Author: Kyle
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Go With The (Nework) Flow, Part I
Some preliminaries: (1) I couldn’t resist posting a link to this New York Times piece about eHarmony, et al. The “Algorithms of Love” in the headline alone made it worth it. (By the way, I love it when copy editors choose to force “EHarmony” and the like when these ridiculously capitalized words come up at…
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PSM PSA
Thought this article about MBA-like degrees for scientists was interesting. Here’s something you don’t see every day: Sloan left engineering out of its grant specifications because, said Carol B. Lynch, PSM director at the Council of Graduate Schools, “engineers get it and already understand the value of a master’s degree.” I actually agree with her…
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Sunday Judgment I
Today’s subject: chagrin. At last, I’m unveiling today the probably-not-so-highly-anticipated Sunday column I’ve been promising for three or four weeks. Column isn’t really a good word for it. Weekly feature might be better; I’ve realized that the key to maybe keeping this thing regular is to keep it short. My advisor puts a premium on…
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News Dump
I’ve only sort of mentioned GENIUS (Global Evaluation of Nuclear Infrastructure Utilization Scenarios) in passing on this blog, but it’s a huge part of my life. I’m developing Version 2 of the code for my master’s degree work, which is supported by a fellowship from the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative/Global Nuclear Energy Partnership program. The…
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Wouldn’t That Be Nice
About a year-and-a-half ago, I started to get into tennis. My friend Emily taught me how to play, but I also learn a lot from David Foster Wallace. His essay “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness” (from A Supposedly Fun…
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Balancing Act, Part III: King Day Cold
All day in the back of my mind I was thinking about what might make a good Martin Luther King Day post (unfortunately, I did go into work, so in the front of my mind I was thinking about SQLite–a scaled-down database tool I highly recommend). Maybe the coolist MLK Day coverage I heard was…
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Balancing Act, Part I: Introduction
If you’ve been following CSC, you’ve probably noticed that it’s been a little science-heavy for a blog that aspires to straddle the letters-and-science spectrum. Blame the lopsidedness of my life, in part, but also blame the NFL playoffs. You see, my not-so-double life as a full-time engineering grad student and part-time freelance writer and editor…
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Insane in the Brain
Two crazy brain-related stories caught my eye today in Science Times. One of them, get this, involves involves a monkey controlling a robot on another continent. Monkeys and robots? Nice. Turns out we wrote a similar story in Wisconsin Engineer; there’s some (probably related) research going on at UW-Madison. The other story, perhaps more bizarre,…
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Miscellany
Apologies for the week-long absence. I’m sure it doesn’t seem to bode well for the future of this blog, but I’m honestly just trying to enjoy my last couple weeks of relative sanity before the new semester starts. And again, that means we’re pushing back the anticipated release of the CSC Sunday column. (Conveniently, that…