Kyle Matthew Oliver

Author: Kyle

  • Critic Signing Off

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    Kyle
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    Final columns by long-time writers are a fascinating genre all their own. I like the way NYT restaurant critic Frank Bruni handled it yesterday: by collecting a list of “questions that [he] was often asked or that [he] wished [he]’d been asked, along with responses.” Here’s my favorite: IS THERE ANY BEST, SAFEST WAY TO…

  • Advice

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    In this week’s video post: brats and beer, baseball, and biblical languages. Two of the three required an umbrella.

  • Glad Someone Else Mentioned This

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    Earlier today, Anglican Centrist asked a question that I’ve been wondering about myself and will paraphrase here: where’s the media tumult over the recent decision by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America‘s Churchwide Assembly “to open the ministry of the church to gay and lesbian pastors and other professional workers living in committed relationships”? Don’t…

  • (Video) Greetings from Alexandria

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    Well, I’ve emerged from the minor ordeal that was finishing up a master’s thesis (an interesting process that probably deserves further reflection at another time), recovering from same, and moving across the country. So I wanted to start checking in (hopefully regularly) about my somewhat different new digs and educational context. Most of you know,…

  • More Funny Found Science

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    Man, colloquia abstracts are a seemingly endless source of buried jokes. Check out the grad student dig in the following summary of a talk on using machine learning to study human and animal learning: Machine learning studies the principles governing all learning systems. Human beings and animals are learning systems too, and can be explored…

  • THW on the Radio

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    A couple weeks back, The Hacker Within‘s fearless leader Milad Fatenejad and I did an interview with Matthew McCormick of Hacker Public Radio. I got notification today that it recently went live. Aside from having to suppress the occasional wince at my usual longwindedness, I had fun re-listening and think it turned out pretty well.…

  • Some atoms? Some CHEMICALS?

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    I was looking up some citation information on a text I use a lot but don’t have on me today when I stumbled across this wonderfully bizarre customer review on Amazon. Those of you familiar with Benedict and Pigford’s Nuclear Chemical Engineering may find this especially funny, but I thought the prose was amusing enough…

  • Another Sweet Google Tool

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    Three events recently converged to respark my interest in a little mini-project I tried to do some time ago: (1) At yesterday’s Python subgroup meeting of The Hacker Within, our resident Pythonista got me all excited about developing easy web applications in that language. I write a lot of Python for pre- and post-processing of…

  • Cross-posting: St. Francis Forum

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    I put an item up at St. Francis Forum that I figured I should post here as well: I had the opportunity (at Bishop Miller’s suggestion) to preach at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in addition to St. Francis House a couple Sundays back. I wanted to post the sermon because I know that some folks…

  • Doctorow Did It!

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    As I was catching up on my usual Web comics this morning (which were really on fire this week–see links in sidebar at right), I was especially amused by a thought that occurred to me when reading Wednesday’s xkcd. If you’ve seen Cory Doctorow’s excellent essay “Wikipedia: A Genuine H2G2—Minus the Editors” in the mostly…