Blatant promotional post coming up! (But not self-promotional.) Do you still have unticked items on your holiday present list? Then please consider this option: a calendar or two by my faraway friend Novita Listyani, a superb photographer and great friend who has been the main inspiration behind my taking up photography seriously as a channel for artistic expression. Take a look at her post about her calendars, and check our her public photography posts on Google+ or Facebook. I have already purchased her calendar for 2014 and several of her photobooks, and I can tell you that they arrived in excellent shape, printed on high quality paper.
Author: cogiddo
Journal citation distributions
Universities have become too enamored with journal impact factors. These factors are supposed to indicate journal quality. They are used heavily in evaluating the research of scholars, espcially at the time when professors are evaluated for tenure and promotion. But the impact factor of a journal is a bad measure of its quality. This is quite obvious when one looks at distritbutions of citations of journals. This post has an excellent discussion. H/T to Joerg Fliege for posting this link on Google+, where I saw it.
Frosty football
Still yellow after all these Autumn weeks
iPhone panoramic attempt to capture this great tree near my favorite coffee shop.
Morning in Abington
A good Q&A on climate change
The New York Times has a concise question and answer article on climate change, as the Paris conference on the climate crisis is about to begin. I recommend that everyone reads it and does something to press their government to work towards a good global agreement on mitigating the unfolding train wreck of the Earth’s environment. What homo sapiens needs right now is to show some communal sapience and find policies that will work effectively to prevent the threat to the very survival of humans that human-caused climate change threatens us all with.
Economists have said many times that steps such as establishing a price for carbon and a way to quantify the value of natural capital available to humans are our best hopes for mitigating the disaster. Even as the conference in Paris is unlikely to agree on such terms, I sincerely hope to see at least some pledges for cutting emissions coming from the worst offenders, such as the U.S., China, India, and a few other countries.
Heart of gold (-like metal)
Shell lamp
Ocean City Fishing pier
Thankfulness
The U.S. celebrates Thanksgiving tomorrow. For the 21st year in a row, I will be celebrating in the company of some wonderful friends in the house of one particular friend who has meant a lot to me during the darkest times of my life. At the start of the meal, we will all say what we are thankful for, and it will again be a variation of “family and good friends”, for good reason.
Tonight I want to expand on my answer. I am thankful for:
- The people who sustain me with love, first and foremost my better (much better than me indeed) half.
- The people who create and share beauty and teach me to do the same.
- The researchers, doctors, and nurses who have made it possible for my much better half to be in good health more than 15 years after a scary diagnosis, delivered shortly after we were married.
- The scientists, composers, poets, and artists of the past who have brought me the wonders of the world in its many splendors, a vast treasure that I will always be exploring.
- My young friends who will continue on the path that no single person can ever find the end of: the path of growing in learning and beauty. As a young kid, I wanted to learn everything. I know it can’t be done, but may my young friends attain a larger measure of it than I have managed.
- My students, past and present, who evince a thirst for knowledge and want to make the world better. They make the rigors of teaching worthwhile.
The curious incident of DD on the Web 