Please, please, please, please
February 10th 2011Translation Party (which takes an English phrase, translates it into Japanese, then back into English, then back into Japanese until an equilibrium is reached) had its 15 minutes of fame some months ago... read more
Android fleece hat
January 25th 2011Last week was miserably cold in Chicago, so over the weekend I set about making a winter hat. I had some bright green fleece lying around, so it turned into an Android head. From start to finish, it didn't take more than an hour and a half... read more
In memoriam: Rick Peterson
January 13th 2011I was deeply saddened to get word that Rick Peterson, CTO of Washington & Lee University, passed away yesterday evening after a long and difficult battle with brain cancer. Rick (right, with Dick Kuettner at Bamboo Workshop 4) was an indefatigable supporter of improving scholarship and teaching through the judicious use of technology... read more
January 2nd 2011
The Bamboo Planning Project, which consumed my life from 2008 to 2009, officially concluded on December 31, 2010, allowing me to publish a project I've been working on independently for over a year. You can read the full project description here... read more
Trotsky salad recipe
December 24th 2010I recently decided to make beet salad, but managed to forget to pick up every single ingredient in the recipe, save sliced beets. What I did have on hand was a lot of produce that had previously been bought and forgotten... read more
Blocking Jimmy Wales
December 20th 2010Jimmy Wales has been driving me crazy. I've donated to Wikipedia before, and I've been on board with previous donation solicitation campaigns, but I'm really sick of looking at Jimmy Wales, his urgent appeal... read more
Google Ngrams and religion
December 19th 2010Google Ngrams has been the death of my productivity since Friday morning. Google Ngrams are the new word clouds, but more exciting because the output is a chart-- and, as I discovered when I did a mock scientific analysis of university library graffiti... read more
Work-safe xkcd shirt
November 23rd 2010This summer, after I had amassed a delightful collection of geeky t-shirts, I was promoted to a managerial position where I couldn't really wear them to work. My solution? Design geeky fabric, print it at Spoonflower... read more
A 'Wikipedia model' for modernizing scholarly reference
November 20th 2010Here's the slides from the talk I gave on the Medieval Slavic Wiki at DHCS 2010.... read more
Qi Lu on Bing, Facebook and markets: economists needed, linguists need not apply
November 5th 2010A couple weeks ago I was fortunate enough to be invited to a talk by Qi Lu at the University of Chicago's Computation Institute. The President of Microsoft's Online Services Group, Mr. Lu's talk was on opportunities for collaboration with academics on the Bing search engine... read more