From: Dreams from my father

The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have powerand that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition.

From: Dreams from my father

"If you have something, then everyone will want a piece of it. So you have to draw the line somewhere. If everyone is family, no one is family."

Are students overworked?

A Spiegel article on student work-overload.

What being an optimist really means

"My mother's an optimist. She's always hoping for the worst."
Heard in a Columbo series (1st season)

Batch replacing a big deal in Mac OS X

Used to be that in the old linux days one could just use the commandline tool rename to mass-replace filenames with new ones. Amazingly, Mac OS X does not have this utility. Seems like you have to pay more and more for less and less.

After searching for a source code copy of rename (and no, I didn't want to write my own, simply because I know this script/program exists), all I found was MassReplaceIt. It works, but replace was so much easier to use.

Citation statistics

Here's a great article on citation counts (h-index etc).

And if this article inspires you to find out your own h-index, and you don't have access to Web of Science, google "scholar index".

Replicable analyses

I plan to store my published data and code here: thedata.org

And an interesting book to read on data management is here.