Passing thoughts
jstemwedel | July 16, 2010It's Friday, I'm still working on stuff that I was supposed to be done with by now, and the temperatures in the vicinity of Casa Free-Ride have climbed into the uncomfortable range that is more compatible with having a cold beer (or lying motionless) than with slogging through the stuff I'm working on.
This calls for some videotainment!
This video is making me think that classic Star Trek might be the medium through which the young kids nowadays can help their aging parents to appreciate the popular music.
Also, it makes me suspect that there was a lot more drinking and dancing in three…
jstemwedel | July 15, 2010I've been busy in the three-dimensional world, where I am in the middle of committing an unnatural act for an academic: writing out every word of a lecture. (As weird as it is, it makes the video production of that lecture easier -- more about that in the fullness of time.) In between such unnatural acts, however, I've been schlepping the sprogs to their summertime activities.
Today, during one such schlep, the following exchange occurred.
Younger offspring: If I walk in the shady parts instead of the sunny parts, bees and wasps won't try to sting me.
Dr. Free-Ride: Oh. So, you think bees…
jstemwedel | June 30, 2010Recently, I traded up from my nowhere-near-smart phone to a slightly more advanced (but still nearly obsolete) phone -- one maybe about a year newer (in terms of technological endowment) than the old one.
Practically, what this means is that I am now able not only to receive text messages, but also to send them. And, tremendous Luddite though I am, I have discovered contexts in which sending a text message actually seem reasonable (e.g., to contact a fellow conference-goer in the morning after a night of conference-carousing, when a phone call might interrupt sleep or networking or something…
jstemwedel | June 17, 2010From time to time I have a look at the search strings that have brought readers to this blog. Looking at some of the recent queries, I can't help but wonder what kind of blog this would be if these described my main focus:
sarcastic jokes i do not get it is it a gender thing
percentage of academic job applicants are women
SJSU layoffs
is it bad to email your professor alot
I hate academia
san diego zoo ethics
make a fake diploma of brooklyn college
describe the harpy eagle symbiosis
objectifying women for a good cause
Why are some communities more desirous of control more than other…
jstemwedel | June 14, 2010
That all said, as a woman in science, it is sometimes disheartening to almost never hear an article suggest that a woman in science discuss household duties with her partner and split them evenly. The author of your article makes the statement that women bear the burden of household labor, but until scientists begin to tell other scientists that this isn't right, women are going to continue to leave academic science for fear of not being able to "balance" work and family.
You can be right and be practical at the same time. These need not be mutually exclusive. I also think that you need not…
jstemwedel | June 11, 2010This is a blog post that I more or less composed in my mind early this morning when, at 5 AM, I awoke with a runny nose and started sneezing.
Just like I have every morning at 5 AM for the past month and a half.
I do not, as far as I can tell, have a cold.
I do not experience the same runny nose or sneezing at other times of day.
Is it possible that I'm allergic to 5 AM? (People can't actually be allergic to a time of day, can they?)
Or, more plausibly (if only marginally so), is it possible that something about my circadian rhythms makes me more vulnerable to allergens in my environment…
jstemwedel | June 11, 2010This week I had one of those rare moments between work projects to pause and take a look around. I mean that literally -- I actually took a look around in my office and noticed that I have accumulated some stuff in it that one might not be able to count on finding in your typical faculty office.
For example:
Wee containers of red pepper flakes, obviously left over from the last time I brought a slice of pizza to my desk. (That may have been Spring 2008.)
A votive candle wrapped in fabric with a tag attached that says "Thank you!" I cannot for the life of me recall who gave it to me, or…
jstemwedel | May 12, 2010Yeah, still grading here. Yesterday I returned mass quantities of graded papers (with a free paperclip for every student!) and have another assignment to grade today ... just in time for two more assignments which come due tomorrow. And then, the final exam!
Ever the optimist, this morning in the shower I wondered how things would turn out if the Rapture were to happen while I'm in the midst of all this grading. It's the kind of hypothetical that demands a poll:
If the Rapture happens before grades are due:online survey
This hypothetical also gave me an earworm, which I shall now share…
jstemwedel | May 8, 2010... to the elder Free-Ride offspring's trumpet teacher.
While I am generally accepting of your choices as far as the pieces you are having my child learn how to play, I have a small bone to pick with you this evening.
You see, May is what we in the college education biz call "grading season". It is when the calendar tells us we are rapidly running out of time to get the assignments we've collected read, commented, scored, and returned to our students so they can use this feedback to prepare for their final exams.
Grading is not the most enjoyable part of my job. And when the stacks of…
jstemwedel | April 26, 2010It has come to my attention that a number of people are risking catastrophic seismic activity today by exposing n00bs.
This so-called "n00bquake" frightens me, and not just because I live in earthquake country.
If the internet is flooded with n00bs today, the consequences could be tragic.
We face the spectacle of people hot-linking images on other people's servers -- and then, when admonished, asking what sausages have to do with anything;
Of putting their names or handles at the end of their posts even when their usernames automatically appear beside their posts -- like there's no…
jstemwedel | April 22, 2010I really don't know what to say about this news item, except that it had better mean that the California State University presumptively* views blogging on one's own time and bandwidth as fully compatible with a professorial appointment, regardless of the subject matter on which the blog is focused or the views expressed by the academic doing the blogging.
Otherwise, there is a pretty messed up double-standard in place.
______
*Obviously, violating FERPA, HIPAA, or other laws or regulations would count against that presumption.
jstemwedel | April 20, 2010I think I've mentioned once or twice that the California State University system (of which my fair campus is a part) has been experiencing a bit of a budget crisis.
Well, while there may be glimmers of hope for a recovery in the rest of the economy, we seem to be on the cusp of things getting much, much worse.
In the coming academic year, we won't be using furloughs to try to save money. Instead, beyond employing laying of lots of lecturers (who, because they are classified as "temporary" employees, despite the fact that many of them have taught here for decades, aren't counted as being laid…
jstemwedel | April 19, 2010Dr. Free-Ride's parents, Duke and Super Sally, have been working hard to shed some of the material goods they have accumulated in the last several years, on account of they are planning a move to smaller living quarters.
Of course, this means that they shipped several boxes of stuff from their current place to Casa Free-Ride. There's some sort of conservation of matter principle at work here.
Not that I should complain. For one thing, half of those boxes are actually Uncle Fishy's. For another, there's some stuff cool stuff in the boxes that are staying with us.
There are, as expected,…
jstemwedel | April 9, 2010This just arrived at the email address associated with my blog (rather than the email address associated with my university appointment):
Dear Sir,
I am [Name Redacted] a student of [Institution Redacted], currently in 3rd year pursuing Integrated M. Tech. in Polymer Science and Technology. I learned about you through your website and I am extremely impressed with your research interests, I think they are an excellent match to my skills. I have an intense urge towards the development and enhancement in the field of polymers and now I want to be associated with a diversified group like yours…
jstemwedel | April 1, 2010Observant readers will have noticed that three of my last four posts -- the ones sporting the spiffy Research Blogging icon -- were posts discussing peer-reviewed journal articles. This is a substantially higher proportion of writing about the details of scholarly research than I normally feature on this blog.
But I think I've developed a taste for it.
Thus, going forward, I've decided (for the foreseeable future, anyway) to stick to discussions of scholarly research and to set aside freewheeling musings on current events, answers to emailed requests for advice, passing observations of…
jstemwedel | March 18, 2010Our online world is searchable, but it seems likely than not all of our searches are destined to be fruitful.
Here are some searches that have recently brought people to this blog:
what temperature does mucus melt at
Do I smell a science fair project? (Or am I too stuffed up?)
* * * * *
tenure neuroscience dossier online
I am hopeful that the searcher in this case was looking for an exemplar. It would, of course, be a horrible idea to "find" one's tenure dossier online in the same way that some students seem to "find" research papers online.
* * * * *
passenger breast feeds a monkey
I…
jstemwedel | March 11, 2010Why is it that it's not until you're right in the middle of a class discussion, one where lots of people are actively engaged, asking good questions and raising important issues, and where you know that you are working against the clock to get all the contributions in, that you discover ...
... that the white board, where you have been tracking key points in the discussion (and which you need to erase to collect the new points that people are raising now), will no longer release the dry erase marker with a dry cloth?
And, at that point, in the absence of a water bottle, what alternative is…
jstemwedel | March 6, 2010Which has a larger carbon footprint:
An office that uses a photocopier or an office that uses carbon paper?
How much difference does it make if you're using the carbon paper in an electric typewriter as opposed to a manual one?
How much less is the environmental impact from being able to proofread on the screen before printing out and making your copies (which I'm assuming is itself lower impact than printing multiple copies ... but maybe I'm wrong)?
How do we pin down the relevant impacts of the manufacture of the computer and printer and photocopier compared to those of the manufacture of…
jstemwedel | March 3, 2010The semester must be in full swing, because suddenly I have an abundance of papers to grade. So I'm using a brief pause (between grading one stack of papers and grading another stack of papers) to share a grading-aid I just figured out at the end of last semester.
Typically, by the time the stacks of papers come in, I have all kinds of other pieces of work-in-progress on my desk. I could put those away (and hope that I'll remember where I put them when I'm done with the grading), or try to keep the papers I'm grading restricted to part of the desk. This never works that well, and the…
jstemwedel | February 13, 2010I'm not looking for a general theory of what sets up the right room for dialogue as opposed to an argument, nor even for a fine grained analysis of whether dialogue or argument is what most blog readers and commenters are looking for.
If you're reading this post, I'm interested in knowing what you prefer.
First, a quick poll (where you can choose all the answers that apply):
I'm unlikely to comment on a blog post where(polls)
What puts you off of commenting on a blog? What conditions make you feel welcome to comment -- indeed, set up an irresistible urge to jump in and participate?
Or,…