'Fumbling' is the appropriate word

Speaking of photos,* I once again disqualified myself from true geek status today by way of sheer technological incompetence. And it involves photos. (Hence the topicalised participial phrase.)

Because, you see, I was trawling through my own blog archives, marvelling at my reflection in the pond, when** I suddenly noticed that all my photos were missing. All of them!

In the next 30 seconds I came up with all sorts of explanations, mostly involving Blogger and exceeded file space and/or general screw-ups (but some involving aliens holding my photos ransom for reasons unknown), and I went all sorts of colours of crazy and miserable and just generally pissed off.***

It took me ten whole minutes of teary clicking through old photo posts to realise that I had -- wait for it -- AdBlocked my own site.

Don't even ask.

________

*Well, okay, we weren't, but I posted one yesterday, and that counts, right?

** To make the analogy work here, I should really say, "when I reached out and suddenly fell in", which doesn't work at all well when we are talking of archives. Although, how cool would that be? Falling into your own archives?

*** But this time of the month, pretty much anything that happens is guaranteed to turn me exciting shades of angry. In the last few days, for example, I have been pissed off at my bicycle, the computer, Geekman (entirely unfoundedly), broccoli (don't ask), Geekman again (this time moderately foundedly), John Howard (entirely foundedly), and that weird orange foamy stuff that collects around the plug-hole in the bathroom sink. Some of them (including broccoli) have even made me cry.

It thinks it's spring, but it's delusional

Because if it was spring, I wouldn't be this cold.

While I have your attention...

I'm going to make the most of all my extra grad student visitors today and extend an invitation to join our online grad student support group. Shrinkykitten has a few more details about it here, but in brief, it's a private blog where we write about our current dissertation-related goals, give each other support and try and keep each other accountable for progress being made.

We would like a few more members (but don't want there to be so many that people get lost in the crowd). So if you are interested, send me an email, and I'll get back to you within a few days. If we get huge numbers of people wanting to join, though, it may be that we have to take the first comers only.

Ist Monthly Carnival of GRADual Progress

Preliminaries

As this is the first Carnival of GRADual Progress ever, I haven't limited it to recent posts but have included some oldies as well.

Hunting and gathering the following posts from around the internet, I was struck with how much of what is written about grad student life is extremely depressing. I'm a little concerned that this carnival might send you all off to slit your wrists -- I guess the best to hope for is that reading it can also have the effect of creating a sense of shared experience (a trouble shared is a trouble halved and all), or maybe give the evilest of you a few moments of schadenfreude. And sometimes it just helps to know you aren't the only one who's struggling. But so as not to turn this entirely into the Carnival of Doom and Despair, I made an especial effort to sprinkle some happier (or even just neutral) posts into the mix. If you have particularly depressive tendencies, you might want to skip the first three or four: I promise they get cheerier after that.

But you don't want to hear me waffling on forever, so I declare this carnival officially open! Stop stuffing your mouths with candyfloss and hotdogs (it'll just make you feel sick when you go on the ferris wheel), and get to the reading!


The agony...

Flossie, from Stepping on Acorns, nominated Dean Dad's post on the wisdom (or otherwise) of going to graduate school. As she points out, it's too late for most of us, but reading it might help remind you of why you are here and what you want to get out of it all.

In case you are tempted to believe that Dean Dad is exaggerating the hardships of grad school, you might want to read this post, where Hopeless Academic compares research to a hell, "where satan deposits me in thoughts of proteases and nucleotides and SNP's and colloids and lasers". Hopeless Academic also shows he has time between lab meetings to be political in this submission.

Parts-n-Pieces writes about a couple of feelings we can probably all identify with: the fear it won't be good enough and the feeling of being an imposter, with some interesting ideas about finding a model of how to be a dissertation writer.

Holly, on Field Notes from an Evolutionary Psychologist also writes about the difficulties of being a first generation graduate student trying to find models of how to be in academia. Her question in this post is how you can get published in grad school if you don't have the sort of supervisor who lets you 'ride their coattails onto the royal road of publications'.

The PhD Explosion confronts the widespread acceptance that grad students will end up feeling suicidal and makes the radical suggestion that maybe this means there is something wrong with the system. On a less bleak note, the post on other people's reactions when you tell them you are doing a PhD is also well worth a read.


...and the not-all-that-bad, really...

In case reading about other people's struggles is starting to make you dwell on your own, the following few posts might work as a bit of an anxiety antidote.

With the benefit of hindsight, Collin Brooke from Collin vs. Blog reminds us that dissertations don't have to be good. They only have to be good enough.

Chris Uggen points out that even if you fail an exam, it doesn't mean you won't be a good professor.

And despite what we've all heard about the shrinking academic job market, Minor Revisions shows it can be done. I'm going to quote a whole passage of her post, because I find it soothing when the panic starts to build:

It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t find a job after grad school. After a period of panic where I was terrified everyone had realized I suck, I had a nice batch of interviews, followed by a good group of offers, and picked what was clearly the best one in the right area. I make enough money, work with delightful people, and can pretty much do what I want with my time.

Admittedly most of these 'antidote' posts are by people who are no longer graduate students themselves. But maybe that is a good reminder that some things that seem like big deals right now might not look so terrifying a few years down the track. (Or, you know, that the world has got a whole lot nastier since these people were at grad school. Whatever.)


...and the ecstasy (Yes, you thought that wasn't coming, but I fooled you)

All the same, some current grad students seem to be having a good time of it. Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast has a post about being in love with your research, reminding us that when things are good, they are very very good.

And Stewgad at Pretty Hard Dammit writes about what it's like to really own your dissertation.


The hilarity...

If you're still not having fun yet, Ranjit Warrier at The Warrier's Kraal is bound to make you laugh with his signs you are spending too much time in the lab or his post on what would happen if virologists could name movies. He's not someone you would want to go through airport security with, on the other hand.


... and the ingenuity

If When I manage to complete my dissertation, I know it's all going to be thanks to the tips, tools and tricks I nicked off other people's blogs. So here's a brief catalogue of some useful strategies I've stumbled across lately.

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast recommends some unexpectedly low-tech tools.

GTD Wannabe has a helpful post on personal experiences in implementing the GTD system as a grad student.

Earth Wide Moth at Indexical Thinking gets thinking about the usefulness of indexes.

If you've ever struggled with the tension between wanting to keep your partner informed about your PhD progress (or lack of it!) and not wanting to answer yet another bloody question about how the thesis is going, Pretty Hard Dammit has a suggestion for a stress-free compromise (and it wins extra points for being based on a scene from Buffy!)

Aunt B. at Tiny Cat Pants isn't a grad student herself, but I found that her Free Advice for Academic Authors is equally applicable to dissertations.


The soon-to-be

Let's now take a few minutes to step into a daydream about the (maybe not so distant!) future and look at a few posts on finishing and beyond.

First of all there are a few useful posts on how to get finished.

HistGrad at Eating an Elephant writes about How to Finish a Dissertation in Two Easy Centuries (Part I and II).

ScienceWoman at On being a scientist and a woman also has a post on finishing up in reasonable time. While some of her suggestions are only relevant to North American Readers (classes? comps? prelims?), there's plenty of more general advice -- also in the comments.

Over at this site, on the other hand, you'll find a whole heap of suggestions for how to avoid graduating. After all, some of us are here because we like PhD student life: why would we want to leave?

If you do want to finish on time, but aren't sure what you need to be doing when, here's a useful calculator to help you work it out.

Porkorama at Dissertation Hell tells us about the final step: the oral exam. This is a horror story with a moral ("Do it or don't do it, but don't just stand there suffering!").

Finally, just in case you are about to make it out of here in the near future, Dr. Mom has a comprehensive list of what needs to go into a faculty application package (thanks to ScienceWoman for the tip-off).

Many thanks to everyone who submitted something, or who pointed me in the direction of something that deserved submission. Huge apologies if you submitted something and I somehow missed it. Please let me know if that was the case and I'll tweak the system (or my brain) so that it doesn't happen again. Hopefully the next month will bring many more submissions from people who didn't know about the carnival until now.


... and the cup of tea.

I'm off to make one, anyway. Won't you join me?

Which part of, oh, ANY OF THAT, didn't you understand?

Visiting speaker (who has just asked to use my photocopying account to copy handouts, a request I had to decline because grad students have a copying limit and I'm nearly at mine): "Thanks for finding me someone whose account I could use. Are you joining us now for morning tea before the seminar?"

Me: "No, I'm really busy and would like to get a few things done* before your talk."

Visiting speaker: "Well, if you aren't coming for coffee, would you mind taking these and stapling each copy at the top left? [hands me her huge pile of handouts] And there's a mistake on page three: just cross out the first word on each one."

_______

* And yes, I am now blogging instead of doing any of those, but that's not the point. It's just not. Okay?

StyleyGeek pretends to be a real blogger who cares about news and politics and stuff

Since BBC news is watching me, I might as well make the most of the attention and marvel out loud (in a metaphorical, online sort of way) at two new bizarrenesses.

(1) What is with the "What could be in the news during the next week" column? In my humble* readerly view, if it hasn't happened yet, it isn't news. It's weather forecasting. Or horoscopes. Or rune casting. But not news. Have patience, people! Wait until it happens and then report it. Otherwise you'll just have to repeat yourselves.

(2) On a less ranty note, I was sitting at the gym the other day on one of those horrible cycle machines which have TVs all lined up in front of them, and was pleasantly surprised to see that instead of Oprah or South Park repeats, I was just in time for the BBC World News Headlines. So we get the lead in and (presumably) music and all (no earphones). Followed by...

A five-minute-long screenshot of the BBC world news website.

I'm all for encouraging people to get their news online instead of from TV, but isn't the whole point of online news its interactiveness? Which is not exactly a quality that a screenshot has all that much of.

On the other hand, it is probably an excellent way to save money. So I'm thinking we could all incorporate this strategy into our teaching. (Think how proud of us our departmental budget monsters would be!) Rather than actually giving lectures, we could lock the students in a room with the readings projected up on the wall. Instead of tutorials, we can take relevant online discussion board posts and show them on a screen at the front of the class.

Tell me, am I on to something here?

_____

* Okay, we all know that any time anyone says "humble" when referring to themselves, they mean exactly the opposite. So yeah, read this as, "[...] in my megalomaniacal 'the world revolves around me' readerly view [...]" because clearly that's what I really wanted to say.

The generational divide, or why my family thinks I have a boring life

My mother has threatened promised to call tonight.

So I was making a mental list of what I can tell her about when she asks how I spent the weekend. The problem is that I don't think she will be able to identify, let alone identify with, any of the things I could mention:

1. I blogged. (My mother doesn't know I have a blog. I doubt she even knows what a blog is.)
2. I collected some posts for the Carnival of GRADual Progress. (See note to #1.)
3. I read an article called "Parataxe, Hypotaxe et Corrélation dans la Phrase Latine" [Parataxis, Hypotaxis and Correlation in the Latin Phrase] (Let's just pretend that was a helpful translation, okay?)
4. Geekman and I installed a different distribution of Linux on my university computer. (My mother is uncomfortable with the idea of using Firefox as a web browser because she "likes Windows better".)
5. I memorised the pronominal system of Middle Egyptian. (Do I even need to comment on this one?)
6. I designed a computer program to randomly suggest combinations of the contents of our fridge, in the hope of generating ideas for exciting new sandwiches. I wanted to design an evolutionary algorithm in order to evolve the perfect combination, but got stuck at the point where I needed to create a metric to measure goodness of sandwich.

I think I'll just tell her we went for a walk.

Old people are Not Like Us

At a reading group on Friday that I am no longer going to be specific about* (as Googling for this topic seems to have been the way several people I know have found this blog), it was suddenly brought home to me that I don't represent the average demographics of the group.

Someone was soliciting annual fee payments for an organisation that some members of the group belong to, and it was suggested that everyone pay in advance for the next four years, since this apparently makes it easier for the organisation. Now, as you might expect, there was huge objection to this, but it wasn't for any reason I would have predicted.

Because it would put a financial strain on people's budgets?
No.
Because they weren't sure they would want to stay members for the next four years?
Not quite.

But I think a request for clarification that came from one of the members gives an indication of the problem:

"Will any money left over be paid to my estate?"


_________

* But if you care, I've posted about it here and here.

The world's a big place with some odd people in it. Amazing.

Although it is apparently an appalling blog cliché, I love to read other people's posts about the Googling weirdness that brings people to their blogs, so screw it, I'm going to write another one myself.

Best of the last two weeks:

what can a koala do

something neat about strategic thinking

what did you do this weekend <- are you asking Google? Because I expect it just sat there and helped people with their searches.

squirrels in my addict

too much cuddling koala <- Do you think this one is looking for help for an addiction?

king parrot trap <- If I knew who you were, I'd report you

can parrots eat pencils? <- And you.

My friends now despise me and it's all Shrinky's fault

Since the only one of the commentators to my post about Mission Impossible III who claimed to have seen it said it didn't suck,* I went.

And was pleasantly surprised.

Sure, Tom Cruise doesn't do anything for me, but the action was actiony, there were enough explosions to keep Geekman happy, the plot had enough twists to keep it interesting, and the dialogue even had some clever moments.

Standing around afterwards with friends, and hoping to score some sort of celeb-watching cred, I plagiarised quoted Shrinky's comment about Tom Cruise's partner in the film looking like Katie Holmes.

All of them, without exception, replied, "Who's Katie Holmes?"

_____
* Hey, syntactic processing memory, you can suck my complex sentence! (See, I could write action movie dialogue, too.)

Technology can't keep up with me

I don't know about you, but I almost never use the thing on my browser that you are meant to type URLs into. I'd say that at least 90% of the time, I use Google (for things I don't know I am looking for), links (for things that people tell me I should be looking for) or bookmarks (for things I obsessively stake out multiple times a day). I certainly can't think of a single instance in which it would be quicker and more convenient to type in a URL.

So how come the URL-typey-in-thing is located in the centre of the toolbar and takes up most of the space, while the Google search box (if you are using Firefox and even have one) is hidden off to the side all scrunched up?

Ideally, I want the Google box to be where the URL-putter-inner is and the URL-thingy itself can go hang.

Anyone want to design me a custom-made browser?

Update: I've been fiddling around with the toolbar options and it seems you can put the Google box on the left of the URL-thingy, but you can't change their relative sizes.

In other news

Because sometimes I like to explore my human English heritage, I'm going to talk about the weather.

I just looked at the daily temperatures for the last few months and you know what? On Tuesday we had both the coldest night this winter (-6 C, or 21 F) and the warmest day (18 C, 64 F).

What is with this country?

Mission Impossible III tonight

How much is it going to suck? Even bearing in mind that it is free, should I bother going?

Opinions before 7 pm, please!

I have bike!

Not quite a new one, but new to me. I stole it bought it from Weekend_Viking with a vague promise of money changing hands at some point. (He claims to have mafia friends, so this is a debt I should probably pay.)

Three special features that this bicycle has that my old one didn't:

• Working brakes
• Gears
• Wheels that stay attached to the bicycle when going over speed bumps

I've upgraded!

He reads too much science fiction

We censused last night, along with (I suspect) most of the rest of the country. I love filling out census forms. It's like a multiple choice test where I know all the answers! Plus, it makes me feel like I'm important in someone's grand scheme.

I think there's a person in our house who needs to work on his question interpretation skills, though:

In the box for "ethnic heritage", Geekman wrote "human".

It seems that I'm a fake

In light of some recent discussion in our little corner of the blogosphere (that I'm too lazy to hunt down links to) about the nature of words like "intellectual" and "academic" and how we describe ourselves to other people, I submit, for your interest and amusement, this brief conversation from yesterday.

"Good morning StyleyGeek."
"Morning." I hurry past, not wanting to get stuck in conversation with this person whose head is so far up his own arse that he has a permanent crick in the neck.
"Styley?"
"Yes..."
"I hear we have a scholar in the department this week." The word is said in awestruck tones.
"Huh?" (Don't we have around 20 scholars in the department all day every day?)
"You know, our visitor."
"Oh, you must mean X, our visiting speaker for tomorrow's seminar."
"That's right. From Harvard, I hear."
"Yes."
"Well, it's nice to have a real scholar around the place for a change."

And with that, and a final throat clearing, he disappears into his office.

Stealth learning

I've recently been forced to return to doing some reading in a subfield of linguistics that I have tried to avoid for the last two years because it is just. too. hard.

My memories of reading this stuff in the past are of struggling and struggling to make sense of things and always feeling like I am missing a huge piece of background information -- like I walked into a surrealist play half-way through the final act without any prior knowledge of the subject matter. Worse: the final act of a surrealist play in a language I don't speak.*

But today I was finally forced to look at this area again and it makes perfect sense. It's easy! And it's the missing link for a section of my thesis.

Somehow in the past two years, without actively trying to, I have acquired the necessary background to understand this material.

Hooray for research degree side effects! Hooray for StyleyGeek's brain!

________

*I had that experience once. It was about as much fun as it sounds.

Nooooooooo!

Where'd New Kid go? Is she coming back? I miss her already!

StyleyGeek goes to party: gets cold

Abstract:

In this paper the author will argue that parties held during winter when the outside temperature is less than minus two degrees (28 F) should not be held outdoors. The addition of a small brazier can improve matters, but if there is only enough wood to last an hour or two, and/or so many guests that only a tenth of them can fit huddled around the brazier at any given time, the brazier's presence may lower rather than improve morale.

Allowing access to an inside room is thoughtful behaviour on the part of the hosts, but it should be noted that leaving the windows and French doors wide open all night is likely to bring the room down to the same temperature as the outside area.

In conclusion, the author explains that while she enjoyed the pizza and is still recovering from the extremely alcoholic punch*, it took her 45 minutes upon her return home to stop shivering and return to something approximating a normal human body temperature.

__________
* "So what's in this punch, then?"
"Well, it started as pina colada, but the bowl was only about a third full, so we added the rest of everything we had in the liquor cabinet, and other people have been pouring in some of whatever they brought with them."

Grovel*

I have a favour to ask youse.

In case you haven't seen the website for the Carnival of GRADual Progress lately, I decided to hold the first carnival on 15th August. Now I don't have a problem with making the first one consist almost entirely of posts that I have stumbled across myself rather than actual submissions, but that does mean that I'll probably miss a lot of good stuff.

So it's actually two favours:

1. If you come across any posts about grad student life during your browsing over the next week that you think are submission-worthy, please let me know (via one of the ways described on the Carnival website).
2. A little publicity for the carnival on your own blogs (a post? a link to the carnival website in the sidebar?) would be most excellent, since you probably all have larger readerships than I do.

I have no doubt that it will get some momentum of its own after the first couple of rounds, but for now, the more publicity there is, the better reading will be coming your way on the 15th.

________
* Which is one of those words that, when you look at it all by itself, doesn't really look like a word at all and sends you running dictionarywards to check its spelling.

Up with the birds

I came in to university extra early today. As I sat down to work, though, I heard a noise from the pavement below my window: Clatter clatter clatter clatter! In fact, it was exactly like the sound of claws skittering over paving stones. Coming closer and closer.

So I opened my window and looked down.


It seems that someone was confused by my early arrival when he'd thought he would still have the place to himself.

Observation on last night's movie(The Da Vinci Code)

I've probably said it before, but it's still true. It's always a bad sign when the audience cracks up laughing at the emotional climax of the film.

Doomed before I begin

I'm going to a course today on how to get a postdoc.

It's probably an ominous sign for my future prospects that I've been trying to get into this course for a year, and the eight times it ran during that period it was booked out within an hour of opening for enrolment.* Each time it was advertised, I'd send them an email, and receive a reply saying that they had already had hundreds of other students enquire and I was too late.

Perhaps this is the first lesson for postdoc applications: get used to that feeling.

_________

* Most courses for postgrads at our university take a couple of weeks to fill up, if they ever do.

The AIU: "More Better Education"

I love the website of the Australian International University (slogan: "More Better Education"). It's a spoof of my university, which has an extremely similar name and has recently been trying to attract more international students.

But whether or not you know my university, you'll probably find the site is an amusing satire on academia in general.

Here's an excerpt from their "Staff Strategy" page:

At Australian International University we have no staff. We are a revolutionary, management only university. By cutting out staff members completely, we have reduced our costs to a market-leading level, enabling us to provide our clients with world-class price point options.

All lecturer and tutors at Australian International University are SSP’s. SSP stands for “Subcontracted Service Provider.” The utilisation of SSP teachers keeps costs as low as possible for us. We can then pass on these cost savings to you, our valued clients.

[...]

Incentivisation is an important part of motivating our SSP’s. The Australian International University has found that for an SSP, the fear of losing one’s job is a powerful incentive to lower one’s hourly rate. We believe in regularly providing incentives to our SSP’s in order to improve performance and service delivery.

Here at AIU we are also very proud of the fact that our management staff have absolutely no academic experience. Our management team have all been recruited because they come from management, marketing and entrepreneurial backgrounds. We guarantee that none of them are tainted by any experience of pedagogy. George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach,” or words to that effect. Except for our SSP’s, all management staff at AIU are able to “do.”

And from the 'International Students FAQ':

Q4. I worry I don’t speaking so good English, actually?

A4. No worry, mate. We don’t speak good English neither. But your father is good businessman. He has $100,000 in cash? He can pay your education? No worry mate. You already speaking our language very good. Don’t worry learning more English classes. No necessary. No worry. Mate.

Q6. My friend he go already to AIU. But he say he can't understanding what lecturers saying. What if I can't understanding them too? How I can learning proper?

A6. No worry, mate. We don’t calling them “lecturers” any more at AIU. We calling them “SSP” this mean “Subcontracted Service Provider.” If you have problem with you can't understand your SSP, you tell us, we fire him. Your father our number one valuable client. We don’t offending your father. He important man, him. SSP is very “pretentious.” This is special word - mean think he very smart. But if so smart, why he SSP? If he more smart, he is being manager or marketing man. Not stupid teacher.

Q8. Normally I don’t understanding English very good. How come I understanding everything you say? How come you so clear?

A8. Because we writing all questions and answers in this FAQ.

I also recommend the page explaining the Latin mottos of the various university services. I'm thinking of adopting the main university motto as my own:

Rapacitas Bona Est

Progress through procrastination

I've wasted significant time online in the last couple of days searching for and installing some of the software suggested in the comments to this post at Bitch PhD. (The irony has not escaped me.)

You, on the other hand, can be grateful, since I am going to pass on the little sparkly gems of my hard-won wisdom (having cleaned the mud off first and polished them lovingly with a soft cloth), in order to save you from the drudgery of surfing around for yourself.

Most highly recommended are: the Invisibility Cloak plugin for Firefox, the method suggested here under (2) for banning particular sites, and the cunning use of Adblock to filter out your own personal time-wasting nemesiseseses.

I'm now using all three of these solutions, plus Temptation Blocker to disable Internet Explorer entirely (I use Firefox for all my work-related internet use). While each of these programs is easy enough to disable independently, switching them all off is a little too much effort to go to unless I'm really, really desperate.

No, don't thank me. I'll just get all shy.

Geekman explains the universe

or StyleyGeek gets someone else to do her blogging for her. (Do you think this strategy would work for my thesis, too?)

In the comments to a post below, there was a discussion of a public lecture that was recently given on the topic of supersymmetry. Morton T Fogg missed the lecture and made the request that someone explain the lecture in one or two sentences. Miss M then fingered me as "a real live physicist" (as opposed to a dead one, I can only assume) and suggested I have a go. So here I go.

At the lecture the speaker didn't really say a lot about supersymmetry itself, and didn't really explain what it was when he did. This is understandable, since it was a public lecture, and he had to first cover a lot of physics background before he could even start talking about supersymmetry. It's also hard to get lay people excited about supersymmetry since it's really abstract. Still, he gets my admiration for even trying.

So here's my explanation of what supersymmetry is, assuming a moderately scientific background.

...

That was a five minute pause where I stared at the screen without writing anything. This is going to be difficult. Geekman adopts a lotus position and attempts to focus his chi.

Right. At the most fundamental level we know about, everything physical can be sharply divided into two classes with nothing left over. This division is normally made at the level of elementary particles (which are particles that appear to be absolutely fundamental and indivisible, i.e. not made up of anything else), but since everything is either one of these elementary particles or made up of collections of them, this division also applies to macroscopic objects.

The two classes are called bosons and fermions, and they have very different properties. Some of these properties are pretty abstract and don't make much sense outside a quantum mechanical analysis, but there is at least one property that has obvious, understandable consquences for everyday life: Bosons are friendly, fermions aren't. You can put as many bosons in the same place at the same time as you like; with fermions you can only have one in one place at any given time.

As you may now have guessed, practically all the stuff you see around you is fermionic. If you try to walk through a wall you will quickly become aware of this. You, the wall, not generally happy being in the same place at the same time. Feel free to try this at home - it's a very cheap and educational physics experiment, and probes fundamental properties of the universe.

Something that is bosonic, on the other hand, and is noticeable in everyday life is the photon (photons are particles of electromagnetic radiation). Light, radio waves, X-rays and so on all pass happily through each other without any problem.

Geekman un-adopts the lotus position as he's getting cramp, but tries to hold on his chi in case it proves useful.

Now, the next thing you have to know is that physicists like symmetry. A lot. A lot lot lot, even. If there's something asymmetric about their equations (making them ugly), they'll often stick in extra terms just to make them more symmetric (and elegant or beautiful), even if there's no justification for it. Amazingly, more often than not, these extra terms, in the fullness of time, turn out to actually be correct and describe extra stuff in the real world. The universe appears to like symmetry too. Good universe. Pretty universe.

I've used the term symmetry a lot, so it's probably time to explain it. There are all sorts of symmetries, and the ones that are most familiar to people are geometric ones. If, for example, I rotate a square through ninety degrees, it looks unchanged. Similarly if I reflect it though a diagonal and so on. But what does symmetry mean when applied to equations? Well, the same sort of thing, really. It means you can apply some transformation to one of the variables in your equation and the equation is still valid. One example might be if you take the solar system and move every object in it a metre to the left. The solar system ends up shifted but behaves exactly the same. This is equivalent to taking your equations that govern the movement of matter in a gravitational field and adding a constant to the variable denoting the position. If your equations don't still work after this change they don't respect this particular symmetry. The beauty about seeking symmetry in equations is that you can use symmetries that are a lot more abstract than the obvious spacial ones.

So, that's symmetry. Unfortunately we have this sharp dichotomy: bosons and fermions. Distinct, different, not symmetric. This makes physicists twitchy. Is is possible, they ask, to change the standard equations of quantum mechanics so that if we turned fermions into bosons the equations would still be correct? The standard equations don't respect this symmetry, but it's possible to construct equations that do, and they are indeed much more elegant. Beautiful, even. And if you look at these equations, you see they predict a whole lot more elementary particles that we haven't seen yet. If past history of physics is any guide, the fact that we have altered the equations to obtain beauty and seen new forms of matter predicted strongly suggests these new forms of matter actually exist.

That's the abstract motivation. Symmetry and beauty in the fundamental equations that describe reality.

There are a number of other motivations, but they're kind of too abstract to describe here. Suffice it to say that making our equations supersymmetric removes a number of inconsistancies in quantum mechanics, and it also appears to be required to make string theory work.

So, there's my quick and dirty description of supersymmetry for non-physicists, although it ran to a lot more than the one or two sentences requested by Morton T Fogg.

A dissertation is just a really long blog entry, right?

I've been remarkably productive (for me) the last few days. All the same, I've started to notice ominous signs that I may be spending more time and effort on blogging than on my thesis:

• I used to spend the time cycling from home to uni planning what I'd do on my thesis that day, and the time travelling home (over-)analysing what I should have done differently. Now I spend it composing imaginary blog posts.
• I keep coming up with ideas for photos and images I could put in my thesis... if it were a website instead. I want to apply a pretty template!
• My supervisor just pointed out that the section headings in my latest draft are 'amusing, but kind of random'.
• And worst of all? Three times today LaTeX barfed when I tried to compile my files, thanks to me having typed in html commands by mistake.

Are you proud of me?

The contents of our shopping trolley this week:

• apples
• kiwifruit
• mandarins
• tomatoes
• feta
• capsicum
• carrots
• lettuce
• fish
  
• roast beef
• multivitamin tablets (like we're going to need them after that lot!)
• blank DVDs
• washing powder

And that is ALL.* (So how come it still came to 75 freaking dollars?)

________
* But lest you start respecting me, I should probably admit that this week's fresh produce frenzy was only possible because last week's trolley contained nachos, doughnuts, chocolate, cream, sugar, butter, chocolate chip biscuits, and chips.

More gold from Geekman

Me: "How do I look?"

Geekman: "Pretty."

Me: "You weren't even looking!"

Geekman: "I've seen you before. I remember what you look like."

The cupcakes were disappointing, though

Our university had a big anniversary today and celebrated with huge amounts of free food.

It was an excellent opportunity to observe large numbers of ravenous, aggressive graduate students in their natural environment.

Many of the departments were also open to the public to try and prove why they deserve more funding demonstrate the products of their research or to give talks. The funniest thing was that you could tell how (un)interested the organisers had thought the public would be in each demonstration by the amount of free food being offered to go along with it. At two extremes, the virtual reality theatre had no food, while the solo violin recital offered wine and cheese.

Why I love my husband (Reason #4879)

Geekman: "I thought today we could go to the mall and hang out like teenage mall-rats. First we'll go around all the clothes shops and try on clothes. Then when we get tired we'll find a cafe and have coffee and cake. After that we can hunt down pretty sparkly things for you, until we get tired and have to return to base camp for more cake."


Clarification: I don't actually like shopping, at least of the sort where I have to buy some item of clothing and it's all stressful because of nothing fitting properly and nasty salespeople. But I'm happy to window shop. And I have an excellent relationship with cake.

Overheard outside the gym

"I forgot my towel. I'm going home and back to bed."

"You can hire towels at the front desk."

"I don't have any money. I'm going home to bed."

"I have an extra towel. You can borrow it."

"I'm going HOME to BED."

Thesis griping

Only once you've already painstakingly collected hundreds of seemingly unrelated pieces of information for yourself, do you know enough about it to be able to find the places where other people have already done that work for you.

See StyleyGeek be a bitch!

Here is a paraphrase of the emails I have been exchanging with a woman I met at the hostel in Brisbane:

Dear StyleyGeek,

I have an idea for a paper that borders on both your field and mine. The idea is [...] Would you like to collaborate with me?

Regards,
Crazy Girl.


Dear Crazy Girl,

This sounds like an interesting idea. It is really more in [subdiscipline of linguistics X] than my own area, but I might still be able to help out. The only problem is, I don't know how different it really is from what has been done before. I'll have a hunt in the literature and get back to you in a couple of days.

Regards,
StyleyGeek.


Dear StyleyGeek,

I attach an entire draft of the first half of the paper. Please write the missing sections.

Regards,
Crazy Girl.


Dear Crazy Girl,

It's a pity you did so much work already. I just found that this has not only already been done, but it is a huge sub-field of [branch of linguistics X] that I didn't know anything about. It was obviously a good idea, though -- otherwise so much wouldn't have already come of it.

All the best,
StyleyGeek.


Dear StyleyGeek,

Told ya it would never work. [Uh, when???] But it's okay. I have a new idea that is a bit similar but different enough that we could get it published still. Here's a new draft.

See ya,
Crazy Girl.


Dear Crazy Girl,

Since your new idea is still in [sub-field I just found out about] and there is such a huge body of literature there, I don't think I can commit myself to collaborating on this with you. To make sure that your idea was original and relevant, and in order to write my own part of the paper, I would need to do a huge amount of background reading and research in an area that, as I said, is not my own branch of linguistics.

I can't really afford to spend so much time and effort on a project that is not related to anything I do. I recommend you find someone in [X field] who is willing to collaborate with you.

Regards,
StyleyGeek.


Dear StyleyGeek,

You do not need to be ashamed of your ignorance. [<- direct quote!] I know more than enough in [X field] myself, since I used to do X [non-academically]. Did you forget this? It is still worthwhile to me to have you collaborate with me, since I was kicked out of my grad school program [<- big warning sign] and don't have access to any of the online journals or databases.

Here is a new draft. Please fill in the missing sections. I think Chinese is probably relevant to this because [insert hugely misguided notions about Chinese and language in general].

Crazy Girl.


Dear Crazy Girl,

I hadn't forgotten that you used to do X, but I was not aware you were up-to-date in the modern developments of the theory of X. Otherwise I would have expected you to have known that your first idea had already been published on.

I still don't want to work on this project, for the reasons outlined in my last mail. But if you actually have a reference to a journal article you don't have access to, I am happy to send it to you.

By the way, your idea about Chinese won't work because [...]

All the best,
StyleyGeek.


Dear StyleyGeek,

You are making me very unhappy. I thought I could seduce you back to our project by mentioning Chinese, but obviously you don't appreciate true scholarship. I was right about Chinese, by the way, because [more misguided ideas that hinge on the "spelling" of Mandarin words (in English transcription!)].

Also, I don't know anything about the theory of X, but I think we can write this paper from my field's perspective and publish in my field's journals, and then it doesn't matter if we get the theoretical details about X right or not.

I thought you were just starting out in research, but obviously you know everything better than everyone else and have no need of publications to prove it.

Crazy Girl.


Dear Crazy Girl,

There is no need to be sarcastic. If you look at the situation from my perspective, I think you will understand why I don't want to co-author your article. It may not matter to you whether you get the details about theory of X right or not, because your colleagues will judge you on the parts of your paper that relate to your field and they won't know about theory of X.

I, on the other hand, have plenty of colleagues who know far more than I do about theory of X, and would judge me on how the paper relates to this. I would not want them to think badly of me for publishing something outside my area without having done proper research on it. At the same time, I cannot afford to spend months learning about theory of X, as it is not part of the area of linguistics that my thesis is on, nor an area that I ever plan to work in.

StyleyGeek.


StyleyGeek,

If you were willing to do your best work, you would not be ashamed to have your name associated with it.

Crazy Girl.


Crazy Girl,

That is precisely right. I am NOT willing to do my best work.

StyleyGeek.


Dear StyleyGeek,

I am very angry with you. You are not cut out for research or an academic career. You do not have the passion for publications that I have. [She actually said 'passion for publications', not 'passion for research' or anything else!] You are a failure and will always be a failure.

Crazy Girl.


Now I know I should leave it at that. But I'm REALLY enjoying trading insults with her, now that she has opened up the floor. So I mailed back this morning to say:

Dear Crazy Girl,

I would be embarrassed to be associated with any project of yours. You are insane.

All the best for the future,
StyleyGeek.


I've never been deliberately rude to anyone before that I can remember. I've always been the 'nice girl'. But it seems like I had it in me all along. Who knew?

It lives!

I've set up a website for the Carnival of Gradual Progress. Go take a look. And then come back and offer to redesign the template for me :)

I can't decide

If reading the general Wikipedia entry on your research methodology gives you new insights into how to do your dissertation, is that proof of the greatness of Wikipedia or that your background knowledge of your own subject is fundamentally lacking?

(I have a suspicion that it's the latter.)

The hazardous life of a theoretical physicist

"What happened to your head?"

"Which one?"

"??? The one at the top of your neck. It has a big red mark on it."

"I was thinking."

"Thinking so hard it damaged your scalp?"

"Thinking so hard I had to put my head down on the desk. It must have got bruised by a piece of paper."

If you don't misinterpret this poster, who will?

These posters are up all around our university. And I just don't get it. "If you don't... what?"

"If you don't avoid walking alone, who will?"

Huh?

For one thing, there are almost too many negatives in that sentence for me to interpret it. Secondly, the implications I think it is trying to make are hardly true, are they? "If you walk alone on campus, then everyone else will too?" And if that were really the case, wouldn't that be a good thing? Lots of people walking around campus = a safer environment, right?

Or maybe I'm entirely mistaken in my interpretation. There is actually a whole series of these posters with pictures of people in dangerous looking situations, and each one has the slogan: "If you don't, who will?" Maybe the correct inference is, "If you don't get mugged, who will? Take one for the team!" Or "If you don't mug someone, who will? Do your part for a less secure campus!"

Or does this slogan make sense to everyone else but me?

Edited to add: And isn't it kind of spooky how well this poster fits in with my blog colour scheme? (But if it doesn't, what will?)

My department can be bitchy after all

The scene: People leaving the room at the end of afternoon tea.

Staff member 1: "Well, back to pretending to work."

Staff member 2: "Watch it. You haven't got tenure yet."

Staff member 1, with a pointed look at #2: "One of these days the university is going to shake itself like a dog, and all the fleas are gonna fall off and die."

Vote for a name!

It's time to make a decision.

Should the new carnival be called:

• The Carnival of GRADual Progress
• The Carnival of Permanent head Damage
• The Carnival of Procrastination to a higher Degree

Votes in the comments, please.

Once a name is chosen, I'll set up a webpage to put the details on (how to submit posts, where and when each carnival will be held, etc), and start hunting down posts for the first carnival. I'll host the first one or two myself here, and then if it seems to be working, I'll be looking for volunteers to host the later ones. I don't think we'll be able to run it more than once a month, at least at first, and I'd suggest the 1st of the month, since the Teaching Carnival is on the 15th, and spacing them like that means we'll have a carnival to look forward to almost every second week.

Any other suggestions are extremely welcome.

Don't you wish your night was this eventful?

5 am. An electronic fake bell shrills me out of sleep. And peals again. And again.

I wander sleepily into the sitting room, thinking it might be the smoke alarm. But no, the doorbell is ringing, and from there I can hear that every other doorbell in the apartment complex is also ringing. Someone is pressing all the buttons at once.

Geekman mumbles, "Ignore it. It's drunken louts."

But I can't. It might be someone who has been attacked and escaped from her attacker and barely made it to our apartment and is now desperate for someone to let her in before her attacker finds her again. (I have an overactive imagination).

Geekman says, "If you let them in, they'll just start banging on someone's door, which will be even louder."

I go out onto the balcony and look down. There are two guys so drunk they are struggling to stay on their feet, laughing while they push random doorbell buttons. One of them has a mobile phone. If they need help, they are hiding it well. Plus, with that phone, they can always call the police.

I go back to bed.

5:30. The doorbell is still ringing and sleep is not a happening thing for me. I am about to call the police. I go back to the sitting room to see if I can disconnect the bell from up here. No such luck. But miraculously, it stops.

I go back to bed.

5:38. Clatter clatter! Ping! Ping! Crunch! Crunch! Bang! Someone is climbing up the balconies at the back of the building. I look out the bedroom window, see nothing. But I can hear drunken male laughter, which suggests it is the same two guys, rather than a not-very-subtle burglar.

They must have reached the door they were after, because BANG BANG BANG! BANG BANG BANG! BANG BANG BANG! Non stop. For ten minutes.

Then: Clatter, clatter, ping, ping, crunch, crunch -- ARGH! Thump!

Somebody fell off the balcony. (Or was pushed.)

And here I discover how callous and uncaring a person I am deep down. I smile at the silence and go back to sleep.


Postscript:

This morning I did go out to see if anyone was lying dead in the back garden. And they weren't. But I still feel a little guilty for valuing my sleep over the life and health of a noisy loutish drunken yobbo who was trying to break into someone's apartm-- Wait. No I don't.

I like people who give me food

For reasons that will be apparent at the end of this post, I am feeling the need the need to blog about one of my favourite people in our department. One of my supervisors describes her as "the Miss Marple of linguistics". She turned 80 a few months back, but refuses to relinquish her office, still coming into the department a few days a week, even though it is nearly a one-hour drive to get here from her farm (where, besides the usual flora and fauna, she also raises injured and abandoned wombats). She has just gone off for a few weeks to do fieldwork in the outback.

And she regularly brings in lemons from her tree and eggs from her chooks for all the graduate students in the department. Three of which eggs (laid yesterday) I am enjoying right this minute. (And there's another 18 in my fridge. She has a lot of chickens.)

Yay for Miss Marple!

Always willing to help

The scene: about an hour ago. I am still in bed, trying to snuggle up to the cup of coffee Geekman just brought me. (I am not awake enough to have assessed its proper function yet.)

"Sorry to have woken you up."

"It's okay. I'll have to get up soon anyway to go see how the internet has been doing all night without me."

"I could bring you the laptop if you like."

"But then I'd never have any reason to get up and I'd get fat and slow."

"I suppose if you have to hunt and gather your computer regularly it keeps you lean and sleek."

"Except that I don't have to go very far. It doesn't exactly run away from me."

"I could pull it around on a string if you like."

Drool... slurp...

There's a roast dinner happening on the lawn outside, and it's all I can do to stop myself drooling into my keyboard. Everyone eating it is Asian, too, so I think I might be a little conspicuous if I gate-crash. Sigh.

Friday poetry blogging: Falkenlied

I can't believe that in my medieval poetry posting frenzy, I never posted this one. It was always one of my favourites, and took on a special meaning for me in the years that Geekman and I were living 18 000 km apart.

There are a few versions of this, but this is the one from the Codex Manesse. Scroll down for the translation (mine).

Falkenlied
Der von Kürenberg (c. 1160)

Ich zôch mir einen valken mêre danne ein jâr.
dô ich in gezamete, als ich in wolte hân,
und ich im sîn gevidere mit golde wol bewant,
er huop sich ûf vil hôhe und vlouc in ándèriu lant.

Sît sach ich den valken schône vliegen,
er vuorte an sînem vuoze sîdîne riemen,
und was im sîn gevidere alrôt guldîn.
got sende sî zesamene, die gelíeb wéllen gerne sîn!

Falcon Song
(my translation)

I once trained a falcon for longer than a year.
Then when I had tamed him as I wanted him to be
and into his feathers gold I had wound,
he flew up into the sky and away to another land.

Since then I have seen the falcon flying,
From his feet silken jesses were trailing
and in his plumage he was all red-golden.
God send those together who dearly long to be loved

Carnivals are fun! (Except for mine)

Does anyone know if there is a blog carnival for graduate students and related posts? Because I've had a look around, and haven't found one. But I'm constantly coming across interesting posts by and for grad students that motivate me or at least help me feel like I'm not alone, and I think it would be great to have a regular round-up of those.

So if you do know of an existing carnival on this theme, please let me know. Otherwise, would you be interested in one if I got it started? And if you are, you have to help me think up a catchy name for it. I'm bad at that sort of thing.*

___________
* If you want proof of how bad I am at this, the first names that suggested themselves to me were, "The Carnival of Desperation", and "The Carnival of Gloom and Despair", which probably say something about where my thesis is at right now, but don't exactly have a ring to them that will make people come lining up to read and be merry.

Who will evaluate the evaluators?

I will!

(Marked on a scale of 1 (highly unsatisfactory) to 7 (excellent).)

Ability to follow instructions: 1

Was anyone listening when I pointed out that there was a different set of evaluation forms for the lectures and that this set was only for evaluating the tutorials and the tutor (me)?
Because comments like, "This course had too much assessment" and "The lectures should have been more often than twice a week" are kind of... NOT RELEVANT.

Internal consistency: 1

Most students commented favourably on my ability to explain difficult concepts clearly (which, at the risk of blowing my own trumpet, I think is one of my biggest strengths in teaching). One said, "StyleyGeek clearly knows a lot, but can't put it into words to save herself."

95 % of the students gave me the top mark possible for "approachability and engagement with students". One commented, "The tutor was way too distant."

Two students said that I move through the material too fast and don't give them enough help with the practice problems. Another two said that my class is like "linguistics for morons" (yes, that's an exact quote) and that I should speed up and let them work out the details on their own.

Attention to (irrelevant) detail: 7

"StyleyGeek really needs to improve her handwriting."

Understanding of the time and effort your tutor owes you: 1

"Suggested improvements" included: "The tutor should run an after hours study group to help us with our assignments", and "StyleyGeek needs to be available in the weekends for students who work or have children."

Ability to compose comments that will make your tutor's day: 7

Also under "suggested improvements": "Fire ScaryLecturer and replace him with StyleyGeek."


Technorati tags: teaching carnival, academia

I have questions

Why am I always sitting behind the one person on the plane who immediately on take-off puts his seat into the extreme reclining position and stays there for the entire trip?

Why is it that on every trip I am selected for a "random" search? Do I look like a terrorist?

Yes, I am blogging from an airport. Because I can.

Shocked

I forgot to mention this when I posted about the Peter Brown lecture the other day, but I was shocked and appalled by the way the Museum Director began his speech of welcome to the lecture:

"Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge the traditional aboriginal people whose land this museum is built on. And now it gives me great pleasure to introduce Professor Peter Brown..."

Wait a sec, back up! Which traditional aboriginal people would those be, then, eh? Did you just not bother to find out the name of the tribe that this land was stolen from? Or is it too hard for your European tongue to pronounce?

This is like referring to "traditional asian people" when you mean the Chinese. And then pretending that this counts as an "acknowledgement" is adding insult to injury.

And I bet this is the guy who was responsible for the display on level two of the museum. The one that has glass cases containing random weapons, tools and artwork, without any attempt at arranging them in related groups or putting them in some sort of context (not even suggesting which tribes they might have come from), and the whole thing simply entitled "Aboriginal Artifacts".

Thankfully there was an excellent display on Indigenous Australia and Queensland Indigenous history on the next floor up, but that doesn't exactly cancel out the seeming lack of interest with which this one was thrown together. Especially since anyone going through the museum in order will get to this haphazard jumble before they come across the real exhibition.

Things I like about Brisbane

Going everywhere by boat.



Houses on stilts.



The fake beach. (That smell? Chlorine, not salt.)



People thinking they are cold. It's so cute to see people wearing scarves and coats when the temperature is not significantly different from a NZ summer. My favourite cafe at the university here even provides blankets for people to wrap themselves up in if they want to sit outside with their morning coffee.

Brisbane by night: Take II

During my walk by the river last night, I looked back along the path to see if there was a better photo opportunity in that direction, and saw a man teetering on the edge of the promenade. His feet were half over the river, half still on the edge, and he was swaying back and forth, looking down at the river.

And I froze.

Either he was thinking about jumping, or didn't care much whether he fell in or not, since even after one moment where he nearly lost his balance completely, he didn't move to a safer position.

Now, the river isn't very deep at the edges there, and not especially cold, although the current might be quite strong. And the drop from the promenade to the water was only a couple of metres. So if he was wanting to kill himself, he'd chosen a plan with a very low probability of success.

This was my main reason for not intervening. The other reasons were that (a) he hadn't seen me, and I was worried if I said anything, he'd be startled enough that he would fall in, and (b) he looked kind of unbalanced (in more ways than one), and there was no one else in sight in case things got unpleasant.

If I'd had a mobile phone, I would have called the police, but I'm a paid-up member of the 'I already hate all phones, why would I want to carry one around with me?' society. So instead I stood there for around ten minutes, watching him sway, thinking that at least if he did end up in the water, I could get him help fast.

Then all of a sudden, he took a step back from the edge, and walked away down the path in the other direction. Problem solved. Or maybe he'd just thought of a more effective way of doing the job. Either way, I have a nagging, unresolved feeling that someone should have done something about it.

Brisbane by night

Walking beside the river last night (after an unsuccessful attempt to find an internet cafe).



The view on the other side soothed most of my internet withdrawal symptoms.



But it didn't help much with the shakes.

Last night's lecture

The first thing I noticed about Peter Brown is that he seemed to be on the verge of keeling over with exhaustion. This was a man who has been on the public lecture circuit a long time. It also showed at a point in the presentation when he knocked a key that made his computer desktop visible, where you could see five different clocks with local times all around the world, and folder after folder labeled “USA lecture”, “Australian lecture”, and so on.

Despite the tiredness, he was an engaging speaker. I didn’t think so for the first five minutes, when his credentials, background, etc was delivered in a monotone that was completely oblivious of sentence transitions. I have no idea when the man breathed, because he didn’t seem to leave himself any time for it.

But then he told the story of the discovery as a narrative, and the suspense at each point in the story just about stopped me from breathing. When he got to the point where he realised what they had found, I felt shivers prickling up and down my spine. It seemed that Brown himself got a little emotional in the retelling, too. But after all, imagine what a life-changing event it must have been: One minute you are looking at a skeleton that just doesn’t make sense: it looks like something from 2 million years ago, but you know it is only 15000 years old. The next minute your measurements confirm that it isn’t homo sapiens, it isn’t homo erectus, and to be honest, it just isn’t homo anything.

Brown said quite categorically that if the team had had access to the full evidence (the arms of the first individual, and the other skeletons) when they published the first article, they would never have classified the skeleton as homo. The first one they found was ‘the basketball player’ of the group, and her arms were bent beneath her, so not uncovered and measured until much later (when it was found that the skeleton had the same arm-to-leg ratio as a gorilla -- nothing like any of the homo family at all).*

Peter Brown’s conclusion, which he claims is shared by the rest of the team and everyone who has looked at the evidence themselves, is that these came out of Africa around 3 million years ago, and that they are related to australopithecines. They obviously made stone tools, but seemed to have had no symbolic culture (art, pottery, etc), and probably no language. This first attempt at an exodus from Africa was generally unsuccessful, but an enclave of these things survived on Flores, and possibly other Indonesian islands, until they were killed 15000 years ago by a volcanic eruption.

I thought he convincingly demonstrated that homo floresiensis is not related to any of the other hominid groups, and that the most similar family is australopithecines. He didn’t seem to have much evidence that they had reached Flores so early, though, or even that they left Africa 3 million years ago. He only had evidence that they had been in that particular location for the 3000 years preceding their extinction, and apart from a few tools found in Pakistan and China, there is not much evidence of such an early wave of migration from Africa.

I would have thought that if another genus of hominid had been hanging out in the region for 3 million years, we would have found more trace. But then, I would have thought if strange hobbit hominids had been hanging out in Indonesia 15000 years ago, we would have found them before now, too, yet we didn’t. Brown seemed certain that more skeletons and other archeological evidence will be found in the region now that they know what to look for.

I would say that the biggest point that struck me from his lecture, though, was how much the media suck.

To start with just about every newspaper and magazine who ran a piece on the “hobbit” skeletons created an artist’s impression of it, and every one of them sent him the picture to comment on and correct, then systematically ignored every flaw he pointed out. All of them gave it an improbable nose. Not one of them got the leg-to-arm ratio even vaguely right.

Secondly, the “controversy” surrounding the skeletons was entirely media-generated. The public was given the idea that there are three competing theories: that they are pathological human skeletons, that they are homo floresiensis, and that they are the products of island dwarfism. In actual fact, according to Brown, all experts in the field who have published in peer-reviewed journals on the subject, all of the 12 (12!) reviewers of the first article, and everyone in the field who has read the papers agree that these are not pathological specimens. Brown pointed out that there was originally a whole section in the first article devoted to refuting this idea, but that the reviewers were unanimous that this was unnecessary because it was “so bleeding obvious”. The only person who has claimed the pathology explanation was someone a news team sought out after the discovery was announced in order to find an opposing viewpoint. The guy hadn’t read the article or seen any of the evidence, and said it must be either a pathological human, a mistake, or a hoax -- which is precisely what ALL of Peter Brown’s team believed until they had seen it, because the reality was just so unexpected. But the media made it sound as though both this random guy who hadn’t seen the skeletons or the evidence, and Peter Brown, who had worked on the skeleton himself and had peer reviewed publications on it, had equally valid and well justified viewpoints.

As for the idea that it was island dwarfism, this is not someone else’s viewpoint, but rather the “most likely scenario” envisaged by Peter Brown and his team when they published the first article. This was because they had not yet seen the arms of the skeleton (or any of the other 7 or 9 skeletons), since these were buried underneath the rest of the body. He said that once they had seen the ratio of the arms to the legs, they knew that it couldn’t possibly be dwarfism, but had to be something completely new. So no one believes in the “island dwarfism” explanation now, but the media continues to portray it as a competing theory.

There was a question session at the end, which was a demonstration of how to be diplomatic. Example:

“Are the excavations still ongoing?”
“Yes, elsewhere on the island, but not in Liang Bua.”
“Is that political?”
“Yes. Next question, please.”

And finally, I have to mention the image that stuck with me most from the talk. This was from a moment near the start when Brown was talking about how humans (and presumably also these things) traveled from the mainland to islands like Flores, and how it was a bit of a mystery that they made it, considering how strong the currents are. Then, after a moment’s thought, “Of course, elephants managed it, since that’s where the ancestors of the Flores ‘bonsai elephants’ came from. But elephants are very buoyant.”

__________

* This wasn’t his only evidence for the classification of these skeletons, though. He also systematically showed that they differ from modern humans and homo erectus in premolar shape, brow ridge, brain size, chin (lack of), shape of base of skull, and size of teeth relative to body size. He showed that there is no pathology that would cause the arm-to-leg ratio, the brow ridges, and the lack of chin. The head-to-body ratio is also different from pygmy humans (who still have a ‘normal’ skull size, while these things have the brain size of a chimpanzee).

Inhibitions, he has none

After the homo floresiensis talk last night (which I will post about in detail later today -- it was very exciting), a bunch of us were at a bar, when a complete stranger came up to our table.

"Excuse me," he said, "I don't know anyone in Brisbane and I'm feeling very lonely, so I wondered if I could join your group for a few drinks."

The unexpected thing is, he turned out to be (apparently) a completely normal guy.* I was expecting extreme oddness, if not mental illness, judging by his willingness to go up to complete strangers and tell them he was lonely, which is something I could never do in a million years.

So I couldn't help feeling a kind of admiration towards that attitude. Wouldn't the world be a simpler place if none of us were scared to tell people around us what we needed and ask for their help?

_________

* Apart from the fact that he comes from a town called "1770". (The linked website spells the name out, but the guy we met claims the locals always write it in numerals.)

Look what I'm going to tonight!

Peter Brown is a member of the team that originally discovered the skeletons that they are calling Homo Floresiensis. I'll be interested to see what he has to say.

(And secretly, I'm hoping to see a fight.)

Will work for food

A comment on the sad state of academia (overheard at lunchtime):

"I have quite a nice theory about this, but if you want me to convince you of it, I rather suspect you will have to buy me a coffee."

Brisbane has signs that make me laugh

I'm not the only one who's not 100% in favour of these birds:



Attention comrades!



This is the first time I have seen a speed limit sign for bicycles. How does a cyclist know how fast they are going?

Another Andrew Spencerism

Which is also probably only amusing if you are a linguist, sorry.

"No one has a half-way decent theory of semantics for us to interface with: you just get things in capital letters, or endless strings of lambdas to do with donkeys."

(It feels very wrong to blog about someone when they are sitting less than five metres away. I came in to class an hour early to feed my internet addiction; so, apparently, did he.)

Photos for Lucy

Yesterday morning I wanted to take photos of the ibises you see all around Brisbane.

But when I got close, they advanced on me in a very determined manner.



And then I had to run away a little bit.

I think it's meant to be a compliment

One of the other students at the summer school just told me that if I "ditched the academic look", I'd look like Cameron Diaz.

Is that a good thing?

Disclaimer: this is only funny if you're a linguist

The conference has ended (sigh), but now the linguistics "summer school" begins. One week of intensive courses on such funky topics as language and genetics, or paradigmatic morphology! (Okay, maybe I'm the only one who's excited about that last one).

Today in Andrew Spencer's morphology course (Andrew Spencer!)*, he came out with the great line:

"A morphologist who believes in morphemes is basically someone who doesn't know the difference between inflection and compounding. Otherwise known as a Minimalist syntactician."

___________

* It's very exciting (in a geeky sort of way) taking a course taught by someone I only ever came across before on the covers of textbooks. I think I always had a sneaking suspicion that he didn't really exist as an actual! live! talking! person!

How do I love conferences? Let me count the ways:

Exploring other universities' campuses.*


Finding new and funky ways in which your own university needs to get with the program. Every library needs its stationery vending machine.


Mmmm.... tropical.


Discovering the many ways in which backpacker accomodation (the refuge of the stingy grad student) can fail to live up to (even my meagre) expectations and yet simultaneously far, far surpass them.**


Conference dinner: this year livelier than most. Not often do you get a chance to see your supervisor do the 'macarena' (not pictured -- I'm keeping those photos in reserve)


... or to watch big names in your field being dragged onto the dance floor to learn to belly dance.

And last, but absolutely not least, the seemingly humble conference bag. Crammed full of useless information, and guaranteed to fall apart the first time you try to use it, but somehow still able to induce the comforting feeling of having got something in return for that obscenely high registration fee.

____________

* Why do all universities smell the same?

** Room with no window; tropical garden with swimming pool. Receptionists so far beyond incompetence that watching people (try to) check in has become a spectator sport; free shuttle bus to anywhere you want to go.

Note to self: laughing at other people's languages is Bad Form

I came across the best words ever in a presenter's example sentences at the conference today:

ninggeninggepathamanangintha

buywinthuwurrkpurrknunintha

(The first one means "jealous" and the second means something like "will fall and break".)

I was the only one who found this words funny. I was just about falling off my chair killing myself with laughter, then turned around and noticed that everyone was giving me A Look.

The never-ending story

Despite my maybe over-optimistic attempt to give an "ending" to the ScaryLecturer saga a few weeks ago, it continues. Oh, it continues.

When I checked my emails for the first time part way through my week in NZ, I found my inbox was foundering under an onslaught of mails from the Head of Department. These turned out to be increasingly frantic attempts to find out some (any! even fictitious!) marks for certain students from the course I had been tutoring for ScaryLecturer.

It turns out he went off on his scheduled overseas trip without having finished marking the exams. And three of the students were due to graduate at the end of this semester, but obviously couldn't unless their marks were finalised in time.

The best I was able to do was ftp into my university files and find the marks for the in-term assignments that comprised 50% of these students' grades. But those put two of the students on borderline passes so without their exam marks it can't be sure whether they will be eligible to graduate or not.

The HOD called
The Dean, and
The Dean called
Security --

no, wait, that's an A.A. Milne poem.

But he did, and he did, at 11 o'clock at night, with the final deadline for course marks at nine the next morning, and they broke into ScaryLecturer's office to find a pile of partially marked exam papers, MISSING the two belonging to the students due to graduate. I am told that they then all went around to ScaryLecturer's house and lurked there in the dark for a while but couldn't quite bring themselves to break into private property.

So in the end, the two students will graduate, whether they really deserve to or not, and ScaryLecturer will not be a popular guy when he gets back to Australia.

Meanwhile, my inbox is gradually filling with emails from baffled students who want to know why the marks which just came out say "incomplete" for their linguistics course. I've settled on a slightly more diplomatic reply than the one that first occurred to me, which was, "Because your lecturer is an incompetent arsehole."

Hooked on a feeling and I'm high on believing

My conference presentation is in an hour, and I've just figured out what I'm really talking about. I've given this talk once before without being quite sure. And this time it is going to be so. much. better.

It feels like my brain is on some really excellent drugs. Or maybe they put something exciting in the conference coffee. Whatever it is, I like it.

Not all bad

There were the occasional amusing moments in my trip, though. The best ever came during a conversation between my mother and the people she was staying with:

"I can't seem to get my dial-up internet to work."
"It probably only works from your house, because it needs your telephone line. But I have broadband. Would you like to use that?"
"My dial-up SHOULD work."
"Well, even if it does, if you are going to be using the internet much while you are here, you should use my broadband account, because unlike dial-up that doesn't cost me any extra."
"Oh, I won't be using the internet much. I'm not really a web browser."

Well that wasn't any fun

Moving house is horrible at the best of times, even when you are only helping someone else do it, but this was quite exceptionally bad, so I'm not going to dwell on the details of it too much here.

As an indication of a certain source of irritation, though, and because the commentaters to the post below convinced me that normal rules of respect for ones elders don't apply on a blog, here are three things my mother came out with when meeting me off the plane (in her defense, due to a delayed flight, it was 2 o'clock in the morning and neither of us was at our best).

"Your hair looks... different."
"Yes. It's a new cut."
"Do you like it?"
"Yes."
"Well I suppose that's all that matters."

"Is that all you brought with you to wear? We have a proper winter here in Christchurch, you know, not like Australia." (This set the tone of the next week, where she kept stepping into the role of "host to the ignorant Australian tourist", continually forgetting that I lived in Christchurch for three times longer than she has.)

And, running her fingers through my hair: "Do you need to borrow some shampoo when we get home? When did you last wash your hair?"

So that gives you an idea of one source of unpleasantness in the trip -- not at all unexpected, and not really very that serious, but just irritating enough to make things seem even worse than they really were. And I wanted so much to be all sympathetic and helpful, since my mother's life has really turned to custard this year, but I found my reservoirs of sympathy dried up all too quickly and I whenever I wasn't concentrating hard on being nice, I turned back into a sullen fourteen-year-old.

Then there was the general horribleness of moving house. Especially since it kept reminding me that we will probably have to be doing this ourselves within the next year sometime.

And then, and then, as if that wasn't enough, I came down with the virus that everyone in the whole of New Zealand currently seems to have, which has for the past four days has filled my lungs with mucus, taken away my voice, and left me unable to walk more than 10 steps without sitting down to rest. The only good thing about it was that the accompanying fever meant that I felt warm for the first time in the whole 10 days I was there. Curse people who think that large wooden houses with enormous glass windows, wooden floors and no insulation are the right sort of architecture at a latitude of 43 degrees South.

But I'm back. And I've had a hot bath, and slept a lot under my own snuggly warm duvet, and eaten a good dinner cooked by Geekman, and I'm almost feeling ready to leave for the conference I have to go to in Brisbane this weekend.

Just as soon as I work out how I can present my talk (and chair the ninety million talks of the two-day workshop I am running) without a voice.