Owing to the fact that children are vectors of disease, three out of four members of the Free-Ride household have been feverish, achy, sneezy, sleepy, and grumpy for the past few days. (It’s not clear yet whether the progression of this bug will include other dwarves.)
Since I’m still kind of dopey, in lieu of a content-ful post, I’m offering some random musings from the sickbed.
Category Archives: Personal
Profiles in mentoring: Dr. James E. LuValle.
(Written for the inaugural edition of the Diversity in Science blog carnival, with big thanks to DNLee for launching it.)
Back in the spring and autumn of 1992, I was a chemistry graduate student starting to believe that I might actually get enough of my experiments to work to get my Ph.D. As such, I did what senior graduate students in my department were supposed to do: I began preparing myself to interview with employers who came to my campus (an assortment of industry companies and national labs), and I made regular visits to my department’s large job announcement binder (familiarly referred to as “The Book of Job”).
What optimism my successes in the lab giveth, the daunting terrain laid out in “The Book of Job” taketh away. It wasn’t just the announcements of postdoctoral positions (which, I had been told, were how one was supposed to develop research experience in an area distinct from the one that was the focus of the doctoral research) that listed as prerequisites 3 or more years of research experience in that very area. The very exercise of trying to imagine myself meeting the needs of an academic department looking for a certain kind of researcher was … really hard. It sounded like they were all looking for researchers significantly more powerful than I felt myself to be at that point, and I wasn’t sure if it was realistic to expect that I could develop those powers.
I was having a crisis of faith, but I was trying to keep it under wraps because I was pretty sure that having that crisis was a sign that my skills and potential as a chemist were lacking.
Finding my academic writing groove.
Some of you may be aware that, at least in certain corners of the blogosphere, November is celebrated as International acaDemic Writing Month. Indeed, in November 2007 I jumped onboard the InaDWriMo bandwagon.
This past November I did not, largely because my November usually turns out to be a ridiculous month for serious writing. There’s Thanksgiving and the attendant food-related preparation activities, plus the run up to the December holidays. Also, this year my kids were still playing soccer into December (which is what you get for being too successful in your weekly games), so I was tangled up in that. And the days getting shorter and colder did not help one bit.
The holidays are behind us now, and there’s still academic writing to be done. At ScienceWoman’s urging (what is it with her?), I’m going to invite others who may have sat out the November frenzy of academic writing to join me in using February and March to try to establish some sort of regular writing groove.
Robert Burns’ birthday food blogging.
Robert Burns‘s birthday, which was January 25, is an important day for Scottish celebration and food.
Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Give it a chance.
So, back at ScienceOnline’09, I was talking with AcmeGirl about marking the 25th with some lovely Scottish food. She was talking about haggis. In the Free-Ride house, seeing as how we don’t do meat, we don’t do canonical haggis either. (In 1997, in Scotland, I had a fabulous vegetarian haggis, but I doubt I could reproduce it in my own kitchen, at least on the first try.) So I was thinking maybe tatties and neeps (potatoes and turnips).
But on the eve of January 25th, things were kind of wet and cold in our neck of the woods. And, our garden had just yielded …
On my way to ScienceOnline’09
Once again, I’m sitting in my favorite airport with free wifi, bound this time for Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, for ScienceOnline’09. The conference has grown to feature two days of official sessions, plus a third day of semi-official goings on, and the place will be lousy with blogospheric glitterati.
I’m going to be leading a session late Saturday afternoon on “Online science for kids (and parents)”. I’ll be highlighting a selection of the good content that’s out there already, and I’m hoping that there will be some folks at the session interested in talking about how to create new kid-friendly science content. Our wiki page is here, so you can play along at home and join the discussion virtually.
In case you’re wondering why my posting has been relatively light in the days leading up to this conference, well, I seem to have been channeling Dr. Isis.
Light in the darkness.
A colleague of Super Sally’s forwarded her this*:
It’s funny because it’s true, and the pain isn’t just from laughing so hard.
Please apply.
If memory serves, today is the day that the meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association draws to a close. That meeting, always conveniently scheduled to fall in the interstices between Christmas and New Year’s, and more often than not located in some East Coast city with nasty winter weather (this year, Philadelphia), is traditionally where philosophy departments from U.S. colleges and universities (as well as a few from elsewhere) conduct preliminary job interviews.
Except this year, apparently, a great many job searches have been frozen or canceled, owing to the fact that exploding economic markets have depleted endowments and state budgets and probably baskets of puppies and kitties and bunnies and chicks. There’s some higher-than-average probability that a lot of the people at the Eastern APA this year actually spent most of their time giving and listening to papers. I can’t even guess whether that would be more fun or less fun spending four days in the dance of presenting yourself as the ideal candidate (or, on the search committee side of the dance, of trying to discern from how those you are interviewing present themselves who might in fact be a good fit for your position and a good colleague in your department).
Since I’m not in Philadelphia but in sunny Los Angeles County at the moment, this is mostly idle speculation. However, during one of my infrequent sabbatical visits to my departmental mailbox a couple months ago, I retrieved a letter soliciting my application for a position in a philosophy department not my own.
You say you want a revolution
Dr. Isis expresses reservations about signing on for Twisty Faster’s revolution.
ScienceWoman offers a sketch of what her revolution might look like.
Me? I’m pretty exhausted from today’s outing with my offspring, what with it being Winter Break, otherwise known as 24/7 parenting. But I have a few brief ideas of what I’d like to see on the post-revolutionary landscape.
How I spent last weekend.
Blogging has been light for a while owing to the fact that the Free-Ride family was in transit to the wilds of New Jersey in order to celebrate Uncle Fishy and RMD getting hitched.
Edible (and sustainable) construction in a lean year.
You may remember that last year we were inspired by Bake for a Change to dabble in “green” gingerbread construction. As 2008 draws to a close, the challenge has been issued once again to make a house both good enough to eat and eco-friendly enough to heat (or cool, etc.).
The rules are the same as they were last year: