It is generally a bad sign when I get home and fall asleep on the couch watching Pardon the Interruption around 6 or so, because inevitably what happens is after a 30-minute nap I’m nicely rejuvenated to the point I can’t fall asleep again until the wee hours of the morning.

I guess the upside is that at least I can sit in front of the computer and work on some job applications to kill the time I’d otherwise be spending staring at the ceiling trying to fall asleep.

It’s just as well that I have labs on Thursday and Friday for my methods students; I think they may be too traumatized to understand the lecture on the difference of proportions and chi-square tests. Hopefully they will recover for next week.

Greg of Begging to Differ provides an update on the whereabouts of writer-director Whit Stillman, whose films Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco (which seems to be out of print) rank among my favorite films of the 1990s; I’d have to agree with Greg that Barcelona is my absolute favorite of the three, but all three movies are definitely worth renting.

Well, at least now I feel better about the news that the Intel Mac mini has an integrated graphics chipset (þ: Ars Technica).

Mind you, since I wasn’t really planning to run games on it—that is, after all, why I have an Xbox—it didn’t really bother me in the first place. I may end up upgrading the RAM from the default 512MB sooner rather than later, depending on how much of a memory hog fetchmail, Apache, and the blog end up being, but waiting around for Apple to install a memory upgrade before shipping it didn’t exactly appeal to me.

Stephen Jessee and Alexander Tahk, two Ph.D. candidates at Stanford, have put together a website that attempts to estimate the ideological positions of Samuel Alito and John Roberts from their votes on the Supreme Court this term.

Perhaps the most interesting result thus far is that Roberts’ estimated ideal point (position in the unidimensional ideological space) is virtually indistinguishable from that of his predecessor as Chief Justice, William Rehnquist, although that is of course subject to change as more cases come along. (The Alito estimates seem to solely reflect the uninformative prior that Jessee and Tahk have placed on him thus far.)