Category Archives: Blogs

The Guardian has pretty good web coverage, and they carry a pointer to the web site of King Norodom Sihanouk

Each day, His Royal Highness King Norodom Sihanouk scribbles a few pages of French in his notebook, which is then scanned and posted on the internet (Norodomsihanouk.info) in what is thought to be the first sovereign's weblog.

The royal blog has proved popular in Cambodia – as popular as any website can in a country where more than a third of the 12 million population live on less than a dollar a day. In part, this must be down to the king's decision to handwrite – as opposed to typing – his feelings, which affords a rare opportunity to read the royal state of mind. On difficult days, the king's memoranda are fissured with furious underlinings, scrawled with frantic disregard for page rules, along with bubbles of emphasis added in the margin. He also has a charming habit of separating his sections with three little Xs.

Brad DeLong's Request for help

My two children get what the payoff to reading well is immediately and completely. My two children get what the payoff to writing well is as well: they understand that it is fun now and it will be important later on if they want to have options to be able to write quickly, clearly, and coherently.

But math. Math textbooks are remarkably dry. How can I persuade them that math can be fun, that they will be able to learn and calculate interesting things if math is their friend, and that their options later on will be much, much greater if only they apply themselves to math now?

So far, I only have twenty-three problems that I regard as interesting and amusing enough to hand them in an attempt to propagandize for math. But I want more: I want to have one hundred…

Have a look at Brad DeLong's Collaborative Website: OneHundredInterestingMathCalculations.

Back from the dead? BlogShares :: Coming BACK Soon. “BlogShares should be back sometime today — DNS propogation will delay this a couple days for some users.”

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I never did quite get around to figuring out the rules, but it was interesting to see who linked to me and watch my “valuation” gyrate (but generally rise) for no discernable reason. Now it's dead. BlogShares – Closed Down. I think I had a 'market share' of something just over .0065% towards the end there…

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David Pollard (who has a wonderful, wonderful Blog called How To Save the World asks, Is the Blogosphere Sexist?. I think it's a fine essay, but I wonder if it's the right question.

First, I'd like to know, 'Compared to What'? I teach on a faculty that has far fewer women then men, so I'm prepared to believe there is a fair amount of sexism remaining in society. (On the other hand, we have had three female Deans in our fairly short history, including one whose ghost all but still walks the halls, so it's not all bad news here.) So the question may not be “are blogs sexist” but rather “to what extent to do blogs replicate or transcend existing patterns of behavior”.

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It seems I am not the only one to have modified their link to the Volokh Conspiracy to eliminate the high volume of posts from the most voluable and least interesting conspirator. As of yesterday, the link in the left margin leads you to a Cori-free version. Not to censor, but because that's how I decided I liked to read it.