Picking Your Poison

I said something a little (actually more than a little) harsh about Humanities grad students in the comments of one of Ginny’s posts.  That reminded my of how I began to see myself as a misanthrope in grad school. Upon leaving the Academy, I discovered that I was not misanthropic, I merely didn’t like Academics – either profs or larval profs, all that much. While I have much less patience with people in the Humanities (and they tended to try my patience with educated stupidity much more than techies), scientists are not easy lot to deal with, either. Early in my blogging career I came up with the taxonomy of scientific graduate advisors below. I had always planned to come back and do the grad students, so spurred on by Ginny’s post, I’m going to do both Humanities and Science / Engineering grad students in a future post.  But for those of you uninitiated into the arcane world of gradute work in technical fields, and especially for those of you about to enter that world, I’m reposting this:

Read more

Wisconsin Electricity Situation

First and foremost I would like to thank Jonthan for inviting me to become a part of Chicago Boyz.  I have admired this blog for a long time and am looking forward to being a contributor.  I have written for a while over at my “home base”, Life In The Great Midwest.  We have three contributors over there and write on a variety of topics.  I will keep most of my “cat blogging” over there and try to post some of the more serious issues that I write about here.

 One of the topics we spend a lot of time on at LITGM is energy.  My co-contributor Carl is what I would consider an expert in the field, having spent many years in various roles that have had to do with energy.  My post here about the current situation in Wisconsin is in response to his recent post about the woes of Illinois. 

Read more

Why There?

I have had my attention* directed to the recent publication of some rather interesting predictions about global warming and tropical storm activity in the Philosophical Transactions  of the Royal Society A (Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences). My first reaction was: why Philosophical Transactions A? Especially for two researchers from Georgia? Then I looked at the journal’s internet masthead:

Philosophical Transactions A is expanding and most journal issues will be dedicated to the publication of Theme Issues in four subject clusters:

               

  • Nano-science nano–engineering and quantum computing
  • Environmental change and renewable energy
  • Dynamical systems and complexity
  • Biophysics, biological mathematics and medical engineering

The reason that the choice of journal raised my hackles is that the Royal Society’s Transactions is not the first choice for a meteorological article of such startling significance. It has a middling-low Impact Factor, and most scientists** strive to get their research published in as prestigious a journal as possible in order to win the publish-or-perish games that are the lifeblood of Academy politics.

Read more

Excellent Blogging on Power, Infrastructure and Financial Issues

I highly recommend Carl from Chicago’s posts on these issues at the Life in the Great Midwest blog. Carl’s posts are easily accessible via the category list on his blog’s left sidebar (click on Economics, Electricity, Social Security or Taxes to start).

Carl’s latest post, on the economics and politics of electric-power infrastructure in Illinois, is here.

Tangerines per Gallon

In a meeting with environmentalists, Elizabeth Edwards talked about the importance of buying locally-produced foods:

“We’ve been moving back to ‘buy local,'” Mrs. Edwards said, outlining a trade policy that “acknowledges the carbon footprint” of transporting fruit.

“I live in North Carolina. I’ll probably never eat a tangerine again,” she said, speaking of a time when the fruit is reaches the price that it “needs” to be.

Being the kind and considerate person that I am, I don’t want the Edwards family to unnecessarily forego the pleasures of tangerine-eating. Therefore, I’ll try to help them out by calculating a vital economic and environmental parameter which shall be known as tangerines per gallon.

This is a very rough and preliminary analysis; tangerine experts and transportation experts are invited to chime in with more data.

Read more