Foaming at the Mouth: Academic Inbreeding

One of the nice things about having old issues of The California Tech available online is that I can occasionally look at articles I wrote as an undergrad and see how much I agree with what I wrote back in the day. In this issue from 1998 (the year I graduated), I have a commentary on p. 2 about academic inbreeding. In this case, I pretty much agree almost completely with what I wrote 16 years ago. My occasional feature column, by the way, was called "Foaming at the Mouth". I was a Tech Editor before then and, additionally, my articles from early in my Tech career were reporting more often than features. I made an active change during my time at Caltech. Now if only the Rivet were online so that I could post the blurb from the time (last week of senior year) that I was named "International Terrorist of the Week".

New to the Blogroll: "LegendsofCaltechProject"

OK, I admit that I added the capitalization and describe in my blogroll what the blog legendsofcaltechproject actually is (a blog about a project about making a movie version of Legends of Caltech) instead of using the technically correct title.

This blog has its first entry: an article in The California Tech about the project. (This issue of The Tech includes an article about the proposed new core curriculum, which continues recent trends to reduce the amount of mathematics and physics that's required. I know there are a large variety of things out there, but I think that's a shame.)

Blast from the Past

I was doing some googling while the math department's e-mail server is down, and I found this old edition of "The California Tech". I need to get to a meeting with a student, so I haven't been able to check thoroughly if I can find a more interesting issue from the archives. I'll try later.

Update: Here is the directory of scanned issues in the archive for The California Tech. Awesome! (By the way, on page 7 of this issue is the 'strangle this cat' advertisement that tried to attract attention and get people to work for The Tech. The latter wasn't very successful, but we did attract some attention, and this led to a chain of events---including some stuff in future issues of The Tech that pissed off the Pasadena Humane Society and ultimately culminated in the special issue of The Rivet with an animal-oriented theme. Then the school year ended and everything blew over. Ah, memories.)