Kyle Matthew Oliver

Author: Kyle

  • Taco Town

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    This New York Times story about taco trucks in LA is just brilliant. A really carefully crafted feature story that’s funny but hits on some serious socio-economic issues as it builds momentum. Any article that contains the expression “taco-loving public” should be shooting up the most-emailed list. It’s currently at number 10, I noticed. OK,…

  • Wiscmail Down

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    The campus-wide e-mail servers here at UW-Madison seem to be down right now. If you’re trying to get in touch with me via my main account and have somehow found your way here, note that you can reach me via my gmail account, a link to which appears in the second box on the top…

  • Non-Secular Programming

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    First, a Sports Night scene to set the mood: CASEY: Finish the story. DAN: The story is, we had a conversation. Seriously. Someone had clearly briefed her on my stuff with the public schools and I told her about my opposition to secular programs that are publicly financed. I really spoke up and she seemed…

  • Local News of National Import

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    It’s weird when you get news about your community from a national news source. Sadly, that happened today to this Madison, WI resident: Reluctantly, a Daily Stops Its Presses, Living Online (New York Times) Was I the only one who hadn’t heard about this? I’m not a very good local news consumer, so I guess…

  • Sunday Judgment VII

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    Today’s lesson: not all copy is created equal. If you have the final responsibility (or even part of it) for the copy in some publication, I submit to you that it’s a good rule of thumb to spend twice as much time copy editing the text in headlines, captions, etc. than you would on the…

  • Can This Just Be My Career?

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    My baseball partner-in-crime Matt sent me this awesome link to a New York Times story I missed about a month ago. If you want to know how tons of nuclear engineers spend their time, look no further. We run simulations like the one in the article. Except instead of flipping these virtual weighted coins to…

  • Playing Catch (-Up)

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    In honor of yesterday’s beautiful weather and the associated (and long overdue) first game of catch, I checked out a couple of baseball blogs today. Perhaps I’m too much of a Turnbow apologist, but I think this guy is partially misplacing the blame for today’s Brewers loss. I was only listening to it on the…

  • What I Did All Day

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    As it turns out, only this (click to enlarge): It’s getting to be that time of the semester where scheduling and time management become both more difficult (because the time-uncertainties in end-of-semester-type activities are so much greater) and more important (because of the number and importance of said activities). Case in point: the above plot…

  • New Insights Online

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    I linked to the March edition of our College of Engineering’s Teaching and Learning Insights newsletter last month, mostly because I’d written a piece for it. But it would be a shame if I didn’t pass the April link along as well. This issue rules. In particular, check out the feature about my friend and…

  • Science News: Patterns

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    All the stories that caught my eye in this week’s Science News digest had to do with violated patterns. (1) I was checking out the videos of the big Intel young scientist competition finalists and was pleased to see a few non-biological scientists getting some recognition. It seems like almost all of the elite young…