Online social science.

Dang, I wish I had thought of this. A nice analysis of reading tastes versus SAT scores that really makes you go hmmmmm. The gist is that you get the ten most popular books at every college (which you can do these days), corellate that to the average SAT score of the college, and presto: books that make you dumb.

It's funny, slap more text onto this and you've got a masters thesis or a pretty damn good journal article (and one with more empirical data than many in scholarly library literature land). (thanks jessamyn)

Choking on war

Did you know that Miss Utah is an Army National Guard recruiter?

That little factoid was sent to me by the teacher of a class that is currently choking me with reading.

Well, not just that class, which is a grad seminar on the geography of war and peace (the two concepts, not the novel), but the whole quarter is a lot to digest right now, hence the silence from my end of the blogosphere. There's a half-dozen draft posts waiting for completion, a bunch of Chinese friends that deserve emails, and a thesis that needs to be worked on, but I find myself putting most of my effort into classes and work. That's not all bad. It's just the way it is.

We woke up this morning to 4 inches of wet, sticky snow. Good for packing snowballs. We are supposed to get more overnight. It's awfully pretty.

2 new folders that changed my life

Well, not really. Anyway, I have a new habit to go along with last quarter's '2 minute rule' habit. Before I blew town for the summer I made a folder called 'after China'. It's still got stuff in it, but it's now turned into 'nebulous stuff that really doesn't need to be dealt with right now.'

My second folder is called 'Sunday reading,' which is a reflection of it being the place I put everything one Friday afternoon as I was trying to get a handle on my inbox. It's basically stuff I want to read, but that's not at all timely or task oriented.

So while it might be too soon to tell (it's only week 2 of the quarter after all), it does seem to be keeping the overall size of my inbox down.

I still need to give a full report on my recent trip to Chicago. hmmmmmm...maps. As someone said in a meeting this morning: "Everyone likes to look at maps."

Bacon: the candy of meats