I keep meaning to try National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), but once again forget to do the prep work. I suppose that’s the whole point, give yourself a deadline and just do it. Well, maybe next year.

I haven’t done much blogging recently, mostly, and somewhat ironically, it’s because things have been too busy to actually write about them. Sierra’s doing well. She and Darwin are getting along great. They’ll run around the yard, the house or even the couch, if given the chance. There is much mouth fencing. She’s still very curious about the cats – poor cats. Our house has turned in to baby/puppy-gate central. Sierra went to the vet on Saturday. She’s in great health, although it seems that she’s about 50 pounds (from her size, I had guessed 30 – 40). Right now she’s sound asleep, snoring on the couch. Work is busier than usual. I did manage to interview a couple of candidates for an open position. One did very well, so I’m hoping to get approval to extend an offer next week. ...

Publishers of academic journals have a sweet deal going. The content is written by researchers. The publisher hires a few academics to edit the journal. The editors then identify reviewers in the academic community. The reviewers cull the wheat from the chaff and make suggestions to help turn the later into the former. For the papers that are finally selected, the researchers/authors sign over the copyright to the publisher, so they now own the intellectual property. The publisher solicits ads and then prints the whole thing. Once printed, the publisher sells the journal to everyone involved and their schools. ...

K’s mom suggested “Sierra as a name for the new dog. That works for both of us, so Sierra it is.

We’ve been needing to get another dog as a friend for Darwin. Today we drove out to Wake Forrest to meet a rescue dog that needed a home. She and Darwin hit it off and so we’ve brought her home with us. Her name is currently Holloway, but she doesn’t know it and we don’t really care for it. We need to come up with something different. We thought about “Goodall, but it doesn’t really roll of the tongue. I’m sure we’ll come up with something, but we’re open to suggestions if anyone has any.

I haven’t posted pictures of the squirrels in quite a while. Here are some from mid-September when they got big enough to move out of the aquarium and into a wire cage… Two or three weeks ago, we put them in the outside cage. Today we opened up the release door, we’ll see if they’re there in the morning.

The Chronicle of Higher Education today notes a report from Harvard regarding the number of women being offered tenure track faculty positions and the number accepting. In 2005-2006, women were offered 39% of the tenure track faculty positions. Unfortunately, only 20% of those accepting positions were female. This compares to 2004-2005 when 40% of those accepting tenure track faculty positions were female. There are two conclusions you can draw from this: ...

I recently had a small argument with a vendor selling biometric fingerprint scanners tied to your credit card number. He said that they were the greatest and most secure thing ever; I said that there weren’t any standards and that the security of the devices was questionable. I wish I had seen this earlier.

last week saw the 300 millionth American. I happened to be online about that time and saw the U.S. census office’s population clock hit 3×10^8: I don’t have too much to say about hitting 300 million people. It seems like something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, population growth helps increase the level productivity in the economy. On the other hand, it already seems like we’ve got too many people, particularly at the U.S. level of per capita consumption.

Statistically speaking, there are apparently 171 people with my name: HowManyOfMe.comThere are:171people with my name in the U.S.A.How many have your name? That sounds like 170 too many to me. On the other hand, K statistically doesn’t seem to exist. Once again demonstrating the problem with statistics: HowManyOfMe.comThere are:0people with my name in the U.S.A.How many have your name?