There are fifteen rounds in a heavyweight boxing match. There are fifteen weeks in a semester. Today, I feel like that isn’t a coinc...

Earlier this year, the UTRGV medical school had its dean step down for reasons unknown. Now, one of the communities is backing out of its...

Sharp. It’s a word that has both a negative and positive meaning when you say it of a person. And if I had to use one word to describe th...

Seen on Twitter this morning, from Moosesplaining Max: A neutral stance on a contentious person is an implicit endorsement, stop kidding...

“This crustacean appears to be on a tenure track.” - Rutger Vos “2017 goals” - Ryan Broderick

Here’s a picture of UTRGV president Guy Bailey from a little over a week ago, doing what he’s doing in a lot of pictures: agreeing to tak...

In a recent document, one of our adminstrators was talking about student learning outcomes (SLOs), and wrote (my emphasis): Identifying w...

There’s practically a new emerging literary genre of academics writing pearl clutching thinkpieces decrying the sad effect of social media o...

This is an excerpt of a data set from a manuscript I’ve been working on. The box shows where half the data live, with a line dividing t...

My dad used to have an expression: “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” - Joe Biden Press...

I find it interesting that I can know I’ve crossed half a million views on a Q&A site, but still have no idea what having a journal’s “...

I’m far from the first to note how music locks us into times. You can’t control what songs are playing and popular in any year, and they bec...

Mark Humphires has a nice post about the difference in research conducted at private organizations versus universities . His argument is tha...

Ahab had a great white whale. Emily Voigt had a great red fish. Then a great batik fish. Then a great silver fish. In every case, Vo...

It’s trivia night at the pub ! Because I am a non-imbiber, the most fun alcohol ever gets for me is enjoying the names and the bottle design...

I sometimes get emails from undergraduate student here asking if there are research opportunities with me. Partly because I have some bott...

August is rarely a happy month for academics. Summer is more than halfway gone, we haven’t done as much research or as much writing as we wa...

We are in the middle of a science news hype cycle. First, the inflated expectations. Lots of news sources reporting that funds from the...

Because my blog is a place I don’t have to put up with the proliferation of political memes.

Caption: Lobster ( sic ) in a bucket looks like a gigantic monster on a metallic planet, and the waterdrops look like stars. From here ....