The Plattsmouth Semi-Weekly Journal, Nebraska, December 3, 1931

it's healthy for academics to have professional feuds. enrichment activity

Holy shit. "The demese ef the Ne'enderthels: Wes lengege a fecter?" published in the Science magazine

short but sweet

i think a really funny project that a statistics professor could have their class do is like. put a bunch of random, patently untrue demographic statements into a hat. "the most popular tv show among white men ages 24-27 is Bluey." "the majority of business majors are middle children." "bisexual women love hot chips." and each student picks one out of the hat and you gotta like. design a whole study and survey a group of people to specifically achieve that result. you have to prove it true. by whatever means necessary. you have to construct the most biased study possible and wrangle in your exact demographic to make that statement a statistical reality. i think people would learn a lot.

CLARIFICATION: students would be forbidden from recruiting participants with any communication that contains more than 1 demographic qualifier!!

e.g. they can put out an ad for "female study participants" but not for "bisexual women who like hot chips"

this forces them to design a screening process that narrows it down to their desired group. "yeah sorry the survey takes 2 hours, and it's right during lunch, but we do have an unlimited supply of hot chips you can eat." and then occasionally a beautiful butch woman walks by the windows idk im still brainstorming

careers in science & academia are so Cassandra-coded. you possess a Great and Burdensome Knowledge (at heavy cost*), which is both its own reward and its own punishment. and no one fucking listens to you

working in labs will get you used to specialized equipment slowly but surely until you’re searching stuff online like “can i use an autoclave to disinfect makeup brushes” and “used autoclave cost”

no, and $200 on facebook marketplace btw

A good friend of my spouse's and mine made us an amazing alphabet book for our baby! Entirely written and illustrated by hand. Look how gorgeous:

(not including all of them because I didn't want to overwhelm with images, but here are A, B, C, and a selection of my favourites. I particularly love J!)

Also here's the title page!

I love this book so much I wanted to share it with our friends. Baby is still too little for books, but I'm sure he'll love it too!!

Yeah, well, I can’t stretch out that review of 16th century economics by adding a gratuitous hand job.

#not with that attitude you can’t

i think you should be allowed to cite scholars who are bad people but only if you put the word (oof) or (yikes) after their name

like Parker (yikes, 1989) or Obbink (big oof, 2007)

Freud (derogatory, 1923)

#reminds me of the time a former grad student from my dept cited the unabomber in a math paper with the footnote ‘better known for other work‘ @sierpinskis-assket

Meirl

LOOK AT THE LITTLE DUDE 

He’s just a little guy.

This is why people get PHDs.

do u think omegaverse acknowledges covid-19 and the generation of people who permanently lost their sense of smell like how are they all scenting each other now is the omegaverse economy in shambles

actually pheromone sensing works differently from normal olfaction, since humans in our world don’t have a functioning vomeronasal organ (VNO), we don’t have any data on how covid-19 would affect a functioning VNO in omegaverse AUs

Actually there is evidence that covid probably would affect the VNO and it stands to reason would accordingly impair its function. Briefly:

In conclusion the omegaverse economy IS in shambles.

OP this is very well-written but im still hung up on how you came onstage dressed as a clown only to tear off the costume and reveal yourself as a biologist

nearly all libraries have a ghost, but medical libraries frequently have a ghost and a skeleton

i’ve been reminded that most people don’t know about the ghost

‘ghost reading’ means collecting usage stats for books which are used within the library, without being checked out (which would automatically generate usage data).

This is often done by checking out the book to a dummy user account belonging to The Library Ghost before it’s reshelved. (After being returned ofc. Ghosts read very fast.)

Due to ghost reading, most libraries ask that you do not return books to the shelves yourself, even if you’re confident of where they go - there will instead be somewhere they’ll ask you to leave them (or just leave them out on a surface somewhere) so they can be collected and ghost read.

I knew about leaving books out after you read them, but I didn't know about the ghost account thing! Thank you for explaining that 👍

Certified Library Post

Google AI Overview

Yes, some universities have a tradition of including a "snake fight" portion in thesis defenses, where students fight one of the university's snakes. The quality of the student's thesis determines the size of the snake they must fight, with better theses resulting in smaller snakes. After the committee reads the thesis, they tell the snake master how good it is, who then chooses the snake. In some northern European countries, an external examiner called the "opponent" fights the snake on the student's behalf, with the opponent's skill level based on the thesis's quality.

I have seen this posted here about 87 times, but in case you have not seen it:

And this is where the part about Northern Europe is from:

If you speak in an authoritative voice, the AI will believe it. So much like humans. I asked Google too.

#is this what all my phd friends have experienced or will experience...

My best friend from my PhD program actually asked what sword I would use, theoretically, to defend my dissertation from the snake. I chose this one:

the professor in the lecture series i'm listening to said "who will volunteer to fight in my phalanx?" so i asked the obvious question, which is "which one of my professors would i have died for?" and unfortunately the answer was immediately apparent to me

A LaTeX mod to draw coffee cup rings on your technical papers

LaTeX is the venerable, gold-standard layout package favored for scholarly papers, especially technical papers; back in 2009, Hanno Rein released LaTeX Coffee Stains, an extension to draw a variety of coffee-cup rings on your paper; the code has been improved by community contributions over the years and is very robust and full-featured! (via Evil Mad Scientist Labs)

https://boingboing.net/2018/04/30/hanno-rein.html