• Repost: Kindred Spirits

    Original post here.Β  A couple of weeks ago, I took an older colleague to lunch. He’s in a different area so we’d never interacted too much, but to the extent we had, I’d always thought he was pretty cool. Anyway, he’s 70, retiring, and moving cross-country to take up a research-only position elsewhere. I’d missed

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  • Levity

    https://twitter.com/scalzi/status/1588133006916653056?s=20&t=W7AlFtrJikd9eM22hzbHtg We succeeded in recreating a Neolithic flatbread! This is about as close as I can figure out how to make bread as it would have been baked in one of the first daily bread-making cultures, ca. 9,000 years ago. I’ll let you judge the authenticity…but the taste is fantastic. pic.twitter.com/z3cWIyVXbf — πšƒπš‘πšŽ π™»πš˜πšœπš πš‚πšžπš™πš™πšŽπš›

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  • >>NOVEMBER 2022: If you have a question you’d like me to answer during Nov 2022 daily blogging, please leave a comment to this post.<<Β  Another question by Profdirector, originally posted here: What not obvious thing do you wish the old fully promoted men in your department knew? I’m going to assume this question ends with

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  • Welcome to daily blogging in November! In the spirit of NaNoWriMo, there’s an old blogging tradition known as NaBloPoMo, national blog posting month. I will start with a question from Profdirector, originally posted here: Navel-gazing subject: what amount of yearly money could your research survive on? I.e. what annual budget would allow you to stop

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  • Simplistic

    The other day, I came across this tweet (screenshot below): I started fuming, but that’s neither here nor there, since I fume a lot, on account of being a perimenopausal woman and the world generally being a steaming cauldron of irritating shit. Still, upon closer inspection, I realized this was a very specific kind of

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  • RBOC

    NOVEMBER 2022: If you have a question you’d like me to answer during Nov 2022 daily blogging, please leave a comment to this post.Β  I have a new pen name/email/web domain for the new (to me) genre in which I am writing a novel. This brings the number of different email accounts to seventeen gajillion.

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  • This book chapter, a gift that keeps on giving. And by giving, I mean taking. Mostly the will to live. The book has been in the making for literally years, and there’s constantly some additional shit that needs to be done by us, the authors, rather than by the typesetters and copyeditors that the publisher

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  • Random Bits of Academia

    In recent years, our enrollments have been increasing, which I suppose is good for the department and the college. However — and I don’t know if this is a pandemic effect, or the effect of us enrolling students who aren’t as prepared as we need them to be — the skills of students in basic

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  • As it often happens, a few things occur simultaneously and all lead to the same place. For me, that place has been the database of salaries for my university system. One of the things that nudged me to go there was this post by the Grumpies (congrats on the promotion and associated raise to 1/2

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  • Howdy, fellow academics! The new school year is in full swing, and, oh boy, is it swinging! Straight for the fences! Only the bat is aimed at a faculty member’s head instead of a baseball! Sure, I’m yelling and mixing metaphors, but what do you expect from a headless academic blogger? I’ve realized that, when

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