Essays

Essays

by Allen B. Downey

Freshman Hordes More Godless Than Ever. A survey of college freshmen shows a long-term trend away from religious affiliation and participation.

The Passive Voice is a Hoax!. Scientists think journals require them to write in the passive voice; journals want them to stop!

My Pet Punctuation Peeve. Hyphen and dash? Not the same thing!

Comments on Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point.

What I Learned from Dance Dance Revolution.

Meta-traditions and Benedictions. Secular institutions should not include prayers as part of commencement ceremonies.

Intelligent Design Marches North. Intelligent Design is coming soon to a town near you.

Software Fallacies. A comment on one of the fallacies in Robert Glass's Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering.

Lies: the bigger, the better. Why I think it's a good thing that pressure groups in Texas and California dictate what goes into public school textbooks.

A theory of academic justice. Rawls's thought experiment applied to incoming students.

Printer friendly? Why is the web friendly to printers and hostile to everyone else?

Enemies for life. On the dangers of the casual classroom atmosphere.

Why you shouldn't send people Word documents.

The Tyranny of the Extroverts. Speaking up for the meek (someone had to).

A review (of sorts) of Natural Capitalism.

Wellesley's Fabulous Honor Code.

Packet switching and nanotransistors. I answer two questions from a (former) student at Wellesley.

Why I Hate FirstClass.

A Free Software Reader.

Science is Ugly. Why the science building is the ugliest building on campus. Every campus.

The sin of computer illiteracy. No need for flagellation.

Ever wonder what a Computer Science Department is doing at a liberal arts college? Here is my attempt to answer that question in a CS FAQ.

I think the concept of Page Orientation is fundamentally broken in a way that is making it confusing to produce, display and print electronic documents. Here is my discussion of the problem.

Here is a collection of readings about Free Software.

Ever wonder Why I Hate FirstClass? Even if you haven't, here's the answer.

What I Really Think about Ishmael.

Are you configuring the INN news server under RedHat Linux 7.2? Here is a very simple set of instructions to get you started.