Month: April 2013

PhDon’t. | JD’s a Bust too.

“[W]hat if I told you that by ‘five hours’ I mean ’80 hours,’ and by ‘summers off’ I mean ‘two months of unpaid research sequestration and curriculum planning’? What if you’ll never have time to read books, and when you talk about them, you’ll mostly be using made-up words like ‘deterritorialization’ and ‘Othering’…I can’t even tell you what kind of ass you have to kiss these days to get tenure — largely because, like most professors, I’m not on the tenure track, so I don’t know.”

Another one for my burgeoning PhDont tag: Literature professor and Kafka scholar Rebecca Schuman explains once again why getting a humanities PhD is a terrible life decision these days. “No, you will not get a job – In the place of actual jobs are adjunct positions: benefit-free, office-free academic servitude in which you will earn $18,000 a year for the rest of your life.”

What she said: The jobs are not out there, the wheels have come off the tenure-track cart, and many people are in a bad way. I count my lucky stars every day that I had a prior career to fall back on.

Update: “More attorneys are finding themselves in plights similar to that of the thirty-four-year-old lawyer with more than $200,000 in school loans and a job that would never pay enough to retire them: ‘It’s a noose around my neck that I see no way out of.'” As Stephen Harper points out in Salon, law school isn’t the best answer either. “The promise of a secure future at a well-paying job is often illusory. The persistent problem of lawyer oversupply rose to crisis level, and the market for new talent has remained weak…For most of the nation’s forty-four thousand annual graduates today…positions were never there at all.”

Update 2: “Once, being a college professor was a career. Today, it’s a gig…Since 1975, tenure and tenure-track professors have gone from roughly 45 percent of all teaching staff to less than a quarter.” More fuel for the pyre: The Atlantic‘s Jordan Weissmann offers a graph depicting the demise of tenure. “[T]he big story across academia is broadly the same: if it were a movie, it’d be called ‘Rise of the Adjuncts.’…The AAUP reports that the median pay for teaching a single course was $3,200 at a public research university, and just $2,250 at a community college.”

The Balcony is Closed.

“I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear…I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.”

Roger Ebert, the reigning Dean of film critics, 1942-2013. As a movie reviewer, I often didn’t agree with him – I found his sensibilities a bit too saccharine for my taste. But as a writer and convivial voice, he was always inviting, and and always worth reading, and few established columnists have embraced the democratic give-and-take of writing on the web as much as he did. R.I.P.

That’s Exactly What They Want You to Think.

“9% of voters think the government adds fluoride to our water supply for sinister reasons (not just dental health). 4% of voters say they believe ‘lizard people’ control our societies by gaining political power…14% of voters believe in Bigfoot. 15% of voters say the government or the media adds mind-controlling technology to TV broadcast signals (the so-called Tinfoil Hat crowd.)”

PPP polls America’s taste for various conspiracy theories. “37% of voters believe global warming is a hoax, 51% do not. Republicans say global warming is a hoax by a 58-25 margin, Democrats disagree 11-77, and Independents are more split at 41-51. 61% of Romney voters believe global warming is a hoax…20% of voters believe there is a link between childhood vaccines and autism, 51% do not.” Sigh. Don’t blame me, I voted for Lizard People.

Titan’s Brew.

“‘Scientists previously thought that as we got closer to the surface of Titan, the moon’s atmospheric chemistry was basically inert and dull,’ said Murthy Gudipati, the paper’s lead author at JPL. ‘Our experiment shows that’s not true. The same kind of light that drives biological chemistry on Earth’s surface could also drive chemistry on Titan, even though Titan receives far less light from the sun and is much colder.'”

A NASA/JPL simulation of Titan’s atmosphere suggests a chaotic chemical brew conducive to life on Saturn’s most interesting moon. “Now we know that sunlight in the Titan lower atmosphere can kick-start more complex organic chemistry in liquids and solids rather than just in gases.” (Titan image via this 2011 post.)

Plancking the Universe | AMS Activate.

“In a statement issued by the European Space Agency, Jean-Jacques Dordain, its director general, said, ‘The extraordinary quality of Planck’s portrait of the infant universe allows us to peel back its layers to the very foundations, revealing that our blueprint of the cosmos is far from complete.'”

This came out while I was in Seattle and I’ve been meaning to catch up: By measuring the cosmic background radiation still extant from the Big Bang, the ESA’s Planck satellite gives us our most detailed map of the universe yet.

“[T]he new satellite data underscored the existence of puzzling anomalies that may yet lead theorists back to the drawing board. The universe appears to be slightly lumpier, with bigger and more hot and cold spots in the northern half of the sky as seen from Earth than toward the south, for example. And there is a large, unexplained cool spot in the northern hemisphere.”

I find these maps particularly fascinating because, as I said when NASA’s WMAP returned its data in 2003 (and here in 2002), I spent the summer of 1992 poring over the original COBE DMR version of this map for my high school senior thesis, in order to determine whether the radiation exhibited a fractal distribution. (And, honestly, how early 90’s is that?)

“‘A.M.S. has confirmed with exquisite precision and to high energy one of the most exciting mysteries in astrophysics and particle physics,’ said Justin Vandenbroucke, of the University of Wisconsin and Stanford’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.” In related news, NASA’s recently-installed Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the ISS is helping physicists and cosmologists get to the bottom of the dark matter mystery.

The A.M.S. has “confirmed previous reports that local interstellar space is crackling with an unexplained abundance of high energy particles, especially positrons, the antimatter version of the familiar electrons that constitute electricity and chemistry…’Over the coming months, A.M.S. will be able to tell us conclusively whether these positrons are a signal for dark matter, or whether they have some other origin.’“

Dad to Daleks, Mom to Muppets, Uncle to Many.

R.I.P. Dalek inventor Ray Cusick 1928-2013, Muppets co-creator Jane Henson 1934-2013, and actor Richard Griffiths 1947-2013, best known as Uncle Dursley of Harry Potter, Professor Hector of The History Boys, and Uncle Monty of Withnail and I.