Do you want to meet Dennis Lehane, the well-known author of eight novels, including Mystic River (made into a 2003 movie directed by Clint Eastwood) and Gone Baby Gone (made into an soon-to-be-released movie directed by Ben Affleck)? Aside from… Read More ›
Month: August 2006
When you've forgotten the combination to your lock…
As we all know, combination locks should really be called permutation locks. Actually, that isn’t quite right. Duplicates are allowed, so you aren’t really taking permutations of 40 numbers. But that isn’t the subject of this post. The point is… Read More ›
Cold Moon
Just finished reading Jeffery Deaver’s Cold Moon. Like the rest of his Lincoln Rhyme series, this novel is full of surprise turns. At many points, just when you’re finally sure that you understand what’s going on, there’s some new twist… Read More ›
I Heart Huckabees
What a strange movie! I definitely enjoyed the unconventional film I Heart Huckabees, but it’s more than merely unconventional. I can’t do better than to quote a few sentences from Roger Ebert’s review: …the moment a movie is over, everybody… Read More ›
Hackers and Painters
You should definitely read Paul Graham’s highly opinionated book, the one with the unlikely title of Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age. But the first thing you have to know, if you’re not a computer geek, is… Read More ›
Vacationing in Lexington, Newton, and Quincy
If you’re not going anywhere for vacation, how about being a tourist at home? That’s what Barbara and I did this year as a consequence of having unfortunate summer calendars: we ended up having a total of one week’s vacation… Read More ›
Spellbound
Just finished watching Spellbound —the 2002 documentary, not the 1945 Alfred Hitchcock classic. (I do highly recommend the Hitchcock film, but that’s not the subject of this post.) What’s so interesting about the national spelling bee, anyway? Yes, that’s what… Read More ›
Unaccustomed excitement at the Museum
Part of our at-home mini-vacation (more on that later) was an all-too-rare visit to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, all-too-rare since we’re members and ought to be taking more advantage of that opportunity. Anyway, we wanted to see the Americans… Read More ›
This year we decided to cut back on the number of topics
Less is definitely more. In the first summer of the Crimson Summer Academy (2004) we attempted to explore two different (but related) topics in our Quantitative Reasoning (QR) course for rising sophomores: Visual Representations of Data and Models of Voting…. Read More ›
Ruth Rendell: Thirteen Steps Down
“The doyenne of the crime writing world” is Mystery Ink’s description of Ruth Rendell. I’ve long been a fan of her fiction, not only her traditional detective series featuring Inspector Wexford but also her psychological crime novels. By this point… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 