I am giving an exam today

You know what that means, boys and girls? A sudden flood of email from students letting me know they are sick today, or have some other major conflict, and can I please take it on Friday, and gosh I’m sorry. And I get so mad.

Because I want to write back to them and tell them to never ever feel bad for being sick or stressed. I’m not here to make anyone miserable or force them learn stuff while I hold a whip over their head, and if you tell me you’re struggling or have encountered unavoidable problems, my job is to say OK…what can I do to help you get through this? If it just means giving you a few days to overcome, I’ll always say yes. Just do it. Don’t apologize.

Now we are working within a system here, and that system says I have to evaluate you and say something about how well you’ve mastered the material in the course. I also know that I have to incentivize keeping everyone focused and working steadily to keep up with the material, because last-minute cramming is a terrible way to learn, but ultimately all I care about is that you know it all well enough to be competent in the next course in the curriculum, and that you at some point graduate with broad knowledge of biology. That’s my goal! Making you take an exam while sick is not part of that.

Some people do have this idea that I’m supposed to train you in servility and fitting into capitalism with bosses telling you what to do. I’m not a boss. That’s not my vision of the teacher-student relationship. If I’m told I’m doing students no favor for their future in the workplace by cutting them some slack, that isn’t telling me I need to change — it says we need to change the world.

So get better and go do that.

Train people are definitely strange

A quote from J. K. Huysman’s Against Nature:

Does there exist here below a being, conceived in the joys of fornication and born amid the pangs of childbirth, whose figure and whose form is more dazzling, more splendid than that of those two locomotives adopted by the Northern railway line?

One, the Crampton, is an adorable blonde with a shrill voice, her long delicate body imprisoned in a glittering corset of copper, as supple and sinewy as a stretching cat, a showy, gilded blonde whose extraordinary grace is frightening, when, stiffening her muscles of steel, beginning to sweat on her warm flanks, she sets in shuddering motion the immense rosette of her slender wheels and springs forward, eagerly, across hill and dale!

The other, the Engerth, is a dark and monumental brunette with a deep husky cry, her brawny loins constrained by a cast-iron girdle, a monstrous beast with a dishevelled mane of black smoke, and six low, coupled wheels, what a crushing force she has when, making the earth tremble, she slowly, ponderously pulls the heavy tail of her goods-wagons! ‘Certainly there’s nothing to match such delicate slenderness and terrifying force in the dainty beauty of the blonde and the majestic beauty of the brunette; one can surely say that man, in his own way, has done as well as the God in which he believes.

(From Helena Constantine’s MeWe page, which is not at all safe for work)

Seriously, dude, no one should get that hyperbolically erotic about anything that isn’t a spider, but you be you.

We are #1!

Guess who came out on top in a list of Every State, Ranked by How Miserable Its Winters Are? You guessed it. Although the psychoanalyzing of Minnesotans is way off the mark.

1. Minnesota
To think of the generally cheerful brood of Nordic-bred people being the winners in any sort of a contest of misery seems downright crazy. But for all those adorable don’tcha knows, we think something else is going on. We think beneath that eternal Nordic happiness is some inner pain, trapped below the surface like a Grain Belt dropped into an ice fishing hole, a cauldron of hot anger ready to spill out like a cut-open Jucy Lucy.

How can you remain so upbeat when you get all the winter weather patterns? Alberta clippers? Sure. Panhandle hooks? You betcha! Parts of northern Minnesota see up to 170in of snow in a winter. One hundred seventy inches! That’s like two and a half times the height of Kent Hrbek!! It can get down to -60 degrees, a temperature at which frostbite can occur in fewer than five minutes. There are no chinook winds or moderating oceans to temper things outside of a small area by Lake Superior. Your sports teams never win championships. All of your good high school hockey players end up starring for NHL teams in other cities. Ice fishing can’t be that cool, really.

And so we think that — despite all appearances — Minnesota does in fact have the most miserable winter in the United States. So to all the Eriks, and Astrids, and Christens, and Bjorns, and Brynjars, it’s OK to show a little displeasure at the clusterfuck of a meteorological hand you’ve been dealt. After all, don’tcha know emoting is good for the system?

No, no, no. This is precisely wrong. Minnesotans wallow in their gloriously bad weather. You would not believe how many times I’ve heard residents brag about the Halloween blizzard of 1991 — and I kind of feel bad that I didn’t move here until 2000, so I can’t contribute to the myth. Every winter I, and every other Minnesotan, check the weather reports religiously, because otherwise we wouldn’t have anything to talk about, and besides we’re hoping for another day of record breaking cold. Bring on the polar vortex! We’d be heartbroken if we had weather as boring as, say, Iowa’s.

We’re all frost giants up here, and proud of it.

I usually lie and say it’s for the grandchildren

This might be a little weird for most of you, but it’s Jenny Nicholson reading reviews of fake spiders from Amazon, and it resonated with me, because I too have browsed Amazon for spiders, and I have a few fake spiders — and fake cephalopods — decorating my home right now.

It’s a thing. If you were a member of the cult, you’d understand. You know, “Four legs good, two legs bad, eight legs unholy harbinger of the apocalypse,” all that jazz.

Are you looking for spooky stories to tell tonight?

Karen Stollznow has written some and is selling them on Amazon. These are variations on the kinds of modern myths you may have heard as a skeptic many times, but they all have slight twists, which means we’ll probably be hearing these as True Facts™ sometime. Don’t Leave Me, Unforeseen Circumstances, Welcome Home, I Am Me, and The Dark Road are all available on Kindle right now. Download and read them at the Halloween party tonight! They’re all short stories and perfect for a creepy session around the fireplace.

This explains a lot

I stumbled across the story of the Cat sìth.

The Cat Sìth or Cat Sidhe is a fairy creature from Celtic mythology, said to resemble a large black cat with a white spot on its chest. Legend has it that the spectral cat haunts the Scottish Highlands. The legends surrounding this creature are more common in Scottish folklore, but a few occur in Irish. Some common folklore suggested that the Cat Sìth was not a fairy, but a witch that could transform into a cat nine times.
…
The people of the Scottish Highlands did not trust the Cat Sìth. They believed that it could steal a person’s soul, before it was claimed by the gods, by passing over a corpse before burial; therefore watches called the Feill Fadalach (Late Wake) were performed night and day to keep the Cat Sìth away from a corpse before burial.[1] Methods of “distraction” such as games of leaping and wrestling, catnip, riddles, and music would be employed to keep the Cat Sìth away from the room in which the corpse lay.[1] In addition, there were no fires where the body lay, as it was said that the Cat Sìth was attracted to the warmth.

And then I looked down at our cat, which has been a major pain in the butt while my wife is away, and realized…solid black cat with a white spot on its chest.

Goddamnit, it’s been trying to steal my soul all this time.

Sayeed, and UW-Madison, take another hit

To recap: Akbar Sayeed is a University of Wisconsin engineering professor whose training methods were so abusive they led to the suicide of a graduate student, John Brady. This was a bit too blatant for the university to look the other way, so they punished him with a two year unpaid leave, after years of screaming fits and tyrannized students. He used his time off to apply for a research position at NSF, which he left abruptly 8 months before his appointment at UW-Madison would be restored.

More information is trickling out now, and it’s not good for the university. UW-Madison failed to inform NSF of Sayeed’s salary status and why he was going to be available to work there, which are facts required for his temporary position. And now we know why he left NSF.

…NSF provided an additional statement that said the program under which Sayeed was hired requires institutions to report employee status.

“Unfortunately, the institution did not accurately disclose that information,” said Amanda Hallberg Greenwell, head of NSF’s Office of Legislative and Public Affairs. “When NSF received complete information, we terminated Dr. Sayeed’s assignment.”

I can imagine what happened here. If it were disclosed that he had driven a student to kill himself and that the university placed him on unpaid leave, NSF wouldn’t have hired him (probably — I’m beginning to develop a jaundiced opinion of institutional concern about humane behavior). Sayeed certainly would have avoided reporting himself, and sympathetic admins at the UW would have been reluctant to sabotage his opportunity at employment, so they conveniently neglected to mention certain salient facts.

After all, he’d been getting paid $166,650 per year to yell at students, and it would have been so mean to slam him down to $0 abruptly, just because one student had died on his watch.

Funny how all that works. Also funny: that he was a bad teacher getting paid 2½ times what I do, probably with a much lower teaching load. There are some remarkable inequities within academia.

NSF sets some standards, at least.

NSF imposed a new requirement last fall requiring institutions to disclose if any faculty members with NSF grants committed harassment, including sexual harassment or sexual assault. Depending on a university’s policies and codes of conduct, bullying may be included in the policy.

The policy is not retroactive, applying only to researchers who received an award after Oct. 22, 2018.

Universities seem to be falling behind. There are rules underlying tenure; I would think that “harassment, including sexual harassment or sexual assault” ought to warrant revocation of tenure.

We really need to abandon Facebook

It’s getting ridiculous. After recent events in which Facebook openly declares that lying in political ads is fine — as long as you pay them — they’re cracking down on…peach and eggplant emojis?

Facebook and Instagram are now prohibiting the use of peach and aubergine emojis in sex-related posts and nude images, reports indicate.

The new rules form part of the platforms’ new Community Standards which were implemented at some stage between 7 September and now, according to adult industry website XBIZ.com.

I’d much rather see people freely posting weakly veiled sexual images with peaches used to suggest genitals, than I would coded posts about killing Jews, but I guess Facebook has those priorities reversed.

I’m still trying out MeWe. It’s far from perfect, but at least it doesn’t have Facebook’s hypocrisy problem.