Listen to Hipster Kitty, students! (Gimme a break, I'm going to spend every waking moment for a week grading...)

_The Wire_ as Victorian literature.

"Q: Do I have to kill the snake?
A: University guidelines state that you have to "defeat" the snake. There are many ways to accomplish this. Lots of students choose to wrestle the snake. Some construct decoys and elaborate traps to confuse and then ensnare the snake. One student brought a flute and played a song to lull the snake to sleep. Then he threw the snake out a window."
--- It would be a Bad Thing for me to send this to the graduate students, wouldn't it?

Gauss, writing letters for Riemann and Dedekind!!!

Of course, now I will be very tempted to send this to all the graduate students whose committees I'm on.

"every spring, Patterson runs a policy simulation designed to illustrate the difficulty of operating an organization in the context of asymmetric and limited information. Every fall, I run a two hour mini-simulation designed to give students a sense of how the larger simulation will play out. In my first year, I did zombies; the year after was the aftermath of Independence Day, and last year I asked our 35 first year graduate students to develop a strategy for containing or killing Godzilla. Since vampires seem to be in the news lately, this year I chose a vampire oriented scenario. The scenario was broadly organized around the motivating concept of True Blood; vampires, in existence throughout human history, reveal themselves and demand civil recognition...."

Actually, this kind of makes me want to read _The American Evasion of Philosophy_; which I guess shows that McLemee isn't being _simply_ malicious.

"The French government currently honors a very unusual debt contract: an annuity that was issued in 1738 and currently yields E1,20 per year. I tell the story of this unique debt, which serves as an anecdotal but symbolic summary of French public finances since the 18th century." Or: That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even the dead can collect interest.

Are these esthetic complaints, or moral ones? Or is this an example of how the distinction blurs and breaks down?

"My survey of around thirty prominent twentieth-century southern authors has led me to conclude, without fear of refutation, that there is indeed a single, simple, litmus-like test for the quality of southernness in literature, one easily formulated into a question to be asked of any literary text and whose answer may be taken as definitive, delimiting, and final. The test is: Is there a dead mule in it? As we shall see, the presence of one or more specimens of Equus caballus x asinus (defunctus) constitutes the truly catalytic element, the straw that stirs the strong and heady julep of literary tradition in the American South."

"I hereby deny, abjure, and repent my previous allegiance to the gospel of "Greenspanism." I reject Greenspan, and all his works, and all his empty promises.

I will strive now to walk in the light."

"The real distinction between qualitative and quantitative is not widely appreciated. People think it has something to do with counting versus not counting, but this is a mistake. If the interpretive work necessary to make sense of things is immediately obvious to everyone, it’s qualitative data. If the interpretative work you need to do is immediately obvious only to experts, it’s quantitative data."

"I'm defending my thesis tomorrow. I have to prepare." "Defending it from whom?"

Making of the poster.

Memories!

"GALFRIDUS CHAUCERES LYNES OF PICKE-VPPE"; of which I think the best is "Ich haue the tale of Lancelot yn myn roome. Woldstow rede of yt wyth me?"

Geof. Pullum blasts Strunk and White. But you read languagelog already.

A review of Newt Gingrich's ph.d. thesis on the colonial Belgian educational system in the Congo.

This is how English and string theory got so weird.

" I want Lewd vs. Prude comics. In each installment, Lewd acquires a new pornographic novel and, with child-like enthusiasm, attempts to get Prude to read it. Meanwhile, Prude is busy trying to destroy it – burn it, dynamite it, bury it, sink it beneath the waves, send it by post to Australia. But the efforts on both sides invariably cancel out. In the final panel, Prude sits down to read. Again. We could have “Lewd and Prude on Holiday”, “Lewd and Prude Go Ballooning”, “Lewd and Prude at Baffin Bay”, “Lewd and Prude in the Big City”, “Lewd and Prude at Sea”, “Lewd and Prude and the Doctor’s Orders”, “Lewd and Prude at the Opera”. ... It will be much better than “Spy vs. Spy”, because Lewd and Prude obviously have a somewhat dysfunctional, asymmetric-yet-mutual love. It’s like “Krazy Kat”, with a pornographic novel playing the role of the thrown brick."

Guilty.

"exquisite modls finely carved from bones of walras"!

"If you are using R and you think you’re in hell, this is a map for you. "

In a logistic regression to predict voting, being a Virgo has a positive and significant coefficient...

"An example of a scholarly investigation of a topic or figure which finds that the conventional representation of such is in fact exhaustive and accurate."

The context of unjustification visually explained.

I don't know whether to be cheered or deeply depressed.

"Stop Anthropomorphizing Me"

Viciously unfair, of course.

Andrew Leonard provides the appropriate quotations from 1848...

"It was not easy to get approval from university administrators for a project that could include ordering products from unknown and unverified sources, and which could lead to illegal trade of substances, or costs associated with items for the enhancement

"And I tell you, artificial intelligence is a false god that provides correlative and not causal models of language acquisition. The infallible methodologies are the comparative study of world languages and lesion analyses of those who must be treated wit