I am basically only on board with holidays to the extent that they are about pie. Thanksgiving? An awful lot of it is about pie. National Pie Day? Oh my yes. Christmas? It’s more about cookies than about pie. This is a problem.
What's the most festive Christmas pie?
And a few links, none of which are about pie:
I have a stack of final papers on my desk. Soon, it will be joined by a stack of final exams. Whee.
I’ve found that comment codes are useful ways to keep myself sane while grading - if I can just scrawl “E” for “You are making the baby English language cry. If you do not take your next paper to the campus writing center before turning it in you are at serious risk of dictionaries leaping off the shelves to pummel you”, I feel less compulsion to make time-consuming line-by-line edits that my students are very unlikely to ever read. Plus, while no one bothers to pick up their old work after the semester is over, most people will log in to the online gradebook. If I put a brief note there, they might actually read it.
When I prepare the actual comment decoder sheets, I try to be constructive. Sometimes it takes a few drafts to remove all the snark. (Note to any students who might be reading this: sometimes I also put in extra snark, just because it’s funny. Most of your papers were actually pretty good.)
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The local seismologists have been holding non-stop post-AGU mini-conferences, over this weekend and continuing through Wednesday. While it may be convenient for people’s travel plans to shove all the conferences into the same period of time, I do not understand how they expect to learn anything - my brain was full after a mere four days of conference action, and even though it was exciting, I have just barely recovered. Thankfully, I’m not a seismologist, so I don’t have to participate in any such nonsense.
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- Spill some coffee on my badge, to project that professionally absent-minded coffee-ridden image - SUCCESS!
- Get this year’s supply of post-its and novelty pens from the swag booths - FAILURE! The swag booths don’t open until tomorrow. Silly swag distributors, don’t they realize that my best contiguous downtime for swag-collecting was today?
- Have a slightly awkward, stilted conversation with the guy with the totally opposite theory from mine - SUCCESS!
- Have beer and tapas with fellow geobloggers - NO PIX, IT DIDN’T HAPPEN. Seriously, I think we may have violated the very physics of the blogosphere by having a bloggers’ meetup with absolutely no digital cameras present. If you find that your blog posts start to grow unstable, lacking any remaining reason or coherent narrative structure, uh, well, we’re sorry.
Also, one of my group-mates proposed that there are five permissible emotions at AGU:
- Nervous
- Excited
- Overwhelmed
- Preening
- Jaded
This probably applies to any large professional conference. I am firmly stuck in “nervous” until my talk is over.
The geoblogger meetup extravaganza is now on Monday! Which, uh, is apparently tomorrow.
At about 6:00, I plan to loiter in the lobby of Moscone West (probably nearer the stairs than the escalator), wearing my bubblegum pink backpack. I also own many silly hats, which have in the past proven useful for this sort of thing, but I think that bubblegum pink will be a sufficiently rare color at a serious convention of serious scientists that silly hats shouldn’t be necessary. If things get really desperate I’ll pull out my purple umbrella.
We have two nominations for boozing-places: The Thirsty Bear and Pacific Coast Brewing. I’ll throw in Weird Fish, because I’ve been wanting to try the food, and Toronado, because I keep hearing that it’s The bar for beer aficionados in San Francisco. The winner will be decided by consensus at the beginning of the game. If we fail to reach consensus, the winner will be decided by an unarmed fight to the death.
(If anyone wants to join late, or you’re really paranoid that we’ll leave without you, email me and I’ll give you my cell phone number.)
My apologies to anyone who’s been accused of harboring spambots by my blog in the past couple of days. One of the third-party blacklists used by my very favorite anti-spam plugin, Bad Behavior, started throwing false positives like candy at a parade. I’ve updated the plugin, so you may now resume normal commenting. Anyone else running Bad Behavior should update immediately.
In other news, my students might be drylabbers and plagiarizers - I have a couple of suspiciously well-written, wildly off-topic papers sitting on my windowsill - but at least they are smart enough to avoid idiot maneuvers like plagiarizing from Wikipedia. I typed quite a few sentence fragments into Google yesterday, to absolutely no avail. Go Bears!
I was browsing through the list of industry employers who will be recruiting at AGU, and came upon one firm which bills itself as an “affirmative action employer”. In the next sentence, the ad explains that this means that they recruit and promote the most qualified candidates “without regard to race, sex, [etc.]…”. I am guessing they added that because they were worried about running off the white male applicants with all this scary language about establishing a level playing field.
When did “affirmative action” cease to be a description for a class of policies, pointed to by countless shrill right-wingers as the very definition of unfairness, and become instead a meaningless way to give a shiny progressive gloss to your thoughtless continuation of the racist, sexist, etc.-ist status quo? My copy of What Words Mean must be out of date.
NB: I’m not making any specific claims here about the obligations any particular consulting companies might have to establish a real affirmative action program. However, any time someone tries to claim that their failure to actively discriminate is the same thing as an active attempt to mitigate the deep-seated effects of centuries of injustice, and they totally deserve a diversity cookie, I will puke on their shoes.
ETA: Huh, this’ll learn me to spout off without Googling - apparently “affirmative action employer” has a legal definition, and is a designation you might want if you are bidding for federal contracts.
Weird. I still think that last sentence is to avoid scaring the white men, though.
So Andrew Alden has suggested a fun game: predict which AGU abstracts will get the most mainstream media attention. I’m working on my own list (though restricted to stories from the sections whose abstracts I would glance through anyway, which means I’m missing all the climate stuff), but I thought it’d be fun to see how well the informed judgment of scientists compares to the inscrutable mutterings of a modern divination machine.
So how ’bout it, Oracle? What stories will we see in the popular science press from this year’s AGU?
Also: would anyone like to meet up for an AGU geobloggers’ dinner? Brian? Andrew? Thermochronic? Bueller? If enough people are interested, I can set us up the bomb restaurant.
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Remember that book so many of you volunteered to be interviewed for? It’s done! It’s out! It has a snazzy cover and a snazzy new title (Who’s Afraid of Marie Curie?: The Challenges Facing Women in Science and Technology)! I’m in it, albeit briefly and pseudonymously! I have not yet gotten my grubby hands on a copy, but I have been assured that it is captivating.
Also, remember that the December edition of Scientiae is coming soon, with a theme of transcending the debate.
I didn’t formally sign up for International Dissertation Writing Month, but I did set myself a couple of goals for November. I’m not sure I’ve done enough to consider myself an InaDWriMo winner yet (though there’s still time!) but I’ve made more than zero progress, so that’s good. However, I still find myself deeply embedded in thesis-related gloom, so it’s nice to find inspiration in my RSS feeds. This time, it’s from Niniane, who is doing the real NaNoWriMo:
The Nanowrimo organization sends out pep talks once or twice per week. Most of them are corny and useless. But last week they had one from Neil Gaiman, which I and all of my friends agree was truly uplifting:
The last novel I wrote (it was ANANSI BOYS, in case you were wondering) when I got three-quarters of the way through I called my agent. I told her how stupid I felt writing something no-one would ever want to read, how thin the characters were, how pointless the plot. I strongly suggested that I was ready to abandon this book and write something else instead, or perhaps I could abandon the book and take up a new life as a landscape gardener, bank-robber, short-order cook or marine biologist. And instead of sympathising or agreeing with me, or blasting me forward with a wave of enthusiasm—or even arguing with me—she simply said, suspiciously cheerfully, “Oh, you’re at that part of the book, are you?”
I was shocked. “You mean I’ve done this before?”
“You don’t remember?”
“Not really.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “You do this every time you write a novel. But so do all my other clients.”
I’m at that point of the science. With this project, I’ve actually been at that point of the science for a very long time. The people around me seem to disagree with my ceaseless proclamations of epistemological doom, though, so I soldier on. I am constantly finding new and creative ways to enlarge my error bars.
What do you do when you’re stuck at that point of the science?
