Both here and in Canada, I have frequently heard Guinness described as “a meal in a glass,” apparently on the basis that it is dark and flavourful. It is a position I have always found dubious, so I’ve decided to do some mythbusting.
I was going to compare Guinness Draught to orange juice, but that is [...]

I saw the following astonishing statement on Photo.net founder Philip Greenspun’s blog:
Harvard’s endowment… earned 16.7 percent on an approximately $30 billion stash. In other words, Harvard earned around $4.5 billion, tax-free. After deducting for inflation, in other words, Harvard earned enough last year to purchase a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, complete with a fleet [...]

According to iStat Pro, a system monitoring Dashboard widget, the battery in my 14″ G4 iBook only has 31% of the endurance that it shipped with, a bit more than a year ago. No wonder I have been unplugging it from the wall recently only to find less than an hour worth of power available. [...]

A practical question to those who have walked the path of grad school before me: when working on a major research project, how did you take notes on books, articles, and the rest? How did you file those notes? Also, how did you file documents and photocopies that served as sources? All the archivist readers [...]

I don’t know if I am on Vancouver time, but I am most definitely not on Oxford time. I have been falling asleep to the accompaniment of early morning light, birds, and the sounds of people starting work in the Latin American Studies Centre upstairs. Then, I have been waking up in the early afternoon. [...]

All told, Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth was quite impressive. The combination of factual information and moral or political argumentation was generally well done, though some of the personal asides about Gore’s life were somewhat tangential to the point being made. This is a film I would recommend to almost anyone: regardless of your [...]