George Sodini’s blog

George Sodini, the gunman who murdered four people and wounded nine others in Philadelphia on Tuesday maintained a rambling online blog for the last many months. The blog has now been taken down, and I am not sure how long the copies of it that remain in various other news sites will survive, so I [...]

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Blogger’s fatigue?

29  last month. Just 14 posts in 24 March days. Really? And for much of last year I used to average 50 posts a month…

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Packed schedule ahead

My calender for the next five weeks includes over twenty days when I am out of town. I am doing three mountaineering trips, each three days long (and occuring in altitudes above 10000 feet and temperatures twenty degrees below freezing); then there’s a talk I give in San Diego, a week-long conference in Arizona and [...]

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Chetan Kunte and NDTV

(See updates below) (This post, for legal reasons that will be obvious, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.) Gaurav Sabnis writes about the unfortunate case of blogger Chetan Kunte, whose views about Barkha Dutt’s “unethical reporting” apparently caused NDTV to browbeat him into deleting the post and replacing it with an apology. [...]

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Off to Switzerland

I will be in Zurich for the next three days to give a talk and take part in an interview. Blogging may or may not happen during that period; it would depend on time and internet connectivity.

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Another policy change

I have changed the Creative Commons license that governs the content of this blog. In plain English, the change amounts to the following — now you can quote, republish, adapt or otherwise use any part of this blog for non-commercial purposes, provided you attribute me  as the original source. This is more restrictive than my [...]

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Comment policy

Here’s a simple question — who owns the comment you post on someone else’s blog? One view is that the blog is the blog owner’s property and he owns all the content on it — including the comments — and has the right to do whatever he wants with them. Thus he may choose to [...]

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Why Muse Free?

A reader asks me why I call my blog “Muse Free”. I generally think that names should speak for themselves but in this case I don’t mind giving a bit of an explanation. First off, thought and freedom are two concepts that are very dear to me; and who doesn’t want a name to consist [...]

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A query for my readers

Do you find that this website is much slower over the past few days? If so, is your problem limited to my site or are you experiencing it on other wordpress blogs as well? As for me, everything from viewing my own blog, posting, accessing my dashboard etc has been really slow for the past [...]

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The stressful process of job applications

Seventeen postdoc apps sent off, (around) thirty more to go. Thankfully, the whole process is free and (mostly) automatic. I love Mathjobs. I hope to come out of hibernation some time next week.

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Blogging without obligation

I could give many (true) reasons for the lack of substantial posts over the last eight days or so: I have been travelling, I have been applying for postdoc jobs, I have been very busy otherwise. But why bother explaining myself when I can point to blogging without obligation? (Hat Tip: A commenter in QI’s [...]

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Feuding libertarians

I would not be doing my job as a libertarian blogger if I did not link to the blog war between Todd Seavey on the one hand and Kerry Howley/Will Wilkinson on the other (with minor roles played by Helen Rittelmeyer and Julian Sanchez). The best link (in the sense that it points to almost [...]

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I am back!

Had a great week backpacking in the Sierras. Some pictures are below. A fair bit seems to have happened while I was away; notably the economic panic culminating in the massive government bailout and Obama’s bounce-back in the polls. Will post more on these and other stuff over the next few days. For now, here [...]

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Backpacking trip

I’ll be away for the next six days backpacking in Sequoia National Park, so there will be no posts till next Sunday. Have a nice week!

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Liveblogging Gustav

Mark O’ Malley is ignoring mandatory evacuation orders and staying in New Orleans. There’s a good chance I’d have done the same. Riding out a category 4 hurricane is highly risky, even when you are in a sturdy three-story house with enough supplies to last several weeks. On the other hand, this is, simply, a [...]

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