trippen – cups cosy
Tuesday Shoesday
Being prepared is a waste of time
When it comes to getting your travel reimbursements anyway.
I complained last summer about the complicated process and long time frame for getting reimbursed for conference travel. My funding came from several sources that each required a different application. The applications could not all be filed at once and forgotten about – there was a specific order they had to be filed in and each required proof that the sources ahead of them in line had already ponied up.
A simple guide to applying for your travel reimbursement.
I did what any responsible graduate student would do – got my shit organized, read through travel policies the length and complexity of the fucking US tax code, and plowed through all the applications in a day and a half. I then got my supervisor to sign them all at once and neatly stacked them on my desk with post-its reminding me of the order and deadlines associated with each application.
Being responsible is such a waste of time.
You see, the processing time for the first two funding sources took so long that the third funding source has completely changed their application (and of course they want even more information). So today, instead of reading exciting papers about landscape genetics, I filled out yet another travel reimbursement application.
This additional twist in the trail of tortuous paperwork would have made me give up on the last $500 if I didn’t need it to make rent in January.
While you’re waiting for the bus
Why are so many women-in-science events actually about leaving science and having babies?
Good science journalism can help scientists get their work done.
The oldest pine cone ever found.
The president of the World Bank editorializes about the need for climate change mitigation. The IEA tells us how to fix climate change, or at least slow it down, then acknowledges that “in the absence of a concerted policy push,” we’re fucked.
On the similarities of the English and Russians: both drunk racists
From Nikolai Leskov’s short story The Left-handed Craftsman:
Their contest started while they were still on the open sea and they went on drinking until they reached the estuary of the Dvina at Riga, and all this time both of them drank the same amount of liquor and neither of them was able to drink more than the other, and so perfectly matched were they that when one of them took a look at the sea and saw a devil jumping out of the waves, the other one would immediately see a devil too, except that the jovial sailor would see a ginger devil, while the left-handed craftsman would maintain that the devil he saw was as black as a negro.
The poetry of leaves
A leaf is filled with chambers illuminated by gathered light. In these glowing rooms photons bump around and the leaf captures their energy, turning it into the sugar from which plants, animals, and civilizations are built.
Chloroplasts, fed by sun, water, carbon dioxide, and nutrients, do the leaf’s work. They evolved about 1.6 billion years ago when one cell, incapable of using the sun’s energy, engulfed another cell – a cyanobacterium – that could. That cyanobacterium became the ancestor of every living chloroplast. Without their chloroplasts plants would be left like the rest of us, to eat what they find. Instead they hold out their green palms and catch light. If there is magic in the world, surely this is it: the descendants of tiny creatures in leaves, capable of ingesting the sun. [Rob Dunn writing in National Geographic]
On building something better than the English
From Nikolai Leskov’s short story The Left-handed Craftsman:
” … for the English aren’t fools but a very clever people and their craftsmanship has a good deal of sound common sense behind it. One can do nothing against the English,” they said, “without careful consideration, but with the Lord’s blessing we may be able to do something …”
Working on the weekend
My office is a difficult place for me to get work done during the week. 9 of us share a space. Between the battle over whether to keep the glaring, buzzing fluorescent lights on or off, the very warm temperature, phone calls, random chit chat, TAs having their office hours, people coming by to ask questions, buzzing phones, microwave use, etc, etc, etc, I am constantly distracted.
But on the weekends1, my office is wonderful. My office is pretty high up and my desk faces a window. I can see a bit of ocean and forest and a whole lot of sky. I open the window to cool the room down to a comfortable temperature. I turn on a small lamp instead of the awful lights. And it’s wonderfully quiet.2
Occasionally, other people come in on the weekends. Luckily they are on my side in the lights battle, and they’re quiet since undergrads can’t get in the building to beg for more credit on the last homework.
Of course, the depth of focus my office affords me on the weekend does have some drawbacks. Whenever one of my officemates says something to me, I react a bit like this:
1. I don’t want to give the impression that I work all the time – weekends at the office mean a lot of half days during the week.
2. Oddly enough, my other super productive environment is a coffeeshop. I’m still sensitive about the light and temperature, but the noise and movement doesn’t bother me there. I think it actually helps me focus. I don’t know why.