Coliving Reinvents the Commune for a Networked Age. I’m all for seeing this kind of cooperative, intentional scene rise outside of the traditional hippiecrunch nonsense crowd, but I hope they don’t think what they’re doing is so phenomenally new that they can’t learn from groups of people who’ve been living together for decades already…
Category: linkstream
A running log of all the links/bookmarks I share.
Categories
Hacker Hostels
A NYTimes article on the phenomenon of ‘Hacker Hostels’, group living situations in the Area of Bays with minimalist accommodations for nerdy collaborative types.
Categories
Teaching Good Sex
A Quaker prep school in Pennsylvania has a novel approach to sex education: it’s co-ed, respectful of the students, and sex-positive. The full semester of curriculum almost makes you think that the school wants the kids to have good sex — safe, emotionally fulfilling, and pleasurable — when they’re ready, and no sooner. What an idea. I knew I liked something about the Society of Friends.
An open letter to Donna Laframboise, who’s just written a book entitled “The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert,” about how mere graduate students have given input to and even played leadership roles within the UN’s IPCC process. Shock. Horror.
Categories
To: Professors; Re: Your Advisees
To: Professors; Re: Your Advisees. So many PhD advisors are so bad at academic and career advising, that there’s now a cash market for consultants who will do their job for them. Paid by graduate students of course.
Area Woman Excited To Finally Experience Unbearable Loneliness Of Having Her Own Place. This is, thankfully, not a problem we have here at Masala.
Categories
The U.S. Postal Service Nears Collapse
BusinessWeek on the End of Mail. Honestly, I can’t wait for the USPS to collapse. It’s a garbage delivery service as far as I can tell, and it sounds like virtually all of their plans for pulling out of the dive are related to serving that industry better. FedEx and UPS kill them on parcels, and real, personal mail is so rare these days I don’t think I’d even notice if it vanished.
Categories
Scientific Process Rage
Scientific Process Rage. Science doesn’t work like in the movies. In reality, there’s a lot more cursing and crying.
Categories
The PhD factory
Nature notes that the world is producing more PHDs than ever before. And asks it time to stop? Graduate education isn’t like a pyramid scheme, it is a pyramid scheme. And like all such schemes, it will eventually end in ruin for most of the participants. Something has to change. Why not sooner, and pro-actively, rather than later and in shambles?
Tarsnap looks like a good offsite backup option, if you’re afraid of snoops and spooks and gagged subpoenas, but not of the Unix command line. Spideroak looks like a more user friendly application with the same zero-knowledge ethic.