George Mason University, bought and sold » « Yet another under-reported hate crime

Two job openings, and we aim to fill them NOW

It is the last week of classes, and they’re going to fly by in a blur because this is also the time when I’m running multiple on-campus interviews. I’m looking at Friday as the day I reach the finish line and collapse in a broken heap. It’ll be fun, as living on the cusp of catastrophe always is, until it isn’t.

Anyway, blogging is buried at the bottom of a heap of work. You know the drill — talk among yourselves while I engage in the biz.

George Mason University, bought and sold » « Yet another under-reported hate crime

Comments

  3. scottde says

    The last week of classes is awfully late to be holding on-campus interviews. Any reason for that?

  5. blf says

    The last week of classes is awfully late to be holding on-campus interviews. Any reason for that?

    They™ didn’t take up the mildly deranged penguin’s offer of a custom calendar. She has a surplus of Mondays, and offered a long month of same (up to seventy days, as I recall), but never got a reply. Not even when she reduced the price and pointed out the length of each Monday could be increased, or even made variable (batteries not included). She also claims different people can have different lengths for the same day (batteries still not included), but I think she’s getting a bit over-excited there…

  6. says

    #3: Sudden announcement of the departure of two faculty to elsewhere, followed by a mad scramble to find temporary faculty to teach their classes while we convince the administration to give us permission to do a tenure-track search.

  7. robert79 says

    Last week of classes? I still have a month to go!

    I’m suddenly imagining your school to be a Valhalla of class-less “free” (erm… grading…) time.

  8. scottde says

    PZ,

    That makes more sense, although our dean would never approve on-campus interviews for temporary faculty. We’d have to be satisfied with a Skype interview.

  9. birgerjohansson says

    At least the intense work will distract you from worrying about trade wars.

    “talk among yourselves”, subset “mischief”. I am bored with the shenagians of Trump.

    I watched “Jizya in Islam -explained” on Youtube. (Lightbulb moment)
    We should hint to Fox & Friends the atheists are planning to extort jizya from all Christians, just to watch them freak out.
    Then we should tell the incels at “We Hunted Mammoths” they must pay jizya to all happy couples. Those who cannot pay will be sold into servitude to lesbians.

  10. jrkrideau says

    My local university seems to have finished exams last Thursday (2018/04/26).

    I noticed the libraries are on summer schedule. The annual student migration was in full swing over the weekend.

  11. archangelospumoni says

    There once was a POTUS named Drumpfh
    Who brayed “lock her up” on the stumpfh
    He took his election
    In the wrong direction
    And now he is blaming the umpfh.

  13. birgerjohansson says

    BTW a mass child sacrifice in Peru, dated 550 years ago, has been discovered in Peru. Ca 140 children aged 5-12 were sacrificed, by cutting the hearts out.
    (Modern people (like in Myanmar) only consider it acceptable to kill children of *other* religions)

  14. birgerjohansson says

    From “Dispatches from the culture wars”
    “EPA Grants Exemption to Former Trump Adviser and Billionaire”

    http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2018/05/01/epa-grants-exemption-to-former-trump-adviser-and-billionaire/
    “The exemptions in question are designed for small, struggling companies facing financial hardship. Icahn is worth $18 billion. We should all be in such hardship. How’s that drainy swampy thing going, Trump?”
    -pop quiz, reasons not to hide the corruption:
    A. They don’t see anything wrong with their actions.
    B. They have no sense of shame
    C. It’s not like anyone’s going stop them anyway.
    D. All of the above

  15. birgerjohansson says

    Even Scandinavian countries have tough laws against immigrants. They get extra attention when the targeted person is white, threatened with deportation because of pregnancy, thus exposing the absurdities. https://satwcomic.com/lazy-lady

  18. blf says

    The universe is an egg and the moon isn’t real: notes from a Flat Earth conference:

    […]
    There was the three-hour presentation which contended that the universe is a giant egg. There was the Manchester musician who posited that the Earth is the shape of a diamond. And another who believes that the moon is a projection.

    Welcome to the Flat Earth UK Convention, a raucous departure from scientific norms where people are free to believe literally anything.

    When people ask me what I believe, I can’t say that I believe in anything 100%, Gary John tells the audience during his opening address. Apart from that we don’t live on a globe.

    That unshakeable belief is one of the few points of total agreement for the 200-strong audience at this week’s gathering. There is less consensus, however, on what form the Earth actually takes: some believe it to be a disc with the Arctic circle in the middle; some believe that circle is under a dome, above which there may or may not be an expanse of water; others believe the Earth is just one in a series of ponds in a vast expanse of ice; and other still believe the Earth exists beneath four cosmic rings within a giant egg-shaped universe.

    Most do not believe in space; none believe mankind has ever travelled there.

    […]

    Several speakers throughout the weekend take time to highlight that evolution is a myth, accompanied by occasional heckles of monkey men! from audience members.

    To their credit, there are members of the Flat Earth community who are determined to disprove the globe model through scientific experiments: some use high-powered lasers over bodies of water to try to attempt to observe any curvature, others creating complex 3D models to explain the movements of the Sun and stars.

    […]

    [… O]ne attendee during lunch showed me his favourite proof of the Flat Earth — a video showing a side-view from a plane-tracking software […].

    It shows the height of the planes as they fly, he told me, excitedly. If the Earth was round, we’d see their heights all change as they fly over the curve!

    “Isn’t it measuring altitude?” I asked, “So that’s the elevation above the ground. If the ground curved, and the plane’s path naturally curved with it, it would stay the same distance from the ground — which is exactly what we see in that video, don’t we?”

    He paused for a moment.

    “That’s interesting”, he said, “I’ll have to think about that”.

    […]

    Dave Marsh […] tracked the movement of the moon across the night sky, in order to compare his observations to the “official” records and see if the movement of the moon matched that of the ‘Globalist’ model. The results of his backyard experiment differed from data he found online, leading him to conclude that the moon is a projection, put there for a reason, which we could study for a thousand more years and never understand. A more cautious experimenter might look to the accuracy of their equipment before drawing so radical a conclusion […].

    […]

    [… O]ne of the most telling moments of the weekend came in Darren Nesbitt’s talk, after he dismissed the disk Earth as being counter-intelligence set out to throw people off the scent, and before he explained that the Earth is a diamond, resting on seven circular pillars, operating in a 4D Pac-Man version of reality.

    Nesbitt shared what he called the “Flat Earth Addiction” test — seven questions Flat Earth proponents should ask themselves, including “Have people said that you are pushy or obsessive about Flat Earth?”, “Have you thought that if only everyone knew about Flat Earth the world would be a different place?”, and “Have you noticed that you spend less and less time with your family and friends and more and more time talking to Flat Earthers?”.

    Looking around the room, I could see knowing nods, as people recognised themselves in each question. The questions, Nesbitt explained, were taken from a checklist used to determine whether someone is in a cult. The implication seemed lost on the audience.

    Perhaps the people poopyhead is searching for can be found amongst these creative — very creative — “thinkers”. Applying their “skill” to biology, where clearly evolution’s monkey men! is another counter-intelligence, it seems very plausible they could explain the egg-shaped turtles holding up the diamond, and thus disproving evolution in the 4D Pac-Man reality.

  19. blf says


    Belgian monks’ search for lost beer recipe holds up brewery plan     (Grauniad edits in {curly braces}):

    Researchers have spent a year combing through abbey’s library and have yet to find formula

    The Belgian monks of Grimbergen, whose beer is mass-produced by Carlsberg, are seeking to reclaim their roots and start brewing in their abbey again — but they have come up against a problem.

    Four volunteer researchers have spent a year searching through the 35,000 books and files held in the library and archives of the Flemish abbey, first founded in 1128 by Saint Norbert of Xanten, and they cannot find the original recipe.

    The monks last produced their dark brew in 1797, at which point the French Revolution shattered the monks’ communal life and their abbey’s walls.

    They reinstated their home on the same site, in the province of Flemish Brabant, six miles (10km) north of Brussels, shortly afterwards, but the monks did not brew again.

    In 1958, they came to a deal for the Belgian Maes brewery to use their brand, and today the beer is produced by the Alken-Maes brewery for Belgian drinkers and by a Carlsberg-owned brewery in Strasbourg for foreign markets.

    The abbey’s subprior, Karel Stautemas, said: “It is an old dream to start again. Four men have been looking for that document for a year …”

    […]

    Stautemas said the abbey had received the support of Alken-Maes and Carlsberg for a micro-brewery “in the same place as where the brewery stood here until 1797”.

    […]

    Stautemas said he was still hopeful that the team of researchers would be successful in time. “They are not even halfway through {the records},” he told the Belgian newspaper Het Nieuwsblad.

    “It is not such an easy job either, because those texts are in Old Dutch. But there is good hope that the recipe will turn up. And then there is the question: do we still like that medieval beer today?”

    […]

    The article notes they know the medieval ingredients, but not the proportions.

    I didn’t realise Grimbergen beer is using the name of an older abbey beer. I’d always presumed it was just a commercial beer named after the Flemish town for some unknown-to-me reason. (I myself am not too keen on the current beer, but that is neither here nor there.)