Answers.com asserts that the term "rant" connotes "violent or extravagant speech or writing."
This may be true for rants that are not labeled as rants, but rants that are labeled as rants are different.
Instead, these are personal essays that are written with the expectation that they will be ignored --- however wise, beautiful, or just dog-gone useful the essay might have seemed to the author at some particular moment (usually late at night).
I've written a few rants. Actually, most are just snippets.
Still, for a while I harbored the thought that at least a couple of these might grow up to be worth publishing in some appropriately obscure place. After chatting with friends, it has become clear that the best course is simply to post them here. After all, this place is as obscure as most journals --- although less obscure than many.
Rants That I Believe to be Useful (especially for students):
- Rigor and Simplicity --- and Hints for Talks
- Advice to Graduate Students in Statistics
- On Journals and Refereeing
- Models: Masterpieces and Lame Excuses
- Steele 'at' wharton 'dot' upenn 'dot' edu --- NOT!
- Seminars: Quotes and Comments about Seminars, Research, Books, Etc.
- How the Journal Statistical Science Got Its Name
Rants That I Believe to be Amusing or Informative:
- Changing Minds --- Our Own and Others
- Great Data Analysis --- By Cryptographers
- Dominated Assets
- Should Academics Consider LULU?
- Quotes for Academic Talks and Lunchtime Banter (REVISED)
- Theory and Reality ---Some Quotes for a Talk
- Risk and Reality
- Leadership vs Decision Making
- The Shocking Theory of Meta Quotes
- How Quotations Get Changed by Accident or by Intention
- Personal Investing and the Active/Passive Debate
- Time and Tide ... GTD from the Ivory Tower
- Knee Surgery
- Uncertainty --- Passage from Probability
- Post-modern Statistics
- America's Most Popular Game
- Anyone Can Automate Translation (You Know---- the Little Flags?)
- How to Use Pretentious Words
- Shattered Sets --- Story of a Colorful Term
- Laptops in Class Rooms?
- Polls, People, Predictions, and Buffalo
- Why Didn't I Think of That?
- P-Values and Data "Is"
- Leisure Time
- Tasks, Galbraith, and Humility
- Web World --- Notes on the WWW
- Mathematical Genealogy Project (Four Steps to Hilbert)
- Black-Scholes and Stylistic Facts (source)
- The Quotable Government
- Bingham Court (Philadelphia)
Rant's that I have (almost) deleted now rest serenely in a Mausoleum for Deleted Rants.
Over the summer of 2006, my cause celeb for rants was the possibility (certainty?!) of an H5N1 Pandemic, and, In this instance, my little essays come closer to the Answers.com definition of rant.
Still, nothing angry here, mostly just bemused. The vision I have is of a lion waiting in tall grass.
After some soul searching, I started up a blog Bird Flu Economics. For a while the new blog did decently in the search engine war for eyeballs. For example, if you Googled "Bird Flu Economics" it came up 'above the fold' --- just after CNN. Still, after classes of Fall '06 began, I posted rather infrequently, though the topic never flagged in its importance.
Anyway, here are the brief pieces that started my involvement with the bird flu blogging. Some, but not all, of this material has migrated to Bird Flu Economics.
For the moment I'll leave this topic here in delicious ambiguity. If you start with the web page for the Stanford Singularity Summit you will quickly learn more than I know.
The personal notes that that I might add are (1) I agree that this sounds goofy and (2) I believe that there is something in it --- something right.
While the apocalyptic version is as unlikely as it is unpalatable, it seems almost inevitable that there will "singularity like" events in technology, especially information technology, which at which human kind look back and say,
"Yes, that was the point at which everything changed."
Oddly en ought, the "thing" doesn't even have to be very big. Just take the ODE for exponential growth, and raise the right side to a power p>1. You then get a "growth curve" that becomes infinite in finite time.
