Today, I…
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Spent half a class hour working step by step through a cunningly clever linkage problem that most of my students didn’t get…
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Spent the rest of the hour trying to explain imprinting, slowly and carefully, with diagrams, and left everyone looking like they’d been pole-axed…
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Tried to race through Beadle-Tatum, Hershey-Chase, Watson-Crick, and Meselson-Stahl (at an introductory level) in the next class.
My head hurts. Need a nap. A civilized country would put naptime in our schedules.
Oh, yeah, Stephen Hsu responded to me, too, and man, ignorance makes my brain hurt even more. I’ll reply to that later.
I’d say “after my nap,” but I have committee meetings to attend instead.
I just hit my students with the first physics problem using calculus of the term. My students had about the same look.
You know, I wouldn’t mind declaring 2-3 PM as a campus-wide nap time: no meetings, no classes*, no office hours. The downside is that I’d probably feel guilty and work through it.
* They already reserve an hour on Thursdays without classes, which is when faculty meetings happen, so I can’t nap through it.
Can you think of a better place to have a nap?
Um …
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So what was the linkage problem?
Not that I need something ELSE to work through. I have to teach LOD score analysis tomorrow as it is.
Naps are the civilized way to handle the day. And I dare say that scientific studies back us up.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21075238
https://blog.bufferapp.com/how-naps-affect-your-brain-and-why-you-should-have-one-every-day
Always fun to watch someone complaining about PZ being patronising just prior to phys-explaining population genetics and sequence space to him…
Hsu also seems to think that chicken breeding for increased poultry weight provides a good anology for his super-intelligence engineering. If Hsu can’t see the problem with chicken breeding, then he really is quite blinkered.
I need a nap too. My day started with any ’emergent staff meeting’ 30 minutes before classes started that could have been covered by a very short email. Then I tried to explain Faraday’s Law of Induction and Lenz’s Law (without the math but lots of demos) with success ranging from ??????????? to the classic deer in the headlights look.
Yes, this is going to be on the exam next week.
Heh. My day was spent making sure the t’s were dotted and i’s somethinged in order to get a critical update released that would have been released back in December if pointy-hair hadn’t declared he wanted something which isn’t too important in the broad scheme of things but happens to be his hobby-horse released first. He is, of course, blaming me, and had the deer-headlights look when I insisted I was doing what he told me to do. Next up is something else which should have, and could have, been released last year, if pointy-hair hadn’t… you get the idea.
Reminds me of the Calculus class where the prof decided to prove to us that e^z is infinitely differentiable across all complex values of z. Half an hour and four blackboards later, we were all just kind of sitting there stunned.
The Algebra prof came in for the next class, stared at the board for a moment, then said, “You just did that? I’ll go easy on you today.”
(Hmm, ez, aka e<sup>z</sup>, doesn’t seem to work in preview)
Doesn’t work for a post either. Not all HTML commands work for posters, which makes those of us, like this chemist, wanting to use super- and sub-scripts frustrated.
Naps are, of course, an essential part of the Way of the Cat.
No, but you have to get really good at looking like you are alert while you’re napping.
Actually, there’s was a guy on an engineering team I worked with who fell asleep in meetings. And snored. Everyone took in stride.
This might numb your brain to the pain: UC Berkeley reveals more staff members involved in sexual misconduct. Nineteen…and counting?
First thing one of my phd committee member taught me:
-make sure you look engaged in the first 5 minutes of any talk you attend.
-make sure within that 5 minutes, you figure a reasonable question to ask
-proceed to sleep
-awaken on applause at end of talk.
-be first to raise your hand to ask the question you thought of an hour ago.
winning.
worked for him 90% of the time for 30 years.
we never told him that actually, everyone knew he was sleeping… because his questions were always good ones.