I know it’s good form to say where you’ve been when you disappear off the face of your blog for two weeks. Answer: bilge-pumping. That said, we’ll try to do better next time. Now onto to other things. A side project I do got some news coverage this past Sunday. And it was a pretty… Continue reading

Via Udell, a link to a paper that attempts to refute David Hockney’s theory that the sudden shift to photographic styles in the Renaissance was due to the use of optical projection. It’s an interesting paper because it introduces what seems to be a new method of objectively measuring geometric deviations of paintings from “reality”,… Continue reading

"I will be arguing, and this is a controversial opinion, that Madison’s support for democracy comes not because of a belief in the innate wisdom of the majority in society, but because he believes that in the absence of objective answers it is better for the honor of the individuals in society to allow everyone… Continue reading

The hardest thing to answer when you’re trying to start an institutional blogging community is what the legal ramifications of it are. It’s not only hard to answer — it’s impossible. It’s a legal question. You’re not supposed to answer it. The problem is that it’s hard with this sort of thing to start from… Continue reading

So, deciding I had not reached my full geek potential, last night I started a league in Fantasy Congress. Fantasy Congress is like Fantasy Football — you pick a team out of all available members of Congress and the Senate, and during a specified season your team competes — if my Senators “stats” (for legislation… Continue reading

So, like the WordPress junkie I am, I’ve been trying to recruit other Keene Staters here into my fold. Trying to get me some co-bloggers. And so it was I broke the will of one Jenny Darrow, who leads and implements much of the Academic IT initiatives over here. Her first posts are up and… Continue reading

OK, we’re not godlike. We ain’t Jim Groom. But we are launching our own WordPress MU intitiative: KeeneWeb. Our particular angle is going to be less academic, and more creating community on campus, community outreach, and (hopefully) getting some tradmed attention. We have some really talented people on our campus, it’s just hard for the… Continue reading

We want to go guerrilla video over here, and inspired by the Stanford ePortfolio crowd, we got a couple of SmallWonder cameras from TigerDirect. The idea is that they are less intrusive than a traditional camera, more portable, and easier to use, and that sets the video threshold to a level where people are more… Continue reading

UMW has put together a tools section for incoming freshmen and new faculty. The idea is to present to them six free low-threshold tools which will be their tools of the trade for the years to come. The tools are: Firefox, WordPress, del.icio.us, Google Docs, Google Reader, and Flickr. As much as I like to… Continue reading