April Pieces Of My Mind #2

While a stable salary is wonderful - or so I have heard - I think you perhaps overestimate how much better your research environment would be with a tenured job. You'll have plenty of teaching and committee work, and you still need to spend a lot of time and energy to hustle for any actual research funding.

That's very kind of you, but there is a difference between hustling for grants of about €5,000 (Paul on a wax cylinder) and for grants of about €150,000 (Paul on a 128-channel digital recording desk). The latter are only ever given to tenured people.

Teaching, meanwhile, is fun and allows me to radicalise the students so I can lure them along on mad fieldwork adventures.

Researchers believe they have uncovered the purpose of puquios in Nascahttp://phys.org/news/2016-04-uncovered-purpose-puquios-nasca.html
What a letdown. I had hoped the spiral ramps led down to Lovecraftian stairwells to the abyss.

Correct link http://phys.org/news/2016-04-uncovered-purpose-puquios-nasca.html

Yum!
Filmmaker Louis Theroux set a trap for Scientologists — and turned the results into a movie http://www.rawstory.com/2016/04/filmmaker-louis-theroux-set-a-trap-for-…

At least this blog leads you down Lovecraftian stairwells to the abyss.

there is a difference between hustling for grants of about €5,000 (Paul on a wax cylinder) and for grants of about €150,000 (Paul on a 128-channel digital recording desk)

The latter sounds like enough to pay some wages to your summer help, rather than rely on volunteers. Or alternatively, to pay yourself during the summer. I don't know about Sweden, but in the US even tenured professors are expected to pay their summer salary from research grants, if any. The exceptions are if the professor teaches a summer course, or advances to the university administrator[1] level.

[1]Also known as turning to the Dark Side. Once you start down the path that leads to administration, forever will it dominate your destiny.

I don't know much about how the the demands for external funding are organised. But I've never heard that a Swedish lecturer goes without a salary during certain identified months if s/he can't get external funding. I believe s/he always has a salary but only gets to do any research if s/he gets external money.

I believe s/he always has a salary but only gets to do any research if s/he gets external money.

That's the opposite of the US system. Here, there are no institutional barriers to doing research in the summer months if you don't have a grant--you just won't get paid for it, and will have to cover any expenses out-of-pocket. It's also harder to get graduate students--some departments will let you put them on teaching assistantships, but most university physics departments expect professors to pay their graduate students' stipends from grants. There is also strong pressure for professors to keep earning grants--in the US "publish or perish" is not an exclusive or.

Yeah, publish and still perish... I've learned in recent years that a solid publication record isn't as important as being buddies with the right people when it comes to getting Scandy university lectureships. Quite surprisingly non-meritocratic system. Or put less pleasantly, surprisingly corrupt. But then the Scandy system makes a lot of public scrutiny possible. You can really see them being non-meritocratic. You just can't do anything about it. In e.g. the UK you have absolutely no idea what happens in that committee room. You only know that they work really really fast.

The US faculty hiring system is more like the UK system. Rumor mill sites exist, at least in physics, so you can find out who's allegedly on the short list (standard procedure is to pick 3-6 applicants for on-site interviews) and who's supposedly been offered the job, but nothing official until the offer is accepted. It probably takes longer than in the UK, because the on-site interviews are generally a couple of days each (candidates are expected to give a seminar and a colloquium, as well as meet with several faculty and, in some departments, grad students) and have to be staggered to minimize the chances of candidates meeting on campus. Most faculty positions will have a specified subfield, so if you're a condensed matter physicist applying for an astrophysics position (or vice versa), you won't be considered even if you have done Nobel Prize worthy research.

My department is in the middle of a faculty search right now. We have three candidates on our shortlist: two have been interviewed already, and the third is scheduled to visit next week.

"Tried to listen to a Nightwish song. Imagine a late Scorpions track, a female singer, a really heavy Finnish accent. I could not take it."

Give them another chance. Tara's Finnish accent is not that strong. Also, she is not just a female singer, but has a really operatic, high-soprano voice. (She also studied Lied singing in Karlsruhe. There's a pun here: a Schubert singer says "I'm a lied singer".)

After Tarja was fired, they had a Swedish singer for a while. Now they have a Dutch singer (who is taller than everyone else in the band) and Troy Donockley on uillean pipes. What a combination! Their last album features Richard Dawkins as a guest. Check it out.

"In the 1180s a French abbot wrote to King Canute IV of Denmark requesting some construction funding for his monastery. In the letter, the abbot points out that Danes destroyed a lot of towns and monasteries during the Viking Period."

Canute the Great (yes, another Canute) died in 1035. He was unmistakably Danish (though he spent a lot of time in England; Lund in Sweden was named after London). In 1066, the Normans (i.e. Northmen) under William the Conqueror (previously known as William the Bastard) who conquered England spoke French. That's just one generation!

Edward "arrow in the eye" who died at the battle of Hastings was the stepson of Canute the Great.

There seems to be genetic evidence that not that many Anglo-Saxons invaded England (which would explain why the people in Angeln, Saxony, and Jutland look quite different from typical English people), but nevertheless put their stamp on the language and culture. I don't know about the corresponding numbers in Normandy. If they are similar, then maybe it is not so much the Normans learning French as just not imposing Norse on the local population.

And the spelling "Knut" is much better!

"in the US even tenured professors are expected to pay their summer salary from research grants"

I think that this system exists only in the US.

" I believe s/he always has a salary but only gets to do any research if s/he gets external money."

It used to be the case in Sweden that professors were hired only to teach. If they wanted to do research, they could apply for funding. If approved, they could tell the university "I'm going to spend half my time on research" and the university would reply "fine; we'll cut your salary in half" (knowing that the other half would be paid out of the research grant) and hire some temporary lecturers to take up the slack. This was a good system: i combined job security with peer-review for all all research funding. (At many places, if all funding is peer-reviewed, then there is no job security. When hiring someone for a permanent job, there is the risk that they might burn out and do no more good research, even though they continue to get paid for it (though this danger is not very large in practice). It also provided a source of funding for temporary lecturers, so one could gain some teaching experience (and no-one should be hired to teach who has no experience teaching). People who like to teach could teach more; people who wanted to do more research could do more (subject to funding).

But I think that Sweden is now moving away from this system. Sic transit gloria mundi.

"Here, there are no institutional barriers to doing research in the summer months if you don’t have a grant–you just won’t get paid for it, and will have to cover any expenses out-of-pocket."

There are no barriers to do this anywhere, perhaps just a lack of feeling comfortable for working without pay. Many (non-academic) tasks which are handled by volunteers elsewhere are paid in Sweden. If it is worth doing, it should be paid.

By the way, I highly recommend the book Fishing in Utopia, which really captures the decline in the quality of Swedish culture since the 1970s. It is written by an Englishman who lived for a long time in Sweden, had a Swedish family, etc. For Swedes, it's hard to describe the country objectively because of lack of experience elsewhere (and anyone who spends a significant portion of time elsewhere is not a typical Swede). Most foreigners have an over-idealized Astrid-Lindgren-paradise view (this is common in Germany) or are neo-liberal anti-socialist jerks who paint a completely unrealistic description, often including flat-out lies. This book is really balanced and objective and at the same time passionate. (I bought it by chance at Arlanda.)

#13 - by 'Edward "arrow in the eye" ', do you mean Harold?

Replica of 5,000-year-old 'Iceman' made on 3D printer http://phys.org/news/2016-04-replica-year-old-iceman-3d-printer.html
This is nothing! In William Gibson's "Idoru", the titular Japanese AI hijacks a network of 3 D printers and downloads itself into brand-new human bodies all over the world.

"#13 – by ‘Edward “arrow in the eye” ‘, do you mean Harold?". Yes; wrong king! Edward the Confessor was King until he died at the beginning of 1066, after which Harold, who was killed at the battle of Hastings, took over. Still, just one generation from Canute to the Norman Conquest.

(OT) Charpentier walks on water again:
Cpf1: CRISPR-enzyme scissors cutting both RNA and DNA http://phys.org/news/2016-04-cpf1-crispr-enzyme-scissors-rna-dna.html

...and Liu follows suit:
Gene-editing hack yields pinpoint precision http://www.nature.com/news/gene-editing-hack-yields-pinpoint-precision-…

Re: the photo

I just planted a cherry tree myself last weekend, and it seems to be coming into bloom. I'm also in the midst of an ambitious landscaping project, converting a strip of grass along the street/sidewalk to ornamentals that will better resist the winter ravages of road salt and snowplows. It's rather more effort than it would be in most countries because lot sizes in the US are especially large (mine has approximate dimensions of 40 m x 45 m, and by local standards that's a small lot).

Prince has died. He was 57.

A more positive news item.
Wellderly study suggests link between cognitive decline genes and healthy aging http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-04-wellderly-link-cognitive-decline-…

Phillip @12: I really like Nightwish (I need to get their latest album) but the song that introduced me to them was "Over the Hills and Far Away", which is so very Irish it's green. (They're so delightfully nerdy, too!)

Seeing them on concert was great, if surreal because it was at the House of Blues in Downtown Disney. So you've got all these metal heads dressed up for a concert and all of the people who've just spent the day at Disneyland.

"If they meet opposition then it means they’re right."
is't that a universal attribute of kooks?

-- -- -- -- --
This Four-Letter Word Is The Swedish Key To Happiness At Work http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sweden-workplace-happiness_us_5718f…
Seconded! To work, talking need to be about other things than the piece of work immediately ahead..

BTW a queen just turned 90, but the court journalists choose to ignore that the time of her reign coincides with the decay of the bloated corpse that was the British Empire.

The British rise to economic strength in the 19th century was not a period of strong economic growth, rather of mediocre growth while the other main powers had even worse growth. Once the other countries got their acts together, the sun was inevitably going to set on the Empire.
The Brits should learn from Germany and Sweden; their best times coincides with all traces of empires having been erased.
-- --
Another reason to favor a republic:
-The universe can only support the strain on spacetime by so many princes. So two days after the Swedish royal family produced another male offspring, Prince died.
The aristocracy is literally sucking out the vitality of the Cosmos!

China targets 2020 Mars mission launch: official http://phys.org/news/2016-04-china-mars-mission.html

Something huge is about to go down with Scientology that could destroy the ‘church’ once and for all http://www.rawstory.com/2016/04/something-huge-is-about-to-go-down-with…
Hooray!

"I really like Nightwish (I need to get their latest album) but the song that introduced me to them was “Over the Hills and Far Away”, which is so very Irish it’s green.

Written by Gary Moore, so of course it sounds Irish. One of their few cover versions. (Another is Pink Floyd's "High Hopes".) However, there has always been a folk influence (especially on the first album), and the addition of Troy Donockley was a really good move.

(They’re so delightfully nerdy, too!)

Indeed. Evolution as the concept for a concept album? Check. Richard Dawkins guesting on spoken words? Check. I saw them not long ago. I read a really good review in Prog magazine about their Wembley show, which might appear on DVD.

Seeing them on concert was great, if surreal because it was at the House of Blues in Downtown Disney. So you’ve got all these metal heads dressed up for a concert and all of the people who’ve just spent the day at Disneyland.

Yes, many different types in the audience. Usually a good sign.

Birger@27: L. Ron Hubbard himself said, "If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion." (Wikiquote lists several variations of this quote.) That was before he founded Scientology.

Hubbard's Wikiquote page also has a gem in which he attributes calculus to a conspiracy theory involving powerful people in New York. Hubbard admits in the quote to being unable to understand calculus, and claims it to be entirely useless, based on an argument from anecdote. As the great philosopher Bugs Bunny would say: What a maroon!

The Daily Mash: ”2016 to end early”
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/international/2016-to-end-early-2016…
2016 is to be brought to an early end before anybody else dies.

The Solutrean coffin now has so many nails in it that it's more steel than wood.

But the claims by North American tribes of rights to the remains have also been punctured.

http://dienekes.blogspot.hk/2016/04/more-on-kennewick-man.html

And bamboo bikes are not a joke - some people take them very seriously and prefer them to carbon fibre or titanium. Fracture a carbon fibre or titanium frame, and you have to throw it away. Fracture a bamboo frame, and you just put in a new piece of bamboo. Plus the use of bamboo makes it perfectly feasible to construct your own bike.

http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1940246/across-world-bamboo-…

Martin - a slightly more detailed answer to your question about lack of Cro Magnon ancestry in modern humans:

http://dienekes.blogspot.hk/2016/05/neandertal-ancestry-going-going-gon…

The paper is not about that, but it states the following: "there is no evidence of the earliest modern humans in Europe contributing to the genetic composition of present-day Europeans."