AGU Four
I skipped yesterday to do homework. Problem set and final all complete, two term projects to go, hoorah! I mean, yikes!
Today’s conflict: the second round of talks on fault permeability vs. communicating with laypeople and policymakers. I took a little from column A, a little from column B, and came away feeling inspired to blog. Said inspiration vanished around 4:00; there’s a little file of notes from the communication talks that I’ll try to reconstitute later. Suffice it to say that they were interesting, but not very well-developed.
Meanwhile, here are some smaller things that’ve been sitting in the “to blog” folder:
- David Feldman thinks good peer reviewers should get free socks. But I have to say, socks that said “Geophysical Research Letters” or “Tectonophysics” wouldn’t be nearly as cool as socks that said “Advances in Complexity”. Maybe I’m in the wrong discipline.
- Wendy has a good plan for revenge on pharmacists who won’t dispense contraception: give them some unwanted children for a couple of hours while you shop:
Some folks think the kind of pharmacists who refuse to fill emergency contraception prescriptions are judgmental and stodgy, but that’s just not true at all. They’re actually spontaneous and fun, always encouraging you to embrace the unknown! Hey, take a chance on that broken condom!, they’ll say, or aw, what’s another baby? or just because he’s a date rapist doesn’t mean he can’t be a good daddy! This whimsical approach to life means they won’t mind at all if your 3-year old wants to repeatedly kick the glass case where the razor blades are kept, stick Nicorette patches on Mrs. DeSimone’s leg while she waits to pick up her heart medication, or see what’s inside Mr. Thermometer. In the meantime, especially if you’re at Target, you can shop for thongs, or liquor, or wholesome toys, content in the knowledge that someone with moral values is looking out for your children, even the children that don’t exist yet. Try getting service like that at some dismal Chuck E. Cheese with stained carpet.
- And finally, today’s forehead-slapping moment:
One guy asked me what I could have possibly meant, and I said, “Well, it kind of changes how seriously you take a guy as a feminist if he date-rapes you, or bites your nipples until they bleed and won’t stop even when you’re screaming in pain and begging him to quit, or stops you in the middle of sex and says, “I don’t really like it when a woman gets that worked up.’”
[…]
And the guy said, “Huh. I can see how that would be true, but I never thought of feminism as anything other than a political movement.”
Rehydrated AGU at Green Gabbro on 30 Jun 2020 at 7:57 pm
[…] Well, I guess I did promise to try to reconstitute my notes from the AGU mass communication sessions I attended. Like many reconstituted foods, this might be a touch gritty-pasty… I made it to two of the communication talks in between all the Science. Talk the first: Karen McCurdy on How Congress Stopped Communicating with Geologists. She began by pointing out that the current administration’s utter disregard for reality is not new: in the late 2020s, John Wesley Powell realized that the lands remaining for settlement in the West did not, in fact, have enough water for conventional farming, and suggested reorganizing things around irrigation districts. He was roundly ignored while people insisted that the rain would “follow the plow”. The bulk of the rest of the talk was an odd labeling of policymaking eras according to which experts get the most respect (technologists, naturalists, or economists), and drawing parallels between political science jargon and mineralogy jargon. Slightly baffling, at least to those of us who still expect talks to have anything to do with their titles; maybe with another 15 minutes of talk time it could’ve been spun into something interesting and more directly on point, there are arguments in the abstract that never made it in to the talk. […]