Category: General

Some quickies this morning after 5 hours of sleep:

• An excellent article from The New Yorker about how admissions to Ivy League schools really works. Of all the critisims against Harriet Meirs, I think the lamest is that she didn’t go to an “elite” school. There are plenty of other good ones.
• One of the best blogs out there, in terms of the quality and level of the writing, has to be the Becker-Posner blog. Gary Becker is the winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Economics and probably the greatest microeconomist of the 20th Century. Richard Posner is a judge in the United States Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and probably the guy that Bush should have tapped to be on the Supreme Court. Regardless if you agree with them, they are treating a blog like a personal outlet for serious writing that would othewise be in journals and take months to get published.
• The New York Times has a great article on how technology is increaing the responsiveness of the economy and making recessions less severe and shorter. They primarily look at FedEx, but the same is true for many large companies which have large logistical operations, or worth with companies that do.

The next 3.5 days are going to suck ass.

I have a test in Structural Geology on Wedensday. I got a presentation to give on my Argentina trip on Thursday morning. I have a problem set in Isotope Geology due on Tuesday along with last weeks Structure lab. I’m also behind on some problem sets and a lab. I got my Earth Systems lab and some random Structure stuff to do too.

I also am working a grant proposal tonight which I sort of caught me at the last minute. (not that I didn’t know about it before hand, I just didn’t know how involved begging for money was).

Without exaggerating, I think I could just sleep in Pillsbury and shower at the rec center for the next three days.

I’m considering doing it.

Every aspect of my life is sucking right now. Every single one.

I’m off for the next 36 hours or so to Wisconsin for a Strucutral Geology trip. I’m not entirely sure how great the structure is, but when you live in the midwest, you take what you can get I guess.

This trip is pretty much mandatory for the class, and it comes at a pretty bad time. I really could use today to study and get work done. I spend 6 weeks this summer doing the same shit, so I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to be learning. Its also going to be cold.

Also, if you use an RSS reader, you should take a look at Google Reader. Its still sort of slow and buggy, but its worth goofing around with.

Bietz also got me into an online game of Diplomacy in which I hardly know anyone…..and I think that works to my advantage.

You will notice up above I’ve added a banner image which lists the last three songs I’ve played on iTunes. Its not exactly what I want, but its close and it seems to work.

It is hooked up via an iTunes plugin that sends my music to Last.fm. The problem I’ve had with this in the past is if you listen to an album or an artist and let it play while your gone, you wind up with that one artist massively over represented in the music you listen to.

If you look at what it has listed for me, Queen is listed pretty high. Way too high. I like Queen, but not as much as it would indicate.

What I’ve done the last few days is let iTunes play on random while I’m away from home from my entire music collection. Its sort of fun to go to my site and see what the last songs played have been when I’m not there to listen.

Like 5 years ago I had a shoutcast stream running out of my house that I could listen to wherever I was. I should do that again, I’m just not sure how to do it when you have DSL running using NAT.

On a somewhat related note, there is a sort of release party for the new Philip Glass CD in Minneapolis on Tuesday at the Caterpillar Lounge on Nicollett. I’m thinking of going.

The test was easy.

I’m writing this in lecture. Its a wednesday night class so we have to have a lecture after the test because its a 3 hour class. So I’m multitasking as I listen to the prof talk about dissolved O2 and CO2 levels in seawater.

I almost feel bad taking this class. Almost.