The end of February marked five full years of blogging for me. And did anyone send me a cake? No, they did not.
After a half-decade, I can slack off a bit while I finish the book. But here are some other goodies to keep you entertained on the internets:
A few months ago, friend-of-the-blog George Musser from Scientific American visited us here in LA, and had some fascinating stories about the process of equipping his house with solar power. We were like: dude, that is totally bloggable. And so it is! George is telling his tale in a series of posts at the SciAm 60 Second Science site.
Malcolm MacIver, a versatile engineer/philosopher/neuroscientist at Northwestern University, also flew out to LA a short while back to help the Science and Entertainment Exchange with a consultation for the upcoming sequel to TRON. He is now blogging about the experience at Northwestern’s Science in Society blog: here, here, here.
The 2008 edition of The Open Laboratory, collecting science blog posts from around the web, is now on sale. Thanks to Bora Zivkovic and Jennifer Rohm for doing the heavy lifting.
As always, use these threads to pimp out other things people should be reading.
The cake is a lie anyway
Since you’ve invited us to open the discussion, how about talking about this recent New York Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/07/arts/07grad.html?_r=1&em
The article talks about humanities PhDs in particular, but I think the conclusions could be generalized to include the sciences (especially the theoretical sciences). Is the old model of “apprentice scholars” dead? (I think so–the professoriate shouldn’t be training new apprentices if there aren’t suitable careers available within the practice, i.e within academia).
Jeff, that’s not the way the game is played. More post-docs (most of whom, almost by definition, won’t find permanent jobs in their chosen profession) means more papers with your name on them etc. etc. etc. The universe would certainly collapse if uni professors showed any morality about their over production of replacements.
Loved the quote in the article you referenced: ““If you cannot find a tenure-track position, your university will no longer court you; it will pretend you do not exist and will act as if your unemployability is entirely your fault.” Yep, bad for the rep so it must be your fault because if you were REALLY smart, productive, accomplished…………
I guess the bloggers on this site aren’t interested in questioning the academic system from which they have benefited.