I dig musician/songwriter Bill Callahan. He's been at it for a long time - working under the "Smog" moniker for many moons before shedding that skin and performing under his own name for the past few years. He's run the gamut from lo-fi home recording (long before GarageBand) to his current, more polished sheen. "America!" from his new album Apocalypse is filled with great imagery of a nation past and present - shifting gears from name dropping some of his songwriting heroes, to pop-culture references to war and the political. 



Just watched the video and it really struck me with its lyrical style and amazing visuals - separately unique, but also equal to Callahan's songwriting. It's the kind of piece that I hope that the talented people here at A&S can explore making - a great example of blending cool illustration/animation with narrative. Not only complemeting it, but enhancing it to new heights. It's pretty inspiring stuff - to me at least. Major props to the team behind this - Okay Mountain/Dave Bryant. 

            Opulence and squalor usually seem worlds apart. Country clubs usually don’t border low-income housing, designer clothing stores purposefully keep access to their goods limited to only a certain clientele (if you haven’t seen the movie Pretty Woman, watch it and you’ll get the reference), and the checking accounts that most people take for granted are a privilege offered only to people who have quality credit. Yet, I just experienced an exception to this rule.

            I just landed in Kunming, which is a town in southwestern China. My hosts Xinyue Zhou, Ding-guo Gua, and I flew here to attend the biennial Asian Association of Social Psychology conference. (We’re usually in a town called Guangzhou, which is located in south central China.)

You might be surprised how many questions already have answers, simply floating in the internether. As a person who's grown up alongside the world wide web, I've come to rely on internet queries to quickly answer a question or offer instruction. The key to finding this information is to be able to effectively use search engines to navigate the web. For this post, I'll be talking about methods I use for a Google search. If you're using a different engine, your search results may vary. I will also be using square brackets and italics to denote example queries, such as this [ query ] for the word query.

Phrase searching

When you search for a phrase, such as [ which seat should I take ], you may notice that you get a variety of results with the words in any order. While in many cases this is fine, it can also be very helpful to use double quotes in your search to contain a specific phrase. The results will contain the keywords in the exact order. This can be used to find a reference, song lyrics, and is especially useful for finding information on an error message. The query [ "which seat should I take" ]  will give you more specific results.

Site filtering

Around this time, with classes just around the corner, I’m usually tempted to look up what books I need for each course and start reading them to get ahead. However, after reading an interesting article from ProfHacker, it looks like reading ahead might not always be all it’s cracked up to be. Check out the article at this link!