personal
sa smith | June 7, 2008My grandparents generation fought in WWII.
My parents generation fought for civil rights.
My generation fights with nunchuks on YouTube:
Fear the power of my generation.
pharyngula | June 6, 2008Cool — I've been written up in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It's a good story by a journalist, Tom Paulson, who I just met this week, and who seems to know what's up in the area. I've already had a relative call up and say she's glad I'm famous, so it's all just in time for the family reunion tomorrow — everyone will be prepared to take me down a peg and make sure I'm not too cocky.
Since I did say a few things about the Discovery Institute, he called them up and got their side of the story. This part is the typical creationist sidestep.
Not so, said John West, associate director of the…
jstemwedel | June 6, 2008For the June edition of Scientiae, Zuska notes:
Taking up space in the world is a Bad Thing for women to do. We waste a lot of energy and time worrying about whether or not we are taking up too much space. ...
How do you want to take up space? How do you want to let yourself sprawl, in your professional or personal life?
In the wake of the letter informing me that I had been awarded tenure, I've been thinking about sprawl and containment a lot.
My strategy for my six years as an untenured assistant professor was to come in to the office Monday through Friday and hunker down. Verily, there…
drorzel | June 6, 2008A quick glimpse from the 1993 version of Facebook:
See, college students took pictures of each other standing around drinking, even before we had the Internet to post those pictures on...
I'm off to my 15th college reunion for the weekend, to see old friends, renew old acquaintances, play a little golf (if it stops raining), and bore the hell out of Kate with long and involved stories about people she's never met. Good times, good times.
Play nice while I'm away.
sa smith | June 3, 2008Alls quiet on the intertubes tonight.
And I had a really bad day at work today (one of those days where nothing worked *rolleyes*) so Im too grumpy to write a nice post. I just wanna make some cocoa and take some Tylenol PM.
And Ive been on SciBlogs for about a month now.
And one major element has been missing.
BLAAAAAAAAG ROLLLLLL!!!!!
Leave a comment so I can add you all to my blog roll! I only ask that you post now and then, and you allow comments!
pharyngula | June 3, 2008So all these people are coming to my talks, and they're reporting on me! Scott Hatfield caught my talk at the Berkeley IEDG meeting, and even has video of my conclusion. Geoff Arnold has a discussion of my talk at the Pacific Science Center last night.
One odd (or not so odd) thing. Both of those talks have focused entirely on the process of communicating science; I'm making a case for rhetorical strategies to combat the rising tide of creationist foolishness. They have not been about atheism, and I try to phrase everything as universally applicable to even the most devout scientist — I'm…
sa smith | June 1, 2008Yes.
I went to see 'It.'
'It'. The Movie everyone has been talking about for months.
ERV readers might not think It was a movie I would be into, but it was awesome!!!
'The Fall' was really really good*.
Ive been looking forward to it ever since PZ brought it to my attention a few months ago. Im not so much into the 'Harry Potter' stuff, but Ive always been a huge fan of childrens/young adult fantasy, so if you like that stuff, youll like this movie. I mean, its like a kids movie...
But its rated R.
Its like a fairy tale + the ultra violence.
But it could have used more violence.
Anyway, I…
pharyngula | June 1, 2008I've made the journey to Seattle (actually, Auburn, where many of my family members live), and have discovered that access to the internet is spotty in the west coast suburbs — there are wireless servers everywhere, but at the same time, everyone has gotten savvy and protects them with a password. How cruel! Fortunately, I've talked one of my nephews into handing out their home network password to a known internet provocateur, so maybe I'll have some access this week.
Alas, I'm too late to remind you of Atheists Talk radio — I'm sorry if you missed it, but really, it should be a habit by now…
pharyngula | May 31, 2008Well, almost. My flight is delayed a bit, so I'm stuck in the San Francisco airport for a few hours. I will get there, though, and I will nap the whole way. It's been a long couple of days.
So, yesterday for lunch I was able to visit the giant gleaming temple to rampant Darwinism, the NCSE. I got to tour the crystal dome containing the Laser of Retribution, the underground bunker, the massive computer complex…oh, wait. They didn't have any of those things. They did have stacks of paper and an overworked staff, and Kent Hovind's Ph.D. thesis, and the worlds most interesting bathroom, but…
drorzel | May 31, 2008The scientific program at DAMOP runs three and a half days-- Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and only in the morning on Saturday. The weather for the first three days was spectacular-- glorious, sunny late spring days, with clear blue skies and pleasant breezes.
And, of course, I spent the vast majority of that time indoors in dark rooms listening to talks.
Today, Saturday, I get to spend something like eight or nine hours driving, first to Schenectady to get Kate, and then on to Boston for a FutureBaby shower. (It's like a regular baby shower, but with jet packs and broadband Internet...). It's…
pharyngula | May 30, 2008This is my last day in Berkeley, and the last day of the IEDG meeting, and I'm giving the very last talk of the meeting…which means, unfortunately, that the time I've been able to give to local readers has been minimal and is disappearing fast. Here's one last chance. I'm talking at the Art Museum on the Berkeley campus at 7:30, and I'm guessing that it should be done by 9 (maybe later, if the audience decides to lynch me, but this really isn't that provocative a talk, so I should be safe), and at the suggestion of a local I will then retire to the Jupiter beer pub on Shattuck, near the Bart…
jstemwedel | May 29, 2008Since I read it last Friday I have been meaning to say something about this article in Inside Higher Ed about why female academic appear to have lower birthrates than male academics and than female professionals in other fields. Of course, between work and family obligations (and grinding fatigue) it's taken me until now to get to it.
Is this a clue of some sort?
Luckily, Sciencewoman has written a thoughtful and detailed rumination, and she links to Dr. Crazy's, Mommy Prof's, and Dean Dad's fine discussions, too, so I can keep it brief.
From the outside, academia looks like a perfect…
drorzel | May 28, 2008I made it to Happy Valley without incident, though it is Orange Cone Season in Pennsylvania, and I spent a lot of time dodging construction. Happily, there really wasn't anything important at the meeting last night.
So I skipped out on the welcome reception to have dinner and a few beers with Kevin and RPM and the world-famous Prof. Steve Steve. They're good guys, as stamp collectors go...
Kevin and RPM both posted pictures, but I'm too lazy to bother right now. Maybe later. I'll definitely post something about actual physics later, but for now, I need to run off to hear more talks, and look…
pharyngula | May 27, 2008I'm having some difficulties with my lab server, difficulties that I can't sort out right now since I'm going to be leaving town for a week and a half. Unfortunately, this is also the server that handles mail coming in to my pharyngula.org and tangledbank.net addresses — so if you've sent stuff to me there in the last few days, it is now hiding somewhere in dev/null, I think. Resend it to pzmyers@gmail.com if it's important! And especially, if you sent submissions for the Tangled Bank to host@tangledbank.net, that email is temporarily dead, so try again to my gmail address.
Sorry about all…
drorzel | May 26, 2008Most of my reaction to this weekend's Emily Gould article in the Times was "Gosh, who knew that writing for Gawker might have a corrosive effect on your personal life...," but there were some interesting bits. She did a nice job explaining how blogging can be sort of addictive, and also had some good bits on the phenomenon of blog fame:
I started seeing a therapist again, and we talked about my feelings of being inordinately scrutinized. "It's important to remember that you're not a celebrity," she told me. How could I tell her, without coming off as having delusions of grandeur, that, in a…
pharyngula | May 25, 2008Hey, classes are over … aren't I supposed to be lazing in a hammock, slacking off until September? Instead, it looks like I'm going to be prepping and giving lectures for the next couple of weeks. Here's the schedule:
On 28-30 May, I'll be attending IEDG 2008: Integrating Evolution, Development, and Genomics at Berkeley. Look at the schedule on this thing: there are some phenomenal speakers at this meeting, and I'm really looking forward to several days of solid science. I'm giving the last talk of the last day at this event.
On 2 June, at 7:00 pm, I'll be doing a public lecture/…
jstemwedel | May 23, 2008In my faculty mailbox today:
After a review of the tenure evaluations and recommendations of the appropriate committees and administrators ... I am pleased to inform you that your service to the University merits the award of tenure. I am also pleased to inform you that you have been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor, effective August 21, 2008.
One less thing to worry about while working through the grading.
sheril | May 23, 2008At 2:22 pm tomorrow, I'll have circumnavigated that spectacular star of ours exactly 28 times.
Despite the traditional hullabaloo and fanfare every twelve months, it's easy to argue that counting orbits is rather arbitrary. Our year results from the happenstance masses of earth and the sun, the distance between them, and a few other extraterrestrial considerations in the mix. Given all entities involved came about due to a great big bang billions of years prior to my arrival, birthdays don't seem very significant when you scale out. An individual cameo isn't even a glimmer in the eye of…
drorzel | May 23, 2008A few years ago, my father retired from public school teaching, and decided to get a dog to keep him company. He purchased a yellow Labrador Retreiver puppy, who was dubbed "RD" for "Ron's Dog." He started out small, but quickly grew into a barrel-chested lunkhead, who panted like a freight train whenever he saw a person who might give him food or attention, which is to say any person at all.
A week or so ago, he started acting a bit off, and wouldn't eat. For this dog, that was a major crisis, so they took him to the vet. Yesterday, they found out that he was riddled with tumors, and they…
jstemwedel | May 22, 2008Another dispatch from grading Hell (fourth circle), in which the reader gains some insight into circumstances which evoke my sympathy, and circumstances which do not.
I have this pedagogical strategy where I try to make my students think more than they have to write. One way this strategy manifests itself is in how I deal with case studies on finals exams.
We've spent the whole semester working up case study responses following a standard plan of attack -- identifying the interested parties in the case, the potential consequences for those interested parties if the protagonist in the case…