Books

My students frequently complain that I stay up late at night dreaming up fiendishly difficult homeworks and exam questions for them.  To which I reply, I do much of my best work in the morning.  But now I have help and inspiration!  During a recent visit to the local Barnes and Noble to pick up Read more

One of my pet projects is writing across the curriculum.  A common complaint among my fellow faculty members is that students can’t write intelligible statistics reports.  A few of us have gradually added a "writing component" to our statistical methods courses; of course this means we need to develop readings and exercises for our students.  Read more

One of Steven Saylor’s latest Roma Sub Rosa novels, The Judgement of Caesar, is out in paperback, and I couldn’t resist.  As usual, our hero, Gordianus the Finder, is right in the middle of events, this time with Caesar and Cleopatra, and it’s great reading.  Saylor always manages to connect the ancients to us moderns: Read more

Dr Richard Brougham, a philosopher at San Antonio College, has been giving me pointers about the philosophy of science for my fall freshman seminar, Systems of the World. One of the philosophers Dr B put me wise to is Susan Haack at the University of Miami. Her article on preposterism in the Skeptical Inquirer made Read more

Young Allison caught up with me after the seminar on Friday to recommend Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s stories. I just laughed and told her that I had read them as they were published, way back in the 20th century. They still are funny. I recommended Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, which is great fun, and is the Read more