Adventures in Onionism

Well, it's been a fascinating few weeks. When research is going well I actually sort of enjoy insanely long days in the office every single day of the week with no time to even do my laundry or buy groceries. Or cook. Or eat. Today I have a minute to breathe, but only because I'm all the sudden really worried that my data are too good to be true in that they might exhibit evidence of time travel. (You see how I made "data" plural there? I hate that. Next I'll be speaking only in passive voice or talking about myself with the the royal we.) Obviously this means I've goofed or my model is mis-specified or something. Anyway, my birthday was a while back so I ran a fun midnight 15-miler up to Inspiration Point with Gazelle. I also caught a free sneak preview of the financial collapse documentary Inside Job . It's worth seeing, but if you already dislike investment bankers and have listened to the This American Life episode called The Giant Pool of Money , the...

Can anybody out-google me to a list of the names of those who died in the Persian Gulf War? Actually, I don't need names, I need service unit, home county/state of record, and date for all US military fatal casualties from Jan 1, 1990 to October, 2001. DoD press releases usually have this information, but they don't always issue a statement, and an incomplete set doesn't help that much. Monthly recruiting goals by service branch from 1990-2006 would be dreamy too. Otherwise, I'm 1600th in the FOIA line.

And with that, I probably won't be posting much for a while. I'm hoping to be on the job market this year, which means military labor supply research 12+ hours a day, 6.5 days a week for the next couple months. I'm signed up to present in a lunch seminar in a month, then if all goes well, job applications go out mid-November. I unsubscribed from a ton of blogs, removed a bunch of sites from my bookmarks toolbar, cook less, and run only enough to stay sane. Wish me luck, and if you're a potential employer, say, at a great school in a great location, I would be an awesome colleague and an excellent teacher and researcher.

I read Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, and I shouldn't have bothered. Reading Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance a few years ago was more than enough motorcycle-philosophy for one lifetime. First, I must admit, relative to other intellectual qualities I have, reading comprehension of philosophy is not one of my strong suits. Only when philosophy is reduced to near-math, or when it is very clearly applied to practical decisions in real life do I enjoy it. With that said, I still think Soulcraft is unnecessarily complicated, boring, and doesn't actually say anything that means anything. It's dense drivel. It's styled as a philosophical defense of the trades, and starts out talking about how it's easy to pick up good used machine lathes and other shop tools off eBay, because schools have been abandoning shop in favor of "the knowledge economy." Then there's a interesting disc...