While Peeling Carrots

"Mommy!"

(Looking up from reading Latour's "Reassembling the Social") "Yes?"

"When we are finished making dinner, say Thank You, ok?"

"Ok. Can I say Thank You now?"

"No."

Playing Spore?

You know you are. We know you are. Look for us under the handle "DonGusano". If you friend us, our creatures will appear at random to be your mortal enemies, allies, and pets.

DG's are the ones with eyes in inappropriate places that he insists are NOT penis creatures. Mine are red and/or have too many legs.

Enjoy.

Full time work

A college is experimenting with no classes on Fridays. I'm all in favor, but let's be clear -- this isn't really a four-day work week, as the title implies. It just means that faculty and students work from home on Fridays (and, in the case of the former, probably weekends as well), saving on commuting costs, while the college saves on energy costs.

I'm in favor of less commuting and saving energy, and I think this is win-win situation. But I object to this being portrayed by the media as "less work" for college teachers. Even when I only teach two days a week, I work full time. Most of the work teachers do is not in the classroom.

This kind of coverage just adds to the idea that it's ok to pay teachers less, because they don't really work "full time."

Security Books

Teh N00b has never been into "lovies," stuffed animals, or other soft, cuddly things that are supposed to give infants comfort as they go to sleep. He has, for years (he's now a ripe old three years, after all) slept with books. Even before he could memorize and recite them (the stage he's at now), he would demand they stay in bed after we read them to him.. If we forgot, he would get out of bed to retrieve them. We always find him asleep, a book under his head, or on top of his head, or tucked under his arm, or under his body.

Geez, it's like he's the one writing the d*** dissertation.

Tonight I put him to bed, and it got quiet, so after reading 30 pages on neoliberalism I went up to recover the books and slip them back under his bed, like I do every night. I tip-toe in. It's dark, he's still -- "Tough Trucks" between his head and the pillow, "Dazzling Diggers" under his arm.

As I approach, I hear a little voice, quiet but insistent: "My books."

Ooops. Too soon.

So I sneak out with a chuckle. An hour later I go back. He's rolled over, face up with the book open to truck drivers beneath him. As lift his head to move the book, he startles and whines, "My books!" then immediately goes back to sleep when I put the book beside him.

I wonder when I'll have to break it to him that eventually you have to stop reading and start writing. I guess I'll wait until he's four.

Michel Callon and the Elliptical Machine

I've been reading Michel Callon recently -- he's a science studies guy, interested in exploring the systems created by both human and non-human actors. "Non-human actors" include things like machines, technology, and... elliptical machines?!

I mentioned before that I am becoming a proto-gym-rat. On my second day at the gym, I mistakenly pushed the "cardio" button. It was ok for a while. Me and the machine, human and non-human actors, me running, it pumping, lights flashing.

And then the resistance goes way up. I'm pushing down with all my feeble might, flabby leg muscles straining.

RESUME WORKOUT

"What?"

RESUME PEDALING

Dammit, I AM pedaling!

NO, SERIOUSLY, FEEL FREE TO START EXERCISING ANYTIME.

This is where I decided to exert my humanness and lower the resistance on the machine with the little electronic button, so that I could, in fact, bend to its dominating will. And after that the pedaling went very well, thank you.

Gym-Rat-in-training

I always hated gyms, so I never went. But a couple days ago I hit a low point with the dissertation. Really low. And I thought, screw this. I'm not happy with things the way they are, so something has to change -- and I don't mean the font on this d*** thing. I need my life to recenter itself.

So, DG dragged me to a gym.

And I got on the elliptical machine.

And I liked it.

Flashback to college -- my roommate (hi there!) would go to gyms and talk about her amazing feats of stairmaster-ly endurance. Of course, she looked (and looks -- nothing has changed) a lot better than me because of that.

Now, I'm not competing with her -- we're talking 20 minutes at a time; it's hardly military-training type stuff I'm doing here. And I don't really care about changing my appearance -- although that would be ok. But seriously, I felt better all day. I even wrote more. It was amazing.

So, maybe I'll become a gym rat after all.

Anthropology vs. Life in General

Saw this on my way to teach an Anthropology class. "Study Anthropology as it happens." In Starbucks.

Now, I don't have a problem with ethnographies of coffee shops (in fact, I encourage them). But I've noticed a real confusion among non-academics about what anthropology is. It is not whatever people happen to do. That is merely the starting point of anthropological research.

Anthropology is about creating knowledge in a -- literally -- disciplined way. That means participating, observing, writing fieldnotes, doing interviews, transcribing tapes, extensively coding data, and finally writing documents that generally only other anthropologists read, mainly because they want to see whether you've read what they themselves wrote.

I assume this process is not what Starbucks is inviting us to see over a tall half-caf caramel latte. It would be boring to watch anyway. They are inviting us to people watch -- fun, but not the same thing as anthropology.

The Philosophy of (No) Money

Teh n00b told me the other day that he was doing "Simmel-saults." I had to restrain myself from telling him that was what my dissertation was about, too.

Tell us some real news, Chicago Tribune!

Ah, more newspaper "human interest" stories... they make so much more sense when juxtaposed...

Front page news: Rich, white, gifted Evanston teen gets into Harvard despite the great hardship of having parents who are wealthy enough to be able to homeschool, send her to Ireland to learn the Irish Harp, to Tibet to study Buddhism, and to Greece to learn philosophy.

Excuse me, but the fact that privileged (in both the economic and the intellectual sense) white kids get into Harvard is not news, people. And certainly not front-page news.

Meanwhile, the Trib puts this in the Metro section: Englewood African-American teen murdered at a drug- and alcohol-free party, apparently in front of a police officer while defending his younger brother.

Speaks for itself.

Corporate Universities and the Unsung Graduate Student Hero

We've been talking here about our incredibly underpaid forays into academic teaching (see the comments). Turns out being an underpaid graduate student is not, in fact, a necessary stepping-stone to a tenure track job. That's just a fantasy that "the university" (and I mean this in the generic, not as a commentary on my own institution) perpetuates to maintain an underpaid labor pool of graduate student and adjunct teachers. These are the people who not only teach "our" college kids, but maintain the university as a profitable institution so that money can be poured into administrator salaries and competitive college sports teams.

Marc Bousquet's new book, "How the University Works," is a depressing read for those of us already trapped in this cycle, and a clear warning to those thinking of entering it. You can read the introduction online. If you are thinking of going to graduate school, you should read this book, then run for the hills.

The Sad, Sad Face of an Academic Game Addict: Traveler IQ Challenge, reviewed

I don't play computer games. Why? They are addictive. Correction: I would be an addict. So I made a promise to myself in college (when I saw my buddies slipping in classes due to computer games) that I would stick to paper-and-pencil gaming.

But a map quiz isn't a game, right? Right?!

The TripAdvisor "Traveler IQ Challenge" on Facebook is totally addictive. For me. Which is sad. But since it is obvious I'm never going to be great at this game (although I AM in the top 400 for the quiz of my own regional specialty, thank you very much!) I will take the academic way out.

I will critique it.

Stop laughing.

The game is based on a standard projection world map. Names of places are flashed at the top of the screen, and you are timed on how fast and how close you can click to the location. Points are awarded and you get a score. You have to score a minimum on each level to continue to the next.

There are some obvious critiques for this game, no doubt made elsewhere. The map is too small, which means that Belize is barely visible and Easter Island doesn't appear at all. Locations have to be given a single point, which means large features like Lake Titicaca are marked for scoring purposes with a single point. There's no credit for knowing that Easter Island is in the Pacific far west of Chile, or knowing merely that a city is somewhere in China -- scoring is all based on distance and time.

My deeper critique has to do with the use of the standard projection map. Sure, it's the one we all grew up with. It's the one we consulted to learn where Timbuktu actually was and such. But it is an inherently skewed vision of the world, where the equator is 2/3 of the way down the page, Greenland is disproportionately huge, and the southern hemisphere is unnaturally condensed.

When I worked in Central America I was introduced to the Peter's Projection Map, which corrects these problems. It has been criticized -- what hasn't? -- but it sure does make the world look very different. My colleague told me he liked it better because his nation looked bigger. It does, but so does everything in the south. As it should. Africa is huge.

What does this mean for my addictive map quiz? Because you are judged on how "far" you click from the actual location -- in terms of miles in real space -- mistakes made in the southern hemisphere (where there are more miles per pixel) are punished disproportionately. This does mean that to do well in this game you need to know where Swaziland and Montevideo actually are; you can't guess as well as you can with locations in Macedonia, which barely covers more than a couple of pixels anyway.

Nevertheless, one's attempts look more accurate in the southern hemisphere because the distance on the screen is far less. Perhaps there is a hidden irony here -- we North Atlantic types usually think we mostly understand the rest of the world until it comes back to bite us in the ass.

Now if you'll excuse me... I have a top score to beat.

Non-refundable education

Imagine the scenario: You buy tickets to see the orchestra. They're playing at 7pm. But, you know, you have to do laundry. Or your roommate invited you to play World of Warcraft. Or you needed to go see some other show you also had tickets to at 7pm. Or you were sleeping.

So obviously, the logical thing to do is email the conductor and ask if they can't play again, just for you, at 8:30pm instead because you are so, so sorry but you really don't want to miss anything.

While it might never cross my students' minds to do such a thing to an orchestra conductor, they seem to think that this is a completely reasonable request of a college professor.

Kids, it's a performance. An expensive, expensive performance, if you do the math (not that I see much of that phat loot). You cannot just email me after you've skipped class and ask me to meet with you privately to "go over what you missed."

If you miss my show, you miss it. Get a review from someone who bothered to attend.

The Mortality of Quasi-Objects

Green Elvis

This made my day. Don't you recycle my blue suede shoes! And thanks to the fellow student who left this poster in our broom closet... I mean, office.

Open Letter from a Graduate Student

I think most graduate student complaints can be summed up by this bit of library graffiti:


I hear you, friends. I hear you. Or rather, I don't because you are all too busy writing your dissertations. Escape the library! Tell Francis you love him already!!