Lincoln Mullen

For unfathomable reasons, when you submit final grades they are listed as A, A+, A-, because you know, letter grades should be listed alphabetically.

For the past few years, colleagues at RRCHNM and I have been making maps of election returns to the first nineteen Congresses. Here is the final release of Mapping Early American Elections, along with a blog post explaining the release.

The 7 y.o. was amazed I had (and would wear) a shirt that is older than her.

Software I used to love but now loathe:

• Jekyll
• Slack

Software likely to head in that direction:

• Docker

If you get the data model right, all the rest of the programming is so much easier. Get it wrong, and …

Making a Doodle poll. Q: What have I become? A: A middle manager.

It’s my eleventh wedding anniversary and the last day of classes. Also, got tenured today.

If you are on an Indie web platform like Micro.blog, then by definition you will be interested in @dancohen talking about copyright and “The Web at 30” on the What’s New podcast. Here is a clip.

There is a bug in Ruby (only on the Mac) that puts “the first shall be last and the last shall be first” into practice.

NYU Press has added an open-access section called Open Square. I’m glad to see more academic publishers releasing open-access work, and NYU Press in particular since they have been knocking it out of the park in American religious history and religious studies.

I read @ayjay’s newsletter, then I read The Typewriter Revolution, and now I am looking for a green IBM Selectric II like my grandfather had in his office.

A tribute to my departed colleague Marion Deshmukh (1945–2019), who was a professor in my department for 45 years.

The chart on “quality of question” vs “strength of evidence” in Roger Peng’s blog post about the goals of data science works pretty well for humanities questions too.

We are all tacitly agreeing not to ask one another to do anything new between now and the end of the semester, right?

For a few months I’ve listened almost entirely to music and not podcasts. I am returning to podcasts again, and it’s a good chance to prune podcasts that weren’t listening to.

Current status.

My rules for giving talks.

1. Make the audience—not yourself—look smart.
2. Entertain, then educate.
3. End early.

A gift from my emeritus colleague at lunch yesterday.

My phone number is still from my home town, where I haven’t lived since 2006 and where I don’t know anyone any longer. Rootlessness is symbolized by the fact that any phone call I get from area code 978 is guaranteed to be a scam.

I played chess with the 7 y.o. yesterday. After she captured both my bishops, she said, “No more bishops for you. Now you’re the Protestants and I’m the Roman Catholics.”* I don’t know where she learned that.

* She pronounced the word Pro-TEST-ants. Also, I hope she knows that her own Anglican tradition has bishops. Time to talk about the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral.

Almost all airports make Dulles look bad, but the Indianapolis airport in particular makes Dulles look like a national embarrassment.

At the Metro on a laptop tethered to a cell phone, SSHing into the workstation into my office, then SSHing into university’s high performance cluster. In part to check on my batch jobs, but mostly to see if it could be done.