I must report the following, although the protagonist wants to be left out of it. (I will allow as how the protagonist has a credit card, lives in my house, and isn’t me, but I won’t divulge any further identifying details.)
Anyway, it starts out as one of those FedEx horror stories — far too common to merit a blog post — but then turns into some sort of parable about common sense. I may, however, need your help in teasing out just what the moral of the story is.
Category Archives: Passing thoughts
As a way to go, I probably saw this one coming.
Sure, John and GrrlScientist and Orac took the quiz first, but I loves me some Edward Gorey, and who doesn’t want to know how they’ll meet the reaper?
A meme until the final grades are filed.
Commencement: done.
Grading: not quite.
So, as seen at See Jane Compute, it’s time for the guilty pleasures meme. (And for those who feel inclined to use the comments to get accusatory about my responses, I’m already acknowledging my guilt!)
Here we go:
Regalia retrofit.
I have a soft spot for commencements. And, as I get on in years, that spot gets even softer.
Part of it, undoubtedly, is because recognizing the hard work and accomplishments of the new graduates is so much more fun than the grading that immediately precedes it. But for me, part of what grabs me is the feeling that what I’m doing — the notion of education and its larger value that I’m trying to impart — connects me to a tradition that is hundreds of years old. One visible sign of that connection is the academic regalia that graduates and faculty alike wear to commencement ceremonies. In the medieval universities, when education was recognized as a calling (and was generally undertaken to serve the church), the students and the teachers wore clerical-looking gowns all the time. While some of us get away with wearing blue jeans and smark-alecky T-shirts in our teaching, the academic gowns we wear at graduations and convocations connect us to this tradition.
But I’ve had issues with the academic regalia I purchased on the occasion of the conferral of my Chemistry Ph.D. **cough** 12 years ago:
- The gown wouldn’t stay closed.
- The hood wouldn’t stay anywhere near where it was supposed to (translationally or rotationally).
My pet theory on this is that the makers of academic regalia for purchase hate professors and want them all to look like fools. (Rented regalia tends to come equipped with zippers and other such conveniences.) But no longer will I be using binder clips to keep my regalia in formation. In preparation for this year’s commencement ceremonies, I have undertaken a regalia retrofit. Details (and photos) after the jump.
Let my people (let themselves) go.
Blogging has been light because grading has been heavy. But Chad has a post that started me to thinking. (Danger! Danger!) And, since he has stated his desire to avoid a flamewar at this time, it seems only fair that I do that thinking over here so his space can be unscorched.
The question at hand, initially posed by Scott Aaronson, is whether there might be a shortage of women in science because women are more prone to be “repelled by nerd culture” than men.
Yet another sign that doing research may be of use in writing final papers.
I’m marking another stack of papers (because it’s May, and the sun is shining, and apparently I was a real bastard in some previous life).
In these papers, the students were supposed to examine an instance where the interests of scientists and the interests of non-scientists (perhaps various subgroups of non-scientists) might be at odds. The idea is to explain the source of the conflict, connect this to the various values of the different players, and to set out possible strategies for resolving the conflict. It was stressed that giving a fair presentation of each side’s view is key.
Quite a number of the students elected to write about the battles over teaching evolution and/or intelligent design in public school science class. Some of these papers have been quite good, but in a few cases I’m fairly certain nothing like careful research occurred in conjunction with the writing of the papers.
Get-rich-quick ideas for hungry inventors (end-of-semester edition).
Dear inventors,
My personal experience (and what I have heard from the many other academics with whom I communicate) suggests a number of inventions that would sell a bazillion units at colleges and universities world-wide. For your convenience, I list the items that would have the biggest demand first. However, it’s worth noting that even the items at the bottom of the list would make professorial lives significantly better, and that we would gladly dip into the funds currently allocated for recreational reading and hooch to purchase them.
What a night in a Stockholm club has to do with good science.
Yesterday, I returned home after an excellent five days in Stockholm, discussing philosophy of chemistry with philosophers of chemistry, eating as many lingonberries as I could manage, and trying not to wake up instantly when light started pouring through the curtains at 4 AM.
It was a good time.
My last night there, we decided to go to Stampen, a club in Gamla Stan (the old part of Stockholm), to hear the Stockholm Swing Allstars. They were fabulous. If they are playing anywhere near where you are, you should see them without fail. They have no CD (yet), but they have some MP3 demos on their website.
And, watching them perform put me in mind of some of the things that can make good science, like good jazz, really good.
My enemy’s enemy is my friend?
Because (primary) election season is almost upon us, one’s mind sometimes turns to thoughts of coalition building. And sometimes, you can find allies in places you wouldn’t normally think to look.
For example …
Why Jade scares me.
OK, if you clicked through the links in my answers to the ABC meme, you know an embarrassing personal detail about me: I rather enjoy watching America’s Next Top Model. (Truth be told, I wouldn’t enjoy it nearly so much were it not enhanced by the reading of snarky episode recaps by Potes. And, as it turns out, regular commenter Uncle Fishy knows Potes from when he lived in Providence — so I had to read the recaps.)
If you don’t like wallowing in the depravity of others (which is to say, my depravity), feel free to go read a classic post from the vault. Otherwise, read on.