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interdisciplinary heterodoxy

I love going to meetings where I can learn totally new stuff. One of the joys of astrobiology is that I can wander into a session on some research way outside my specialty and learn something new and interesting. It is like being a student again. I also like disciplinary workshops, and big in-field meetings, don't get me wrong. In an ideal world my conference trips would be roughly 1/3 workshops on something I am personally actively working on, preferably small workshops; another 1/3 would be to big meetings in astrophysics, giving overview and context, getting caught up on news and what is…

Rare Pygmy Hippo Born in Paris Zoo

tags: pygmy hippo, hippopotamus, Choeropsis liberiensis, endangered species A rare pygmy hippopotamus,Choeropsis liberiensis, was born in a zoo near Paris on 5 June 2007. Named Aldo, this pygmy hippo is approximately the size of a human baby. He is one of only a few dozen born in Europe, bred by a special program to increase the numbers of the rare species. [larger]. A rare pygmy hippopotamus,Choeropsis liberiensis, was born in a Paris zoo on 5 June 2007 after a 199-day gestation period. Named Aldo, this pygmy hippo is approximately the size of a human baby at 53 centimeters (21 inches)…

High School Biotech Students Make Big Impression at iGEM

This story reminds me of those days not so long ago when I was teaching molecular biology to a small group of motivated and talented high school sophomores and juniors. Basically, a group of high school biotechnology seniors from Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco, California, were invited to participate in the international Genetically Engineered Machine competition (iGEM), hosted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. iGEM focuses on the hot new field of synthetic biology: this field genetically manipulates proteins and other molecules that are constructed by living cells…

Recent Archaeomags

Archaeology mags have accreted on my shelf, though something's happened to my subscription to the always enjoyable Current Archaeology. I've written the editors. Populär Arkeologi 2010:4 opens with a look at the garishly painted reality of Classical sculpture. The only place where you could see white marble statues in ancient Greece and Rome was actually a sculptor's workshop. Then there's a spread by my buddies and Fornvännen contributors about this summer's rock-art discoveries in SmÃ¥land province, reported on here and here back in May. Johan Rönnby reports on a beautifully preserved…

They have a real talent there

Has anyone else noticed that you often only need to read the first sentence of anything written at Uncommon Descent to see them screw up royally? Especially, lately, if the author is Denyse O'Leary. Take this, for example. Textbooks often don't discuss extinction — the death of all members of a species — in any detail. That's news to me. I opened up my intro biology text, which is more a philosophy and history of biology book, and found 23 pages dedicated to discussing extinctions. It's been my experience that most textbooks will mention at least the Permian and K/T extinctions; they'll…

Is Rex Tillerson Going To Save Vladimir Kara-Murza's Life?

The State Department has been in the state of chaos over several days, between the Trump Transition Team failing to staff up the Executive Branch, high level officers leaving on their own accord, and so on. And a mere hours ago, Oil Man Rex Tillerson has been officially sworn in as Security of State. Given Tillerson's alleged and real links to Russia and Putin, his inexperience in matters of government and international affairs, his newness, and the state of the State Department, we are moved to ask the following question: Is anyone in the United States, in the State Department, going to do…

The Cosmic Background Radiation

This was the third and final piece of the puzzle that led to the acceptance of the Big Bang and the rejection of all alternatives: the discovery of the background radiation left over from the Big Bang. The "leading theory" before this was discovered was the Steady-State theory. Sure, they knew of Hubble Expansion. But they hemmed and hawed and said, "well, the Universe is expanding, but there must be something that happens that keeps creating new matter for free, and that's why the Universe can expand in a steady-state theory." So, they made one thing up to explain that (which violates the…

Robert Bork Gets a Job

Robert Bork has joined the faculty of the law school at the University of Richmond. According to the press release announcing his appointment, "Judge Bork is one of the most prominent and controversial American legal intellectuals of modern times," Smolla said in announcing the appointment. "He is widely regarded as one of the most influential conservative constitutional law thinkers in America." So far, so good. Hard to argue with that, Bork is both controversial and influential. But here's where we hit a roadblock: Bork developed his theories of constitutional law while professor at Yale…

Groundbreaking study every office employee needs to read

(Subtitle: There is no spoon...) Oh, those crazy Aussies. What will they think of next? The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute Objectives To determine the overall rate of loss of workplace teaspoons and whether attrition and displacement are correlated with the relative value of the teaspoons or type of tearoom. Design Longitudinal cohort study. Setting Research institute employing about 140 people. Subjects 70 discreetly numbered teaspoons placed in tearooms around the institute and observed…

Hagbard's Scaffold

Sweden's bedrock has been entirely abraded by the inland ice. It sanded down the country like a big wood planer, leaving smooth lovely outcrops known as hällar all over the place. This is the main natural prerequisite of Sweden's rich rock art tradition. Most of it dates from the Bronze Age, 1700–500 BC. Denmark hardly has any visible bedrock, so they don't have much rock art over there, and what they do have tends to be on boulders. It is thus hardly surprising that when you do find figurative art on boulders in Sweden, it tends to be in the provinces closest to Denmark. Near Asige church in…

Prized Possessions

I got to thinking about my most-prized possessions. Which are they really? Which of my stuff would I try to rescue if the house caught fire, or if we had to flee enemy troops and bring along or hide our valuables? One way to look at it would be to simply enumerate the most expensive stuff I have, the things that would cost the most to replace if they disappeared or would fetch a good price if I sold them. But YuSie and I don't really have any valuables. No gold or precious stones or artwork or other collectibles worth mentioning, and our home electronics are simple and years old. So's our car…

Scandinavian Attitudes to Nudity

Scandinavians are unusually cool about nudity in certain well-defined situations. The Finnish sauna is a well-known example. Within Swedish families, nudity is also commonplace, while many other nations feel that allowing your kids to see you starkers is tantamount to sexual molestation. (Which is a hot topic here at Scienceblogs at the moment.) My wife and I once had dinner with a young couple down the street, where the man was a Chilean. His parents also had an apartment on the same street. He told us, chuckling, that his ma & pa could never draw the blinds in their kitchen, because…

Hellmuth Makes an Ass of Himself - Again

Okay, so at least one guy was bothered that I revealed that Annie Duke won last night's Tournament of Champions poker tournament on ESPN, but there was still a LOT of fun to be had by watching it. Most notably, you could watch Phil Hellmuth once again make himself look like a total ass. During the tournament, they were showing snippets of interviews with him where, at one point, he said, essentially, "I know it makes me look bad when I talk so much after losing a hand. Why can't I just say 'nice hand' and be done with it? I'm working on it. I want to be known as the gentleman of poker instead…

Miles Davis Redux

Timothy Sandefur has written a brief reply to my post on Miles Davis, in which he states: I cant imagine Miles Davis being on someones second tier. If Miles is on your second tier, your tiers are broken. I suppose it depends on what we're talking about. As a composer, I would certainly place Miles in the first rank. Strictly as a musician, I put him in the second tier, but I fully recognize that this is only because, as Timothy noted, I don't prefer the Harmon mute sound that Miles was so fond of. So that means that while I fully recognize his genius, there are others whose music I generally…

Matt Ruff, Bad Monkeys [Library of Babel]

I first encountered Matt Ruff on Usenet, as a poster on rec.arts.sf.written. When I found out he had books published, I picked up Sewer, Gas, and Electric, which was good enough to put him on the buy-immediately list. Of course, that hasn't cost me a great deal of money, as he's only written two books since then, Set This House in Order back in 2003, and the new Bad Monkeys, which I bought and read on the way to St. John. Bad Monkeys is the story of Jane Charlotte, a woman who is in prison for a murder that she cheerfully admits committing, who has a remarkable story to tell. She claims to be…

Not the Same Old Song

The iPod giveth, and the iPod taketh away. Back in the day, there was this technology called "audio tape," which people used to record music. On a typical tape, you could record maybe ten or elevent pop songs, and then you had to flip it over, and record another ten or eleven songs on the other side. As a result, mix tapes of that era tended to come in distinct "sides." I always thought it would be amusing, in a just-about-as-dorky-as-the-guys-in-High Fidelity way, to make a mix tape where the two sides featured the same song titles in the same order, but with all the songs being different--…

Weekend Sports Round-Up

There were several sporting events worth commenting on this weekend, none of which I saw in their entirety. Hence, the combo recap post. Maryland-BC The Terps got beat by Boston College in a game that I didn't realize was on TV until Kate told me about it about midway through the second half. I'm still used to thinking of Sundays as football days. Maryland was down ten when I started watching, and made a game of it for a little while, before dropping behind by double digits again in the final two minutes. The game was pretty much consistent with what I've seen previously this season-- the…

Bath-Time Fluid Dynamics

SteelyKid's every-so-often bath was last night, and as always, she was fascinated by scooping up water in a hexagonal cup thing that's part of one of her bath toys, and watching it drain out. Which is completely understandable-- not just because she's a baby, but because there's a bunch of physics at work, here. I realize this is trampling on Rhett's territory, but I made a little video showing the physics part (in the sink, not the tub, because I don't want to have the pay the therapy bills that would come from posting video of SteelyKid in the tub): The explanation is laid out in the video…

Great resource on various MWP proxy reconstructions

A commenter here a couple of months ago posted a link to a truly great resource of paleoclimate proxy reconstructions covering various time periods all including the time of the Medieval Warm Period, or MWP. The MWP was a time of generally warmer temperatures in the North Atlantic region lasting from roughly 950AD to 1250AD. It was once thought to have been global in extent and perhaps as warm as or warmer than today. Notably, the 1990 IPCC report contained a rough, manually drawn schematic of global temperatures over the last 1100 years that placed the MWP well above the current global…

Children from low-income families at educational disadvantage

Children from low-income families in the US and Britian are disadvantaged in school, according to research just now coming out from the University's Centre for Market and Public Organisation. From a press release: ...According to the study, children from low-income backgrounds are raised in environments that fail to promote their cognitive, social and health development adequately and, as a result, they are more likely to begin school with deficits in their learning ability and social behaviour. The key findings of the research are that: The poorest fifth of children in the UK are equally…

Campus Traffic Patterns

The building where my office is is on a small hill off toward one edge of campus, and to get to the Campus Center, you used to be able to go out the main door, and go either left down a gently curving path to the other academic buildings, or right, where the sidewalk runs along the top of a slightly steep bank over to a driveway that then runs down to the loading dock at the Campus Center. Most people would choose the left-hand path, and most of those who took the right-hand path would cut down the bank rather than walk all the way out to the driveway. I say "used to" because there's a new…

links for 2009-06-05

Swans on Tea » Going UP (Very Precisely) "Ignoring that weâre working in English units, which scientists donât really do very much, the big thing that pops out to the budding, fully-bloomed, or dying scientist is the misuse of significant digits. Do we really believe the estimate of the houseâs weight is exact? No, itâs probably good to 2 digits, at best â the house could easily weigh several thousand pounds more or less than the estimated value. So the answer is that it takes 1,500,000 cubic feet of Helium to fill the balloons. You canât specify it any better than that. The same mistake…

Experimental Physics for Morons, #47

I spent the bulk of yesterday afternoon doing vacuum system work, specifically working on the system to feed gas into the atomic beam source. My feelings about this can be inferred from the Facebook status message I set at the time: "Chad Orzel abhors a vacuum." The apparatus I'm building uses laser cooling to decelerate an atomic beam of krypton atoms in a particular metastable state. This works brilliantly to slow metastable krypton atoms down, but the only atoms affected by the laser are krypton atoms-- everything else continues along unimpeded. As a result, the entire experiment needs to…

Another hydrogen sulfide (H2S) suicide, with altruism

A year ago we wrote about a death of a San Jose teenager from poisoning by hydrogen sulfide gas, or H2S. At the time, I had hypothesized that the death might have been from an attempt at synthesizing methamphetamine gone awry. But while one can mistakenly generate hydrogen sulfide gas from improper meth synthesis, I soon learned that intentional suicides with H2S is an increasing US trend imported from Japan. One can easily mix commonly-available consumer products to generate the gas and high enough concentrations can cause death. The gas acts in a manner similar to cyanide by binding to the…

Who will stop the rain?

They say the devil is in the details, and climate change is no different. While climatologists have agreed on the general trend of global temperature rise, it's proving quite tricky to predict regional effects. A new paper in the current Nature won't get us that level of precision, but it does take us one step closer, in the form of latitudinal precipitation forecasts. And it's not looking good. From "Detection of human influence on twentieth-century precipitation trends" by Xuebin Zhang et al (doi:10.1038/nature06025): We show that anthropogenic forcing has had a detectable influence on…

Things that I don't understand: 90's television shows and hairstyle edition

Specifically: why in heaven's name did Felicity choose Ben over Noel? I mean seriously folks: Noel was obviously the better choice. And I say this because he was of the geeky, computer literate set, and (I think, I think) was essentially representing all that is good and deserving of those who are single, smart, sensible and nice in the scienc-y community. And yet, and yet, Felicty chooses Ben! And fer chrissakes, this is even with the added variable that had Felicity chosen Noel, she would have also scored a free trip to Europe. So people, what is up with that? But wait, wait... Maybe…

The Daily Show is Bad Meme

Ed Brayton and Mike Dunford have been talking about a Washington Post article on a study that is concerned with the ill effects the Daily Show and Jon Stewart are having on our democracy. Basically people who watch the Daily Show are more cynical: Two political scientists found that young people who watch Stewart's faux news program, "The Daily Show," develop cynical views about politics and politicians that could lead them to just say no to voting. That's particularly dismaying news because the show is hugely popular among college students, many of whom already don't bother to cast ballots…

A Pen Name Unmasked, A Contest, A Literary Bonanza

Listen, we've got a lot to do here, it's a hectic post, lots of links, so stay awake, put down your cell phone, and keep those new windows open and visible in new tabs. World's Fair guest contributor Oronte Churm uses a pen name -- if it wasn't obvious. But he reveals his identity today in two spots. Check out the great interview with him at Litpark.com. It's good reading on its own. Go look real quick, I can wait. Now you're back. So then check out the new volume of Dispatches from Adjunct Faculty at a Large State University over at McSweeneys. This is your must-read of the day. I…

"Attentional Noise": ADHD and Serial Autocorrelations in RT

"It has attained a certain mystique in the physical and biological sciences because it manages to be both rare and ubiquitous. Examples [...] are found in quasar luminosity, tide and river height, traffic flow, and human heartbeat..." (Gilden & Hannock) Since the mid-90s, a small group of cognitive psychologists have turned their attention to variability in human performance which cannot be explained by existing theories and appears not to be affected by experimental manipulations. "One-over-f" or "pink" noise refers to one way in which human performance across time correlates with…

The Fatter we Get, the Less We Seem to Notice

Does this look "normal" to you? A significant number of overweight and obese individuals believe their body weight to be appropriate or normal and are satisfied with their body size. Misperception of overweight status is most common among the poor vs wealthy, African Americans vs white Americans, and men vs women. The unfortunate consequence is that overweight individuals who perceive themselves to be of normal weight are less likely to want to lose weight in contrast to overweight individuals with accurate perceptions. Such individuals are also more likely to smoke, have a poor diet,…

Kleck's DGU numbers

Steve D. Fischer writes: There are two kinds of lies to worry about. The first is making up defensive gun usages (DGUs) which never occurred, or which did not occur within the 1 year time period. The second is concealing DGUs that did occur because you feared that your DGU might have been of question- able legality. We've talked at length about the second circumstance. Let's look only at the first, then. Kleck reported 213 DGUs in a sample of 5,000. Assuming 59 million gun owners, that leads to about 2.5 million DGUs per year. The NCVS estimated 80,000 DGUs in that same gun-owning…

Laughing out loud

Yesterday evening our three year old niece was playing with our four month old daughter Nidhi. She (niece) would leap towards Nidhi and shout. At first, Nidhi seemed slightly fearful of this leaping figure. At around the third try, Nidhi started laughing loudly to everyone's surprise. Our niece, encouraged by the success of her antics, started a regimen of vigorous jumping. A positive feedback loop of leap-n-laugh ensued, much to our amusement. This was the first instance when Nidhi was laughing out loud in such a sustained manner. Her father - like all fathers do - found this heart-warming…

Brown Pelican Flies Off Endangered Species List

Weighing in at around 10 lbs with a wingspan of up to 8 feet, the brown pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis) is an impressive bird. Sure, it's the smallest of the pelican species, but it hardly lacks in size. Along the shores of Florida and the Gulf Coast, these birds are common. They swarm docks and piers wherever fish are being caught and cleaned, and their acrobatic fishing techniques often catch the eyes of tourists and locals alike. But it wasn't always so easy to see these large birds in action. DDT use decimated the pelican population to such low numbers that in 1970, it was placed under…

I get email

Lately I've been receiving a flood of messages from the anti-choice zealots. They've got one thing in common: they all contain lots of images of aborted fetuses, a common tactic used by these creatures to intimidate with horrible images. I'm not impressed. Here's a representative example, with the url to yet another horror show removed. Please read Abortion is more than a "procedure" and it is rare that a pregnancy causes harm or death to a woman. Maybe to better understand the murder that abortion truly is, you should study the photos in the link below. It is easy to desensitize yourself…

Is Your Report Biased? How To Tell.

I wonder if Rachel Brenc thinks the Iraq Study Group's report was biased. After all, of the ten members of the panel who issued the report, nine were all of one gender, with only one of the opposite gender. Oh wait a minute, it's okay. There were nine penises on the Iraq Study Group, so bias clearly isn't an issue here. Actually, there are two factors at play here. If the NSF report Beyond Bias and Barriers had been issued by a panel of seventeen men and one women, I am pretty sure Rachel and her ilk would still not have been happy with it. No, the fuss about the supposedly biased…

Yeah, could have seen that one coming.

When fellow ScienceBlogger Matt Nisbet announced that he had put a panel together to talk about "Communicating Science in a Religious America" at this weekend's AAAS conference, he was greeted with what I'll generously call widespread skepticism among many of the bloggers here (including me). Nisbet, you see, is a well-known opponent of what's sometimes referred to as the "New Atheism". His own talk will focus on the "New Atheism". And he included nobody on his panel who is actually a "New Atheist". A little while ago, he posted a copy of a press release describing another one of the…

Judging experiments

This is a field in which I am largely ignorant, so I will just report it and leave the commenters to interpret. Collider blog has a discussion of an idea reported by Charm &c. in a paper at arXiv by Bruce Knudsen, proposing that experiments should be assessed using Shannon entropy based on prior expectations. The basic idea is taken from Shannon theory using a term - surprisal - to denote the information content of an experiment, or a paper announcing the results of that experiment. Knudsen writes: The larger the surprisal of a particular outcome, the greater its (a posteriori)…

Hannah turning 5

Last night, before she went to sleep, Hannah (my eldest) said to me, "Daddy, in two more sleeps, I'm going to be 5 years old." Man, do they ever grow up fast. Takes me back to the beginning... August 27th,2001: Kate starts recording her contractions. She has contractions at 9:24am, 9:28am, and 9:33am. Kate calls Dave at about 9:30am and tells him that she "sort of has contractions," but that they are irregular. She's thinking that they are actually Braxton Hicks contractions. Dave asks if he should come home and skip his 10:30am meeting - Kate says no, it's alright. Kate has contractions…

The Best Science TV Show of All Time

This week's "Ask a ScienceBlogger" question is easy: The best science TV show is Mythbusters. Let's face it: most TV science programming is downright awful. It dumbs down the content, and tends not to explain the really interesting part of the question at hand. As I wrote recently over on Word Munger, Whether it's Nova or the National Geographic Channel, every documentary I've watched recently seems to follow the same pattern. 1. Introduce "mysterious" or "controversial" element 2. Bring in a tiny bit of factually relevant material 3. Interview a sexy or "culturally diverse" expert. There are…

Hitchens sets an example for us all

So I'm having a few niggling little health problems, but all is well and getting better; meanwhile, Christopher Hitchens mentions this: "Well, I'm dying, since you asked," Hitchens replied. "So are you, but I'm doing it faster and in more rich and fecund detail." And what does he do? He gallops off to Birmingham to debate that supercilious pompous nitwit, David Berlinski. And by all accounts, whips him into slime. I am extremely impressed with Hitchens right now. I'm not at all impressed with Berlinski, but then I never have been. He dredged up the rotting corpse of Hitler to claim he was…

How does the visual system learn?

Can you tell the difference between the images below? At first, they just look like fuzzy diagonal lines -- there doesn't appear to be a significant difference between them. But if you look at them closely, you begin to notice that the images at the top of the picture (category A) tend to have single dark bands, while the images towards the bottom have dark bands that come in pairs. The "phase angle" refers to the technique used to generate the images, and based on this angle, the images can be divided into two categories. With a lot of work, people can be trained to quickly distinguish…

Three Years After Katrina, We Remember. But Have We Learned?

In January of 2003, I sat in Joe Kelley's seminar at the University of Maine as he foretold the devastation that was to come to New Orleans. I'd never heard this chilling story before and listened intently as he explained that as far back as when The Big Easy flooded in the 1920's, scientists realized that the Mississippi Delta would continue to change its course (rivers have a habit of doing that you see). I began to understand that over time, the already vulnerable city faced increasing threat and felt dizzy amid the whirlwind of so many alarming facts and figures. The levees are…

Quick Thoughts: The People's Peking Man

I cannot write a full review of it yet as I am only about 70 pages in, but so far I am very impressed by Sigrid Schmalzer's new book The People's Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in 20th Century Science. Most of what I have previously learned about "Peking Man" (Homo erectus specimens from Dragon Bone Hill) had to do with its identification of it as an early human that, at the time, confirmed that Asia was the birthplace of humans. Unfortunately the fossils were lost when scientists tried to ship them out of the country for safekeeping at the onset of WWII, but surprisingly the…

The Assault on Reason, Open Thread

UPDATE JUNE 30: So. I've finished reading The Assault on Reason. I must say, it's not what I expected. My ultimate takeaway feeling is that this is a very powerful book, whatever flaws it may have. But that's getting close to giving away my review, which I'm still in the process of writing....so in the meantime, let's carry on the great dialogue we have going in the comments. I'll do so by making the following additional points: * In response to Mark Powell: I know you think Gore is making too much of the concept of "reason"--but it's clear that in using this term, Gore doesn't simply mean a…

Do our feet deceive us more than our eyes do?

Researchers have known for some time that people are surprisingly accurate at visually judging distances to objects as far as 25 meters away. If you're allowed to briefly look at an object up to that distance away, then blindfolded, you'll walk right up to it with great precision. If you walk halfway, you can throw a ball the remaining distance, again, quite accurately. But in 2000 Marla Bigel and Colin Ellard attempted a simple replication of the study: instead of viewing the object, volunteers were led blindfolded to the object and back, and asked to walk back to the object again. Now,…

Blazing Stupidity

I don't think I am being unduly harsh in saying that this was an incredibly stupid thing to do: U.S. Forest Service investigators were on campus last week to question Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity members about an Oct. 11 incident at the Lower Gallinas Campground in which a tree was cut down and burned along with plastic chairs and several other items, according to an NMSU police report. A road was also blocked and a large amount of trash was left at the campground. Forest service officers pulled several documents with the SAE letterhead from the fire. The report states an…

Mutating meme

Finally, I've been tagged by Pharyngula's mutating genres meme. I haven't done a meme since moving to scienceblogs, and now I've been tagged with a sciencey one (sort of). I don't know why I am so excited, but I am! Thanks Addy N. If you want to read the latest mutation, go below the fold. First, the rules: There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...".Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations: * You can leave them exactly as is…

The Psychology of Being Rich

If you won a million dollars, what would you do? This is a common and fun daydream to have which represents freedom to most people--being independently wealthy is the American dream. Would you share that wealth or hoard it greedily? I think most people would like to believe that if they received a sudden windfall, they would share some. But actually, this altruism is probably just an illusion, as demonstrated by a series of experiments by American and Canadian behavioral researchers recently published in Science (Vohs et al 2006). While being wealthy reduces feelings of dependence on others…

Cool Visual Illusions: Mach Bands

Discovered in the 1860s by Ernst Mach (hence the name), Mach Bands are actually a set of interrelated phenomena. Take a look at this image: From here The individual bands should appear as gradients, and they may even appear to be curved. In fact, they are all solid colors. Now look at this one: From here If you look closely at the area above the center two arrows, you should see a thin bright line (left-middle arrow) and a thin dark line (right-middle arrow). Once again, this is despite the fact that each of the three areas (dark, light, and in between) are solid colors. This figure (from…

The Transient Nature of Academia

I'm in Italy. Until I get back I've set up my blog to repost some old entries. Here's a post from last year. Yesterday, while driving up to Ipswich to spend the day at Crane beach and watch the see the annual July 3rd Fireworks, a group of us gabbed about the transient nature of being an academic. Living from place to place, moving until you are in your late 30s, an academic is expected to travel and see the world. You live in various places; experience the day to day hustle of different cities, towns and often countries. You absorb the local customs, the ideas, the history. You attempt to…