Making silver linings is a good craft to hone. You watch Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't? He's spot on about spending time outside being good for your mental health.
Classes are back in session and mostly in-person. We didn't require any testing or quarantining before returning to campus. The university's covid hotline rings only 9-3 on business days. Contract tracing takes "a couple business days". Student health staff aren't really all that concerned. I'll be surprised if we're still open in October. My university's council of graduate students, the one crumb of representation we get in the administration, has been effectively dead for the past couple years; this year the grad student body voted on a new constitution. I went to the officer election meeting and, uh, ended up running unopposed for one of the department representative positions. Hopefully this turns out well and isn't a waste of time!
Research I finished a draft of that big survey paper that's been eating me alive for the past several months. Now it's all in my advisor's hands until she takes the time to make edits to it. It's nice to be done with a big task that does not help me graduate. The other local PhD student is no longer doing research in our group, which is more than okay with me. He did not really understand things well, but also didn't ask questions or really talk to me at all, so delegating tasks to him never went well. Oddly enough, I think his intolerant views towards trans people led to him feeling uncomfortable in the lab, but, y'know, that's not really my problem to fix. Next up I need to start getting my ducks in a row for my comprehensive exam. Life Today the truck goes in to the shop for front brakes and wheel bearings and I'm...anxious about it? I should have been socialized different as a kid, maybe, because I have always developed emotional attachments to the machines in my life. Not sure what to make of that. Sunday is our 9th anniversary. We are such different people now than we were when we got married, but we've grown together and it sure seems like we're going to keep that up. I think we are going to do something sexy like tidying and organizing a couple of rooms in the house so my wife has a desk to work at and the basement becomes less my space and more our space. And cook some good food together.
As someone who owns an F-150 of the same era with the same 300 c.i. inline six engine, I can attest to how terrifyingly deadly it is to deer and presumably pedestrians as well. It's already big and I struggle to imagine what it's like to drive something even bigger on a regular basis for typical consumer car tasks. Honestly I would love a tiny Hilux but they command ridiculous money in this area because they're popular for rock crawler/off-road builds. Some auto company should follow Subaru's footsteps and make a small truck marketed at dykes. Ted Cruz might want a mean, threatening, monstrous truck, but lesbians know you don't need a big truck to be good in the bedroom :)
"Why do tomatoes split" feels like a very Missouri question. Surprise week-long summer rains can really do in those almost-ripe tomatoes that were used to dry & hot conditions.
Couple weeks back, one of the local titmice ran into our window and spent about an hour resting on our porch before flying off into the trees. I love these lil friends; they're always up to some kind of antics: chasing each other around or hanging on my windowscreen and watching me through the window. I have all the pictures for truck drum brakes, but I have yet to do the writeup. Since she's a 4x4 truck, the front brakes are extremely non-trivial and since the wheel bearings are due for replacement anyway I am going to get a local shop to do both. Book time is 3 hours so I am feeling like not doing it myself was perhaps a good choice; plus, when something rusted breaks it's not my problem! It still feels weird that we actually have enough money to afford hiring a shop to do it. Spent last night digging around in the dashboard of my metamour's car and hopefully rehabbed a couple of servo drives that were "getting lost" due to a weak internal connection. They're part of the AC system, so not a big deal if they fail again, but hopefully that saved about $350 in parts. I'm getting very close to being done with my part of a big paper and I'm quite excited to pick up my research again.
If people object to the death sentence "on moral, religious and policy grounds", it seems like an incredible leap to argue that such executions are just. One need look no further than the BLM protests to observe that "legal" and "just" are two wholly different things.
Something that I don't really care for about this particular style of discourse is that, fundamentally, it's a lot of words in defense of a somewhat milquetoast idea. Paul clearly feels like this point needs a solid defense. While I can imagine people who'd disagree with the general principle he's arguing for, it's not all that controversial. Paul was clearly thinking of something when he wrote this, as he felt it timely and worthy of defense, but it's not clear what. It'd engender a lot more interesting discussion were he to discuss some concrete examples, as then we could talk more about whether the principle here fits the situations he has in mind. Two people might agree that being helplessly addicted to drugs, but one could be thinking of harsh sentencing and three strikes laws for drug dealers and the other could be thinking of taxpayer-funded rehab programs. It's a fine general principle, but the social outcomes of the specific implementations of it are vastly different, and therein lies some interesting discussion that's denied by speaking in general terms.
I think these statements contradict each other. On the one hand, the source of rules to which you are conformist or independent depend on your peers — your social context, if I may — and on the other, your "conformist—independent identity" is somehow independent of that society? Unless the claim is more that people sort themselves into social circles based on their alignment. But in that case, the customs protecting free inquiry haven't been weakened; Paul Graham has just accidentally sorted himself into a conventionally-minded circle. Instead, I'd claim that one's alignment on this chart can vary significantly based on their social context. I find that I've shifted from "passively independent" to "actively independent" towards my parents as I've matured and become independent from them. In my research lab, I am pretty comfortable staking strong opinions and disagreeing with my advisor on technical issues, but when the topic is about what I need to do and when I need to do it by, I am much quieter as I'm her student and she holds that power over me. Further, vocal support by active independents for social norms that allow independence of thought might look a lot like active conformism. And, perhaps it is, since one's "conformist—independent identity" depends on those social norms! But that doesn't mean that those advocates otherwise make active conformist choices. Since Paul left the exact social context he's thinking in vague, I can't really say a lot more about what he's thinking about. I will say that the situation at universities is complex; administration has taken a lot of power from faculty, but perhaps those faculty have been hoisted by the petard of their independence, which makes cooperation difficult at times and prevents them from using their power effectively. (Leaving aside the possibility that PG is instead discussing the situation of assholes being allowed to be assholes, as nobody ought to defend that position.)When measuring conformism, of course, you have to say with respect to what, and this changes as kids get older. For younger kids it's the rules set by adults. But as kids get older, the source of rules becomes their peers. So a pack of teenagers who all flout school rules in the same way are not independent-minded; rather the opposite.
Since one's quadrant depends more on one's personality than the nature of the rules, most people would occupy the same quadrant even if they'd grown up in a quite different society.
Part-way through reading this, I came to a pretty unflattering realization about myself. For a variety of complex and interrelated reasons, I tend to draw back and hide myself when I sense that a situation might not be emotionally safe for me. I realized that, while it is true that I have good reasons to not be vulnerable, it is also true that that self-imposed distance has negatively impacted my relationship with my wife and has been hard for her to live with. Doubly so now that most of the circumstances that gave me those reasons are long gone. I feel a mix of guilt for taking so long to see this and grief over what could have been. On a different note, I find my parents constantly conflate these two truths to the point where talking to them about anything where we have significantly different ways of thinking or feeling is effectively impossible. Their particular religion benefits a lot from having one kind of Truth that is always right; uncertainty or conflicting truths don't exist; scientists and other religions are equally suspect and illegible to them. I sent this to my college-aged sister; maybe we'll have an interesting conversation as a result.
Please let's hold off on the bad-faith assumptions, okay?
see also:
I think we're far more likely to see a hotly contested election than an outright cancellation. There's a reason we've been arguing about mail-in voting for months now.
I don't see them out there much; trimming a few branches back helped too.
Some weeks I almost forget about the burnout. This is not one of those weeks. Nevertheless, the inevitable passage of time drags me forward, oblivious that I'm lying face-down in the dirt. Right now I am in grad school because I am in grad school. At some point I will finish or drop out. After that? At one point I had some ideas. Now, half those ideas aren't feasible and the other half I'm not sure I or my family want.
I like to think he's showing off for me :)
We have an incredibly handsome red wing blackbird who visits our feeder all the time. Don't see his wife all that often, but she does come by once in a while. I love the little dances he does and the way he fans his tail out:
Based on the all the defamation suits, I'd give even odds that they're peeved they can't manipulate their family into loving them.
What's it like to know that your family paid you $400,000 to fuck off forever?
When I look at who gets nominated and selected for most leadership positions today, I see people chosen by other powerful people for the purpose of entrenching and extending their existing power. Part of the reason that US citizens have such trouble with science is that we have never had a culture of epistemic humility and rarely selected for that trait in our leadership. Looking up lists of "great leaders" turns up people like Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great...many of whom possess the "effective communication" trait but fall quite short of "empathy and humility". A fundamental difficulty of justifying the humanities is that the humanities cannot tell you how to think about the world. The best it can offer is a tour of how other people have thought about the world and a series of exercises which hopefully take you from imitating other ways of thinking towards developing your own. But the exact process of developing that perspective cannot be taught — indeed, that goal denies the student-teacher dichotomy and requires instructors to view students as junior junior faculty rather than as consumers of a product. This difficulty is not unique to the humanities; STEM fields face it as well: I'll stop short of trying to pick out why our society doesn't value this process, but I suspect that it's multi-faceted and I have no real idea on how to "sell" humanities-for-everyone to people with money and power. (And, I mean, have you read modern humanities papers? There's certainly an argument to be made that "the humanities" are just as uninterested in selling humanities-for-everyone as most people are in buying it.)And it should come thus as little surprise that these skills – a sense of empathy, of epistemic humility, sound reasoning and effective communication – are the skills we generally look for in effective leaders. Because, fundamentally, the purpose of formal education in the humanities, since the classical period, was as training in leadership.
There is no “The Scientific Method,” and science offers no path to truth. That may seem paradoxical at first, because science offers innumerable, excellent methods, and is the most reliable path to truth.
That would be an ideal situation; hopefully it works out! Technically the copyright for my book is undetermined; the department paid to have me teach a course with the understanding that I'd write the book for it in the process, so maybe it is theirs, but also faculty usually own their course materials, so I have decided to just claim the copyright and if it ever becomes an issue we can argue about it then. It'd be foolish to argue copyright on a book that turns no profit anyway.
It's interesting to see the differentiation between "the president as president" and "the president as citizen", and good to know that there's at least some level of not being able to use presidential authority to influence personal court cases, at least in theory.
dons her "I wrote a free textbook and all I got was this t-shirt and a horrible case of burn-out" shirt Make sure you don't do what I did and get suckered into writing a course and then writing the textbook for the course over the span of a few semesters. Look around; there are certainly grants out there for developing open-access course materials that you might qualify for (or might get a faculty member to help you qualify for). All that said, free course materials are something I am always excited to see! Good luck, and if you want a second pair of eyes, just let me know.
I think I'm in the same spot and I'm not sure if I like it.
Understandably so. The setting is quite neat to me as it sorts out a few of the more tricky questions YEC has to answer but yet manages to still draw out the point that scientific facts are only as good as our interpretation of the evidence can be. Are there things you do have faith in?
What'd you think of Omphalos? The utterly fascinating bit for me is that the last prayer outlines basically the same mental shift I had to do, and coincidentally the scientific push for me to do that was also learning a bit of astronomy. I feel like that shift could have been better foreshadowed, though; I feel like it was wanting to be a twist of an ending, and in my opinion such an ending should lend a new perspective on a re-reading of the story. I'm not sure this one does.
I'm not done with it yet; the quality feels a bit spottier than his older work but I'm probably just remembering it more fondly. Thanks! I found it in one of the bins of scrap Unicode characters we have under the workbench.Slick №., by the way.
Done!, though without the shoutouts...
We've acquired hammocks and despite it being regularly 90+ degrees F they are quite nice for relaxing in. I'm working my way through Queen of Science which is a memoir by Mary Somerville, a well-known scientist and scientific communicator during the 1800s. It's not the most riveting read but quite enjoyable. I also read another short story by Ted Chiang that inadvertently helped me reflect on some of my own life and actions. I'm tempted to make a sci-fi club post about it but I don't want to horn in on your thing, zebra2, especially to post an author you aren't terribly excited by! My school has at least reversed course a little and while everything is still in-person, at least they are going to require people to wear masks and provide masks for instructors to give to students who forget theirs. We'll see how that goes in practice, as I haven't seen a lot of compliance among the staff yet.
Look, someone has to represent the cows in Congress, otherwise you get too many pork barrel bills.