Friday Sprog Blogging: silkworm reports from the field.

We’re going on three weeks since the first of the Free-Ride silkworms made a cocoon.

SilkCocoons1.jpg

So far, there have been no signs of anyone trying to get out. So we’ll have to wait a while yet before we witness the miracle of life (or of silkmoths bumping bug uglies, depending on your perspective).
In the meantime, we’ve heard reports from the field about other silkworms that came home from school.

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Twenty years ago today.

Twenty years ago this spring, after finishing my last round of final exams as a college student, I was enjoying a civilized custom called “senior week,” a break of approximately seven days in length between finals and commencement. The campus had largely cleared of students who were not seniors, and suddenly we had time to relax and enjoy our beautiful campus before it was time to move on and become adults (or some close approximation).
One of those afternoons during senior week, I was out on the deck on the roof of my dorm, sunbathing (because 21-year-olds care not about incremental increases in skin cancer risk) and reading Newsweek.

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When academics are furloughed, they should act like they’re on a furlough.

Dr. Isis reports that faculty and staff at MRU will be taking unpaid “furlough” days to deal with a budget crisis:

In many cases, faculty (some of whom already do not receive summer support) will be asked to take furlough time in the middle of the instructional period of the academic calendar, but not on a day that they are scheduled to teach. Will faculty forgo preparing for classes on days they are forced to furlough? Will they abandon their research programs on those days? I suspect we all know the answer to that question…

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Silence is the enemy: addressing the causes.

Yesterday, in my first post about the Silence is the Enemy campaign, I wrote:

Addressing rape directly. From the point of view of ethics, you’d think this would be a very short discussion. It is wrong to commit sexual violence. It is wrong to act out your frustration or your sense of entitlement or your need to feel that there is something in your life that is within your control on the body of another human being. It is wrong to treat a woman or a child (or another man) as less than fully human.
Anyone who would argue otherwise could only be a moral monster. Or thoroughly steeped in a culture that regards women and children as less than fully human, and the desire, anger, and frustration of men as something that can be acted out on women and children.

The ethics of sexual violence seem pretty black and white. And yet sexual violence is a reality — as a constant threat, if not as something that has been committed — for more women than you can imagine.
As usual, Zuska say it better than anyone else:

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Snail eradication (day 25).

“It’s never going to rain again.”
— Dr. Free-Ride’s better half, contemplating cloudy skies over the last month or so
“Oh yeah?”
— The weather in the vicinity of Casa Free-Ride, at approximately 4:45 AM today
It was not a torrential downpour, but there was a good, hard rain for 15 to 20 minutes early this morning, and from the looks of things there might have been a drizzle for some time after that.
You can guess what this did for this morning’s gastropod foray.

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