Recent Blog Highlights

• The May Scientiae Carnival is up. This month’s theme: Career paths, perspective, and changing self-mage. (Hosted by Cat Nap).

• A great piece on the history of the platypus is up over at What You’re Doing is Rather Desperate.

• See Jane Compute has a set of posts on “Is computer science a science?” (See Part 1, Part 1A, Part2, Part 3 is promised soon …)

• I saw Jorge Cham give a talk yesterday. It was an hour lecture on the value of procrastination. While the talk was content-light, it was incredibly funny and entertaining.

• Be sure to get your art break in today by visiting Drawing the Motmot.

Advice for New Faculty Members

I’ve just finished reading a book by Robert Boice entitled, Advice for New Faculty Members. It came heavily recommended, particularly as I’m planning to transition from postdoc to new faculty member soon. The subtitle of the book is Nihil Nimus (loosely, “everything in moderation”) which is about a succinct a summary as one can devise for Boice’s book.

Living an Extraordinary Life

Last week I attended a workshop called “Living an Extraordinary Life” conducted by the Handel Group, a life coaching company. I should prefix this whole post with an admission, I was (am?) a raging skeptic about this concept of “life coaching”. But this three day workshop came highly recommended and I thought it might be entertaining. Skipping to the punch line: it WAS an entertaining three days and I even learned a few things.

Hamming’s first class research

PLoS Computational Biology has a regular series on “Ten Simple Rules”. Last week the series stole their ten simple rules from Richard Hamming’s 1986 Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar transcript. The PLoS editorial brings attention to this wonderful transcript which should be read by everyone.