Archive for 2013

While you’re waiting for the bus

CRISPR technology leaps from lab to industry Kind of a big deal The cost savings of food stamps cuts versus the cost increases of diabetes care The Rise of the Urban Forest Trees make your city so much nicer This is what happiness looks like How Wall Street Has Turned Housing Into a Dangerous Get-Rich-Quick […]

I got mine

The closing statement in my Republican aunt’s long rant about the evils of Obamacare: As you know, life is not fair and I am sick and tired of governments trying to make everything equal–I am not interested in a communistic society

Structural problems in academic science

Paula Stephan, an economist at Georgia State University, argues that many of the research community’s problems flow from two big features of how we do research. First, we staff our labs with low-wage, temporary workers—graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who move on after a few years. This means that universities have an incentive to recruit […]

Tuesday Shoesday

When I imagine myself as a young professor, I imagine myself in shoes like these. With some excellent socks/stockings.

No State shall pass any Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts

To protect everyone’s contracts seems like an act of fairness of equal treatment, until one considers that contracts made between rich and poor, between employer and employee, landlord and tenant, creditor and debtor, generally favor the more powerful of the two parties. Thus to protect these contracts is to put the great power of the […]

While you’re waiting for the bus

Stuff worth reading You Know What’s Fundamentally Regressive? NYC’s Current Toll System Green Screen: The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why it Matters. This is incredible Project ranks billions of drug interactions Minnesota State–Moorhead could cut 18 academic programs: Why do colleges cut aca… Evolution: A Stunning Monochromatic Exploration of Vertebrate Skeletons by Patrick […]

Migraine diaries

1 November I’m sick today, but remarkably buoyant; I was able to work yesterday and I might have celiac disease. Perhaps gluten-free will save me. I’m impossibly hopeful. 6 November Spent a chunk of last night at the ER after five rather unpleasant days. Perhaps buoyancy is another migraine trigger? They gave me a drug […]