The hell you say

This is exactly the kind of stuff that motivates me to blog anonymously. This study finds a high correlation between [high IQ] and [religion less important].
Gene Expression: IQ Religiosity Redux

Search engine terms

Do you ever look through the list of search engine terms that have brought web surfers to your blog? It’s an exercise in the bizarre. I actually get a lot of people looking for tips on using Word or LaTeX, so it’s nice to know that my blog might be helping a few people out. But I also see some strange or just plain funny search terms. For example, a few weeks ago I had a post called “Toby Keith: Jackass” that lambasted the country singer for his offensive and borderline racist “The Taliban Song.” But I was getting a lot of hits from people apparently looking for the lyrics, and I really didn’t want to be a party to further disseminating that material, so I deleted the post (but if you’re looking for this gist, it was this: “Toby Keith is a complete jackass”). And hopefully that will help the lost soul that found me through this search:

toby keith nice or jerk

I have two theories about this query:

1. The person was looking for an article that was entitled something like “Toby Keith: Nice or jerk?” But I don’t find this theory very persuasive, because who would take the time to write an article with such an indecisive title?
2. The person was trying to determine whether Toby Keith was nice or a jerk, and thought that Google would just spit out the answer. Maybe we can start a new search engine called Jerkle.com that will definitively classify all public figures as either nice or jerk. Then I could finally decide what I think about Oprah…

Help!

I can't turn the sound effects off on my Mac. Under System Preferences: Sound I have Play user interface sound effects unchecked, but it isn't working. I hate hearing a little "dink" everytime a dialog pops up.

Anyone know how to fix this? I'm thinking maybe there's a prefs file somewhere that I could trash, but I'm not sure where.

Update: Okay, so I think that the user interface sound effects are off (I don't hear noises when I delete files, for example). But how can I turn of alerts? Is that even possible?

Update/Resolution: The slider under System Preferences: Sounds is for alert volume only. For some reason, I was confusing this with the system volume. Duh. And thanks to Jen for bringing that to light.

Shhh

Okay, I’ve decided what to do about all of the truly freaky issues involving blogging, anonymity and professional and academic conflict of interests. I’m taking this blog into stealth mode. That means that I scrubbed mentions of my name or links to sites that could easily identify me as the author of this blog. My name is already on a few things here and there, but hopefully some time and a Google index update will take care of most of those. It’s probably not possible for me to be completely anonymous, but as of right now, I think you’d have to work pretty hard to identify me based on the content available.

Yes, I’m probably over reacting, but my career is tremendously important to me, so I’d rather not take chances. So if you already know who I am, please keep it on the DL. Thanks!

Cool OS X tip

If you copy a bunch of files in the Finder, the file names are stored in the clipboard as a text-based, carriage return-delimited list. Useful for programming — you can copy a bunch of files, fire up your text editor, and paste the file names right in.

The new themes rock

That is all.

Office 2007 Beta

I finally managed to download the Office 2007 Beta today. The install took a while and I couldn't completely activate it, I think because the MS server load is so high because the beta came out today. I've never beta tested for MS before, so I don't know exactly how it works. But I'm hoping that I basically have an activation key that I'll be able to use even after the software ships. We'll see.

So far my impressions are mixed. The functionality all seems pretty much the same. What has changed are style and user interface. In style terms, Office 2007 is shinier. To me it almost looks cheesy, but I'm told that some people thought that about OS X at first, too, so I'll see if it grows on me. 

The user interface changes are significant. Tools (all I've tried so far is Word and Excel) are organized along a ribbon at the top of the screen, and the standard menus (file, etc.) are gone. I think that for casual users, this will be a plus, since features are less buried in menus. But for hardcore users, the new setup might be problematic. Only a few functions are always visible. The rest pop up in huge, magnified windows. So making a lot of changes might involve either pointing and clicking constantly, or copign with having screen real estate hogged by large dialogs.

In particular, the styles menu only shows a few styles at a time, and you have to click on it to open a panel that reveals more (or scroll through a tiny little window, which just isn't an option because Word is bad at guessing which styles you need to be readily available). But opening the styles dialog takes up a lot of space, so you either need to decrease the canvas, or try and look past the huge styles list.

One feature that I'm really excited about is the new equation editor. As someone who uses math in his writing, I get mad that software vendors often overlook the need for equations and mathematical formulas. Word has always had a stripped down version of Design Sciences MathType included with Office. It worked, but it was ugly and slow (unless you figured out the keyboard shortcuts, which made things substantially easier). The new Word has an integrated equation editor that doesn't look like it uses MathType or Microsoft Equation 3.0. Instead, everything is point and click. It's probably a bit more powerful than the old solution, but I miss the keyboard shortcuts. 

All in all, I don't know if anything is a must-have, and I haven't had a change to play around with much yet, but I'm sure I'll be blogging about big changes as I discover them. 

Yipes —

Here's a question for everyone:

Lately I've been hearing/reading a lot of scary stuff about job candidates, particularly in academia, being denied jobs because of (or partially because of) their blogs. This frightens me. A lot. At first, I thought "well, I don't really make any outrageous political or personal remarks on my blog, so I should be okay." But one of the comments from this article was that a job applicant that blogged about technology came across as not being interested enough in academics, and wasn't hired because they didn't want him running of to the Comp Sci department. That might hit me. And I'm way past the point of anonymity here – my name is all over the place, indexed by Google, linked from many other sites and blogs.

So I'm thinking about dropping this blog cold turkey and maybe starting up an anoymous blog elsewhere. I don't want to do this, but I do need to think about my future.

Comments are open, and if you can dissuade me, please do. Especially, if you're a prof somewhere, I'd love to hear your input.

Thanks

Quote of the day

CNN.com – Reclusive Linux founder opens up – May 18, 2006

At the same time I don’t think this whole “openness” notion is new. In fact I often compare open source to science. To where science took this whole notion of developing ideas in the open and improving on other peoples’ ideas and making it into what science is today, and the incredible advances that we have had. And I compare that to witchcraft and alchemy, where openness was something you didn’t do. So openness is not something new, it is something that actually has worked for a long time.

I think this is why (a) open-source apps are so popular at the university level and (b) why so many open-source apps come from universities. The spirit of sharing information is pervasive in that setting, and everyone just wants to look at what others have done, add a little bit, and pass it on.

Last.fm

Last.fm is awesome. I used to use it primarily to keep a feed of the last few tracks that I listened to in i-Tunes on my blog. That was about a year and a half ago, and I kind of forgot about the service. Then I went back…

Maybe they had this all along, I’m not sure. But you can download the Last.fm player (there are versions for Win and OS X, and it’s free) and either

1. type in the names of some artists that you like to get a streamed radio station including those and similar artists, or
2. enter a premade station address directly

Personalized, free streaming radio!

If you know what’s good for you, you’ll listen to my Last.fm station:

lastfm://artists/1006142, 1001531, 4192, 1233196, 3940,2784, 1001909, 1285410, 1041714, 1235700, 1006234, 1000130, 1235644, 1001276, 1233239, 420, 1233770, 1000952, 1298659

It’s indylicious. Make sure to get rid of the spaces after the commas when you paste it in (hint: go to controls > enter station address to input the station location directly).

Update: Oh, and it’s adaptive. So you can single out tracks and say “love this track” or “ban this track.” Presumably this helps Last.fm hone in on your particular musical tastes.