• OK folks, I’ve been a delinquent blogger, yadda yadda, but, as in years past, I will try to post every day through the month of November, doing an unofficial NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month, the blogging companion to NaNoWriMo). Based on past experiences, I can’t eke out more than 1-2 deep essay posts per week,

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  • Octobleurgh

    I’ve always thought that the amount of work would plateau at some point. That the busyness would no longer increase. But nearly 20 years into being a faculty member, it doesn’t seem to be true.  This is a semester in which I have a new and very challenging course that takes a lot of energy;

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  • September Ahoy

    Yeah, I know I haven’t written a real post in a while, but I’m still here. Not going anywhere, just having limited bandwidth. Work is busy, home is busy, midlife ennui flaring up and getting really weird.  So, for now, links! Courtesy of my trusty Twitter bookmarks.  If you need a chuckle today, commiserate with

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  • Sat Scat

    Saturdays are generally the stupidest and deadest days on the interwebs. So, here are some Twitter links to hopefully make this Saturday—in what a few years ago used to be a vibrant academic blogosphere but is now more like a post-apocalyptic desert—a little less stupid and a little more alive. When I looked at the

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  • It’s August, which means that, when I am not fielding the barrage of emails that signal the arrival of a new school year, I am preparing for proposal submissions in the fall.  As flush as I’ve been in recent years, the funding winds haven’t been that favorable during the pandemic, which is a source of

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  • Another 5-Min Post

    Super busy here with white papers for proposals. So, so many white papers.  Trying not to get overwhelmed by the sheer wastefulness of so many people writing, so many pitches being  made for one to be allowed to do research, and so very few actually being allowed to do proposed research. In my experience reviewing

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  • 5-Min Post

    – Being an associate editor for a relatively large technical journal takes a lot of time. – That doesn’t mean I no longer review papers. I just had to tear some authors a new a$$hole, because the work is so technically misguided, so completely clueless of prior art and main issues in the problem they supposedly

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  • Blingy Linky

    https://twitter.com/deapoirierbooks/status/1411850860758548484?s=20 pic.twitter.com/mVYYcJnzkn — dinosaur (@dinosaurcouch) July 5, 2021 Never forget this gem pic.twitter.com/8rvzKfsycU — ConvoOfCosmos (@Real_Lets_Talk) July 4, 2021 Yes they showed up. Happy 4th to my fellow Americans pic.twitter.com/GzEJw4v17V — Dudes Posting Their W’s (@DudespostingWs) July 4, 2021 https://twitter.com/iammattsanders/status/1410943785450803202?s=20 https://twitter.com/Manglewood/status/1410958225713905668?s=20 big chaos energy https://t.co/fBfMgcYIwp — D.T. Robbins (@dt_robbins) July 3, 2021 https://twitter.com/calebkraft/status/1389984284795101189?s=20 The pink

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  • I received some requests for reading recommendations, so here they are. The is basically my TBR (to be read) list, and is heavy on speculative fiction and horror.  Philip Roth’s American Trilogy. I saw the movie The Human Stain, and the trilogy was highly recommended by some people whose literary tastes I trust, it’s considered

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  • I received some crappy grant news several weeks ago. The update that shook me most was a declination of a competitive renewal. During the post mortem with the program manager, I was told that one issue was that the  productivity hadn’t been “outstanding enough.” Mind you, on the three-year grant I had one major code

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