Steve Carell and Stephan Colbert on Negative Campaigning

Batman vs. The Penguin

This sums up last night's debate about as well as anything.

Red Sox in New York

With the crazy hours I've been keeping and no tv, its been difficult to keep up with all the Red Sox post season shenanigans. I was going to keep up with everything on the radio, but it turns out the only a.m. stations I can get are insane talk radio people. As fun as it is to listen to the most racist conversations about Barack Obama I could imagine or about how our secret alien overlords are trying to control us through messages encoded in The Day After Tomorrow, I really just wanted to hear some baseball.

After hunting around online I found a few options of varying legality. Somewhat suprisingly, the best option was offered by major league baseball itself which has a deal where for a few bucks I could stream any baseball broadcasts off the MLB site. Its called mlb.tv and aside from some small sound quality issues, it works pretty well. I mean, it sounds fine on my laptop speakers, but I can pick up the compression in my headphones. However, for the price (and the internet connectivity in my apartment) it works well.

Apparently if your Phil or someone else crazy enough to want to do this, you can stream multiple video feeds at the same time to keep track of every game as it happens. Since there is only two games happening every day now... and I only care about one of them... I just chose the radio option. I'm thinking next year, I'll have to invest in the yearly package so I can annoy my office and lab mates 160 times next year.

Oh, and apparently Jacoby Ellsbury has a blog now? Actually as far as blogs go, I think Curt Schilling's is better.

Whats going on?

I don't have television anymore, but I do try to keep up with the news using online news feeds, podcasts, and the like. Despite all of this, I still had a hard time figuring out this economic situation. I've had a very hard time finding any sort of comprehensive summary online or anywhere else.

So whats going on? The best summary I have been able to find is a set of podcasts from Chicago Public Radio. I've included links below where you can download the podcast or transcripts.

This podcast is from May and summarizes how everything started.

The Giant Pool of Money

This a the more recent podcast that details the situation as of about a week ago.

Another Frightening Show about the Economy

The people responsible for the above podcasts have started a podcast through NPR as well as a blog detailing what is going on a daily basis.

Planet Money Podcast
Planet Money Blog

I'm not sure I still understand everything, but the above links helped me to wrap my head around the situation. My conclusion: This crisis is the result of people being criminally negligent and criminally greedy.

Things are going to get worse...

Applying to graduate school has become ridiculously competitive, to the point where its difficult to get in without some sort of work experience. However, there is some indication that things are only going to get worse. Click the images to enlarge.


The image is from PhD comics, but the data is pulled from legitimate sources. Will undergraduate students now look to graduate school as an alternative to entering the workforce? Will people already working return to school in order to boost their credentials? All signs point to yes. I'm not sure how this will effect the application process, but if graduate funding remains as tight as it has been for the last eight years, its going to become even more competitive as more people with more qualifications apply for a dwindling number of spaces.



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