Mssv

Tough Love for PhDs - Brad talks about the mismatch between tenure-track positions and PhDs granted as US universities (I don’t know what the situation is in the UK). Good job I have four years to figure out what I want to do.

A while ago I mentioned that I was thinking about setting up a collaborative weblog akin to MetaFilter, called (appropriately enough), GamesFilter. Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on it on and off during the periods in which my brain refuses to accept any more information about neuroscience.
GamesFilter has been running for the [...]

A couple of days ago over dinner, I was having one of those typical university conversations about whether the Internet had really changed the world. As was pointed out, “We’re still not buying all of our groceries over the web.” I replied with something about delivery of large perishable goods and how in fact the [...]

Readers of mssv.net will remember my ill-fated expedition into Mozilla Mail 1.3. There was only one reason behind the expedition - to get rid of the 50+ junk mails that I receive per day.
In itself, the junk mail is not that much of an annoyance compared to other things in life. However, it is something [...]

4,000,000! - the population of New Zealand reached 4 million today. New Zealand has a very nice statistics website which sets an impressive example for other countries (via MetaFilter).

A Note to Parents about our Magic Wands at Alivan’s Wand Makers - “…an Alivan’s wand is only meant to stimulate your child’s growing imagination. Our company does not, in any way, support the dark side of magic. In fact, we completely discourage it.” I love this kind of stuff.

Tom Watson (Labour MP) may be under the scrutiny of the web for his patently joking Teens Page but I’m more impressed by the fact that he actually has a weblog. Not just that, but it’s regularly updated, written by himself, and runs Movable Type. Even better, it isn’t a constant litany of propaganda. How [...]

The Best of Craigslist New York - for the non-American readers here, Craigslist is an online community consisting of (I believe) mainly tech-savvy people looking for jobs, chat and romance. Their ‘Best of’ list is always full of fun ads and messages. Quite apart from that, it’s always interesting trying to figure out all the [...]

MetaFilter has just become energised about a new project: MetaFilter Online Journalism (aka MoJo). You can see the origin of this idea in this thread. It is basically being put forward as some kind of website in which members of the public will be able to perform collaborative and investigative journalism, something which has been [...]

There’s been a bit of a ruckus on MetaFilter recently regarding a journalist, Laurie Garrett, who attended the World Economic Forum and sent an email to her friends filled with her personal thoughts an speculations about the conference. The email was of course not intended for publication, but this being the 21st century and what [...]