Archives for August, 2010
Nerdery
Posted by Josh Rosenau on August 27, 2010 The Times takes on current debates in linguistics, and asks: But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind us. All I can think is: “Never! The House of Mogh is dishonored for seven generations!” Then I remembered that Duras ultimately did get the rightful blame for the Khitomer…
Somebody’s getting married
Posted by Josh Rosenau on August 8, 2010 And that somebody’s me! If this post goes up when I scheduled it to, the ceremony will have just started. It’s been a crazy year of planning, but everything seems ready to go as planned. Tomorrow we go on a honeymoon and I’m obliged to leave my computer behind, so no blogging until late August.…
Who is a scientist?
Posted by Josh Rosenau on August 2, 2010 T. Ryan Gregory asks this important question: Who is a scientist? It’s a followup to a post titled: “Graduate students are not professional scientists. Discuss,” which – briefly – argued that grad students are scientists in training, not yet scientists-full-stop. In the later post, he explains: Here are the criteria I threw out off-handedly for…
Don’t Use Microsoft for Oil Rigs
Posted by Josh Rosenau on August 1, 2010 Deepwater Horizon Alarm Intentionally Disabled: Testifying before a federal panel investigating the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Transocean employee Michael Williams said that an alarm designed to warn the crew if combustible gases were in danger of igniting was deliberately disabled. … Williams also told the panel that the computers used to control drilling operations on the…
Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at the