Last night some friends and I caught the Live Arts Theater’s production of Metamorphoses, Mary Zimmerman’s stage adaptation of Ovid starring an ensemble cast and a pool of water. It’s kind of Ovidian sampler, featuring some of the more famous myths (Midas, Orpheus and Eurydice, Psyche) and some of the lesser-known ones (Erysichthon, which in […]
I didn’t get the job after all. Rejections are never fun. Though I will say that the search committee was admirably fast about getting back to me, and I wish all search committees behaved with as much courtesy and consideration toward the candidates they don’t choose, because a prompt rejection is so much better than […]
I’m unplugging for the next few days. I’ll be back when life settles down a bit. In the meantime, here’s a favorite semi-obscure William Carlos Williams poem: The Attic Which Is Desire the unused tentof bare beamsbeyond which directly waitthe night and day—Here from the streetby * * * * S * * O * […]
Via Crooked Timber: Geoffrey Chaucer Hath A Blog! Go. Read. Now. And be prepared to laugh until you cry. (The Brokeback Mountain parody post slayed me: "At morwe-tyde, he sayde me, ‘Thou knowst I am not of the scole of Edwarde II.’" And the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight references! Hilarious, by Seinte Loy!)
Psst, readers in Charlottesville who read this blog for the music bits (all two or three of you): The Jefferson-Madison Regional Library’s annual Friends of the Library book sale is an unexpectedly good place to find classical music CDs. I spent the earlier part of the afternoon there and walked away with Cecilia Bartoli’s 18th-century […]
Today I learned about Musipedia from two of my colleagues. Sheer brilliance. It’s basically a Wikipedia-esque encyclopedia of tunes (classical, popular, and folk, plus hymns and national anthems), and you can search it by humming the tune you want to identify. I haven’t had a chance to try the latter feature (I need a microphone […]
As soon as I saw the Dynamic Einstein Picture Generator (c/o Rana), I knew I had to make this. Click to enlarge: (For the non-librarians reading this: He’s showing a class how to use science article databases. And yes, I also considered having him demonstrate Boolean operators: "search for (wave OR particle) AND quantum.") And […]
Link of the week: "This page is an electronic archive of images of people proving theorems while wearing sarongs." The Sarong Theorem Archive: quite possibly the definitive proof that no concept is too random, too specialized, or too implausible to have a web page devoted to it. Via Bitch Ph.D., who offers a sarong to […]
First of all, hello to everyone who’s read parts 1 and 2 of this set of posts, and I’m awfully pleased to have been in the latest Carnival of the Infosciences. (Thanks for the nomination, Tangognat!) If you’re just tuning in, I’ve been thinking out loud about why it’s so tricky to decide what parts […]