Kyle Matthew Oliver

Author: Kyle

  • Gaining Energy

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    Kyle
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    I got one of those thirty-hour stomach bugs this weekend, so I didn’t get to unveil my cool Sunday column this past weekend because I could barely get off the couch. Stay tuned! As I slowly regain my own energy, I thought I’d pass along two energy-related news items, complete with short, grumpy commentary: Detroit…

  • Hitting the Links

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    I added a bunch of links to my work today, and it occurred to me that two of the items I posted do an excellent job of representing the kind of complementary writing I’m trying to do in this blog of letters and science. I wrote them both a few years ago, but I’d still…

  • Point of Contention

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    Is The Tipping Point‘s central tenet–that “‘social epidemics’ are ‘driven by the efforts of a handful of exceptional people’”–correct? Some networks theorists writing in Journal of Consumer Research don’t think so. I won’t start my “Network Flows” class until the end of the month, but I think these guys’ central point makes sense: Dodds compares…

  • Molten Swing

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    This article from Power Engineering caught my attention today. One common claim about renewable energy is that you can’t use it to make “base load”–the electrical power you need available all the time: day or night, rain or shine, wind…or no wind. My gut tells me that the claim is effectively true, though of course…

  • New Year’s News Wrap

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    Mourning yesterday’s Badger loss in the Outback Bowl due to a “gutsy” but selfish and foolhardy performance by Tyler Donovan, subpar secondary play, and questionable play-calling (you guys had all three of your gifted running backs available and this is the best you could do?!), I decided to just do a quick news wrap-up today.…

  • Challah! Hallah! Holla!

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    As I’ve written elsewhere, my sister is a baker. Yesterday, to fulfill some Church-charity-auction-related obligation, she was baking a couple loaves of Challah (not to be confused with Ciabatta, as I eventually found out). Dutifully typing away at the terrific kitchen counter where I do all my work when I’m at my parents’ house, I…

  • Pryor Precedent

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    Kyle
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    Great article in the Times today about Chris Rock and his upcoming New Year’s show. I’ve been thinking about Rock lately in light of Dave Chappelle’s mostly MIA status. It reminds me of an interesting Rock/Chappelle moment from when a good friend of mine was in UW-Madison’s course Black Music and American Cultural History (which…

  • The Bohr Identity

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    Kyle
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    I have a favorite physicist. While that puts me in a relatively small subset of the American population, I suspect that among members of that subset my choice is relatively common. After all, few physicists this side of Einstein and Newton are more well known than Niels Bohr, and even fewer of them have had…