sciatrix

I have reached the phase of PhD hell...

2020-07-09T16:25:54Z

...where I wish to drive to a cliff, launch myself off of it, and hopefully hit and kill some rodents on the way down.

Everything is chapter two. Chapter two was due two days ago. Is chapter two being sent to my committee? Noooooo. Is it ever going to be Good Enough? NOOOOOO. Am I trying to write two manuscripts from basically raw, unanalyzed data in six weeks? Yesssss.

god help me, I promised I'd broadcast this defense so people could watch if they wanted* but I am despairingly certain it's going to be shit and everything is shit forever and I just want to lie here and die. Instead the Manuscript beckons.

Then I have two weeks to do it again with chapter three. *high-pitched giggling* while around me, the world burns.

_{*look, there's got to be some benefit of dealing with Zoom defenses, right?}

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defense officially scheduled

2020-06-25T17:33:42Z

I am going to defend my PhD on August 6 at 11a CST. God help me.

Because it's a Zoom defense, sometime in July I'll probably work out how to stream my defense live to Youtube, where I might as well just... share it so that anyone who likes can listen in. That way y'all are all protected from any zoom-bombers, I can wave the link around to anyone who wants it, and I can check in later on with anyone who is interested.

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Hey! Academics who have disabilities, are neurodiverse, and/or are d/Deaf!

2019-10-02T20:48:57Z

You want a Slack to come and talk about that shit in with other folks in science who deal with this stuff? (It’s like Discord but a touch more professionally-oriented; no one can search anyone or share your info outside the group.)

I was at Evolution for a disability lunch that went really fucking well this past summer, and we decided that we should keep in touch more. Plans for organizing are ongoing (i.e. resource collection, a front-paging website, etc), but I think one of the most important things we can do is create more of a social network for academics dealing with disability. It can be an isolating experience, and talking breeds community breeds support.

Disability is broadly defined here. You do not need to be identified as disabled by your department or lab to come on in and participate. You don’t need to be diagnosed with anything, either. If you want to come in and say “I’m an ally” or “I’m really interested in this but I don’t know that I can self-define as disabled/neurodiverse/d/Deaf right now,” or “I’m interested but I’m scared I don’t count,” that’s okay. Come on in.

We’re primarily organizing around the needs of scientists in academia right now, but that does not mean that undergraduates who are aiming at that sort of career aren’t welcome, and we’re including “social sciences” under the banner of sciences.

Please pass it on if you know anyone who could use/is interested in such a space. If you’re interested, DM me or otherwise comment with an email address, and I’ll send you an invite.

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another thought

2019-09-30T23:19:32Z

I have been tremendously enjoying this conversation about disability, queerness, and transness over in hellofriendsiminthedark 's space, specifically about ableist language and whether or not introspection about ableist language is useful and how criticism makes both of us feel.

I come to that conversation from a place of being frustrated with language introspection, but.... it’s a good original piece, and it is a good conversation, and it is a thoughtful discussion I have enjoyed having. I want to share it, and have done so with permission.

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a few poems I was introduced to the other day

2019-09-27T23:53:44Z

A few poems I was introduced to the other day.

What the Living Do, Marie Howe

You Are Jeff, Richard Siken

Wandering Around an Alberquerque Airport Terminal, Naomi Shihab Nye

This'll do until I can get round to updating my poetry book. Do other people do that? I have an epub I've made myself (and I can tell you, I'm proud of the formatting), filled with the poetry I like best.

( self-indulgently, it has a rather idiosyncratic organizational system, which I have reproduced below )

Feel free to bring up other poems you like in the comments, if you feel moved, or ask for others. I'm in a mood.

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vrrrrrrrrmmmmmmmm

2019-07-25T03:43:07Z

I have only just now managed to finish Good Omens, having been traveling when it was airing and then having been threatened with disemboweling by Tay if I spoiled it by talking or looking too smug or otherwise allowed them to predict anything, so–we’ve been watching episode by episode this week. And we finally finished, having watched in tow with the whole house; I’d been trying to get both roommates to read the novels for years, I’m on my fourth and fifth copies of Good Omens and I have them for the lending, but no one took me up on it, and now they will because they’re in love with it, too.

and oh, oh, oh, the changes were such good changes, and oh, I am so content and so pleased, and the story is so much more applicable to the present than it was when I first read it in 2004 or so, and–it was one of my first real fandoms and many of the same people are still around, and I have this community to return to and be part of again–

I am gently chiming like a tuning fork that has received a sharp tap, and my critical brain can come online tomorrow. Tonight I am vibrating with pure delighted joy, and I am well pleased.

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bzzt bzzt, motherfuckers

2019-07-20T00:12:56Z

One of the good things about re-opening my account at Metafilter has been rolling around in links for things I find pretty cool. To that end, a quick list:

generating an electrifying conversation, in which I wax enthusiastic about electric fish.

Human races are not like dog breeds: refuting a racist analogy, in which I basically just brought HollyDunsworth's recent paper of the same name in; it's a really good paper, and a reasonable discussion.

a rewilding experiment that's now been running for 25 years, in which I check in on what's going on with the invasive hippos that Pablo Escobar helpfully gifted Colombia with in the 90s.

Starry starry knit, on some of the more interesting knit stellar pieces--Celestarium, Southern Skies, that one enormous knitted blanket an engineer did with a knitting machine charting a massive star chart.

How inmates play tabletop RPGs in prisons where dice are contraband. More or less what it says on the tin.

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I have a big post-trip post to work up...

2019-07-05T00:49:11Z

...but I keep getting myself snagged on feeling totally overwhelmed and avoidant about actually talking to or engaging with people. I'm tired and while it was generally a good trip, I walked into the house with some significant construction work to do and it won't be done till tomorrow or the next day, and everything is still a GIANT mess. I sort of want to surge ahead and work on ALL THE THINGS--a collaborative piece asking how biologists actually tend to define sex in practice rather than theory! revisions on the manuscript that just got accepted with revisions! submitting my one manuscript I have in prep! handling the data from my other study!--but at the same time, I want to curl up and do absolutely nothing and hide. Not an option, but there it is.

I am beginning to notice and grapple with just how disconnected I am most of the time from what's going on around me, right now, and just how much time I spend wandering around some kind of disassociated. It... it sucks? And I have valid reasons for being tired, but I don't know what to do about it, and I'm impatient with everything else going on.

Bah. Tomorrow I'll see Spider-Man in theaters--won't be Miles Morales, but it should help--and do about a half-day's worth of research, and then maybe I'll sit down and work out my manuscript revisions. Hopefully I can sit down and talk about the cool things I did and saw on my trip then--the Disabled Academics mixer! the incredible reception we got to our joint poster! all the cool research I got to see! the excellent discussion I had with a colleague on science outreach and rural/Southern America, and how you have to target silly beliefs without threatening identity! and then all the other things, like the distillery in Wisconsin and the incredible Maryland Crabtowne joint Rat took us to, and and and--

there's so MUCH! Half my life is spent twitching and wanting to reach out for more things, and the other half seems to be sitting back on my ass and going "oh god no no no too much." Middle grounds, brain! We should do middle grounds!

Anyway, my little orange trash child is curled up in my lap. I missed him a lot,, so I'm glad he's feeling cuddly again. I'm going to pause and spend some time breathing and petting him, I think.

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impatient screaming

2019-06-06T19:04:59Z

I want to watch Good Omens but I don't have time and there are too many things going on and I have a new and exciting experimental problem that needs resolving today if I'm going to run my last set of animals before I leave town and the contractors are being shitheads and not fixing the three appliances they broke and we still don't have a functioning dishwasher or dryer and and and--

auuuugh everyone is having fun and I want to have fun, too!

Bah.

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linkspam, linkspam, where've ye gone

2019-05-31T19:42:50Z

via siderea: Croutons, Capitalism, & Conservation (Kondo & the Bibliophibians, Pt 2i)

Kondo's respect for our attachments to things – for our emotional lives vis a vis inanimate things – is a breath of fresh air. For many, Kondo's insight into the fact there are multiple kinds of emotional attachment, and it is profitable and wise for us to distinguish between joy and duty, is a liberatory revelation. Duty is not good enough, she says, only joy. She is the champion of no-fault divorce from things.

With Kondo's focus on getting rid of things – and how that played out with books – one can easily see where bibliophibian backs would be put up by Kondo's philosophy. Less obvious is why bibliophibians might – and often do – feel she speaks to them. Less obvious is the necessary corollary of the above.

In telling us that we should only keep those things which spark joy in us, Kondo is telling us that it is okay to take joy in things. Indeed, she is telling us that it is good and right to take joy in things.

And that is not something bibliophibians hear much from outsiders.

star-anise has been killing it with discussions on disability activism and language on Tumblr this week. Those links go to base posts, but there's a lot of good stuff in reblogs. I've chimed in in a few places, too, but the reblogs are worth glancing at.

The surgeon had a dilemma only a Nazi medical text could resolve. Was it ethical to use it?

Knowing the book’s history, which came to light in the mid-1980s, Mackinnon and Yee wondered, is it ethical to use the Pernkopf illustrations? They reached out to some of the nation’s leading historians of Nazi medicine, bioethicists, and experts on Jewish law to discuss whether Mackinnon acted ethically, as they describe in the May issue of the journal Surgery.

Fighting the power in a southern college town

Parker is just one of hundreds of young people in the South who entered local politics in the wake of the 2016 election. And it’s easy for the national press, which loves a story that will trend in social media, to play Parker up. She’s the one who got sworn in on a copy of “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” And she raps!

But it tells us more about the direction of the South to look at how Parker operates on the local level in a college town — and how the movement that brought her and others like her to office plays out on the ground.

This is actually the town I went to college in, although I left before Parker moved in. But I'm so delighted to hear about her work.

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took today mostly off

2019-05-28T03:02:47Z

...which means I'm back to mainlining Community. I trailed off watching it midway through S4 when it was actually coming out, and I never picked it back up again. So now that I'm watching early S5, I'm watching totally new material for me.

And okay, okay, okay, I'm like five years late to the party, but making Jeff take on a teaching role at Greendale? Fucking genius, oh my god. It's so fun watching the shift from student to teacher mentality, and watching people negotiate the new role of being an Authority Figure at the same time as they're learning how teaching actually works.

Also I got to watch as the Dean wailed internally in French song that Jeff wasn't paying attention to the Dean's excitable journey into learning Excel, and T went from casually paying vague attention to what was going on to zeroing in on my laptop like a dog who has just heard an extremely confusing whistle.

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increasingly annoyed findings

2019-05-26T21:38:09Z

-There is a power supply totally missing from one of my amplifiers. Those amplifiers each control two chambers and supply power to both of the connected microphones, so those "recordings" are from microphones with the power off completely and are, yes, useless. This explains two thirds of the missing data I was upset about last night.
-One of my colleagues, a labmate who does recording work but usually in another building, walked off with it and didn't tell me during a lull when I was not running experiments. (This was probably in a week-long lull when I was troubleshooting other things, shortly after I spent most of February getting the chambers in working order.) She left the amplifier itself in place, so without going over the setup end to end, it's pretty hard to notice exactly what is and isn't there.
-Actually, I've identified exactly when the lull was. It was in the end of March, shortly after I had verified that all my hardware was working properly and functional but while I was busily trying to nail down issues in my recording stimuli without wasting further animals. There has been no power going to my microphones in the bottom two chambers for all five runs of animals made within that time frame. This includes every single run that I thought had been executed correctly and for which I thought I had complete data.
-I do not feel I should have to be on top of the possibility of random components of my equipment going missing.
-I am not entirely sure WTF is up with the remaining chamber, but I suspect that my white amplifier was slowly going bad and/or slowly blowing a fuse again. I have replaced that white amplifier now.
-I have now spent my entire weekend carefully checking and cross-checking all of my experimental apparatuses. They work okay now.
-I am fully prepared to sell this labmate down the river if my boss complains to me about not having had the foresight to be checking this data as I was going. Actually, I will be selling the labmate down the river regardless, because he needs to know this data is missing and also: what the fuck.
-I do not particularly like this labmate and have similar issues in the past, which my boss has tried to both-sides during all conflicts because he fears open conflict. He has repeatedly asked me to minimize problems with her and be cordial to her. I will therefore be dumping this bullshit in his lap and accepting no criticism for this, because, again: WTF.
-Actually, because my boss repeatedly told me not to look at the enormous piles of recording data that came off this paradigm prior and to focus on publishing a manuscript he has now been ignoring my emails on for a week, I will be accepting no criticism period for failing to notice this earlier. Pushing me faster yields mistakes, and there's only so much I am actually capable of or willing to work.
-White amps are now going to be switched off unless recording is actually in session, and I need a checklist of all the things needing to be switched on and off as there are now... at least six devices that need to be on while recording and off otherwise.
-Fuck me, I really wanted to have more data than this before Evolution.

Probably coming later: a thinkings-out-loud about accepting responsibility and who really does and does not need to be nudged to do that.

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oh, son of a bitch

2019-05-26T04:00:29Z

I was spending my day sitting down and going through all my playback acoustic data for my mice. This is my second chapter, I'm supposed to graduate in the spring, my PI keeps reminding me that I have to make progress, and... well, it's a pretty complicated thing I'm trying to do. I've had several errors that have set the work back by losing animals so far, and I'm very, very animal-limited: my singing mice only have litters that average ~2 or 3 pups per litter, and there are a number of experiments going on that are using the animals our colony does produce.

( Long story short, I think I might have about 25% of the runs I thought I did. )

Anyway, I have lost a truly staggering amount of the behavioral data I thought I had, and I will be spending a large part of tomorrow desperately tinkering with my hardware and trying to make the thing go before I contact my boss and ask to replace some component of hardware and/or explain that I've had yet. another. setback.

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watching Community again

2019-05-26T02:02:50Z

...and all over again, I'm struck by just how unusually good Abed was/is, as autistic characters go. I think he is still the only character I have ever seen who would tone up the robot impersonation when it was useful, or who was cheerfully capable of stepping into an acting role and putting on a totally different persona when it was fun, or who was insecure not about who he was, but about whether people would stick around and find who he was interesting.

I ought to go back to watching The Good Doctor, come to think of it. But--Abed's special, and part of why Abed is special is that Abed's not particularly special, but his perspective is so clearly formed by someone writing out rather than someone looking in. And I still haven't seen anything remotely like that in the--hell, it's been almost ten years since Community kicked off. People didn't know what emoji were yet. It was revolutionary then and it still is, for all it's a flawed show (but then, what isn't?).

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got no roots, but--my home's not on the ground

2019-05-22T20:54:14Z

A friend of mine asked for good retellings of fairy stories for a D&D campaign she's working on this week, and I dove headlong with great glee into T. Kingfisher's short stories. (Well, and her novels, but the short stories are easier to link, and I like people to buy her books if they get a taste from the stories.) Which got me thinking about witches in stories, both hers and Terry Pratchett's which are clearly influenced. My character in the campaign I'm in with my friend is an older woman in service to Death, and she's a little sillier than the archetype of those witches, but not so far unlike them.

Except that she doesn't have a settled, single place she lives. I wrote her as a traveler, someone who gets itchy if she's still too long, partly to explain why she was happy living on the road with an adventuring party, and partly...

...well. Partly because I don't get to set down roots. I've lived in Austin seven years, and I lived in northern Virginia for eight, and aside from that I've never been in a city for more than three or four at a stretch. And I'm set to be moving again in a year or two, because that's how this job goes. My dad was a military brat, and his feet got itchy, I think; but more than that, in the world I live in and the world I grew up in in North America, you move to go where the jobs are. I remember starting a in high school history course and my teacher asked how many of us were born in Georgia, and perhaps two people in a twenty-odd person class raised their hands. (I'd lived in Georgia two years then.)

I think some of the magical realism from those characterizations of witches and witchcraft comes from being part of the earth of a specific place, of being born somewhere and knowing it in your bones and so forth, and drawing the kind of power that comes from knowing many people for a very, very long time, being a known quantity in your community. But, well. Migration patterns across hundreds of miles have been common in many families for a long time in North America. Immigrant narratives are a huge part of our national mythos--if I recall rightly, about half of white Americans descend from immigrants who arrived after 1850--and even if you only look at patterns of movement within North America, well, my ancestors are Irish Catholics; if you look at Irish-American history, there's an awful lot of movement across the northern borders, and there's an awful lot of moving around the continent to move to... well... where the jobs are. Military jobs, construction jobs, labor jobs. If you broaden your sights from white people history, you see things like the Great Migration out of the South for African-American families towards the West and North. Of course you do see the centuries-old pattern of migration from rural centers to the cities, or (again in America) the westward migration of Anglo settlers, and those have worked their ways into stories. But migration patterns from areas of similar population density? Don't see that, much.

I don't know; I'm just thinking about roots and where people come from. And it strikes me that I don't see much in the way of that archetype of older women in any other context. (I mean, they're not precisely thick on the ground. But.)

I think the only place I've seen those migratory patterns commented on within fantasy is Neil Gaiman's American Gods, and then only in passing. Funny, that.

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wednesday linkspam

2019-05-22T16:26:23Z

and we're back, dammit! The house has air conditioning that works again, I have no massive terrifying looming deadlines, and I'm going to use Wednesday to share links I have open in my tabs. Among other things.

From around DW

Via rachelmanija: Debunking food, fatness and fitness myths

I would like your best recs for in-depth articles, studies, or books on the most cutting-edge current knowledge about nutrition, body weight, and health.

greywash has been killing it: On mourning, transformative works, and audience manipulation (CW: suicide)

And look. If someone comes into my fandom and writes a story where the character I most relate to dies in a way I find tone-deaf, oppressive, and clueless, I'm sure as hell not going to take that death on board as part of my personal mythology. I'm probably going to get really, really mad; drink some whiskey; drag the author extensively in Discord; write like four Dreamwidth rants where I deconstruct all the bullshit arguments the author was making that I found tone-deaf, oppressive, and clueless; and then write my own goddamned fanfic giving their fanfic all the middle fingers I can muster in a deeply passive-aggressive, naming-no-names sort of way. [...]

But I'm not going to read that story and go into mourning for the death of my avatar character. Why the hell should I? What does that death count? It doesn't even have the (lbr, since I'm a fanfic writer in the first place, to me faaairly spurious) gloss of being "the original source." It's not the fucking original source! It's just some other jerkoff, howling into the void about characters that someone else made up!! They say "he dies"; I say, "hold my beer." Transformative works are transformative works, guys. If they can kill him off, I can bring him back. Why the hell should their version matter more?

via tzikeh: Avengers: Endgame

I’m not mad at the movie per se; I’m mad about the narrative construct employed by pretty much any movie/show/insert-form-of-storytelling-here that the death of one or more main characters (especially The Grand Sacrifice For All Humanity) is the only option in a high-stakes situation–anything else, and the payoff is just not enough, somehow. There is no closure without death? That’s a pretty terrible position for storytellers to take.

Over here, siderea brought me a fantastic little discussion from this NPR piece on taxon-specific bias in animal behavior. You can find the paper that Dr. Rosenthal mentions writing in the NPR piece available open-access here, if you want to read more.

One of the things his work really raises for me is the question of what this research is really for. What are we trying to know, and why?

For instance, if why we, like, as a species, are studying the behavior of other organisms because we want to know what the full range of possibilities are - possibly to contextualize and inform human behavior - then, yes, lack of coverage is a problem. The question of what all those under- or un-studied beetles are up to becomes important, and science should get on that.

Via staranise: Children and the prodigies we make of them

That, and the idea that white people see our children as gardens to cultivate more than people to raise, which—we do. When my 1yo nephew SHRIEKED all through dinner, and everyone at the dinner table winced, I joked, "Ah, future operatic tenor." When my brother's kids earn money and save up for a big LEGO train, we say, "Future entrepreneurs here." We're preparing kids for a competitive world where every early advantage can translate into tens of thousands of dollars lost, into opportunities missed, lives derailed.

It's that age-old question: At what point does adequately preparing a child for an abusive and cutthroat world in itself constitute abuse? At what point does failing to do so constitute neglect?

Generally interesting

An Evolutionary Psychology Quiz

How do we know evolutionary psychology is perfectly legitimate? Well, for starters, it has not one but two science terms in its name. And furthermore, it’s just common sense: Homo sapiens evolved in a vicious, winner-take-all state of nature, and therefore the deepest, realest elements of human psychology are hardwired, brutal, and individualistic. The false trappings of “civilization” came later, and overlaid our natural psychology with everything about us that’s gentle, feminine, decadent, shallow, cosmopolitan, unnatural, and legalistic. Anyone who attempts to call this “sexist,” “pure ideology,” “vaguely anti-Semitic,” or “extremely convenient” just doesn’t understand science.

Here’s a quiz to test your knowledge of evolutionary psychology. Please keep in mind that evolutionary psychology employs different standards of proof than the hard sciences. These standards are unfalsifiable, and therefore cannot be questioned.

Inside the Growing World of Queer Truckers

In an industry dominated by white men, queer people are finding a community on the road.

I wrote the book on user-friendly design. What I see today horrifies me.

The world is designed against the elderly, writes Don Norman, 83-year-old author of the industry bible Design of Everyday Things and a former Apple VP.

Excellent additional commentary via vassraptor here.

Less of a question, more of a comment... (comes with a list of The Worst Questions in ascending order of sin)

If you attend panels or presentations, ever, I need you to read this article because, best case scenario, I need you to help protect me from “less of a question, more of a comment” guy. Worst case scenario, you are “less of a question, more of a comment” guy. Let’s talk about panels in general, panels about diversity and identity topics in particular, and how you as an audience member can make choices and ask questions which improve that experience for both panelists and audience. I’ll also answer some questions we both did and didn’t get to at PAX East’s “Designing Asian Settings and Themes in Analog Games” panel.

What ‘Guardians’ Director James Gunn Learned From High-Profile Firing

My apparatus for being loved was my work, and being famous. I had never really experienced before that feeling of being loved so deeply. It has been a problem for me in relationships, in friendships; I can experience loving another person but I have a very difficult time experiencing being loved. In that moment, the apparatus which was my only hope for feeling love was torn away from me and I had absolutely nothing. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.

And then came this outpouring of real love. [...] That amount of love that I felt from my friends, my family, and the people in the community was absolutely overwhelming. In order for me to have fully felt that love for the first time, the thing that needed to happen was the apparatus by which I was feeling falsely loved had to be completely taken away.

Scabby the Rat Is Under Attack—And Needs Our Help

The Trump era presents unions with a range of new threats to their survival, including the 2018 Janus Supreme Court decision revoking the right of public sector unions to collect dues from nonmembers. This erosion of union protections is being met with large-scale protests and grassroots organizing, from picketing school teachers to striking ride-share drivers. But as battles over union rights transpire at the local and federal levels, an unexpected figure has come into focus: a giant inflatable rodent.

In the late 20th century, Scabby the Rat was popularized in the industrial Midwest and grew into a symbol of union solidarity, showing up at protests around the country and the world. Standing as large as 25 feet tall with an aggressive facial expression, claws ready to fight and a stomach covered in inflamed scabs, Scabby is an effective tactic to force negotiation and draw media coverage while shaming those who violate strikes. The rat’s continued effectiveness is a testament to the importance of workplace organizing, particularly in an era of historically low union participation.

Is gender unique to humans?

This summer, in the introductory course I teach on the evolution and biology of human and animal behavior, I showed my students a website that demonstrates how to identify frog "genders." I explained that this was a misuse of the term "gender"; what the author meant was how to identify frog sexes. Gender, I told the students, goes far beyond mere sex differences in appearance or behavior. It refers to something complex and abstract that may well be unique to Homo sapiens. This idea is nothing new; scholars have been saying for decades that only humans have gender. But later that day I began to wonder: Is it really true that gender identity is totally absent among non-human species—even our closest evolutionary relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos?

Things I keep reading in small bites and then darting away from

Autistic burnout: The cost of masking and passing

Being an autistic seen as “high-functioning” means having your identity doubted and questioned. Exhausting efforts to pass and mask are given little credit. They are tossed aside with an “I do that too” and held against us in those moments of meltdown and burnout when we can longer pretend at neurotypicality. The rewards for passing are the familiar ableist tropes of invisible disability and the expectation to keep on passing, forever.

Access intimacy: the missing link

Access intimacy is that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else “gets” your access needs. The kind of eerie comfort that your disabled self feels with someone on a purely access level. Sometimes it can happen with complete strangers, disabled or not, or sometimes it can be built over years. It could also be the way your body relaxes and opens up with someone when all your access needs are being met. It is not dependent on someone having a political understanding of disability, ableism or access.

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sciatrix @ 2019-05-20T11:51:00

2019-05-20T16:51:04Z

The entire house is currently sitting at 5-10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than Austin is, because of the fans, and I'd had to sit home and look after them much of the week. Having just gotten a text from the drying folks asking us to turn up our AC (!!) because the fans can't work at that temperature (!!!!), I called and left a very snappish voice mail, because it's been 95 degrees in the house all day yesterday and there are four humans, four cats and a dog still living in it. They've asked us to turn off some of the equipment and see if that helps, anyway, and hopefully the tech will be out today to tell us it's all dry and can be put away. Here's hoping, anyway, because the whole experience has left me so drained I haven't really been capable of anything but dozing, playing endless rounds of Zoo Tycoon 2, and watching Bob's Burgers or mindless true crime. It's only now after several hours of work AC that I'm able to sit up and think enough to have something interesting to say.

I'd been listening to the Dirty John podcast today, more or less because there was a Real Crime Profile piece about it I happened to give a shot, and the titular John Meehan's first ex-wife had some very clear-headed things to say about her abusive ex. (Meehan, by all accounts, was what I usually call a piece of work: abusive, threatening, prone to lying, and so forth.) Meehan himself isn't particularly unusual, but the woman the podcast is really centered around is his second ex-wife, a woman called Debra Newell, and she had something of a history of abuse in her family herself: her sister Cindi had previously been shot by Cindi's own husband while she had been in the process of divorcing him.

This is where I get horrified enough to relay the story, because Debra and Cindi's mother Arlene is... well, she's earned something of the title piece of work herself. I just listened to this woman casually describe a pattern of viciously controlling behavior out of Cindi's ex-husband Billy, describe the things Cindi had told her, downplay the things Cindi told her were a problem, and sigh and say she'd been on a number of talk circuits because "well, everyone wants to hear a little more about forgiveness, right?" The husband had asked to meet with Cindi over the impending sale of their house, walked up behind her, and shot her in the back of the head. The police came to tell the mother what had happened, and Arlene paused and asked if they would pray with her, and declared that it would be all right because Jesus had told her so.

Then she explained that, well, she still loved Billy, and of course he'd shot himself too, after, but he hadn't died, and he wasn't in his right mind anyway what with all the stress of the divorce. And she was a Christian woman, and love could fix anything, and, well... she knew Billy before, and she knew him after, and she knew what was and wasn't him, and she knew she had to forgive him.

So she testified at his trial about all the things Billy was going through as a result of her daughter divorcing him, argued at length on his behalf, and successfully got his plea reduced to voluntary manslaughter. And she was proud of this!

My god, but Christianity has a lot to answer for, and so does this woman. The prosecutor in Cindi's case later said that her family had "thrown her away," and having listened to her mother lay out just how much she loved her ex-son-in-law and how he was really sorry and she believed in forgiveness above all, I can't find it in me to much disagree with him.

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grading continues

2019-05-17T05:10:43Z

...but at least I'm just doing the extra choice question now, in which students propose a future lab experiment they'd like to do over the course of the (~twelve-week) lab. They're supposed to explain what model system they want to use, the learning objectives the lab would accomplish, and the experimental idea itself.

Here are some of the more entertaining suggestions, organized by category:

( Wildly Ambitious And Totally Impractical )

( Could We Genotype Ourselves More? )

( Entertaining Suggestions )

( Actual Potentially Workable Ideas )

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this grump brought to you by a sullen plate of bell peppers

2019-05-15T02:16:37Z

Occasionally I am grateful to have a spouse and roommates who bully me to eat things when I would otherwise refuse. (I stop eating every time I'm stressed and then wonder why my head hurts and I can't think. I also become violently unwilling to eat anything unfamiliar, which includes most frozen ready made meals. Normally I suspect this is annoying but doable, but during major construction in the house it gets pretty hairy.)

Today I am not grateful, but I am eating anyway, and that will have to be enough.

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sciatrix @ 2019-05-14T12:29:00

2019-05-14T17:29:53Z

Right, that mess posted, which means I'm going to sit down and work out my grading. I'm hoping I can use up huge amounts of my Noodler's Bernanke Red, because I've grown to hate it, but I still have like half a bottle and it really is a decent grading ink especially in a stub nib like the TWSBI Eco stub I've put it in.

I mean, it feathers like hell and bleeds, but it does dry real fast and doesn't stick around long in the presence of water. And for grading you don't need a ton of precision... and I won't feel bad about dumping whatever's in the Eco when I'm done with it. Sooner I use the ink I have, the sooner I can go buy more Diamine Meadow and/or a bunch of other Diamine colors to play with so I know exactly what to buy when I make myself a huge bulk order from Cult Pens. (They sell Diamine for like half the price as anywhere else, which makes sense: they're based in the UK. But they also do free international shipping if you order enough ink, so my plan is to work out which colors I absolutely love via ink samples, and then save up and do a big bulk order of everything I want a bottle of.)

GRADING AHOY, I guess.

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Okay! Let's talk about some magic words for flood cases.

2019-05-14T17:11:24Z

So I think I mentioned, we flooded last week on Friday evening. What that means, if you've been fortunate enough to never live in a place that flooded before, is that we walked down the hallway on Friday, noticed standing water, immediately started bailing everything we could out, and have spent the subsequent few days with my poor roommates sleeping in the living room and me and T (miraculously, this time spared) in our room for once instead of in the living room with everyone else.

Last time this happened, we bought everyone s'mores and weenies and roasted them on the gas stove, because it felt so much like camping. I'm going to swing by and pick up s'mores tonight, probably, because ffffuuuuuuck this shit. (The electrician just terrified me by suggesting they might have to ask us to turn off all our lights and outlets in order to support the fans and dehumidifiers in here for drying the walls. Fortunately we've dodged that bullet, but I want fucking melty chocolate now.)

T and I own our current place, and this will be our third go-round with a flood incident since we bought it in 2016, so I suppose I qualify as a veteran of this shit now? Hell if I know. But... if I write this out once, maybe this time I won't forget about it, and maybe next time it will help someone else. Probably I should be sanding the rough edges off my committee talk to turn it into a departmental seminar talk for two hours from now, but this is what's on my mind.

This is from the perspective of someone dealing with US homeowner's insurance via water damage, but I have also dealt with this from the perspective of someone dealing with US renter's insurance if that's your bag. (If you don't have renter's insurance and you rent, you should definitely go get some. It's cheap, and it exists primarily to cover your stuff in the event that your landlord or someone living in your building fucks up and you lose all your belongings. It will also cover you in liability if you fuck up the building, which is why some landlords require it. I don't require it for my roommates/tenants, but I did just sit down with M and give her a very dry, pointed talk about what it is and why she might be glad she has it, given our general luck in this house; god knows I was grateful when I needed mine.

I have no idea how this works in other countries, but I'd be happy if folks who have dealt with this want to chime in.

( So your house flooded, you got all the loose water out of your shit, and everything is soggy. What now? )

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unkind things to do to one's movers: spider edition

2019-05-13T22:12:25Z

The nice folks doing the pack-out are here, which means they've been moving through the house like a very tidy cyclone packing everything up and sticking it in the giant 16ft storage cube parked on our front lawn for the duration. I appreciate this intensely, since packing and moving usually inspire in me an unending and completely overwhelmed state of panic. (I am usually about half a step up from useless when moving things until everything is in boxes. Unpacking is fine, moving things once packed is fine, packing is the special hell.)

Everything was progressing just about perfectly until there was a sudden, horrified scream and a yell, which summoned me from my grading cave in the corner.

As it turned out, the poor woman wrapping up M's desk had reached up to add her shells to the box and suddenly felt mild hair... which turned out to be the tarantula moult M keeps from her curly-haired tarantula daughter, Charlotte. A moult I had thought this morning was a) was somewhere in M's "please keep inside, temperature-sensitive" hoard of delicate things by her bed in the living room and b) was living in a little cardboard coffin.*

For those of you who have never seen one, a complete tarantula moult looks more or less exactly the same as a live tarantula, at least if you cover up the part where the spider has exploded its way out of the old exoskeleton. The poor woman packing screamed, her supervisor (apparently terrified of spiders) screamed, her colleagues inspected the exoskeleton with much suspicion and side-eyeing, and then I tucked it away on my windowsill so that M can have it back when she gets home from the pawnshop.

I'm very glad that Charlotte was relocated to our friend P's on Saturday for her own health and safety during the post-flood remediations--not least because I was then able to reassure the nice packout folks that no, there were absolutely no live tarantulas in the house, just the cats, dog, fish and shrimp. Oof.

_{*M is a perky little bubblegum goth who feels this is the optimal way to store things like that. The coffin is, as I recall, a sort of pastel yellow.}

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you know that the finals grading is going well when...

2019-05-11T16:29:09Z

...you get five exams turned to the correct set of pages in before you see a student who has written a desperate apology for his lack of studying and explained he stayed up to 4am the night before and then spent the intervening day working on a homework assignment that he was supposed to have completed before he left class the previous week. I hate notes like this because while I have a lot of compassion for students who are, for whatever reason, struggling... at this point in the semester, there is literally nothing I can do to help this student, I know my instructor has tried to figure out how to meet his needs all semester, and at the end of the day passing him out of sheer awkwardness and pity isn't actually doing him (or anyone else) any favors. I would rather set my students up for success, thank you, and I know for a fact my instructor feels the same way. Bless her.

Incidentally, yesterday's talk went pretty great, inasmuch as anything could given that technical difficulties meant that I didn't have the correct HDMI-to-VGA converter for the screen: I had forgotten that the room this seminar is in contains neither a built-in PC (as I am used to using in lecture rooms) nor any kind of video hookup that anyone has on a laptop these days: it only has a single, sad, VGA port. I could have sworn my boss, who runs the seminar series, had purchased a VGA-to-HDMI converter to sit in the room, but nope--so one of my labmates, bless him, volunteered to run to the front desk of the next building to go borrow a converter from them.

I own a converter now that will live in my bag so this never happens again, thank you.

After I stared, dead-eyed, at the audience for ten minutes after the talk had been supposed to start--I'd figured this problem out ten minutes prior but not been able to find a converter in that time--my labmate got back with a converter in hand, and we spent another ten minutes finding out that my laptop was incompatible with the slide display for some (probably Linux-related) reason.

Eventually I offered sheepishly to sign up for an early talk in the spring semester or possibly to convey my talk through the medium of interpretive dance, to which my boss pointed out "These aren't mutually exclusive..." I wound up giving a quick chalk talk instead, which went surprisingly well. Got a compliment on grace under pressure from another faculty member, even, which I am going to take with a warm sense of mortified gratefulness.

Anyway, I'm doing better housewise--got a storage unit in the front yard, getting nice burly men to move my shit into it, more on that later--and I've survived last week no worse for wear, so I can more or less breathe again for a bit. Finals are due this week, though, so I'll be spending much of my weekend grading. Fortunately I have time.

Oof. I'm getting a cup of tea.

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sciatrix @ 2019-05-10T11:03:00

2019-05-10T16:06:26Z

I have to get up and give this seminar talk, which is going to wind up just being my committee talk because I could not be arsed to sand off the edges and communicate my endocrine stuff more effectively. It is scheduled for an hour from now.

I am not yet on campus. I have been wrangling electricians and storage units. I sat down, and this was perhaps a mistake.

There is, you see, a small pale orange cat, who has inserted himself delicately under my arm, and who is happily sleeping. He is warm and soft and all I want to do is curl around him and doze.

ugh. Oh, well, it's the last Hard thing I have going for a while, that's definitely something, and then I can take an actual weekend off as well as the extremely distracted, slightly lazy thing I've been doing since committee meeting.

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sciatrix @ 2019-05-06T20:13:00

2019-05-07T01:13:59Z

I'm sitting in my bed, ten hours into working on this fucker, staring unblinkingly at dissected testicles while I try to find just the perfect set for this slide.

this is fine

everything is fine

(on the upside, I learned a couple of days ago that if you remove the epididymal fat pad that wraps itself around the testis, no spermatogenesis happens at all. behavioral shit is unchanged, but you're firing blanks. we have absolutely no idea why, but I think it's cool. wonder if it works for ovaries too...

if you just cut off part of the fat pad, it will totally grow back, btw)

SCIENCE

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