Month: May 2010

  • Book Review: Pale Fire

    Pale Fire is a 999-line poem written by John Shade.  It is also a novel by Vladimir Nabokov that contains an introduction by Charles Kinbote, the poem, and Kinbote’s extended commentary on the poem. On the surface, Pale Fire is straightforward.  The poem is a touching — but not, it would seem, terribly good —…

  • Book Review: Surviving Your Stupid Stupid Decision to go to Grad School

    Good jobs have barriers to entry.  Sometimes these barriers are natural (not everyone is capable of writing a novel or being a leader) and sometimes they are artificial (not everyone is born in the right place or to the right parents).  Many well-paid jobs requiring very specialized skills are protected by — among other mechanisms…

  • How to Get a Grant (from NSF, for Computer Scientists)

    Learning to write good grant proposals is hard. First, while we learn to write papers in grad school, most of us only learn to write grants after completing a PhD, and possibly only after getting a faculty position. Second, the hit rates for grants are typically lower than for papers. Third, it’s fundamentally harder to…

  • Book Review: Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air

    The premises are simple.  First, energy consumption must be met by energy production.  Second, use of fossil fuels is unsustainable.  Third, no magical technological fix to the energy problem is going to arrive.  Finally, to understand a sustainable future, we must think quantitatively.  That is, to proceed with a debate about, for example, wind or…