Random Notes
A few items from around blogdom that have struck me as interesting, but haven't quite led to full-blown posts:
- Lefty titans Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias have been spending a lot of time lately discussing the "electability" of various Democratic presidential hopefuls, and Digby hasn't talked about anything else in months, it seems. Kerry, Clark, Lieberman, Dean, Edwards, lions, tigers, and bears, oh my! everybody has their partisans, and they all keep taking shots at one another. I want to see the current gang of hoodlums and incompetents removed from office as badly as anyone else, so I sort of feel like I ought to have an opinion on this. Frankly, though, this whole thing just bores me to tears-- it's the same basic post, followed by the same basic comment thread every damn time. Worse, the whole thing feels sort of like watching pro football stories on ESPN in July. 90% of what gets said now is nonsense, and it's just too damn early to be thinking about this stuff.
- Of course, you can skip lightly over at least half of the comments if you just read Kevin's handy field guide to Republican advice for Democratic candidates.
- On the lighter side of politics, Steve Cook makes like James Burke and explains how Andy Warhol brought about the fall of Communism. If you don't read Snarkout regularly, well, why not, for God's sake?
- Over the in science-blogging world, Derek Lowe has a nice post about the difference between grad school and industry on the financial end of research. I was actually spoiled by doing my grad work at NIST, which can't quite match the deep pockets of the pharmaceutical industry, but was basically the Infinite Money Limit as far as atomic physics research goes. Two of the most surreal meetings I've ever been in took place in 1998, and dealt with finances. In the first, we were told that we had just had a very large sum of money added to the group budget, large enough that they weren't sure we could spend it by the end of the fiscal year (about three months off), so we should order any really large items of equipment we'd been thinking of right away. The second came a month later, by which point the message had changed to "We've overspent our expanded budget by $100K, stop ordering things."
- Were I the sort of blogger to have an Assignment Desk, I'd assign Derek to expand on the comment made yesterday by one of the chemistry faculty, that in today's FDA regime, ibuprofen never would've made it onto the market as is, owing to the fact that it's a mix of molecules with two different chiralities. As I don't have an Assignment Desk, I'll just note that that sounded like the sort of thing that would be interesting to know more about...
- And, finally, Teresa Nielsen Hayden has (as always) the definitive word on bloggercon, having gotten the same invitation letter I did. I'm puzzled by the selection criteria (I got a letter, Patrick Nielsen Hayden didn't. Huh?), and I'd be more flattered if they weren't asking for $500...
Posted at 9:33 AM | link | follow-ups |