And he is in the humanities. He's also super passive and never says anything directly disagreeable.
Jesus.
The other faculty sponsor openly thinks as many people as possible should go to grad school.
I assume that for general "getting along with my colleagues" reasons you've ruled out asking him if he's been smoking crack.
3: Don't mind Me. Not doing a lot. Just scourging some moneylenders. Then healing the sick, casting out demons. Thinking of giving some sort of sermon. Perhaps on a hill or other eminence?
Oh, dear.
I'd suggest being as concrete as possible about separating out the various ideal-types of programs; "going to grad school" or even "getting a PhD" means many different things, and it's even easier for folks to tell themselves they're the exception if you lump together various things that oughtn't be so lumped.
I'd also suggest emphasizing the importance of an honest account of one's work habits and psychological issues, and, if one *does* go to grad school, doing a lot of legwork to find an advisor/program that fits those. If you're someone who easily gets depressed and hides in your room for weeks without external deadlines and feedback, (A) you probably shouldn't be getting a PhD; (B) you definitely shouldn't be getting one with a hands-off, "get back to me when you want me to look something over" advisor.
You could emphasize the point that they pay you to go to grad school, and it should never be the other way around.
Get a therapist in your first year, before you start all the pathological behavior.
Talk about how not only does the job market suck, you have very little ability to choose where you live. So even if you are one of the lucky ones who get's that great job, it may be in a place you hate and where your partner will be unemployed.
Or you can just play a game and see if you can get your debate partner to make your points for you. Just totally play up grad school and the academia track on the level of every grad students professional wet dreams. Even 'other faculty sponsor' must have a point where the pressure of reality cracks the ellipsoidal dome of delusion.
To further jm's comment, set up a mutual support group whereby you all agree to meet regularly and if someone's not showing, the others will go and physically drag them out of their apartment.
Even 'other faculty sponsor' must have a point where the pressure of reality cracks the ellipsoidal dome of delusion.
I wouldn't count on this, at all. He's probably very, very isolated from the realities of grad school and the job market.
What kind of grad school are you talking about? Just phd, with intent to profess, or are you also talking about masters/professional degrees. There are now a bunch of fields where it's almost impossible to avoid the latter and you probably are going to have to pay for it.
Lucky Jim was from the happy days of academia, so it's not appropriate.
Most novels about academic life emphasize the snakepit aspect, but people would read them and still go to grad school. Wolfe's Electric Koolaid Acid Test showed the horror and disgust of that trip as far as Wolfe was concerned, but my son's friends thought it was cool. Satire doesn't really work, it just marks a spot on the map where a certain kind of bad thing keeps on happening with new people. Anti war movies don't usually work either.
13: But Jim himself (i) is miserable and (ii) escapes into the larger world; this is a good example for grad students and potentials, I should think.
You could tell them to read The Disciplined Mind. That helped me, retrospectively.
There is, of course, the "what else are you gonna do" problem. But at least make sure no one pays for grad school, or pays too much for professional school.
I have actually wondered at what point paid-for grad school becomes an attractive option considered as a dead-end job. It's not that it pays well, but it pays enough to keep you living indoors if you live cheap, if you're not attached to the idea of an academic career it might not drive you mad, and you can ditch for paid employment anytime you find something attractive.
The Disciplined Mind
Do you mean, Disciplined Minds, is it a different book, or is my memory wrong?
He's a theology prof, about 70 years old. He's a very gentle guy, but has never changed his mind about anything ever, as far as I can tell.
You're right, NickS. I mean Disciplined Minds.
I have actually wondered at what point paid-for grad school becomes an attractive option considered as a dead-end job. It's not that it pays well, but it pays enough to keep you living indoors if you live cheap, if you're not attached to the idea of an academic career it might not drive you mad, and you can ditch for paid employment anytime you find something attractive.
Oh, it's a really good dead-end job. I went for a PhD in the sciences largely out of a fear of getting into debt and a fear of getting fired.
You can ditch for paid employment anytime you find something attractive.
Maybe, but after a certain point it doesn't look good on a resume.
17 -- me too. I mean, a free ride to English grad school in a not-great program seems like a really really terrible strategy for getting a job at all, and certainly for getting a satisfying career as a tenured professor. On the other hand, if it's between (a) earning a stipend while taking interetsing classes, and (b) waitressing or temping, it might not look so bad as a way to spend your early to mid 20s. And maybe given this economy those are the choices.
That assumes that the grad school is free; if you're taking on a huge amount of nondischargeable debt to do it, it's a different story, of course.
I wonder sometimes if it's like telling kids in the throes of their first love that it's not going to last forever, it's going to end, probably very soon, and it will feel like the end of the world. They won't believe you no matter what you say; they just have to put their hand on the stove themselves.
Grad school's way more destructive than a teenaged romance, though. On the other hand, it turned out pretty great for me. Guess it did for Heebie, too. Maybe you should balance yourself out by also bringing in the 15-20 people from your cohort who didn't 'make it'.
I know engineering post-docs who live happily enough, never intending to move on. They like Davis and the freedom to schedule their work.
What should I do if someone talks as if law school is in the category of "safe way to make a lucrative career"? I'm not actually on the panel.
27 -- Laugh uncontrollably. Tell them to click on shitlawjobs.com.
26: I'm just beginning what is roughly the German equivalent of tenure track, and I spend well over half my day on admin and teaching. The people above me spend >99%, and do no real research. I'm seriously considering voluntarily maxing out at my current rank.
Grad school's super fun so far you guys!
27 -- tell them it's not true, and that if they don't get into one of something like 5-15 law schools (which ones and how many are debatable) they should try absolutely to get a free ride or a very substantial scholarship. If they can do one of those two things, great, go. They should not go if it means taking on a lot of debt to go to a mediocre law school at full cost.
It isn't the same, but I look at the ranks of supervisors one-to-three levels up from me and am pretty damn sure their work isn't more pleasant than mine, and they aren't making enough more money to compensate for doing boring managing work. Right now my incentives tell me to stay at my current rank indefinitely.
What are the grad school paths that have good employment rates afterwards?
I'm thinking:
Masters degrees in education, engineering, health science,...
What else?
Seminary, maybe? He may require his upper-level theology classes to attend.
Computer Science seems to do a pretty good job of successfully turning people loose on the real world.
Math is just applied logic, so you should just study philosophy.
36: less so, I think? At least, I don't know any PhD mathematicians who started companies.
Are there easy to acquire jobs 'in industry' for chemists/biologists/whatever -- testing cosmetics on rabbits or something? I have a vague belief there are, but don't actually know.
who started companies
That seems like a weird metric to be using. How many PhD mathematicians do you know who are un- or under-employed?
Divinity schools are over-populated at the moment, mostly with second-career types, even discounting the decline of the various "mainline" denominations. (The megachurches and similar institutions don't typically draw from Harvard, Yale, Union, etc.)
40: well, the reason I said what I did for computer science is that there is a well-trod enough path into industry that people will go into CS PhD programs with the goal of starting a company in mind from the start. I don't think that's true for (pure) math.
OT: The human elbow: hard. The Flippanter face: less hard, bruised.
For a good ease-of-degree to likelihood-of-decent-career, I'd recommend industrial engineering, then ag engineering, then environmental engineering (which sounds like it should be neato, but is instead just wastewater treatment).
Not biologists! I don't think. I think they're supposed to be compensated by their Love of Nature for the rest of their careers. But chemists might be OK, for all I know.
33: Does an engineering masters degree enhance employability? All the engineers I know just have undergraduate degrees, I think, except the ones who studied something other than engineering as undergraduates, and were using the masters essentially to change careers.
39: I bet that's right.
Some of the neuro subfields have beginnings of the same kind of entrepreneurial/startup culture as CS, but not nearly at the same scale.
45: what kind of engineers are you talking about?
43: Are we still talking about the woman's ass at the gym?
I don't think. I think they're supposed to be compensated by their Love of Nature for the rest of their careers.
I assume everybody who studies dolphins is sexually attracted to them, if that's what you're getting at. I'm not so sure about voles and the like.
43: Yow. Hopefully a previously-negotiated sports or exercise related elbow to the face, rather than just the hazards of commuting.
47 is to say I tend to think of a masters as being pretty much required for most kinds of engineering.
All the engineers I know just have undergraduate degrees, I think, except the ones who studied something other than engineering as undergraduates, and were using the masters essentially to change careers.
We don't offer an undergrad engineering degree, so this can apply.
51: None of Jammies' EE friends (nor he) has a master's.
A Cimmerian has no master's, by Crom!
53: Does he have a fear of meeting people with a related, but higher, qualification? Or do they haze the B.S. people?
53: right, that's why I asked urple what kinds of engineering; I think EE and (especially) computer engineering are different.
(I guess according to wikipedia, and typical four-year "undergraduate" degree in engineering is technically a "graduate" degree. So, there's that.)
From what I've heard, an engineering masters helps get you paid more from the get-go and a Ph.D is a signal that you won't do your work at a level that interests a consulting company (too detailed in too long) and is an active detriment to getting hired.
57: see 54. If you're asking who, specifically, I can think of off the top of my head: several mechanical engineers, several electrical engineers, several chemical engineers, an environmental engineer, a computer engineer, and probably others.
Oh! Also a materials engineer and several civil engineers.
It's funny, of the many engineers I knew in college, I can think of only one who is still a working engineer for a real company. Everyone else got sucked into the finance sector.
Make a point of asking him what kind of interdisciplinary hustle he personally used to learn something useful in school. When he blinks silently, ask how many of his succesful recently graduated students have kept in touch.
59, 60, 61: sounds like I overrated the importance of the masters, then.
64: I don't care if it's overrated in importance. I just want to know where it's not a detriment.
I'm a physics PhD. I graduated in 96, which was not as dismal as now but not a great market. Only the socially maladjusted in my cohort failed to get jobs. I would recommend it to others, just don't expect a faculty job and pay attention to which marketable skills.
The engineers I knew as an undergrad have all done OK, MS and PhDs both. The biggest pitfall IMO is that PhD programs attract people who have a hard time finishing things.
they aren't making enough more money to compensate for doing boring managing work
I know some people in union shops where they really ought to promote some folks into management positions, but the management positions actually pay less, since the management salaries weren't covered by union protection during cost-cutting eras. So the positions are remaining open.
Engineering has always seemed like a separate caste to me. You can't become an engineer or stop being an engineer. Ever since I was 17, when 90% of my freshmen friends were in the School of Arts & Sciences and didn't know what we were majoring in and were studying 2 hours a week, and 10% had somehow discovered this thing called the School of Engineering which guaranteed they would have a successful more-or-less scientific career as long as they did nothing but study for 4 years. "Whoa, that would have been a good idea, to apply to the School of Engineering", I kept thinking.
I am on the 17 plan! It is mostly great, except for the persistent dread about not knowing what sort of paid work to look for or where, and the guilty feeling that someone smarter and harder working should be here instead of me.
But I make more money than I spend, I get frequent two-week breaks, and I like the work pretty well. Plus every now and then I can spend a week or so blowing off work altogether and no one minds.
L., as someone who began to comment here as a high school student, it was clearly your destiny to become a lazy grad student. So it was written.
Why not simply disagree openly? Point out that there is more than one view on the matter and that yours is correct. Dude's a theologian, ffs! His entire oeuvre is speculation about his invisible imaginary friend. You, on the other hand, deal in concrete realities like whatever it is you deal in. Probably not *that* concrete, eh? Still, math is a lot less likely to get you burned at the stake.
For the right person, math grad school in a pleasant city is a fine dead end job. The important thing is to quickly realize whether research is fun for you, and if it isn't get the hell out with a masters.
Can too become an engineer! By using a masters degree to switch fields. I did it.
But, I will also say that I don't think I had the discipline and focus to be an engineering undergrad. I don't think I matured into those abilities until I was in my mid-twenties (and have evidently matured out of them again). I can't believe there are undergrads who make it.
71: I suppose a visible imaginary friend would be something to write home about.
I just went through the alumni director of the classmates of the professional school I just graduated from. It looks like 69% are gainfully employed (though some at nonprofits that might not actually be paying enough for loan purposes), 9% are getting another degree of some sort, and 22% have not reported. Not great, considering the soi-disant prestige of our program, but probably better than PhDs, especially considering virtually all of the jobs listed are broadly the kind of thing we were trained for.
I know these are banned, but I have a friend from grad school who had the best analogy for this. He said, "When you're an undergraduate, your professors show you this big, beautiful garden. When you go to grad school, the professors show you a small bare patch three inches wide, and tell you this is the spot in the garden you'll be working on for the rest of your entire life."
My engineer cousin who ended up in hi-tech somewhere (machine translation) as a supervisor of people smarter than him said that the engineering school tradition traces back to that Napoleonic and Prussian military schools, and for that reason is more demanding than it needs to be (i.e., doing a large number of the same kind of problem, unreasonable deadlines, etc.)
He said this ca. 1990-1995 as I remember based on Cornell in the 1960s-1970s.
"Cornell? That's a super-safety school!"
Everybody I know who got a PhD in CS is employed with an above-median income. None of them are tenure-track faculty. I spend a lot of time musing on how I don't need a PhD to do my current job at all, but I never would have gotten this job without the resume experience and connections I accumulated in grad school. It's hard to know if the eight years invested in sub-median wages and self loathing were entirely worth it, but they were interesting at least.
I did things in the wrong order in my history program. (But the right order the way the curriculum was organized.) I really hated the early years, when I was still more or less sure I'd be going on to gamble in the job market lottery, and then just as I started to feel like I had and was getting a lot out of the program, I hit the point where it was clear I didn't want to become a professor. Leaving me at a point where I had a giant gap in the resume and no phd to show for it.
Nowadays, when I look back, I find it really, really frustrating that the humanities - well certain programs, at least, including the one I was in - suddenly started to value and support the development of some kinds of technical skills just a couple of years after I left. I read about some of the early projects that were already out there when I was still taking classes/studying for orals, was really interested in them, didn't know anyone else who was and knew some people who were actively disdainful of quantitative approaches, and didn't really have anywhere to go if I'd wanted to do something like that.*
*Actually, that's still partly true: one of the chapters in the dissertation I may actually write some day could make use of some heavy number crunching. Mostly, though, the problem with that is that I don't have the resources to gather the numbers - it would involve scanning and then data entrying thousands of pages of reports from the early 20th century. I could do it if I were a full time, funded grad student, and not looking for a "real" job, but a job is the higher priority.
What about the fact that the economy is so shitty right now? If a student is otherwise going to head to the service sector and do a job that does not require a college degree, is there a good reason to buy a few years and hope the economy improves by then?
No, really, moon colonies. Not only that, he wants to make them states!
I prefer to think that what Gingrich is saying is that if he ever has a second term as president, it will be a long time from now, hopefully on a planet far far away.
The Universe, you silly. What lesser realm could possibly do justice to the greatness of the man?
(Not to go all Godwin, but this line of thought reminds me of Downfall, where Hitler keeps telling generals concerned about how the war is devastating civilians in Berlin that they deserve it. Because the people have proven they aren't worthy of him. Will a second Gingrich Administration end in fire? Somehow it seems more likely than ending in moon colonies).
40: pharma was the option, but they're not doing so hot right now. You're probably more employable with a research masters, like the ones Canadian universities offer, than a Phd.
A Phd in mining engineering will get you a job. Plus yay explosives!
I realize that it makes me an asshole to say this, but between Reagan, two Bushes, Clinton, Obama, and the 2000 and 2007 bubble collapses, our world has been entirely restructured. There will just be fewer good options in the future. This has been in the works for some time. You need to make shrewd choices, but even so, things will be worse.
What about the fact that the economy is so shitty right now? If a student is otherwise going to head to the service sector and do a job that does not require a college degree, is there a good reason to buy a few years and hope the economy improves by then?
Only if the few years bought don't result in much debt. Better if they add something worthwhile to the resume. Depends on what's meant by "service sector", right?
We all pretty much know the drill: unless you're in the sciences, a Ph.D. track program should be approached with great caution. The difference between sciences and humanities is so great that a topic like this should be split into two distinct threads.
There will just be fewer good options in the future.
Speaking of the service sector, apparently there was an article somewhere recently about some new technology developed at MIT (?) whereby one might visit a restaurant and order via some computer doohickey installed at the table.
One might query the doohickey about various menu items and receive responses; then place one's order; I think an actual human would still have to bring you your plate(s). But no more trying in vain to catch the waitperson's eye to ask for another glass of wine! That was such a bother, for sure. Then one pays via the doohickey -- no more tipping!
All I could think was: didn't we tire of automats many decades ago?
Those wacky MIT types, what will they think of next?
Will a second Gingrich Administration end in fire?
SOME SAY IN ICE
I did want to say that I think 31 way understates the inadvisability of law as a career choice, or of going to schools 6-15 and not being in the top half (at least) of the class.
OT: If a dog that has always been friendly with everyone (and every dog) he meets, sometimes overly so, suddenly unloads an angry bark and growl at some passerby it's safe to assume that person is pure evil, right?
||
So, how long should I give Community? I've watched the first three episodes so far and am not that impressed.
|>
94: I would never say that they're wasting their talents; but maybe they should have some humanities types on their teams, reviewing their projects.
From what they've tasted of his ire
Most hold with those who favor fire
But if he were to campaign twice
I think we've heard enough debates
To say that for Newt Gingrich ice
Is just as great
And would suffice.
I do still want a PhD in health services/ finance, but I'll be responsible and get an MPH.
If I remember right, it really starts to pick up after the first five or so.
Isn't the Halloween episode the first time it's really great? Maybe I'm confusing seasons.
Heading home. Did you know I resent staying at school into my evening hours twice in one week? True fact.
45: My brother is studying at YourTownU and it's a five-year program where you graduate with a Master's, so I'm surprised you haven't run across more folks who've done that. For reasons unrelated to my brother, we may be in your neck of the woods later this spring, in which case I'd be interested in a chlld-friendly meetup where Lee can hear about your Waldorf experinc because she's getting snooty again about not wanting the public school.
she's getting snooty again about not wanting the public school
What!
I spent thirty years in public school, and look at me!
Waldorf sounds nice, but I really don't like celery.
97: Oh, absolutely. (I'm totally serious about this.)
i am fucking reading this while trapped in a small, sad room on campus, wondering why i stayed in the Awesome Grad Program (with no jobs at the end) when i was so determined to be miserable the whole time. if you are going to get a useless degree, you should at least enjoy it. i seriously fucking regret how little i've let myself enjoy it, because of all the guilt over uselessness.
and using title case makes me feel like a child, or arundhati roy, or -- well, that's probably enough without heaping more on.
i wonder if i would enjoy being in sifu's graduate program, or if i would find a way to hate that too. i may still have a year+ to turn things around. but there's a lot of hate-momentum.
no one need reply to this puerile spewing; glancing at the thread just put the cap on a particularly discouraging afternoon of fretting about climate change and not working on my dissertation and wondering how i can justify my existence.
i wonder if i would enjoy being in sifu's graduate program, or if i would find a way to hate that too
You know, I'm old and employable and went into it with eyes wide open. So probably not.
44: For a good ease-of-degree to likelihood-of-decent-career, I'd recommend industrial engineering, then ag engineering, then environmental engineering (which sounds like it should be neato, but is instead just wastewater treatment).
Well, okay. Industrial engineering sounds pretty appealing--I like optimizing procedures! I never got around to leaving this comment in the "do you optimize your driving route," but I was always obsessive about this w.r.t. NYC subways. Absurdly, counterproductively so--I'd end up frequently missing a train, and being much later than I'd have been if I'd just taken the obvious route, due to obsessively checking alternate possibilities.
But the question is: is there any good way to get a sense of what work as, say, an industrial engineer is like, before you invest tons of money and years of your life into it?
44: For a good ease-of-degree to likelihood-of-decent-career, I'd recommend industrial engineering, then ag engineering, then environmental engineering (which sounds like it should be neato, but is instead just wastewater treatment).
Well, okay. Industrial engineering sounds pretty appealing--I like optimizing procedures! I never got around to leaving this comment in the "do you optimize your driving route," but I was always obsessive about this w.r.t. NYC subways. Absurdly, counterproductively so--I'd end up frequently missing a train, and being much later than I'd have been if I'd just taken the obvious route, due to obsessively checking alternate possibilities.
But the question is: is there any good way to get a sense of what work as, say, an industrial engineer is like, before you invest tons of money and years of your life into it?
Oy. Double-posting, because of the urgency.
Even in sciences, a PhD should be approached with great caution. My friends and I are a lot of 'what else would I be doing?' with a smudge of OCD, low self-esteem and a wack of stubborn-ness. But now we're coming up against the job market (and my poor friend studies inverts! At least I study birds!).
Everyone's comments have been weirdly cheering, or at least make me feel not so alone.
The comment about getting a therapist early is very true.
They engineer things. For industry.
Even in sciences, a PhD should be approached with great caution.
Word. The bio scene from what I can tell from talking to my dad (retired ichthyologist) has been bad for a while and let's not forget that drug companies have been laying off ridiculous numbers of people for years and years.
my poor friend studies inverts! At least I study birds!
Homophobic.
117, 119: I've heard that the funding is better (than in the humanities) while you're in grad school, so that helps.
The worst part in biology is that you know jobs didn't used to have the same requirements. Tenure-track positions need PhDs and always have but there's been a shift in the lower level positions to make them more impermanent and require high levels of education. There are a lot of contract positions that require MSc or PhD that used to be actual jobs.
Better compared to other students, not compared to your friends who have real jobs.
I could have just followed the links on the IEOR website: a video about What Industrial Engineers Do!
Seems cool. Technically, I suppose I could apply to this "professional" masters' program, though, crap, I guess I'd have to retake the GRE, since my score is from 2002, and that wouldn't arrive by February. Doh! But I imagine I'd want to do the normal M.S. track, anyway, to make up for the lack of prior science/engineering stuff. Maybe next year. Hrmm.
I went back and took one class this fall. That was enough to work it out of my system.
Dude you should totally go into "Mechatronic" engineering because that sounds like you make badass robots.
Also, mining engineering. Travel to third world countries, live like a king, destroy the environment, love it. Embrace the evil. Maybe marine engineering? Build a BOAT.
My stats class this semester seems much better than my stats class last semester, Moby. Maybe you should keep at it?
I have found recently that my career trajectory is itself sufficient to convince my students without my saying anything that they shouldn't go to grad school.
I had a good stats class last semester. Obviously, if I took one this semester, it would have to suck.
This thread makes it so frustrating that unfogged doesn't have a "like" button.
130: No like button, but how about 60% off anal bleaching?
Oh, fantastic. And now I've been laid off from all but my every-other-week tutoring bit. I'm sure feeling great about my past decisions!
109: I guess that means you've figured out our plan to raise Mara to be Tweety 2.0.
110: I stand by my previous statement that the Waldorf school could be hugely positive for a kid with attachment problems, but I don't think Mara will be in that group in another year and don't want her to be the diversity. I think we can help her grow into her brilliant, hilarious potential while keeping her comfortable code-switching while not having to pwy bigtime tuition.
I can take a nearly free class in whatever I want so long as it doesn't have prerequisites that I can't meet or beg around. I should try something new.
our plan to raise Mara to be Tweety 2.0
The best decision you could possibly make. How does she feel about beef jerky? Hacker cons? Ninjaing?
Wait, you like beef jerky? My heart is warming, slowly.
I am totally making my own beef jerky at home btw you guys. It will be drying in the oven tonight. TOP THAT SECRETARY WHO BRINGS IN HOMEMADE BROWNIES.
a particularly discouraging afternoon of fretting about climate change and not working on my dissertation and wondering how i can justify my existence.
Strike out "my dissertation" and that's almost every afternoon for me.
Incidentally, that's another problem with soc-sci/humanities PhD programs: if things go badly, it's not only possible that you'll have no degree, and no clear job prospects, but won't necessarily even be able to say, "well, I've got a lot of experience as a teacher." You might, of course, but then, you might be a pretty bad teacher, experience or no, and since plenty of PhD programs give their TAs no support or feedback, you're then in a particularly ugly position: "Well, I've been doing nothing but teaching and research the past 8 years. No, I don't have anything to show for the research, and it turns out I'm not very good at teaching, either. But you should totally take a chance on me in some entirely unrelated field of human achievement!"
137: I fucking love jerky. And bacon. I invented the term "baconator", you Hollywood phony. And then Wendy's stole it from me.
Have you tried home-curing bacon? I tasted the results of mine this morning. Very good but I think I can do better.
141 may be the least appropriate use of "Hollywood phony" ever. I stand by it, though, you goddamned glam-punk commie philatelists.
We made steak tartare for dinner the other night. For christmas, I got a gift certificate for MEAT that I intend to spend on (among other things) LION STEAKS.
I am totally making my own beef jerky at home
Sometimes the fruit is so low that there must be an excavation if it is to hang at all.
Holy fuck I didn't know that was legal but Google says it is. That is the greatest thing in the world. I like eating antelope but now I can eat the thing that eats the antelope.
So . . . someone shoots them for you in Africa? Or?
147: I think they come from farms, maybe? I will ask at the store when I buy them and report back to unfogged. There are a lot of tame/pet lions; maybe it's from them? It would be beyond surprising if the store that sells the meat got it someplace unethical, just given that they're based in cambridge.
I really enjoyed the text adventure game "Violet," and highly recommend it to anyone who has gone to graduate school or is considering graduate school. (It's also worth noting that although the romantic interest is always a woman named Violet you can play as either a male character or a female by setting "heteronormativity off.")
Farm raised in Illinois, Google suggests? Weird.
Heebie should gently redirect students from grad school to lion farming.
Oh wait, that place no longer carries it.
I'm finding it beyond awesome that Tweety and Halford are finally putting aside their differences and bonding over their shared love for eating lions.
Also I had no idea there was actually a market for lion meat. Is it any good? I have the vague impression that carnivores are probably not, in general, very tasty.
Top of the food chain, eh? Guess what, the owners added a sixth story!
113: you know, I thought I was scoring higher on all those metrics at the time, and I got a decent-paying (albeit totally evil) job as recently as fall 2010. (Also, a majority of graduates of my program have gone on to laughably good academic jobs with relatively few turns on the market, so arguably it was there for me to grab if I had wanted it. But maybe your stats larnin can refute me there.) I think the bigger issue is that only two (profesisonal) things reliably make me happy: making big long-term plans for marvelous future careers, and doing very straightforward, incremental tasks for pay. There has to be a perfect graduate program for me with that particular psychological profile -- and by "perfect" I mean "calculated for maximum long-term damage" -- but this one isn't it. I am totally out of incremental paid tasks and future fantasies. (The only real solution, of course, is to change my preferences, because they're ridiculous.)
On what grounds might we suppose that lion tastes good and not like Mega Triple Ammonia Fucks The Meat? Is there a trick to cooking apex predators?
their hypothetical shared love for eating lions
No one has actually eaten any lion yet!
157.1: try to start a company where the funding process involves building really, really fiddly spreadsheets that define future growth? You won't make any money while you're trying, but you're not making any money now.
158: The eating may be hypothetical, but the love seems all too real.
159: way too close to the other source of household income for safety. My job right now is to sit quietly and attract high-quality health insurance for three people.
Otherwise... can the company mitigate global warming? Maybe essear can get in on it too then.
I was simply reporting what's available at the store from whence the gift certificate was issued. I will probably get lion, but I might also get gator, or turtle, or yak, or some really ridiculously overpriced wagyu tenderloin, or bear.
We got quail eggs the other day, but they're pretty reasonably priced, so we paid cash.
Quail eggs turn out to be weird, shell-consistency-wise.
Dave Arnold's Low-Temperature Game Cooking Notes (check out the crisped raccoon pic at the bottom of the article).
In all cases sear the meat first and put into Zip-loc bags with butter. Cook in an immersion circulator for the prescribed times, then sear again for a minute or two per side on high heat.
Yak: cook at 56°C for 24 hours. Rich and gamey, with notes of duck.
Lion: 57°C for 24 hours. Tastes like pork but richer.
Black bear: 57°C for 3 hours. Tastes a little bloody and metallic. Younger bears are reportedly better.
Beaver tail: 60°C for 48 hours. Woodsy, delicious.
...
Raccoon: I recommend cooking raccoon in a traditional braise.
I don't think I've seen beaver tail or raccoon there yet. Oh wait, they have python! I forgot about python.
I also forgot kangaroo, rattlesnake and wild boar, I guess. Also rabbit, frog's legs, antelope, venison, blah blah blah.
Usage Note: The construction from whence has been criticized as redundant since the 18th century. It is true that whence incorporates the sense of from: a remote village, whence little news reached the wider world. But from whence has been used steadily by reputable writers since the 14th century, most notably in the King James Bible: "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help" (Psalms). Such a respectable precedent makes it difficult to label the construction as incorrect. Still, it may be observed that whence (like thence) is most often used nowadays to impart an archaic or highly formal tone to a passage, and that this effect is probably better realized if the archaic syntax of the wordwithout fromis preserved as well.
MY GRAMMAR IS PURE LIKE THE LION FROM WHENCE MY ANIMATING HUMOR CAME.
I'm still grateful to the high school English teacher who took some pompous crap I turned in the second week of class, struck out the phrase "from whence they came," and wrote something like "'where they came from.' Don't sound so archaic."
The Bible also teaches that pi=3 and many other things that Tweety will find useful. Not just grammar.
ONE SHOULD BE THOROUGHLY MODERN IN ONE'S USE OF ARCHAIC TERMS. SPAKED THE GUY.
I was about to get all het up about 173 but I think emerson is just concerned about the fact that I'm in grad school. Don't worry, emerson. It's not a real university.
Also it turns out that 1. my advisor holds the named chair once held by and 2. my lab occupies the space once occupied by the lab of one of the most widely loathed scientists of the past century. So keeping me ignorant is probably to society's benefit.
One very important thing I've learned from Facebook: friends don't let friends become medical doctors. Those people all sound like they're just seconds away from completely snapping and killing someone, accidentally if not intentionally.
If you don't already know (you must already know?) you can probably puzzle it out.
The missing name in 1. was a guy with a really large head, right?
Huh, I had never thought of it that way. He certainly had a giant forehead in many pictures.
178: Huh, my doctor friends tend more toward statuses about the giant cyst they lanced on some dude's ass on the last shift.
156 is beautiful. That said, I'm stunned to hear that you fucking savages are keen to eat lions. What do you think this is? The fucking Kalahari? Wait, don't answer that, Halford.
I am curious to eat whatever my local store will sell me. I dunno why; I developed an interest in weird meats as, like, a ten year old. Why be introspective about such things?
I'm not asking you to introspect; I'm asking you not to participate in making a market for meat from big cats. But then again, your appetites (or not) aren't really scalable, probably, so you should do (and eat) what you want.
Why, he asked no one in particular, would you keep your teeth in the car over night? Why would somebody steel them? Why do I watch the local news?
I will, though, release in a lion in your apartment when you least expect it (I'll warn Blume), Most Dangerous Game stylee. But it will probably have to be a cougar or a cantamount, as I'm fresh out of African lions (racist, I know).
Did the widely loathed guy by any chance write a book with a certain, um, Marles Churray? Otherwise I'm coming up short.
188: Steel teeth? I guess it would help when eating lions.
187: I don't think I'm morally opposed to eating lion, but I was happier not knowing it was so readily available outside of Africa.
At least try a tabby cat first to see if you might like it.
190: no. Wait, why do you think you were wrong before?
187: honestly, that had bugged me before; are there really enough lions that we can comfortable raise them on farms? The same thing must go for bear, right? That said, my default position had been to trust that the store in question had done a bit of that thinking for me, as they are 1. a venerable institution in 2. one of the most hilariously liberal places on earth which 3. seems to deal a pretty small volume in these things. But, sure, point taken. I'll talk to the butchers and think carefully about what they say (and possibly report back to you/here) before making any move.
To be completely honest I'm not terribly interested in lion. I'd like to try bear and some of the fancier beef iterations (aged wagyu? Oh no you didn't), and I would be very interested in trying some of the snake options if Blume wasn't really, really uninterested in that.
Tweety and Halford should open a sandwich shop with menu offerings including: Lions and Tigers and Bears…ON RYE!
Is this actually a thing that's "readily available"? I had sort of figured it was a thing that was available in this one store and not terribly many other places.
I almost tried raccoon pie at a local restaurant, but I couldn't eat the pie part. My sister did ask the classic question "where do you source your raccoon?"
Oh, I can't read. Somehow I thought you were referring to two different people, one who held the chair and one who occupied the lab space. Fail.
A local restaurant recently totally did the thing mocked on Portlandia where they talked about the name of their recently received (deceased) pig (Norman).
196: Certainly more readily than I had thought.
It probably doesn't help that I'm simultaneously trying to read a paper written by people with an extensive and erudite vocabulary (or possibly a thesaurus) but no apparent working knowledge of English syntax. Their language is very... creative.
How long till Halford plays the Most Dangerous Game, though? Seriously. I need to be busy that day, is all.
I am so repulsed by snakes that I do not want to eat one. I love eel (mmm, oily), which is uncomfortably snakelike, but I have only ever handled smoked eel, which is stiff and not slithery seeming.
201: that definitely doesn't sway me! You know who is way more sympathetic than simba/delicious? Welcome to my belly, BAMBI.
You could eat Bambi's mom, for narrative purposes.
How long till Halford plays the Most Dangerous Game, though?
Jai alai?
When my dad went hunting, mom would say he was going to shoot Bambi. Mom wasn't a fan of hunting.
The thought of lions as livestock depresses me in exactly the same way as those YouTube videos of kids at the zoo laughing as lions try to get at them through plexiglas.
Aurochs were bad SOBs. Feral hogs are terrifying. Wild turkeys apparently scare some people.
If anyone around here is going to hunt the most dangerous game, it's going to be me.
For a while I've thought that an amusing evolution of CrossFit and the like would be an "I Will Hunt You for Sport" personal training plan. The trainers would surprise clients at home, at the office, at the grocery store, on the street, etc., and chase them until the client either successfully evaded the hunt or was "killed." For which there would be a cash penalty, as an incentive to run faster and defend oneself better.
Wild geese scare me. Anything that shits like that and flies is scary.
Wild turkeys apparently scare some people.
See, this just makes me ashamed of our species. Sorry teo.
214: healthier humans regard themselves as predators.
Wild turkeys are totally awesome. They're all over the place around here. I rode through a squadron of them coming out of an orchard earlier today. My pastoral existence: let me show you it.
217 makes a good point. Crowdsource it, Flip.
217: Yes. [Smiles.] Yes, they do.
OT: That dog in The Artist rules.
206: Blume said "stiff eel"!
Von Wafer said "I will release in a lion"!
Always got to work blue, eh, JP?
Wild turkeys apparently scare some people
Including the latvian minister of defense. True fact.
Lions and the brown and black bear are in no sort of danger. Leopards, yes, Tigers, yes. Cheetahs, yes.
Griz are endangered in the lower 48.
We all know Halford's most dangerous game target will be Stanley.
I would like to apologize. My Most Dangerous Game allusion upthread was inapt. Please sub in Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back.
Order: restored.
Clearly the next step in the developing Tweety-Halford bromance is for them to go bear hunting together.
"Bromance" is so aughts. In the teens, two men now bond through anal sex, but ironically.
This is both off-topic and everyone's asleep, but I'll ask anyway: should the fact that I had a horrible experience buying a laptop from HP five years ago keep me from ever considering an HP laptop?
I'd like to buy a computer for $500 or less and HP seems to have a big part of that market, especially if you want to buy in the store (which I do) and the stores are in Canada.
I have a few requirements*, but the computer doesn't have to be anything all that special; it just has to work reliably. Unless I break it myself - but the whole point is to have something that I can mess around with.
*At least 2GHz processor, 4 GB RAM, 320GB space. Costco has a model that meets all of these so I know there's at least one.
In the teens, two men now bond through anal sex, but ironically.
Well, sure. You have to do something to pass the time until a bear shows up.
231: I'm awake, but I have no particular insight into HP laptops. Sorry.
I suppose I could get a desktop. It would probably support graphics better. Plus, I already have a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. And if I run some kind of linux, I don't need windows. But it sounds like it would take effort to do that, plus less portable.
Griz are endangered in the lower 48.
Yesterday I enjoyed watching my 11 year old restrain his natural (loud) scepticism and be polite, as a 12 year old he'd just met told him that sometimes grizzly bears come into New York and smash car windows to steal food out of the cars. I was quite proud.
I have a combination of a desktop (with a relatively chunky CPU and a reasonable amount of RAM) -- which is good for graphics and cpu intensive stuff -- and a small netbook with really good battery life for when I need portability, which works for me. What would you be using the computer for?
FWIW, my wife's HP laptop died a total death after about 4 years. As in land-fill.
I mainly want something I can use for teaching myself new stuff, but without putting at risk anything on my "primary" computer.* Regardless of what OS anything I buy comes with, I'm going to put linux on it, run a server (but only locally), test out various types of open source software (many of which need a server). I'd also like to get better at image processing, but a laptop won't solve that issue, as for that price it'll be about as good as what I have now. Oh, and I will probably install GIS software too.
*I'm sure I'm exaggerating the danger, as I have everything important backed up and even left a backup of my research files with my parents in California, but there are certain things I don't want to mess with, like moving around partitions. Also, there's not a whole lot of free space on it and I've already moved non-essential stuff to an external drive.
The HP laptop I bought never started up properly. After a week dealing with tech support who, after failing to figure out the problem in the first few calls then failed to call back when they guaranteed they would, and then eventually told me to send it to them for some undisclosed amount of time and refused to accept that "new" should mean "it works at least once without repairs", I sent it back to Amazon and got a refund.
I will probably install GIS software too.
What sort of GIS software, and what are you intending to use it for?
What sort of GIS software, and what are you intending to use it for?
mumble historical mumble maps mumble something something
I've got a one-year student license for an older version of ArcGIS but it's been sitting around, not installed, for months because I'm not sure what I'd do with it and I don't want to squander the time. I'm told I can buy a discounted student license of the current version, and then string those two together for a couple years.
I know I want to learn the software, but I don't have any project of my own to push me to start. Mainly, I want to understand the kind of work that people who are doing historical GIS (not just historians) are doing. To really know what I'm doing, I'd have to take courses, I think, and I have other things to do that come first.
Dude's a theologian, ffs! His entire oeuvre is speculation about his invisible imaginary friend.
So you can cite Unfogged back at him with a clear conscience.
Pro tip for people who want to eat large carnivores: avoid the liver. A surprisingly small amount will result in Hypervitaminosis A and you will die in prolonged agony.
Interesting how disillusioned idealists become so pragmatic on other peoples' behalf. The answer on grad school has to be temper an understanding of the potential job market with a recognition of the importance of actually liking to do a thing. Some people really are cut out to be lawyers, even if the market is shite.
So what's grad school really like? Well, it's very academic. Some programs, even while being very academic, give a natural path out of academia, some will gradually inculcate the idea that there is nothing so meaningful as the world of academia - and this seems to be more true of the programs that offer little reasonable way forward in the field.
177: LB's sister is a doctor (Dr. Oops). Somebody has to do the transplants.
For a while I've thought that an amusing evolution of CrossFit and the like would be an "I Will Hunt You for Sport" personal training plan. The trainers would surprise clients at home, at the office, at the grocery store, on the street, etc., and chase them until the client either successfully evaded the hunt or was "killed."
Not now, Kato!
78: The French still go in for this in a big way. If you go to the Ecole Polytechnique, as well as studying engineering, you also do part of the French army officer selection course, including riding and parachuting. And there's a Napoleonic artillery uniform (black with gold trimmings).
(Our new intern is a grandes ecoles telecoms engineer! Which means that she is 200% smarter than I am! In fact, far too smart to work here! And she quite possibly knows how to parachute out of a C-160 Transall with her horse and then bayonet me in the neck! And if our treatment of the last intern is anything to go by, we'll probably make her clean up the customer database by hand!)
245: hott. Especially with addition of Napoleonic artillery uniform.
re: 237
If you want image processing info I might be able to help, as that's my 'day job'. I used a mix of linux,* solaris, PC and mac boxes for this so am probably familiar-ish with most things. That's general image processing, rather than anything map related.
* not starting any flame-wars but fast machines with linux on them are really convenient as cheap-boxes for command-line image processing. However, GUI-based stuff leaves a _lot_ to be desired. I know nothing about GIS type stuff under linux, though.
I haven't implemented the project I wanted it for, but the documentation makes GeoDjango look pretty awesome.
For a good ease-of-degree to likelihood-of-decent-career, I'd recommend industrial engineering, then ag engineering, then environmental engineering
There are other factors to consider as well.
231 I was very unhappy with my ultra-cheap HP laptop that I bought three and a half years ago. I bought an ASUS over the summer and so far it is fine.
Some people really are cut out to be lawyers, even if the market is shite.
Sure. The mental health stats, though, suggest that way more people are going into it because they think law school is in the category of "safe way to make a lucrative career", which, even before the recent market collapse, was highly questionable. And the costs of finding out if you're cut out for it have gone way out of control the last 10 years.
(IMO, you can't know before you start school, or by the end of school, or, in many cases, especially if you've gone the lucrative career route, if it's actually for you. You can know it isn't at any of these points, but only that).
in many cases, as much as five years in, if it's actually
Speaking of animals (a ways back), I've seen three deer (doe) and four wild turkey on my two most recent commutes. Both times I was in the park where portions of the muffin video were filmed. I almost hit two of the turkey, lazy waddling bastards who could have flown instead of making me brake hard.
Laptops: There was a time when Hewlett-Packard *anything* would be reliably awesome and awesomely reliable. But my grandfather remembered that his test group at GEC Marconi would always buy HP, if they could afford it. I have a printer of theirs that sucks.
I can strongly recommend Samsung laptops - I've had the Q45 for 5 years and two linux distros and many tens of thousands of miles' travel and two battery packs and it's still giving ultra-reliable service. (And my partner had a second Q45 for three years of perfect reliability until it was stolen.) Don't buy their NF310 netbook, though, it sucks (although the others are good).
Also, Toshiba, and Lenovo (at least the ThinkPads, although good luck finding one for $500. can't speak to the IdeaPad range). Partner ran (and I sysadmined) a Toshiba SatellitePro for six years (including me taking it on mobile network drive tests in Slovakia) without problems even though it ran WinXP. The Tosh NB520 netbook with harman/kardon audio is pretty cool.
I can't speak for Samsung laptops, but all the Samsung consumer electronics gear I've owned -- LCD monitors, phones, and dSLR -- has been solidly reliable.
253: Today I had to break hard going down a steep hill for a flock of about 20 turkeys. Brought to mind the "Connect with Wildlife" billboard I think I mentioned here a few days ago.
104: How did it go?
Basically fine. Most kids there knew me, and so were science-based or health-med-PT based. There were only 1-2 from the humanities.
Most cringe-worthy moment:
One of the panelists was an undergrad English major turned theater grad student. This is a quote from her: "If you're an English major in college, you had better go to grad school, because otherwise you can't do anything with your degree."
I didn't respond directly at that point, because the panelists were answering some question in order.
256: You'd think evolution would make a turkey that would fly over the road.
258: One time I did get one that got airborne in front of me (came out of a low tree) and it semi-flew/glided in an obvious panic in front of me for a hundred yards or so. I guess a kind man would have stopped the car, instead I waited to see when it would figure out that it needed to turn.
I had a ThinkPad at work which was unspeakably horrible - slower and crashier than my 7-year-old garage built desktop. We have a newish HP lappie which seems fit for purpose. OTOH, by all the evidence Samsung will rule the world soon.
136: Mara is in favor of pretty much all forms of meat, so beef jerky should be safe. No hacker cons, but she loves computers and is going to participate in her second yarn bombing soon, which seems like an age-appropriate geeky alternative. Ninjaing, we'll see. She's got the quiet observation and subtle interference down (hypervigilance helps) and is athletic enough to put physical skills into play if necessary. So far more into her scooter than her bike, but that may be because Alex always wants the bike.
231: I just bought an HP laptop (reconditioned) last night. If it explodes and blows off my legs and/or wabblies I will post a comment about it.
Also Sifu - if possible try warthog. It's fucking delicious. Easily the best game I've ever eaten. I've never tried lion, though.
if possible try warthog
Best served with a side of Hakuna Matater Tots. Or so I've heard.
I was thinking about this before falling asleep last night, sadly. The problem with honest, frank advice about careers of all sorts is that it's hard to know what, practically speaking, to do with negative counsel. The point of "don't go to grad school; also, you'll never succeed at anything with your terrible work habits" is not to paralyze the advisees and leave them in the apparently high-demand care of "a therapist" (a growth industry at this point?). The point is to try to spare them some pain and wasted time. But paralysis is an adequate way to "take" the advice. We have inordinate faith in the idea that advice can spare people pain and wasted time: it would be grand if you could just say two sentences to people, and preemptively relieve them of a lost decade. Failing that, we try to lead by example: I was like you and now look at me. But while there is some family resemblance among grad students, it's rare to get a good enough match to genuinely scare someone straight. The compulsion to give this negative advice is one of academia's new déformations professionelles: dude, we say, look at how bad things are -- why would anyone not take our advice? Because the cash value of the advice is zero (minus the likely cost of a therapist) in itself, no? We are the academic network: we have connections aplenty; that's why people ask us about grad school. But those conditions make it impossible for us to give any remotely useful advice, i.e. "here is how to get a comfortable nonprofit job that won't bore you." I'm sure the occasional ex-academic can actually give constructive and helpful pointers in that direction, but it's rare. IME most ex-academics luck into their post-academic careers and cling to them like barnacles.
The biggest problem is probably the ratio of new graduate admissions to remotely desirable post-college jobs: that is, the fact that colleges are so unhelpfully good at preparing students for successful admission to grad school, such that anyone who would have trouble qualifying for graduate admissions would also have trouble finding a better job than barista. And yes, of course it's an open secret that doctoral study is an ideal dead-end job, tho I suppose it's less true than it sometimes feels.
Back at 133: I'm so sorry.You're in the bay area, right? should there be a spontaneous, dashed-academic-dreams meetup at some point? I can't drink, but I can eat the bar olives and oily almonds. We could make origami creatures out of hated monographs.
Is warthog different from wild boar? Because the wild boar I had in Italy was just about the best goddamn thing I'd ever tasted.
that is, the fact that colleges are so unhelpfully good at preparing students for successful admission to grad school, such that anyone who would have trouble qualifying for graduate admissions would also have trouble finding a better job than barista.
Right. What the system needs to become humane is for it to become terribly, terribly difficult to get into grad school. I don't see any institutional incentive for this to happen, though.
"a therapist" (a growth industry at this point?)
I guess that's where all academics should steer their wannabe grad student undergrads. Be a shrink, specialize in depressed grad students, or just run googleads with a 'Grad student? Need therapy? Yes you do! Come before it's too late!"
"Wild boar" is the same species as our friend the domestic pig, and lives everywhere in the world. Warthog is a specific other species that lives in the savannahs of Africa.
What the system needs to become humane is for it to become terribly, terribly difficult to get into grad school. I don't see any institutional incentive for this to happen, though.
Or to have a healthy job market for people with a college degree in the humanities.
The biggest problem is probably the ratio of new graduate admissions humans to remotely desirable post-college jobs
FTFY.
Because the wild boar I had in Italy was just about the best goddamn thing I'd ever tasted.
Mmmm, makes me want to go find some right now! Supposedly a good idea to keep your dog far, far from the boars, though.
269: I wonder if anyone raises 'wild boar' commercially -- own a big, fenced, oak forest, let the pigs run wild, and catch them for slaughter. I suppose the reason not to is the cheap land.
Come to think, my inlaws own a whole lot of shitty forested land in upstate NY. This could be a business.
Yeah, it's raised commercially in the UK. They have problems with the buggers escaping, though. Some southern English forests apparently have established populations of feral boar that have escaped from farms.
They live wild in the forest near my wife's parents home in Czech. I've never seen them, although I've seen where they've been feeding/rooting. Sometimes her dog hares off after something, but it hasn't caught up with one.
266: I've never had wild boar but now I want to try it. I suspect that it's the fact that game animals eat all manner of different plants which makes them so yummy.
They tunnel under any fence. Presumably they would reproduce fast enough on your forest land to to replace the ones that ran away, but then you might get in trouble with the local authorities.
Wild boar is quite good when wild. The farm raised version you get in the US isn't anywhere near as good. High end pork is a better alternative.
As far as I can tell, a lot of the boar farmed in the UK is farmed in semi-wild conditions. Roaming on forested land, with some limited feeding and then regular culling for meat.
Oh! You meant "boar" with an "a"? My bad, guys.
254: Once upon a time even the HP sales people were all engineers or close, and could answer complicated technical questions. Everyone else said "Hewlett Packard" with a subtle voice shift towards reverence.
Now? 6th out of 9 for their laptop's reliability according to CU. Commodities.
"Wild boar" is the same species as our friend the domestic pig, and lives everywhere in the world. Warthog is a specific other species that lives in the savannahs of Africa.
Directionally correct. Wild boar is the same genus as the domestic pig, but different species. Warthog is the same family, different genus.
Warthog also tastes notably different from its porcine cousins. For example, warthog carpaccio is delicious, whereas raw pork is just gross.
"The domestic pig is most often treated as a subspecies of its wild ancestor, the wild boar, and in this case it is given the scientific name Sus scrofa domesticus.[2][not in citation given] Some taxonomists treat the domestic pig as a separate species, when it is called Sus domesticus, and wild boar is S. scrofa.[3][Full citation needed] "
275: This reminds me of the great death scene in Tampopo.
Well, sure. You have to do something to pass the time until a bear shows up.
My friend Johnny once wrote a submission for either the Bulwer-Lytton contest or the Lyttle Lytton: "After the funeral, I started going through grandpa's things, never expecting to find pictures of him fucking a bear, being fucked by a bear." It remains a travesty that he didn't win.
I know I want to learn the software, but I don't have any project of my own to push me to start. Mainly, I want to understand the kind of work that people who are doing historical GIS (not just historians) are doing. To really know what I'm doing, I'd have to take courses, I think, and I have other things to do that come first.
Yeah, I think you really would need to take at least one intro GIS course to really understand how it works. The learning curve is pretty steep, and figuring it out on your own would require a really substantial commitment of time and tolerance for frustration.
I don't know about historical map stuff specifically, but in general ArcGIS dominates the market to an extraordinary degree, so if you want to understand what most people in the field are doing that's probably the program to go with. There are various open-source and/or free alternatives, but they're not widely used. I downloaded Quantum GIS a little while ago to try to figure out how to use it and to do some GIS stuff at home (I have one of those one-year student ArcGIS things too, but one year seems too limiting), and while it's fairly similar to ArcGIS it's very clearly an open-source project and certain things have been so hard to figure out that I've mostly set it aside for now.
"Wild boar" is a European animal that is mostly not wild/farm raised for consumption in the US. But people in the US often refer to feral domestic pigs, which are not the same animal European wild boar, as "wild boar" which is a little confusing. "Hogzilla," which I believe we've discussed here, was a feral pig, not a wild boar.
Wild boar, European variant, is fucking delicious. I'm looking up online warthog meat resources right now.
I'm looking up online warthog meat resources right now.
The Interent Rules #231,497.
I'm looking up online warthog meat resources right now.
And I assume the Unfogged Women's Auxiliary are doing their part by googling fruits, nuts and tubers.
But confused. They look as if they're trying to nurse off a tree.
Hmmmm. Things are looking bad. Warthog meat imports seem to be banned into the USA (true for so much meat) and there is no domestic supplier I can find. Maybe I could buy up some (now) cheap land in the central valley and start a life as a warthog rancher.
It looks like even in South Africa there is no warthog ranching and the species is genuinely taken from the wild.
295: Because introducing exotic species never goes wrong.
297: Maybe they like to eat kudzu.
Opinionated Sterling Archer
Is Archer funny? I've seen a great many advertisements for it and often wondered.
299: Scrawny. Plus eating new world animals is deprecated as being insufficiently paleo. Or should be, anyway.
300: I find it fairly hilarious, although it took me a while to get into it.
My sample of the internet suggests that Javelina tastes terrible, and I've definitely never seen it on a menu.
Per Wiki, hunting had almost eliminated the true wild boar through much of its European range by 1930 or so, but there's been a very successful recovery.
Googling around, American wild boar are a mix of feral domestic pigs and imported wild boar, with extensive interbreeding. I'm not sure that anyone knows or cares how to be tell. My bet is that in the wild domestic pigs quickly revert to their earlier form, with the original traits proving superior to the traits bred in for the convenience of agriculturists. (In the same way, wild dogs revert to mutts and lose all the cutesy shit that domestic dogs have been saddled with.)
Google gives a ton of results for peccary ranching, but they're all pdfs or on jstor, so fuck a link. Anyway, sounds like that niche is full. Might try eating some though.
One forum-poster says his dog refused to eat any of a javelina he killed.
Plus eating new world animals is deprecated as being insufficiently paleo.
Clovis was as palaeo as you like. Upper palaeo, sure, but you shouldn't underestimate palaeo people. The Gravettians (I think) had ceramics, but then people forgot about them again.
Anyway, getting mastodons and giant sloths is problematic, so eat up your peccary or no dessert.
Feral pigs are very common all over the US. At my summer camp, we would have a nightly "boar feeding" where we'd put out the slop from dinner and the feral pigs would come in and eat it up. My guess is that the percentage of European boar in the US feral pig population is extremely low.
They stink on the hoof, due to scent glands. Shouldn't be a problem if dressed with care. I understand that indigenous people in Yucatan and places south eat them.
I was just thinking this morning that mastodon hunting video games would be neat, especially with platforms that respond to motion.
This deserves a teo-post. (There's javelinas in Big Bend, so I assume NM too.)
Wisconsin treats feral pigs as an unwanted invasive species harmful to the environment, which means that you can kill them any time, with no bag limit, if you have a small game license and the permission of the landowner.
Feral pigs, wild boar, free-range hogs, and wild bear are almost the only sources of trichinosis any more, so cook well. Commercial pork you can eat rare, it looks like, except that no one dares tell you that.
This deserves a teo-post. (There's javelinas in Big Bend, so I assume NM too.)
Probably in the southern part of the state, yeah, although I don't know any specifics and don't have much to say about them.
307 is right about Clovis, but that does sort of point to some of the conceptual issues with the whole paleo diet thing.
307.1: I'm looking at it from the perspective of time for the human digestion system to co-evolve with the food source, so I'll stick with the preceding 2.5 My. I wouldn't want to see the awesome intellectual rigor of the paleo movement compromised by such questionable choices.
And as luck would have it, 313 points more explicitly to the issues I was thinking of.
hunting had almost eliminated the true wild boar through much of its European range by 1930 or so, but there's been a very successful recovery.
One of my minor regrets in life is not taking up an invitation from the Bürgermeister of a little backwater town in Thuringia to join him for boar hunting. I told him that I unfortunately didn't have a German firearms license. He scoffed and said "With me, you don't need one." He invited my Milanese companion to come along as well, helpfully pointing out that boar are hunted by moonlight, and if we didn't see any boars, there were other things she and I could do in the Jagdsitz under the full moon.
Come to think of it, he was a little creepy in that regard. Maybe that's why I never followed up on the invitation.
other things she and I could do in the Jagdsitz under the full moon
Jagdsitzpinkel?
313 -- check out the awesomeness of this 13 year old badass who eats paleo and wears bacon socks and then tell me how much good "intellectual rigor" had done for the world, braniacs.
I think that the advent of cooking was a big deal for early hominids, though ther's not much direct evidence.
Still, the linked paper identifies a few known genes in addition to LCP, which is responsible for lactase persistence. The methods used to determine whether early cooks had increased fitness are necessarily pretty crude, currently limited by small human variation sample sizes and an absence of nonhuman early hominid genomes.
I once unfriended someone on Facebook because they were going crazy on paleo. It's like at some point critical mass was reached on food ideology, so that finally the eclectic rear guard , just for self defense, had to formulate their antipathy to food ideology as a new kind of food ideology.
318. Most people seem to think that. Cooked food is immensely more efficient. Neanderthals are presumed to have cooked, but they could in theory have learned it from something else in Africa. Otherwise the behaviour goes back to at least the LCA, which was a long time ago.
HP sounds a bit better than I thought, but still much worse than it used to be (I'm not surprised by that last part).
I once attended a party featuring a large stuffed boar (wild pig? dude called it a boar) that the host claimed to have killed with a spear in Alabama. I was skeptical of the claim, but I decline to air my skepticism, lest the host stop serving me free whiskey.
I had to read that a couple of times to make sure it wasn't a pun.
Back at 133: I'm so sorry.You're in the bay area, right? should there be a spontaneous, dashed-academic-dreams meetup at some point? I can't drink, but I can eat the bar olives and oily almonds. We could make origami creatures out of hated monographs.
Yes, I am--I'm in Bayview, the better to continue embodying the antagonist of Pulp's "Common People"--and I appreciate the sympathy. And sure; I believe this email address still forwards to me if you'd like to set something up. There was a semi-recent meetup, but it was across the bay, and I missed it, so it doesn't count twice over.
Everyone else said "Hewlett Packard" with a subtle voice shift towards reverence. Now? 6th out of 9 for their laptop's reliability according to CU. Commodities.
I was volunteering at a recent German-American business networking event at which the speaker kept using HP's shattered reputation as the setup for various hypotheticals: you should present yourself as someone who can solve this person's problem; ah, but how do you politely allude to the problem, when it's of such enormity? &c. 3/4th of the way through, she thought to check whether anyone in the audience was at HP, and someone was, but that person didn't even try to dispute the accuracy of the characterization. It was a little sad.
And damnit, I wish I'd gotten one of the $99 touchpads. Sigh.
Re: reliable laptops, you actually might want to look at used Thinkpads. Depends on how much you value build quality over processor speed, but if I were trying to put together something from ~500, I'd probably go with something like this, plus a small cheap SSD drive (though I don't know how big GIS stuff gets; maybe you need the space. But if, e.g., 40GB is big enough for whatever stuff you're working on at any given moment, the performance difference from HDD to SSD is huge).
I don't know how big GIS stuff gets; maybe you need the space. But if, e.g., 40GB is big enough for whatever stuff you're working on at any given moment, the performance difference from HDD to SSD is huge
For GIS it varies a lot depending on what sort of data you're working with and what you're doing with it. Datasets can get pretty huge. That said, performance is an important consideration too, and some operations can take a looong time if your system isn't up to it. It sounds like fa isn't really at the point where GIS is going to be driving his purchasing decisions, but if he intends to get into it in the future these are some things to consider.
I'm hesitant to go with used, craigslist laptops, though I guess I could use it as a chance to try out some digital forensics...
I have at least 100 GB of images (sometimes pdfs) of documents I've photographed/scanned/downloaded from databases (though that number will be smaller when I resize the enormous stuff) so SSD is out. A lot of my goal is really to use those as a test collection for digital preservation, ways of organizing personal research collections, image correction for legibility, and so on.* I should take up ttaM's offer of help on that stuff.
*This is another reason why I want to do the messing around on another machine - I don't want to accidentally screw up the "originals." I need that stuff.
I use the word "stuff" too much.
Well, if this is about testing things out, you don't need to work on it all at one time; no one image is anywhere near 40GB, I'm assuming--and if you bought a used computer + small SSD, you could use the original, larger harddrive as an external USB drive to keep the whole collection on. (And indeed, my sense of things is that if you're doing a lot of manipulation of huge images, having an SSD is *strongly* recommended, even if it means having to use two hard drives, the SSD as the "working" drive and the standard one for storage, simply because the faster loading times speeds up the workflow enormously. My ex-roommate, a photographer, *really* noticed a difference when working with Photoshop, for instance.)
But this is just the zeal of the convert speaking--my new computer has an SSD, and it really, really makes a difference.
I don't think any image I have that I'm using for research is more than about 10-12 MB, actually. Though some of the high-res maps/photos you can download are another story. But as much as I'd like to be able to take advantage of SSD, I think 40 GB is too limiting if I want to change my mind on how to use it. Although if the unthinkable happens and I get a real job by the end of the summer, I could up my computing budget. But I don't really want to end up with a personal collection of computers.
I still haven't ruled out a desktop, although I'm realizing that I'm not sure how to evaluate them, especially in comparison to laptops. I'm so used to laptop specs (and I still don't know that much about some of them).
Oh, and I've got a touchpad (it was a gift). There are a bunch of really nice things about it, but you have to have a highish tolerance for things crashing/working inconsistently/not being supported. If anyone works out an easy way to move to Android - and they're getting closer - I'll do it, even though I really like quite a bit of the webOS interface design (more than the iPad, in my limited experience).
