Category Archives: real life

I Can’t See How the Republicans are Wrong Here…

And it worries me, of course. But it seems to me that giving tax breaks on graduate students’ tuition waivers is, essentially, financial support for the graduate school industry. Universities are obviously the great beneficiaries of the graduate school industry, … Continue reading

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Boilerplate-R-Us

I can’t keep up with these new rules, but apparently if you ever expect to denounce/excuse/ignore one guy’s sexual abuse, you must make sure you’re on record as denouncing/excusing/ignoring every other one. I was on a research vessel once where … Continue reading

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Yet Another ‘How Did I Not See This Coming?’ Post

Being at the intersection of academia and SFF has been like watching two battlegrounds lately. But the wars have been almost entirely within the ranks, between progressives and liberals, so I thought they were politically irrelevant. After all, when a … Continue reading

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Politics needs the Cladistic Revolution

This was a big issue in my previous life in the world of systematics. The field was in a huge paradigm war between people who classified dead fish based on shared evolutionary novelties (the cladists) and people who classified based … Continue reading

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Connect – or not?

A friend of mine was in a class of really shy people this summer, and the leader finally had them play the ice-breaking game Connect. Heard of it? I hadn’t either. It’s one of those games where you talk about … Continue reading

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Not to be Politically Incorrect, but…

There’s this thing going around on Facebook.  Some guy posted a whole mess of his opinions under the heading: “I feel the need to drop a little truth on y’all. So buckle up…I’m about to be politically incorrect.” You can … Continue reading

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OMG CSS! And what does it mean for teaching?

It’s taken years, but I’ve finally come around to cascading style sheets. I was introduced to them in the absolutely worst way, when a Dreamweaver update suddenly refused to accept half the commands I was used to putting into my … Continue reading

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Against Political Criticism

If I wanted to write political arguments, I could. But I write fiction instead, because I think political arguments are incomplete and one-sided. They’re simplistic answers, and the only way you can get to such answers is by ignoring half … Continue reading

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When do we get to talk in private?

So apparently this week’s news is that administrators at the University of Illinois used personal email accounts to discuss the Salaita case. I have to say, I don’t blame them one bit. They had a situation in which whatever they … Continue reading

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Ooh, shiny! The next new knitting rage.

Fox Paws didn’t use up my stash. I have a feeling that I could yarnbomb all of Milwaukee without using up my stash. But that doesn’t matter because I’ve just downloaded the most exciting new stash-buster pattern – Zanzibar by … Continue reading

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