Interesting links

Time to play catch-up.  Here are some interesting links I've seen recently.

How to get a faculty offer - a lecture by John Guttag of MIT to their comp sci graduate students.  Not everything translates to the physics/chem/materials/nano communities, but much of this is great advice.  Thanks to Jen Rexford for bringing this to my attention.

A related post from the FSP about the faculty search process. 

An editorial/blog post at Scientific American about the importance of basic research and the painful choices being faced in the US right now.  It contains some choice quotes from Marc Kastner, a great physicist and current dean at MIT.

A very weird article from the Guardian, essentially taking some secular popularizers of science to task for trying to inspire a sense of wonder.  I had no idea that inspiring a sense of wonder was entirely the purview of the clergy.

A Swiftian editorial in the Journal of Cell Science, decrying blogging efforts to point out suspicious (at least to some) figures in scientific papers.  While it's sensible to have some concerns about how blogs are used in this way, I think this editorial is way off the mark.