Please notice that the title of this post promises a “paranoid response”, not a careful analysis. It’s one of those unscheduled features of this blog. Kind of like a snow day.
Yesterday’s Inside Higher Ed has an article about the U.S. Senate getting kind of testy with the director of the NSF about certain research projects the NSF has seen fit to fund. Regular readers know that I think we can have a reasoned debate about funding priorities (especially when that funding is put up by the public). It does not sound to me like the exchange in the Senate was that kind of reasoned debate.
Category Archives: Passing thoughts
Getting ideas from Donald Trump? (An oldie from the vault.)
Hey, it’s May already! Could that explain why things are crazy-busy here?
There will be new content soon, once I’ve plowed through some more grading and exam-writing and curricular trouble-shooting. In the meantime, since I copped to enjoying reality TV more than I should (in that ABC meme, under “Not going to cop to”), I thought I’d share a May post from the earlier incarnation of this blog, a post in which I muse on what “The Apprentice” (a show, as of this season, I no longer watch … we’ve grown apart) might teach us about how to improve the scientific community.
Yes, it’s utterly daft. So what are you waiting for?
Cue the theme song.
Via GrrlScientist, the precisely calibrated quiz for determining theme songs yields the following for me:
A meme between stacks of papers needing grading.
The grading is unrelenting. The crud is not entirely cleared from my system. I still owe you the promised post on plagiarism.
Must be time for a meme (specifically, the ABC meme, which I saw at jo(e)’s)!
The obligatory poem from Emily Dickinson.
Although certain bloggers of my acquaintance are suspicious of Emily Dickinson, I think she’s the bee’s knees. It wouldn’t be National Poetry Month without a selection from Emily.
In case you’re hesitating about clicking “Read on”, I will entertain, in the comments, a discussion of whether the position Miss Dickinson advocates in the poem is an ethical one. And, a bonus fun fact: nearly every Emily Dickinson poem can be sung to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas”.
A poetry-writing chemist for National Poetry Month
Chemists can be quite a literary bunch. Consider Primo Levi. Carl Djerassi. And, of course, Nobel Prize – winning chemist Roald Hoffman. Below the fold, Hoffman’s poem “An unusual state of matter”:
Poetry (a poem for National Poetry Month)
Poetry by Marianne Moore
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this
fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers
in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Joining my cell-mates.
101 Movies meme.
I saw it at Julie’s. Below the fold is a list of 101 movies that the movie-intelligensia think you should have seen in order to have an intelligent discussion about film.
I have bolded the movies I have seen. As well (though I’m adding this part), I’m italicizing movies I have officially “seen” but know that I fell asleep in the middle of seeing them. (Most of these are post-sprog rentals.) And (one last modification), I’m putting an asterisk next to the ones that arguably have something like scientific content (even if peripheral).
Feel free to tell me, in the comments, which of the ones I haven’t seen I ought to move to the top of the viewing list.
Internet diagnosis of what ails me.
If this quiz is good enough for Tara, who am I to resist it? Especially since my eyes are no longer gummed shut.
The results from the culture below the fold.