In a word: Moof.

I know there are already several entries on planet.case.edu regarding the "Case Daily" email, but I thought I'd offer my comments just for completeness.

Case Daily is primarily an news aggregator. It combine all sorts of diverse sources of Case-related information into one spot. Although the goal of Case daily was to eliminate frequent campus-wide emails, the resulting monolithic newsletter is in many ways more problematic. It combines useful information with unwanted information in way that makes it difficult to separate the two. By throwing the wheat in with the chaff, Case daily provides an almost unusable means of transmitting information to case-campus@case.edu.

For instance: looking back at all the emails that went to case-campus this semester, the messages I care about include "Talk by Ken Miller", "Invitation to the Case Concert Celebration", "Closing of the PBL building", and anything from protective services. The messages I don't care about include "Bookstore Spring Rush Hours", "Holiday Safety Reminders", and "Authorship Guidelines". Now, the glory of email is that I can easily sort through all these messages, disregard the ones that don't matter to me, and read only the messages that I find important. More significantly, anyone else is free to pick a different set of messages that's important to them, and only read those. Nobody is forced to read about holiday safety if they don't wish to.

Case daily prevents such selectivity by combining all campus-wide information into one monolithic email. I can either spend three minutes reading all of it, or I can unsubscribe and never read anything. Neither of these are acceptable. I want to choose what interests me and what doesn't. I don't want to read "For Faculty/Staff" or some headline from The Chronicle of Higher Education, but I do want to read "For Students". This used to be easy, I just never read The Chronicle of Higher Education and deleted any email geared toward faculty. Now I have to hunt for the student-related information amidst news of the new director of donations (Not to offend Kathy Robinson, of course).

I admit that the authors of the Case daily have tried to make it easiy to parse with the use of headlines and bold key phrases. This is a Good Thing. But email was designed to help people sort through large volumes of diverse sorts of information quickly; why should we circumvent this with a daily newsletter?

Back home; and, in general, bored.

Spent too much time milling about with the relations yesterday. The food wasn't worth it. Came home, slept for 10 hours or so. These are the first two nights I've been able to go to bed before 11 in months.

Ugh. So boring here without my roommates'. I might head up to Toledo later tonight; maybe entertainment will be found there.

This morning I had a conversation with Dr. Earle Luck. Very informative. One bit he said stands out:

There are about 6000 professional astonomers in North America

Every year, about 150 astronomy Ph.D's are granted.

Every year, about 50 academic positions become available.

Wouldn't it be insane, if I were to become an astronomer?

It just might happen. Wouldn't that be weird. Astronomy would be a lot harder to pull-off successfully than CS, in more ways than one. It would mean grad school, paying for grad school, dissertation, and Ph.D. It means committing myself to academia for the rest of my life. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.

But hell, wouldn't it be fun. Wouldn't a professorship be more fun than a coding job; wouldn't it be more fun to stare through a telescope than at a computer screen all the time? Alright, on the second one I got carried away with the poetry. Computer-screen-staring-time would be almost the same. But still. I'm kinda hoping I do it. It's absolutely insane, and terribly tempting. People say a lot of cliché things about "big decisions." But this really is the biggest decision I've ever had to make.

Just Watch.