college
laelaps | February 29, 2008It looks like more bad news for my bank account; a few days again Gov. Corzine proposed what he called "a very tough budget" that would cut state aid to New Jersey colleges and universities by about $76,000,000 according to the New York Times. Whether the proposed cuts end up as part of the final budget will only be known as the proposal is finalized, but things aren't looking good for state college.
What does this mean for Rutgers specifically? In an e-mail sent by the president of the university, Richard McCormick, it was noted that we cannot be certain how the proposed cuts will affect…
laelaps | February 20, 2008Several nights ago I was attending a lecture, reading Lyman's Vertebrate Taphonomy, when I noticed someone standing beside me. A thin male student in a long grey coat walked into the room halfway through the lecture, peering around the classroom for someone or something. On a normal day I wouldn't have thought twice about it, but this transpired the day after the Northern Illinois University tragedy. My heartbeat quickened, I started to worry about what to do if this was an insane student, and I was somewhat relieved when he found a seat and took out a notebook.
Perhaps my anxiety in that…
laelaps | January 30, 2008When I first started attending Rutgers in the fall of 2001, the football coach had to come and practically beg the incoming freshmen to come to a football game. Promises of free t-shirts and plenty of seating were doled out to try and get attendance up, but the fact of the matter was that we didn't have a good team and no one was very interested in attending games. I've never attended a game and I don't intend to (I've never cared much for organized sports and don't have enough "school spirit" to go), but I have noticed a big change in the way the team has been viewed.
The fall 2006 season…
laelaps | January 22, 2008That's the advice my wife gave to me, anyway. It's the first day of classes here at Rutgers, and things got off to a rather hellish start. After driving back and forth to North Carolina over the course of the past weekend without any major problems, my car decided to stall out in the middle of a major intersection here in New Brunswick. I was able to start the unwieldy behemoth, cursing the sputtering and shaking giant as it barely made it around the corner to safety, but this problem really was all my fault. Even though I was toasty beneath the covers last night the temperature outside…
laelaps | October 10, 2007It seems that I'm down with the memes again, for as I was searching for some Thoughts in a Haystack I managed to once again become infected. Indeed, John has asked me to put my money where my mouth is when it comes to throwing around words like "pseudoextinction" in reference to my blog, and hence here's a fitting meme about the "evolution" of Laelaps;
In order to understand from whence Laelaps sprang, we need to travel backwards through the mists of time to the tumultuous year 2006. On October 18th, 2006 I wrote my first "real" science-oriented blog post about the lack of understanding about…