Some blogs by prominent academics

Should professors wear buttons endorsing candidates for public office while they teach their classes?  Certainly not, says Stanley Fish on his blog. 

George Lakoff uses his theory of semantics to analyze the message John McCain sent by choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Juan Cole quotes a paper proposing Franklin Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor” policy in Latin America as a model for the next president’s Middle East policy. 

Labor economist George Borjas hasn’t updated his blog since August, but what’s there is still interesting. 

University of Michigan linguist Sarah Thomason occasionally blogs under the screen-name “Sally Thomason.”  The drawing at the top of the post is one of hers.

UkeToob

Ukulele Sam

Ukulele Sam

Ukulelehunt links to this new blog that features a selction of ukulele videos. 

(picture from http://www.myspace.com/trippinglily)

The future that never was

The house of the future

The house of the future

The image above is included on a terrific blog devoted to ideas people used to have about what the future would be like.  Thanks to I Eat Gravel for the link.

Celine vs Celine

Here‘s a comparison of the novelist Celine (Louis-Ferdinand Destouches) with the singer Celine Dion.

Strange Maps

Here’s a website devoted to strange maps.

The Artist and His Model

Here‘s an online arts collective, they have lots of nifty pictures.

Walkscore

Thanks to new commenter cymast for this link.  You can type your address or your zip code into a search window and find out how walkable your neighborhood is. 

We tried it last night and came up with some strange results- very walkable spots around our little college town rated 20-30 points lower than places in Seattle where we’ve had great trouble (Queen Anne hill is more walkable than the Quad?)  So I wonder about their methodology, but it’s a fascinating site, well worth a look.

Wall Street Bungles and Bailouts

Here‘s a succinct account of the current difficulties big US financial firms are facing.  It’s from Nuntii Latini, the Latin-language news service from Finnish radio. 

And here is an argument that the bailout the treasury and Federal Reserve have proposed is, in the literal sense of a much-overused term, fascism.

And as usual, Tom Tomorrow has summed it all up quite well.

3quarksdaily

Here’s a filter blog about lots of random stuff.  http://3quarksdaily.com/

Radiophonica Finnica Generalis

For almost 20 years, Finnish radio has been running a daily news program in Latin.  It’s on FM in Finland, on shortwave everywhere else.  Here’s their page about that program, with some old broadcasts available on RealAudio. 

http://www.yleradio1.fi/nuntii/