Aaaaaaaargh.
I have to go back to work, and oh boy, is there a pile of new stuff I have to deal with. My students are coming back to thousands and thousands of flies that need to be scored, so they’re probably going to be grumpy, too.
Now it’s time for me to straggle in and buckle down and dig out from under labors deferred.
Sometimes, the hard part of being a humanist is all the goddamn humans.
At the cell and tissue level, they’re pretty nifty, but once they start perambulating around they’re mostly all about stomping on you.
I’d probably be happier if all my interactions with the world were with computers and embryos. OK, and libraries. Libraries are cool. Especially computer-accessible libraries with books about embryos.
I can cope when you’re reduced to electrons and photons.
“Hello, stream of bits,” I’d say with my own spray of bits.
“You’re looking lovely, ray of light!” I’d radiate.
I’d happily arrange pixels to say, “You can’t screw me over now, abstract pattern of simplified information!”
But people…people mostly suck.
Sorry, people.
If it helps, just remember that you’re looking at a stream of electrons rendered into an array of photons. It’s how I’m trying to see you, after all.
Online Gender Workshop, as ever, is brought to you by your friendly neighborhood Crip Dyke.
There are few things more rant worthy than a promise of a blog post on gender-sudoku that gets lost in off-line life.*
No, wait.
There are few things more rant worthy than a really bad text book. That’s what I wanted to say. I would be, of course, more upset at a text book that was terrible in ways I couldn’t identify as those would actually lead me to significant error, not having any reason not to rely on their representations. However, if one can’t identify the errors, one has no idea that one should feel deceived, angry, or ranty. But one should never be deprived of a good rant, should one?
The creation of The Orbit blog network got mentioned on Religion News today. They got quotes from me and Ed, too.
Many Orbit bloggers migrated from other atheist platforms, including Skepchick and Patheos, but the bulk came from Freethought Blogs. Rumors of discord at these platforms spread throughout 2015, but writers say they are focused on the future.
“This group decided it wanted to go off and do its own thing and more power to them,” said P.Z. Myers, whose Pharyngula blog is among the most popular at Freethought Blogs, which he now manages. He has already replaced The Orbit’s bloggers with new ones.
Ed Brayton, founder of Freethought Blogs who now writes at Patheos, said, “The Orbit is being launched by people I think very highly of and consider friends . . . I see no point in building up some sort of rivalry between blog networks. There’s room for everyone.”
I have to make some additions and corrections. Note that link about “rumors of discord” up there? That was from me. The “discord” came not so much from internal problems, but as I say there, from trolling assholes who harass just about everyone here. So if you’re looking for confirmation of Hemant Mehta’s bloviating, it ain’t there.
The other thing is that our new bloggers are not “replacements”. I’ve been nagging everyone in the back channel for years that we have to bring in fresh blood regularly*, and that our old method of delegating recruitment to a committee — when people are here to write, not serve on committees — was not working. We’ve got this nice flush of new voices here because we’d put together an alternative mechanism that is actually working.
*My secret is out, that I’ve been straining to draw in new people simply to sate my vampiric hunger.
This morning, I read a pile of bullshit about Tyson written by an anti-intellectual reverse-snob — he thinks he should be proud of being so blatantly pro-mystery and anti-science.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is, supposedly, an educator and a populariser of science; it’s his job to excite people about the mysteries of the universe, communicate information, and correct popular misconceptions. This is a noble, arduous, and thankless job, which might be why he doesn’t do it. What he actually does is make the universe boring, tell people things that they already know, and dispel misconceptions that nobody actually holds. In his TV appearances, puppeted by an invisible army of scriptwriters, this tendency is barely held in check, but in his lectures or on the internet it’s torrential; a seeping flood of grey goo, paring down the world to its driest, dullest, most colourless essentials. He likes to watch scifi films, and point out all the inaccuracies. Actually, lasers wouldn’t make any sound in space; actually a light year is a unit of space rather than time; actually, none of this is real, it’s just a collection of still images projected at speed to present the illusion of movement, and all the characters are just actors who have never really been into outer space.
There’s a hint of a point to his long-winded diatribe; scientists who simply drily list the facts or point to a pretty picture from the Hubble telescope aren’t really promoting understanding. But we also need to dispel the nonsense that that writer seems to think are essential, like clouds inhabited by angels
or his Lord Jesus Christ
. It’s disgraceful when a scientist dismisses poetry or philosophy, but you can also go too far in the other direction, and dismiss reality. Both are deplorable.
I was ready to go off on a rant about that this morning, and then Tyson had to open his mouth and leave me completely deflated. An interview was published that just left me muttering, “Why, Neil, why?”.
I know we have a lot of polyamorous people on this network, and people who are not interested in long term relationships, but that’s not me. I’m a devotedly monogamous kind of guy, and today is our 36th wedding anniversary, so I had to do some math. (Isn’t that everyone’s response to important dates?)
Percent of my life spent married to one person: 61%
Whoa. That’s disappointing. That number is just not big enough. So I had to fudge it a bit. We started seriously dating in 1976, so…
Percent of my life spent romantically involved with that person: 68%
That didn’t help much. Only 2/3 of my life? She’s so much more.
But hey, I met her for the first time in third grade, so maybe I can nudge it up further.
Percent of my life knowing that person: 86%
That really feels like cheating. She was just that other kid in class who was better at math than I was, so that shouldn’t count.
I know 100% is mathematically impossible because there were those 8 empty years where I didn’t even know she existed, but I have to strive for a percentage that approximates her importance. At least 99%. I estimate that in order to reach the point where I have spent 99% of my life married to Mary, all I have to do is live to be 2300 years old. And she has to live that long too, or there’s no point.
We can do that. Easy.
Then maybe we can aim for 99.9%.
It’s true — Freethoughtblogs has divided, although I prefer to think of it as multiplying. A new network has sprung from our loins, The Orbit, which includes some popular bloggers formerly of FtB, including Aoife O’Riordan, Ashley Miller, Brianne Bilyeu, Dana Hunter, Greta Christina, Heina Dadabhoy, Miri Mogilevsky, and Zinnia Jones, and incorporating several new bloggers as well. Head on over there, say hello, and start adding them to your RSS feeds.
You can also help them fund their efforts by donating to their kickstarter.
We’re hoping the trolls will be confused. Suddenly, more sites that are opposing and mocking them are spawning? Aren’t we supposed to be collapsing and going away?
Academics have this scheme to rank different universities — many of them revolve around publication metrics, which is one entirely reasonable way to assess one part of the research enterprise. Unfortunately, if a university is ranked by how many publications are produced by affiliated faculty, one way to jack up the numbers is to buy nominal affiliations — pay researchers with successful publishing careers to put their university’s name on their CVs. All it takes is lots and lots of money.
King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Saudi Arabia is playing that game. They are contacting highly ranked researchers, offering them a pile of cash, and asking them to list KAU as one of their academic affiliations.
UC Davis professor Jonathan Eisen also contacted Pachter. Almost a year ago, Eisen had been solicited by KAU but ultimately declined the offer.
Most researchers, such as Eisen, were initially contacted by KAU via email and asked if they would like to join the university’s faculty as a “distinguished adjunct professor.” Eisen traded emails with several people at KAU, trying to figure out what the catch was.
“I tried to get them to explain what they were trying to do,” Eisen said. “It smelled really off.”
KAU offered him $72,000 per year and free business-class airfare and five-star hotel stays for him to visit KAU in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, according to an email sent to Eisen by KAU. In exchange, Eisen was told he would be expected to work on collaborations with KAU local researchers and also update his Thomson Reuters’ highly cited researcher listing to include a KAU affiliation. He would also be expected to occasionally publish some scientific journal articles with the Saudi university’s name attached.
So, basically, free money for sticking KAU’s name in a paper. I have to respect all the people with the integrity to turn that down, like Eisen did. Unfortunately, not everyone rejected them (and it’s also kind of hard to blame them — the life of a college professor rarely provides opportunities to get wealthy), and the stratagem worked.
Even more surprising, though, was that a little-known university in Saudi Arabia, King Abdulaziz University, or KAU, ranked seventh in the world in mathematics — despite the fact that it didn’t have a doctorate program in math until two years ago.
Who knew you could just buy an academic reputation?
I put out a call for applications for new FtB bloggers a while back, the response was a bit overwhelming — we got scores of applicants. Every minute of my free time today was spent organizing and reviewing and making short summaries for other FtBians to help them get through the pile, and I’m feeling a bit bleary-eyed now. So stop applying! No more for this round!
If you’re one of the applicants, we’re going to have the big evaluative review over the weekend and make some decisions then. We’ll contact people yes or no early next week.
Note that if we turn you down this time, it’s not necessarily an absolute rejection — we’ve got so many applicants that the field is particularly competitive, and some applicants will be deferred simply because we can’t cope with suddenly adding 40 blogs to the network. Don’t be discouraged, it may be that we’re just trying to get our first few bites down, and we’ll get around to gobbling you up eventually.
We’ll have a whole bunch of changes appearing next week, so stay tuned.
Let’s not even bother tallying up the chronological years. It’s my birthday, and I’m celebrating by…going to an evening faculty meeting.
I’d say shoot me now, but I don’t think I’m worth the bullet anymore.
