Rant

Whether or not that's the message that is intended to be sent, that is the message that is sent. Here's my deal. Vanderbilt has made it 100% clear that without funding at the level of an NSF grant, I will not get tenure, regardless of anything else. Indeed, my chair has told me that funding is the only issue he sees as being a serious question with my tenure case. (And, by the way, to the two new astronomers who are coming: I know that some dean told you it's a "myth" that tenure is dependent on funding. Unless I have been lied to, you were lied to during your interview.) For what I do,…
Check this poem out, posted at Bad Fortune Cookie (found via BoingBoing). Disturbing, eh? Of course, when a student writes a disturbing essay, what do we do in the post-VT massacre world? We lock him up! Freedom of speech be damned, we're locking people up for writing disturbing things! Hysteria is such a bad thing. After the Colombine school massacres, for a while it became presumed criminal behavior to be a nerd in a trench coat. Yeah, the disturbing writings of the VA Tech murderer were part of a larger pattern of warning signs that were all over the place suggesting that this was a guy…
I guess we should excuse Wiley now, because they've backed down from pointing their lawyers at Shelly Potential cynic that I am, I have several residual thoughts on the issue. Thought #1: I really want to believe what was in the apology letter sent to Shelly: it was a misunderstanding inadvertently caused by a junior member of the staff. I want to believe that had it been calmly brought to the attention of the Director of Publications by a single person (say, Shelley), that an apology letter would have been generated. But I'm having a hard time believing that. Perhaps I'm being unfair to…
Fair use? If it benefits the progress of science or the dissemination of scientific knowledge, it really ought to be fair use, no matter what. But when it's cropping out a piece of a figure for an illustration in an article about a scientific result, with that result fully cited, it fully is fair use, even under the shrinking domain that remains within USA copyright law. Alas, when you are an individual graduate student, and the entity asserting that you're violating their copyright, knowledge that you are well within fair use is little comfort when you're faced the travesty that is our…
Truth to be told, I'm not a gigantic fan of traveling. It can be entertaining and enriching sometimes, but too much travel all at once leaves me pining for home.... At the beginning of April, I went on a 3-day trip to the University of Missouri at Rolla, where I gave a Shapley lecture. Then, for 10 days, I made a trip to CTIO in Chile for a 7-day observing run. (It takes 10 days because of the travel time involved.) Currently, I'm in Greenville, NC, where I'm giving another Shapley lecture (including talks to three high schools, a departmental colloquium, and a public talk). I get back,…
Check this out: National ID Card Regulations Issued (27B Stroke 6 Blog, via BoingBoing). Would somebody please remind me again when it will no longer be considered unhinged paranoid raving to sound the alarm that the US is rapidly degenerating into an authoritarian police state, and that we'd all better become very worried very fast or be prepared to sacrifice most of the freedoms we hold dear?
I don't know if it was intended for me, but somebody printed out and stacked with my airline reservations a scan of a letter by Smith & Smith (from Arlington, Virginia), from the 2006 issue of Physics Today (letters to the editor). The scan also included a number of penned comments written by a highly cynical and annoyed person commenting on the letter. The letter is objecting to an earlier article about the "pipeline problem" in physics, where at higher and higher levels, women represent a smaller and smaller fraction of physicists. The conclusion of their letter reads: Once society…