sciatrix | Entries tagged with academia

...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?}

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

I'm setting up my committee meeting arguments this weekend, which involve a plan to basically take my previous work (leptin injections in singing mice: increase singing behavior, possibly not song quality??? and also it turns out there's a big social order effect) and replicate it in a more sensitive and sophisticated way.

( stuff specific to my work under the cut )

One of the most important things about this presentation to my committee is going to be the choices I make about what we measure that blood plasma for, why I argue we should measure them, and what I expect to find. So I need to nail that down soon and get this presentation sanded down and ready for Wednesday. Trouble is, I'm still thinking.

( here's where the cort and stress stuff comes in )

Also, probably relatedly: I am not sleeping for more than five hours or so at a time, and it is not getting better, and I am really fucking tired of falling asleep over my work, dammit. I had a rough meeting with my boss on Wednesday in which he basically gave me a hard time limit on graduating, and I need to turn on the skill, and I'm still broken but I've held it together this far on sheer cussedness and I'm not going to stop now. I want to look at this fucking thing. I want to look at fat and trauma and this weird little peptide that is doing way more than it gets credit for, and I have enough cussedness to see this damn thing through.

I did get in to see a new therapist, one with trauma training, yesterday for intake, on the theory that maybe change will help. I just about had left this post finished at that when my house started flooding, again, and I've just spent the last hour or so frantically bailing out the hallway and trying to make some kind of barrier against the rain. Thank fuck we have a Hoover mechanical mop... thing; we combined that with the Little Green, made a barrier of towels, and then K and I bailed like motherfuckers and T heroically ran into the side yard and set up emergency flood barriers. Thank fuck they're a paranoid genius and we had them on hand.

And my PI told me I needed to graduate by the spring or it wouldn't happen on Wednesday, and this meeting is... this Wednesday.

*hollow laughter* It never rains but it pours, huh?

I have data I want to be analyzing because it is new and shiny but no, instead I have to make a powerpoint about the motivations and the hypotheses, and I just want to stand up and excitedly word-vomit them at people who already understand me instead of having to communicate and EXPLAIN why this shit is cool.

if it is, because I don't know until I analyse the fucking data, which is taunting meeeee. Dicks.

tell me how many songs the mice made dammit

(I have a committee meeting a week from tomorrow and a dept seminar two days later, so this is supposed to be my talk prep for that. But my shiny new data is overwhelming and enormous and I'm struggling to figure out how to properly run through all of it--48h of recording! per! mouse! continuously! and it's all mine and it's like I've stuck one of those massive novelty jawbreakers in my mouth and it doesn't quite fit, but goddammit I'll bite you if you try to take it away from me.

In the meantime, I'm supposed to walk through why I'm doing this this way via powerpoint first thing tomorrow, and I haven't even started poking at slides because THAT DATA IS RIGHT THERE, I WANT IT.)

Ugh. It's probably time to go look at images of mouse testicular anatomy so I can point at the bits I'm taking and the bit's I'm not and explain why I've been weighing them, I GUESS.

I have hit my first Annoyed Nitpicking Snag on The Body Keeps the Score, which is: the left-brain analytical right-brain emotional divide is not that simple and not nearly as pat as he is making it out to be, and it has left me grumpy.

Whether or not I am using that crankiness as a shield to avoid really engaging is an exercise for the observer.

Anyway, have some links I dug up while trawling my DMs with my collaborators, for future use:

Queering chemicals (EDCs): A bibliography

There is a class of environmental toxicants that are known for their ‘queer-making’ effects. Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals, or EDCs, produce a wide swath of health issues, including cancers, diabetes, and heart disease that disproportionately impact already marginalized communities (Murphy 2017). Recently, scientists have begun linking EDCs to supposed ‘sexual abnormalities’: stories of gay birds and trans frogs have sounded the alarm on possible impacts to human sex, gender, and sexuality. ‘Queering’ refers to practices of questioning, historicizing and “making strange” often taken for granted categories associated with sex, gender, and sexuality. The following is a bibliography of this literature.

Tidepool creatures bend the sex rules we take for granted

We humans are accustomed to thinking of sexual function as being both fixed and segregated into bodies that we designate as either female or male. In the larger animal kingdom sex doesn’t always follow our rules. Many animals are monoecious, or hermaphroditic, having both male and female sex organs in the same body. Not only that, but lots of animals change from one sex to the other. As in so many aspects of biology, the way humans do sex may be thought of by us as “normal,” but it isn’t necessarily the most interesting way.

Scientists Genetically Engineered Flies to Ejaculate Under Red Light

Their experiments confirm that sex is pleasurable, even for animals we think of as simple.

(I'm really curious to think about how you would engineer a similar thing to study female flies.)

Coming out Darwinian: Is it time to rewrite the story of sex?

All coming-out stories are members of the same genus, if not the same species. Mine, however, has one distinguishing trait: along my path to understanding and accepting that I was gay, the obstacle of my religious upbringing was aided and abetted by none other than Charles Darwin. That is, there was a time when I told myself that the uncomfortable feelings I had for male friends and classmates could not possibly be real, because they would be wrong and sinful, and also because they were impossible in a world shaped by natural selection.

Heterosexism in a scientific study of lesbian attraction

An evolutionary psychology study that gained much media attention in May 2017 claims to show women’s sexual attraction to other women is the outcome of evolution, specifically for the pleasure of heterosexual men. The study was reported widely as ‘homosexual women evolved for men’s pleasure.’ Journalists have not read the study nor linked to it. The study is published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. The study is led by Associate Professor Menelaos Apostolou. The team is based at the University of Nicosia, with apparently only one woman co-author.

“Categories aren’t these things that are just there”: An interview with the CLEAR Lab’s Queer Science Reading Group

What does it mean to do queer science—or, rather, to do a queer science?

today's job: sliding through I think almost two year's worth of group Twitter DMs to create an annotated bibliography of books, pop science articles, and peer reviewed journal articles on same-sex sexual behavior in animals that one of my collaborators (or me) have brought enthusiastically and waved at the others at some point. Then figuring out which ones we definitely absolutely yes do need to cite and point people at, in case we've missed anything, and coming up with good sentences to make sure readers can find, say, Malin Ah-King's work or Joan Roughgarden's or more of Marlene Zuk's or anything else.

It's going to be a fun afternoon once I sit down and eat something. I'm excited.

(Then I have to do some data entry and some grading and probably some formulating explicit hypotheses for the second two aims of my dissertation, but shhh. I'm being excited about this instead of rolling my eyes at my boss, who thinks I will magically work out how to graduate by December; I think this time next year is much more likely, but committee meetings wait for no one.)

Also on my docket: sitting down and figuring out what the relationship between cortisol and leptin really is, because there's something really fascinating and antagonistic there but I need to understand more about cort's role in energy balance and leptin's reactions to chronic and acute stressors first. I can probably justify spending the time on that under "lobbying to test my mice's plasma cort levels when I test the leptin" and picking other hormones to look at, but I need to think about what the kind of social stress the animals are under right now looks like in terms of the experiment. They've all definitely had one acute stressor in the form of being handled and injected before I ran the experiment, and I should think about that in context, too...

...just remembered the abstract deadline for the poster I meant to submit was yesterday.

I'm torn on emailing and asking if they'll take one a day late--this conference has no limit for posters--or just writing the conference off entirely, since as of last I heard it was looking like it would probably be me + PI going and the postdoc I would have wanted to spend more time with won't be attending.

And I don't actually exactly have new data anyway, although I might by then.

Augh. *bangs head into wall* I got so hyperfocused on the manuscript + the experiment I'm starting this week that it totally slipped my mind.

Does anyone have good articles on the topic of mental health and the ADA for an audience of working researchers? EEB specific would be great but is not required. I'll be co-leading a group discussion in my department on the topic in two weeks, and I need to send something out. Currently I'm thinking of this Meg Duffy piece on crying in science, but I'd like to touch more on what kinds of mental health supports are actively required in academia which people might or might not have realized. I would also like to find pieces to the effect of "this is why you should care about disability and mental health shit in academia, guys."

It's so hard to know how to focus this one--the ADA addition wasn't my thought to add into the topic, and it makes me want to talk neurodiversity, buuuut this is a very 101 crowd and I don't want to overshoot my audience. Signal boosting would be welcome.

things I should be doing:

asking facilities to take away the corpse freezer from the animal rooms
asking facilities to take away the undead -80 freezer we are inheriting from a lab that is retiring
asking facilities to do other ancillary things like find out why the heat doesn't work in this crappy basement or repaint our "dry erase" wall, swiftly becoming a dingy grey wall from which nothing erases
assembling quizzes for students whose class starts in two hours
grading quizzes for students whose class starts in two hours
eating actual meals
the dreaded manuscript

things I am actually doing:

my beautiful sunshine collaborators told me there was a whole book about how in the Renaissance there was a lot of outrage at the idea that flowers might actually be having sex, and I found it at the library and now I am trying to wrench it from a crummy PDF into a nice readable ebook
listening to the Moana soundtrack on repeat
furiously updating my twitter and occasionally watching my Metafilter account in case this dude comes back and flounces entertainingly again
talking to all of y'all

I ought to do one of those December posting memes for content and discussion, but I've forgotten where to find them and I'm pretty overwhelmed. If I can find one, maybe I'll play with that.

"how has homosexual orientation evolved, given that, on average, homosexual individuals produce fewer children than do heterosexual individuals (this relative fitness relation between homosexuals and heterosexuals is considered an assumption for the purposes of this paper, given that the empirical evidence in the literature from Alfred Kinsey and others is weak)"

sir

do you hear yourself

do you hear yourself

I am not entirely sure if I can review this literature sober. The first thing I tackled was a piece purporting to be a review about proposed mechanisms for the evolution of female homosexuality; it spent three or four paragraphs explaining the possibility that bisexuality in women evolved for the purpose of attracting and interesting heterosexual men.

I cannot even.

...because I promised to work on the section of my collab on models of same-sex sexual behavior evolution that incorporate a pleiotropic effect of fecundity on the same alleles.

Which means I'm going to be heavily diving into the human literature. Which I knew when I volunteered to do it.

But... oh god is this going to be a trip as I dig through this lit and summarize it so I can explain it for my collaborators. Man. I might have to go and indulge in a root beer-and-rum.

me: okay self, I will carefully plan to spend two hours this morning looking at my ongoing manuscript and making lists of what it needs, what I know, what I don't know, and what I need help with.

also me: what if we spent two hours editing the ebook we're making ourselves from a scan of a library book instead?

augh

...because apparently preparing for all those conventions really takes it out of me. (I designed two different posters on different subsets of mine and a coworker's research and presented them both in a space of about six weeks.)

I keep forgetting how rough transitions between summer and the regular academic year always are for me. I'm still ridiculously freaked out about the possibility that I won't finish, but I also know for a fact that my PI gives enough of a shit about my progress to ask people on his facebook how you help out a student who is dealing with confidence issues, and I'm moving fine on my new project which is more interesting than my old one anyway.

Anyway.

I also fell facefirst into Daredevil fandom, of all the stupid damn things--or hell, maybe not, because fucked-up Irish-American Catholicism + actually attempting to interrogate disability (not that the show bothers, but fuck it) + digging into attempts at realistic representation of relying on non-sight sensory modalities without, god help me, resorting to fucking echolocation really kind of is my jam.

(Does Matt Murdock rely on echolocation to "see" things? Well, he ain't wandering around squeaking at high pitches at intervals, and he doesn't seem to be tapping his damn cane either to get high frequency noises smeared across that atonal click, so I'm going to say that he probably doesn't use that as much as he's using a mixture of wind currents, extremely acute spatial sense and calculations, and smell to localize things.

I gotta rant at some point about how my observations of Dent inform my perception of points where Murdock's lack of sight is actually going to cause him some issues, because to be honest the show appears to have given him sensory modalities that are actually more powerful than my cat's. Dent gets around just fine, but vision actually isn't interchangeable with echolocation and dammit, different modalities are useful for different things; that's why species with different ecologies rely on different signaling to different extents, and existing human adaptive tech can compensate for some of those difficulties but not all of them.

Might send that to the relevant comm first, though.)

The weirdest coincidence on that mammoth rant and the asexually reproducing whiptail lizards that kept coming up is that I happen to work in the department where much of the original research on those lizards was done. Specifically, I share a floor with one of the primary fellows who did it.

He dresses exclusively in Hawaiian shirts and ponchos. Although he isn’t currently working on whiptails that I know of, the man is a major packrat–there’s things still on the walls that date back by to before I was born, and our hallways are lined with empty terrariums. It’s not uncommon for me to go digging through one of the hall cupboards for some unattended piece of glassware or elderly specialized equipment and suddenly find myself staring into jar after jar of indifferently pickled lizards.