I'm having a totally grumpy cranky day. I thought getting 10 hours of sleep last night would help (and maybe it did), but I'm still feeling zonked today.

I'd appreciate getting links to cute things, or stories that will make me smile, or even reminders of a time I've done something you found helpful or positive.

thank you.

His most striking contribution to the debate so far has been to show that black students who study hard are accused of “acting white” and are ostracised by their peers. Teachers have known this for years, at least anecdotally. Mr Fryer found a way to measure it. He looked at a large sample of public-school children who were asked to name their friends. To correct for kids exaggerating their own popularity, he counted a friendship as real only if both parties named each other. He found that for white pupils, the higher their grades, the more popular they were. But blacks with good grades had fewer black friends than their mediocre peers. In other words, studiousness is stigmatised among black schoolchildren. It would be hard to imagine a more crippling cultural norm.

Mmph.

He recalls an incident when, en route to drop off his college application, he stopped to ask for directions. A white receptionist asked sneeringly whether he could read. “I laughed,” he says. “I thought: I'm on my way to fulfil my destiny, and you're stuck behind that glass.”

=)

for the gamer geeks

How can you go wrong with a guy whose middle name is Tempest?

This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek. To seek: to embrace the questions, be wary of answers. -Terry Tempest Williams, naturalist and author (b. 1955)

I went out looking for tropical yams for a Beninese recipe I wanted to try, but I ended up buying taro. I guess I'll boil the corms.

PS: The Ethernopian was delicious.

These past two nights, I dreamed of a girl. A very specific girl, who I haven't really thought about in a long, long time. She has especially been absent from my dreams for a good 5, 6 years now. Why is she back?

I have decided to tell everyone who knows her who it is, and omit her name for everyone who doesn't. This, and the fact that I'm posting it here, should be enough information.

I don't remember the dream from two nights ago, but I do remember the dream I just woke up from. Whatever else happened at the beginning of the dream, the last hour of it was spent searching an apartment complex (more like a labyrinth). I was looking for the room of someone I knew lived there, and there was a special sign I knew would give it away. I had something to drop off.

Early in my search, I ran across the aforementioned woman, who was talking to someone else. For a host of reasons, I begged off being drawn in and continued my search. Reasons: I was very interested in the search (although I don't remember who it was I had sought, it was imperative I find them); I didn't want the dream to end (I knew if I stopped, it would).

As luck would have it, one of the rooms I poked into was hers. It was as if my subconscious had cornered me. I wanted to leave, to continue searching, but I couldn't get away. We talked, but with extreme dissatisfaction, I recognized that I was waking up and watched the dream slip away.

The previous dream was less antagonistic. I was, again, doing something Important. Eventually, I ran into her and was asked what I was doing. I explained, though my explanation did no good (as usual; not even in dreams does anyone have any idea what I'm talking about!), and I woke up.

These dreams bother me. Both in the richness of the story they're in, but also in that the presence of someone I thought was behind me was the most memorable: in fact, probably the trigger that allowed me to remember them upon waking. You notice that I remember very little about either dream. I don't even remember who I was really searching for; I think it was another woman.

I haven't had such dreams since the story dreams that incorporated several of my high school acquaintances in that half-year before graduation: January 2002 to April.

The only real consolation I have is that the dreams were both partially lucid, though in neither case did I consider simply changing the reality of the world. I didn't recognize either as a dream until I started to wake up, but I did have full control over my own actions.

Hi folks,

I've had a wander through the tags in an effort to see if this has been discussed before. No luck, so either it hasn't been brought up, or it wasn't tagged in a way I recognised. The post has gotten a bit long, so I'll put part of it behind a cut.

I'm a final year PhD student at a UK university. I'm Canadian and will be going back to Canada following the completion of my degree. I would like to do a post-doc, but I'm a bit stumped. And while I'd like to just get on with my thesis and deal with this later, I can't really do so because SSHRC (the major Canadian funding body that covers my field) wants application in the autumn.

Firstly, and this may sound ignorant, but I can't seem to get a consistent answer: what is a post-doc? Is it different between North America and the UK? Is it different between Canada and the US?


Thanks in advance for any advice you can offer.

I've got a fever, and the only cure is moar Ethernopians. Nom nom nom.

We're in for another bout of severe storms today, tonight, and tomorrow; if I'm not posting or responding, that will be the reason.

We were lucky here last weekend; we had two tornado warnings, but didn't even get the large hail that was falling all around us. But it was the first time in the 28 years we've lived here that I've ever seen six tornado warnings on the tv screen lined up one above the other all at the same time. In the past, seeing even one was rare; what we have now is, I'm afraid, the New Normal.

I have a promise I make to good friends: "My ears, my shoulder, and my arms are always open to you." This is something I take very seriously.

Recently I got to thinking about this kind of threshold. I've heard of a couple different ones. E.g. "I consider as good friends the people who I would tell anything, without dissembling, unless for reasons of someone else's privacy". That's a higher threshold than my "always open", but naturally what's meant by "good friend" will vary accordingly.

(I wonder whether it's significant that "always open" is centered around empathizing and comforting, and "tell anything" is centered around trust and openness? Certainly both are valuable, but it's interesting to look at which ones people codify.)

One wonders, though, where it's appropriate to put such thresholds. It overlaps rather interestingly with the question of where to put LJ privacy filters (although they probably won't coincide because the goal is rather different -- friendslove is different from "trusting people enough to tell them X").

It also kind of makes me sad that the bar for friendship on, say, Facebook is set so low. I have Facebook friends I've never met or spoken a word to (on the internet or in real life). Hell, I'm Facebook friends with a number of fictional characters and at least one cat, and I know them better than I know a good number of my human Facebook friends. The threshold of Facebook friendhood seems so arbitrary and low (although, to be fair, here again the goal differs -- Facebook is mostly for keeping in touch with people who aren't immediately available).

http://improbable.com/2008/05/13/karen-mcfarlane-holman-joins-lfhcfs/

http://209.164.178.202/?p=4241

Karen McFarlane Holman has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. Thomas McFarlane, who nominated her, says:

My sister, Karen, has had luxuriant flowing hair ever since we were children. The photo shows it swinging around during a performance with her band, The Funhouse Strippers. She is also a chemistry professor using infrared spectroelectochemistry and X-ray absorption spectroscopy to investigate fundamental chemistry related to the mechanisms of action of ruthenium anti-cancer drugs.

Karen McFarlane Holman, Ph.D., LFHCfS
Associate Professor of Chemistry
Willamette University
Salem, Oregon, USA

This is weird. I seem to actually... miss... programming in C.

And in reading the doc for Not eXactly C (NXC), I realize I have never heard the term "compound statement" before. =P That's what I get for never studying compiler theory, I guess, heh.

*muses*

I remember the day I spent in the car while my mom went grocery shopping. I sat there with my game programming book and read about how to build a virtual machine, an assembler, and a compiler. I always wanted to do that, but I never got that far.

If I ever did write a language, I'd pull in so much inspiration from Ruby. I doubt I can, though. Maybe it's time to reconsider applying for a GMship.

*ponders*

Maybe I should give up on being a writer-philosopher and let myself become a programmer in full. It pays the bills.

I had this email exchange with a student who's been obsessed about her grade all semester:

"Why do I have a zero for this lab?"

I reply: "The 0.02 on your reflection/refraction report is because it contained a figure plagiarized from Wikipedia; per course policy and standard rules of academic integrity, any figure you do not create yourself has to be specifically cited."

She writes me back:

Hi Entropius, I was looking over that lab write up and I read multiple sources and then I wrote my write up. That 0 will cost me an A in the lab and I had no idea the figures couldnt be obtained from somewhere else becuaseI could have easily drawn it! Is there ANYTHING I can do.I really had no intention and if I had known I would have done the make up lab to do another lab writeup!


(She wouldn't necessarily have gotten an A. The 0.02 is a placeholder on the online gradebook for "zero, can't be made up")

< rant >
You are a B student. You are going to have to accept that. You are not brilliant, and that's okay. I think nothing less of you. But to give you A's is to minimize the achievement of the people smarter than you, and there are lots of them. Yes, I know you show up to my 8 AM lab with perfectly coiffed hair and meticulously-applied eyeshadow and makeup and a designer handbag and a Chi Omega thinger. You are used to being perfect. But you're not, and that's okay, and one of the reasons you're not perfect is that, well, you're not as bright as some of your classmates. Again, this is okay. There's no shame in getting a B. You're just getting yourself into trouble by trying to make me think that you are are smarter than you are. Ask me questions about physics once in a while, not about your grades (incessantly!), and you'll do better.

</ rant >

I called a friend to rant, and he suggested that she might be one of those people who tries to "substitute boobs for brains" and bat her eyelashes at the TA to get a better grade. (She's not.)

My reply: "She's not, but if she were, it wouldn't work anyway. 'Oh, you're perfectly-cosmeticced and buxom and curvy and blonde and whatnot? Sorry, I don't find that attractive. Perhaps you'd do better with intelligence ... owait, if you had enough of that to seduce the TA, you'd not need to.'"

My extended uncle first cousin, once removed (my father's 1st cousin), George LeBlanc, just won mayorship of Moncton, New Brunswick! Wow!

Great job on the campaign, Brian!

Poll #1186857
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

What English word do you use the most often for "food served before the main course"?

It's for a meal prepared at home (not restaurant, etc.) if it makes any difference!

Since I was first alerted to the quake by partners and people from my MFA program sending worried emails (today) I think that answers any outstanding questions about my safety.

Still mostly off the computer, but will hopefully get back to your comments when my wrists have recovered. (Which 15 minutes of typing this morning tells me they haven't, yet, alas.)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080511/lf_afp/canadascienceinternet

I find myself having mixed reactions to this.

more cat pictures