feels like it’s been a really long time…Let’s get a move on, Scatterplot!
Here is another one from the series of Volkswagon’s ‘fun theory’ design projects, this one a bottomless garbage can to induce people to throw away trash: The whole shebang is worth noting, for its effects on behavior and its bigger-issue demonstration of the contextualization of rationality. Plus, honestly, it’s a fun video. I don’t know …
Economic sociologists have long wrestled with the microfoundations of market rationality, and attempted to understand the embeddedness of behavior in the cultural context in which it rests…oh, hell, I just want to post this video of the subway stairs in Stockholm: Have a nice Friday, peoples!
The most unusual part of this unusual story is not that a bee truck overturned and overwhelmed victims and emergency workers with bees. It’s that a similar accident occurred in 2006. WTF, Turkey?
Fabio, over at orgtheory.net, suggets yet again that Sociology should be more like something else. I am genuinely mystified by these periodic forays into the dissing of the discipline, and my take is generally that: There is a small but persistent category of sociologists who always seem to want sociology to be more like some …
What does it mean when you start reading articles, posts, threads, and comments that look like the same exact articles, posts, threads, and comments that you already read 5 years ago? Same cited people, same trajectory of argument, same conclusions. It’s not plagiarism, it’s the re-invention of the wheel. Like undergraduates reading Marx for the …
Well, IMHO they have to publicly levy the maximum fines, penalties, suspensions, scorn, shame, and derision on Serena (tirade! outburst!). Because it allows the officials to not have to admit that they substituted procedural rationality for substantive rationality in a) allowing a linesperson to call an at-best 1/16 inch footfault at 15-30 at 5-6 in …
I am preparing for classes to begin, cleaning out files and cleaning up office. And I decided last-minute, with a cheap fare, to jump to Chicago for the weekend to attend a close friend’s annual party (which I’d never been to before and seemed like the kind of thing to do at least once). As …
One of Erving Goffman’s brilliant insights is the extent to which people engage in presentations of self. Front-stage behavior is the display meant for ‘public’ consumption: witty, urbane, dangerous, smart, smooth, down-to-earth, intellectual, anti-intellectual. This depends on the audience, of course, and it is meant to make oneself look good. Backstage behavior is closer to …
Back from ASA, and it somehow feels incomplete without some kind of wrap-up. So: I am coming to appreciate my cohort and close-related cohorts at Northwestern more and more. Within a couple years or three, wow. This year, I ran into or got to catch up with Mike Sauder, Ryon Lancaster, Tim Hallett, Mike Lounsbury, …
I was scheduled to leave for SF today, and after I arrived at the airport and waited around a half hour or so, I was somewhat horrified to learn that my flight had been irreparably delayed. My choices? Fly to Cincinnati and take an early flight out from there, or fly out tomorrow morning. So …
It’s been a relatively slow year for movies, which are normally among my favorite forms of entertainment. So far this year, I have only seen 7 movies, a low number. I’m alarmed so far at how much more attention we have been spending avoiding the crap than seeing the gems. Good to great: Hurt Locker …
I’m just shouting out that I love my internet hosting service, Hosting Matters. If you ever decide to host your own domain, give me a shout out, and apparently I can get you a decent deal (and possibly get a referral credit). But I would recommend them anyhow. If you hate your current service or …
JL is done with her ASA prep work, and I am not. And so this is the last post for a bit of time, while I prepare then confer in SF. In the meantime, I leave you with Le Pétomane, to make up for the lack of mellifluousness vis-à-vis the last post on melon. Toot-toot, …