The writer talks about how graduate school is not a decision to be taken lightly. The part I really like is here:

Academia, especially in the humanities and the social sciences, is a total culture. It colonizes most aspects of your life. You are never not an academic--the little mental tape recorder is on all the time, or it had better be if you want to be good at this life. Anything is grist for my mill as a teacher and a scholar, and that is as it should be. Graduate school is, if anything, even more totalizing than this. It gets into your pores.

I guess it really isn't that bad in the sciences. I have met dedicated students, but not too many people who connect what they learn to the world around obsessively, which I tend to do sometimes. I think graduate school just isn't that total for most students in science, although for what reason I am not quite sure. Maybe it has to do with the fact that you can get a normal job with a science degree, or maybe it is because science is so well funded that there is a wider range of motivations among its practitioners.

This story from the Washington Times gives an account of the short history of wikipedia in China. What it tells me is that with the right technology, China is capable of change from within. I think that is a very nice message. Given the current popularity of forums and Instant Messaging in China and how hard they are to control, I think coming up with software to replicate the Wikipedia effect without having to cross the Great Firewall is possible. It might even involve those Trust Metrics I'm so excited about at the moment.

I have started a page on how I think distributed trust metrics could bring a sort of perfect information politics.. the same way free markets are contrasted to anticompetitive monopolies. It's seriously patchy and incomplete right now, I am open to suggestions for improvement. You can find it on the right side of this page, under "Pages".

Update (4/30/2006):
I've found the platform I want to do this on: http://www.drupal.org