Alkahest

How White and Nerdy Are You?

Last week a friend pointed me to a comic that accurately described my life for four and a half years. Piled Higher and Deeper is a PhD comic strip. After reading just a few, I couldn’t help but think, “how did I miss this for all these years?” It turns out that [...]

I survived giving my presentation today – in spite of the fact that I showed up to the wrong hotel, in the wrong part of the city.  I blame my boss.  I mentioned that the talk was at the Sheraton Imperial (although I hadn’t looked to see where that was yet) and he said, oh [...]

Checking my schedule for tomorrow, I realized that I have to give a talk at a major “human studies” conference about security risks in web-based surveys.  Unfortunately, I haven’t actually prepared anything.  I’ve got my slides from the last time I did the talk, but I really wanted to do something more interesting and interactive [...]

One of the disadvantages of having so many email accounts is the number of spam you get. Recently, I’ve been noticing an increase in stock spam making it through my spam filters. I’ve been wondering how effective the spam is and whether or not one could make money shorting these stocks.
Apparently, I’m not [...]

Just picked up our cat Whisper from the vet today. She’s been over at the Carrboro Animal Hospital in their RadCats facility for the past two weeks getting her thyroid treated. It seems that cats are prone to tumors on their thyroids. The tumors produce excess hormones which cause them problems.
The treatment [...]

just heard from K – the flying squirrel didn’t make it through the night. She’s guessing that the impact of the truck caused internal bleeding.  unfortunately, there wasn’t much she could do

I haven’t put up the baby squirrels’ seven week pictures yet – I’ll do that tomorrow.  They’re getting huge (~150g each, up another 40g from last week)
Just had a guy drop off a flying squirrel to K.  Apparently, it swooped down on him at the intersection of 15-501 and Europa and he (not his fault) [...]

You can bet that any article written by a conservative that starts with “Liberals don’t value a college education?” will be full of crap. The only relevant question is “what kind of crap will it be full of?” In the September 22nd issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Chronicle Review,” Anthony P. [...]

As I read the newspaper this morning, I came across Charles Krauthammer’s latest piece on how Iran is in the crosshairs of a U.S. decision. In the opinion piece, he lays out the costs of action and the costs of inaction and concludes that the U.S. has less than a year to decide how [...]