Grad school was great! I recommend it to everyone!

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The latest Ask a Science Blogger question is one I’ve already answered, so I thought I’d just repost this unpleasant little vignette to answer this question:

What’s a time in your career when you were criticized extremely harshly by someone you respect? Did it help you or set your career back?

But first, I have to mention that every scientist must have a nemesis or two, as has been recently documented in the pages of Narbonic.

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Thinking about graduate school? Here’s a little story, all true, about my very most unpleasant experiences as a graduate student—and they all revolve around one person. It is a fact that you will find honest-to-god flaming assholes in positions of considerable power in academia.

[Read more…]

School’s out!

Time to go get a beer at Drinking Liberally, ’cause the Fall semester of 2006 is all over but for the final exams and the grading and the tears. The last of the written work was turned in today, and now it’s just grading until my eyeballs evulse.

Here is a prime bit of end of term suckage, too: it is mid-December in Minnesota, and it is raining. Raining! If I wanted to live in a place with cool wet winters, I’d move back to Seattle.

Look out, Phoenix!

In a few weeks, on January 3-7, I’m going to be attending the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in Phoenix. I’m going to be part of a panel in a Media Workshop, along with a few other names you might recognize:

Blogs are online “diaries” that are growing in popularity. Popular political and social commentary blogs are making the news, but is there more out there than chatty gossip and collections of links? How about some science? Can this trendy technology be useful for scientists? Come to the Media Workshop and find out! Experienced science bloggers P.Z. Myers (Pharyngula; http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/), Grrl Scientist (Living the Scientific Life; http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/), and John Lynch (Stranger Fruit; http://scienceblogs.com/strangerfruit/) answer your questions about how blogging works, setting one up, finding things to write about, and using the medium for your classes, for research, or for educating the public.

Cool, hey? Even better, afterwards there will be a ten-round boxing match between me and John, with GrrlScientist doing the honors as the card girl (nah, not really…all three of us will probably just buy each other beers and get embarrassingly sloppy.)

The real coolness, though, is in the schedule: there are some great talks and posters going on at this meeting, and once I get the panel out of the way, I am going to thoroughly enjoy myself, learning new stuff. And yes, of course, I will be blogging the SICB meeting.

True Confessions Day at Scienceblogs!

Since Orac is confessing to a stupid thing, I thought I’d repeat my own public admission of stupidity.

Public Service Announcement: Things Not to Do

Don’t carry batteries in your pocket.

This evening, I was stretched out on my recliner, enjoying a little light reading, when I smelled something odd—an odor of burning, and a faint chemical reek. I looked around and saw nothing, but the odor was getting stronger. I set my book aside, looked down, and saw something no man likes to see: tendrils of smoke rising from my fly. Then, I felt searing pain from my thigh. I jumped up and danced around (to the amusement of my daughter), and frantically tried to fish all the loose change out of my pocket. The coins were flaming hot. I was caught in the dilemma of letting my leg burn, or burning my hands trying to get these things out. I ended up throwing sizzling bits of money around the room.

I had tossed a couple of spare NiMH AA batteries in my pocket earlier, when I was out doing some photography. A pair of them had apparently jostled into exactly the right configuration to short out against the coins in my pocket, leading to the surprisingly rapid and intense generation of heat.

I don’t think I’ll carry batteries that way anymore. I now have the imprint of a pair of quarters scorched into my palm, and feel a bit like Belzig, the fat sadistic Nazi from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. And my kids are laughing at me for dancing around with my pants on fire.

And now I tell you this cautionary tale, O Gentle Reader, to spare you the humiliation of repeating my error. See how much I care?

Whether I’m admitting this to make Orac feel a little less alone, or whether it’s because I have reason to worry that he might be about to do the same thing and needs a warning, is left to the interpretations of the reader. You may also argue among yourselves which of us is more foolish.

I posted that about two years ago, and I’m pleased to say that I haven’t carried batteries in my pockets since. See? I can still learn! It’s so much more sensible and safer to stick them up your nose.

The daughter goes her own way

So Skatje is setting up a new weblog, and she’s looking for suggestions for a new name. Make a suggestion! Just to make it interesting, let’s make it a contest: whoever comes up with a wonderful idea that Skatje accepts will receive a fabulous prize plucked from my collection of biology textbooks, and including some spectacularly cheap plastic cocktail squid.

You might also drop a hint that she really ought to have her father’s blog on her blogroll. I’m feeling rebuked.

There are better fates than this

What if Stan Lee worked for Chick Publications? You’d get apocalyptic tracts with giant planet-eating space men.

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(via Pen-Elayne)

This is all you’re getting from me for a while. I just finished a 9 hour long meeting (freaking uncivilized, if you ask me), and next I have to go attend some god-awful Christian propaganda — my daughter is the stage manager for the high school production of “Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat”, so I have to go — and I suspect my day is going to continue its trend of ongoing frustration and exasperation. It is in my best interests to avoid further posting to the web until the demons fade away.

I just hope I don’t rise up in the middle of this play, barking and howling in tongues, with my head spinning around on my neck. It could happen.

Please, Galactus, come eat me now.

Bowling for Science

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On Tuesday, I’ll be in the Twin Cities to pick up #2 Son for Thanksgiving break, and as long as I’m there, I’ve been invited to join in the fun of this month’s Cafe Scientifique: it’s the Physics of Bowling, to be held at Bryant Lake Bowl in Minneapolis. This has the potential to be very interesting, since they’re pitting the best of BRB bowling team against…scientists. They promise that there will be science-based bowling tips, so maybe there’s hope. (Anyone else remember Egghead Jr., the smart chicken in the Foghorn Leghorn cartoons who excelled at sports by scrawling formulas to calculate what he’d do next? I don’t think that works in the real world, but we’ll see.)

To entice people to show up, this could be dramatic entertainment. I am a very bad bowler. There is a chance of pratfalls. There could be injury and death and destruction, and blood on the floor. I could fall over, burst into flames, and explode. At the very least, you’ll get to watch a geek do a spastic dance and throw a heavy ball somewhere. You don’t want to miss this!

(Unfortunately, if the organizers read this they may decide that somebody else might be preferred to bowl—liability issues, you know. Having all the spectators laid out prostrate with laughter could be risky.)

Bizarro Chez Myers

For a little context, you need to know that we had a foreign exchange student from Italy living with us for a year. If you’ve been reading this blog for long, you may also know that I have somewhat strong feelings about religion—OK, I’m one of those surly evil atheists your momma warned you to avoid.

So now go read this story of a Polish foreign exchange student who came to the US…and found his host parents were Christian fundamentalists. Keep in mind that foreign exchange programs are often stressful, and sometimes the students and host families experience a little culture shock, but still…!

I don’t know exactly what our student thought of us—she hasn’t been interviewed in Spiegel and given an opportunity to dish the dirt—but despite my horned and fanged reputation, when she came to stay with us we showed her where the local Catholic church was and told her we’d willingly give her a ride if she wanted to go. We didn’t try to convert her to atheism, either, or make plans to have her disseminate our godless doctrines when she got home.

I guess we missed our opportunity.