Bleak outlook for academic postdocs

This article in Nature offers a bleak outlook for science postdocs.

The problem is the aggregation of individual human actions. If the system as a whole could change (as per the US National Academies' recommendation, or the article's call for synchronized, systemic global change), then the problem would be easily fixed. Of course! Simplify away all the complexities, and a theoretical approach can surely offer many solutions [she says, tongue-in-cheek].

In the absence of unanimous, organized global overhaul of the scientific research system, what to do? I take the retrospective of Dr. Thuault-Restituito seriously. I have come to a similar conclusion, luckily much earlier in "the pipeline." I am lucky to have the luxury of choice --- if the system is not treating me nicely, I can take my training and education and leave. I can contribute, and find stable, productive, interesting employment elsewhere. I am mentally and personally flexible. I can switch universities, or countries. I can leave academia. If everyone had such freedom (and stubborn self-respect), then again we would find ourselves in a simplified system where decade-long underpaid, precariously-renewed postdocs are eliminated, for lack of a population willing to subjugate themselves to such treatment.

Aside from solving my own (local) problem by simply refusing to participate, I feel some social obligation to contribute to improving the complicated system as a whole. I'm just not sure how to do that from my current position (or indeed from any position whatsoever, even as director of an entire government's science funding agency).

As with all things in science, we continue to fumble towards* understanding and improvement.

This post's theme word is lebensraum, "space required for living, growth, and development." Some postdocs are academic bonsai, continually pruned and hemmed-in, prevented from obtaining the lebensraum needed to progress professionally.

*my least-favorite preposition to see in any scientific context, esp. when accompanied by "understanding"!

Don Pasquale

Modern technology is a delight --- yesterday I watched the Zurich Opera's live performance of Don Pasquale. No passport, flight, train, or international travel required: I got to watch from here, where it was broadcast live in a fancy theater. (The crowd was even more homogeneous than usual: mostly gray- and white-haired. Whereas in the nosebleed seats where I dwell at the opera house, I have some coeval audience peers.)

The opera was a delight, too. Zero deaths! It featured many of the little flourishes that make opera buffo such a pleasure: eavesdropping servants in the corners of the stage, silly staging (trigger warning: teddy bear dismemberment and beheading), hiding in shrubberies to sneak to a midnight tryst. Pulling faces behind the patsy's back. The traditional cross-dressing was replaced by one woman pretending to be another woman, each with dramatically different personalities, wardrobe choices, and vocal flourishes. It ended with a wedding, of course, and a big chorus number. The incredible Aspetta, aspetta, cara sposina got cheered back onstage for a reprise before the opera proceeded to the next scene.

The set was a single, large rectangular building which rotated (silently! to not interfere with the ongoing music, even at pianissimo): recto, the titular character's house interior; verso, exterior. Various partial rotations were used for different exterior scenes, with cunning delivery of verdure and lawn furniture, as necessary. The rotating set was briefly used to break the fourth wall during the final scene, but otherwise not as fully, hypnotically used as the incredible set of this production of The Barber of Seville.

If I were in a student setting where an essay, of some literary and scholarly merit, were required of me (a hypothetical to which my brain is predisposed), my thesis would certainly concern the rotating set and the fourth wall. Characters occasionally made asides to the audience (whether in the libretto or at the director's choice), and the fact that the patsy Don Pasquale's house, as well as his interior monologue, intentions, and general mental and physical state, are entirely open to observation, criticism, and judgement --- not only from Ernesto and Norina, but also from the doctor, the servants, and of course the audience itself --- certainly lends itself to the kind of overreading and overwrought analysis in which I delight and (uselessly) excel. Further supporting this approach: the entire opera is staged to open with two characters literally unfurling the wings (walls) of the residence, unrolling them to reveal Don Pasquale's home (and personal state). Plus of course the staging, where certain colors, statues, teddy bears, clothing, and furniture are used as shorthand for his general mental state.

Basically, it's the same hypothesis and academic paper I always write: how form and structure, predict, shape, inform, etc. (your favorite and most pretentious verbs here!) meaning by controlling how, and in what ways, the audience interacts and engages with content.

Meta-essay. My brain always defaults to one level up the hierarchy; I am always in meta-mode. (Simply making this observation has bumped me even one step higher, to meta-meta-mode, which exceeds my late Friday afternoon brain sugar capacity for processing; plus the preceding phrase bounces me one level up the hierarchy, and this observation bounces me again, and again, and again..)


This post's theme word is iatrogenesis (n) or iatrogenic (adj), "an adverse effect resulting from medical advice." Don Pasquale's iatrogenic marital problems are neatly resolved by the end of Act III.

Phantom sock

A bland, mildly amusing, G-rated personal anecdote follows, ideally suited to a vanity blog like this one.

Several weeks ago, I lost a sock somewhere in my tiny apartment. Impossibly. I searched everywhere and couldn't find it. "Everywhere" includes moving all the furniture around to look underneath and behind; sorting through all clean and dirty laundry, unpacking and repacking all shelves. Checking jacket pockets. Rolling up the carpet to look underneath.

No sock was to be found.

No one entered or left the apartment during the period the sock was lost. My initial hypothesis was that the sock-stealing elves, frustrated by my laundromat vigilance, had made a risky foray up to my apartment for their denied booty (James Bond-style, scaling the building with suction cups).

Then tonight I found the second sock while shifting my wet laundry into the dryer. My modified hypothesis is that the sock got staticked and rolled up inside some other laundry. I was happy to be reunited with my prodigal sock, and I consigned it to the dryer secure in the knowledge that this sock would soon be cosy, dry, and reunited with its partner.

This sock is a renegade.

I have now folded, and re-folded, all of the laundry. The Prodigal Sock has not returned. It's not stuck to something. It's not still in the laundromat. It baulked at the prospect of reunion, and has made itself even scarcer than before.

Oh where, oh where could my sock have gone? Oh where, oh where could it be?

Further updates as the situation unfolds. (Hopefully the laundry won't. I've folded it twice now.)


This post's theme word is tmesis, "stuffing a word into the middle of another word." I un-fucking-believably lost the wily sock again.

Infinite Jest

Phew and egads! I finished rereading Infinite Jest. Relief is accompanied by psychic emptiness, a hollow longing to experience the entire thing again.

... the novel is about many things: fathers and sons; mothers and sons; addiction; communication; entertainment; politics; greatness, mediocrity and failure. It’s a coming of age story alongside a recovery story that is also possibly a love story, all wrapped in a cloak-and-dagger-ish mystery about international realignment and terrorism. Choose your favorite combination and go with it. The book is about a lot of things. -- Mike at Fiction Advocate

The hardest part, psychologically, emotionally, was reading the extremely violent scenes. The Antitoi brothers' deaths, Gately's shooting, the Mt. Dilaudid scene: these are described in straightforward words, treated with the same flat descriptive affect as the extended discussions of drug withdrawal, depression, and early-morning tennis practice. And this consistent authorial treatment is painful to read, because it creates the associative comparison that, for example, being depressed is just as psychically painful as suffering bullets, stabbings, blood loss, head trauma, etc. Reading the violence was unpleasant, not because the violence itself was distasteful or grim or extreme (although those things are true), but because it made so many other things, which had seemed vaguely painful at a clinical remove, become retrospectively intensely painful and excruciating.

Ow.

I understand that this was the a purpose of the book. The reading experience now is colored by DFW's suicide; descriptions of suicidal and anxious, trapped-in-your-own-head scenes are particularly pointed and affecting. When I read:

What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. ... everything unendurable was in the head, ... (p. 1055)

or

If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell. Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. It is a hell for one. (p. 859)

... then my heart aches, and I am sympathetic and sorrowful that such pain can exist, and can have hurt someone who could so beautifully express the isolating pain in a way which is anti-isolating, which is relatable and unifies the human experience. Yet the words themselves, and expressing them by such clear and enlightening means, can worsen the problem:

Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express can really invoke. This can be tricky. (p. 226)

The novel balances on this edge, not by a sustained series of tiny nudges, but by massive swoops to either side: extreme fear, personality-obliterating anxiety, emotions invoked and clinically discussed and manipulated, each in turn. Rote cliches repeated until they gain meaning, lose it, and eventually become both antaclastically significant and a series of meaningless phonemes.

One overarching goal, or conclusion, or hypothesis of the novel has stood out to me in a few places, on different rereads. It is the conclusive-sounding, earnest, non-ironic idea that we need to give ourselves away.

American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret. (p. 74)

This is echoed later, with links that grab many of the other threads of the novel.

It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately---the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. (p. 1102)

Certainly the drug-addiction plots, the tennis-academy plots, the terrorist-plotting plots, the militant grammarians, the film studies, the weird undercover assignments, the personal vendettas --- they all fall under this neat summary: the characters care deeply, dedicate their lives to giving their lives away. Although many of them phrase it as an escape rather than a gift; they all seem to be trying to flee some personal fear by this selfless giving-away of themselves.

It seems that Infinite Jest is fractally interesting. Every closer examination reveals another lurking meaning. I have the sense that each individual sentence could be deconstructed in this way, fruitfully although perhaps meaninglessly: the book holds together so well, it seems unlikely that its individually analyzed components would be as effective at achieving its goals. And in any case, I've written a dissertation already, and have no interest in sinking my time into this recondite time-sponge, especially since it will likely reduce my own enjoyment of the novel. In the end, I let the book describe my feelings about it:

This should not be rendered in exposition like this... (p. 113)

... so, what about rendering it in Legos?


This post's theme word is cathexis, "the concentration of mental energy on one particular person, idea, or object (especially to an unhealthy degree)." Infinite Jest uses the word "cathexis" effectively, as well as embodying in several different ways the never-ending loop of self-reflexive cathexis-spurred paralysis.

March retroblogging

I have been working down my stack* of draft blog posts, motivated mostly by the chore of emptying my full camera memory card. So it may surprise you, reader, to find that there is now posted content which, if dates and timestamps are to be believed, you have neglected for months!

You may have missed:

• Seine view
• Lattice
• Odd buildings
• Maximum rate of bagels/person/day
• A London evening
• The Fire Monument
• Australian laundry

This post's theme word is recrudescence (n), "a renewed activity after a period of dormancy." I hope this month's recrudescence compensates for past negligence.





*actual data structure unknown but some unholy union of stack, queue, heap, and random-shuffle-with-random-deletion.

Cross-cultural Easter candy landscape

Yet another cultural difference for the records.

I associate Easter with pastel-colored candies (like the iconic Peeps and mini-eggs), Cadbury creme eggs, and whole, solid-chocolate rabbits. Plus seasonal changes, religious mutterings, gradual warming, school holidays, snow melting, and ritually hiding tiny chocolate eggs in challenging locations (sometimes locating last year's outstandingly-secreted eggs at the same time).

The season is already quite warm here; rather, it never got cold enough to trigger my winter-detector. Early flowers have been blooming. The clever French staggered-national-school-break schedule means that my part of the "Easter" vacation is not proximate to the calendar date. (This is done so that "every family gets to take a skiing holiday", avoiding overcrowding schedule conflicts, I am told.)

The big difference --- from my perspective --- is the candy landscape. The various pastel-colored sugar atrocities deeply ingrained by my childhood are not available; the import supermarkets have creme eggs only.

Instead, the French* prefer elaborately crafted chocolate figures. Packaging is pastel-colored, but the edible itself seems to be mostly chocolate (albeit, often white "chocolate" which has been colored). These ornate figures are then whimsically arrayed.

Bunnies figure heavily, as do eggs. But also cats, fish, chickens and roosters (separately; chickens often roosting on an entirely-chocolate nest which itself contains chocolate eggs), pigs, and assorted other childhoodish livestock. (See above: cow, duck, etc.)

 Most unexpectedly, there is a resurgence in giant pyramids and transparent plastic bricks packed with Ferrero Rocher (overflowing its usual calendar-containment zone near Christmas).


This post's theme word is eidos, "the formal sum of a culture, its intellectual character, ideas, etc." The chocolate chicken is no French eidos, but in provides an interesting glimpse into celebratory childhood comestibles.

*or at least, Parisian; or at least, Parisian on-display-near-my-work-and-home-and-throughout-the-metro-area [standord blogging anecdata generalization disclaimer here]

Psychological bloodletting and endnote 24

I am crazy about David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Obsessive, even. And although it is encyclopedic, with extended scenes from different time periods imbricated (which juxtaposition serves narrative/explanatory purposes as often as it serves arbitrary/obfuscatory purposes), and contains a scene* beyond which I always decide that I am addicted to reading the book (in the terminology and categorization provided by the book itself!), I keep returning to it. As a mental palate-cleanser. It is not bland or neutral, but rather, it forcibly pushes the mental "aftertaste" of other reading from my mind, through its sheer volume, verbosity, and compelling structure. The challenges of the book (and esp. of interpreting the book, something it begs and also impedes) are the enduring attraction.

Timestamped annotations left from earlier readings indicate that I reread Infinite Jest once a year, very consistently in March. I have no hypothesis to explain this. Habit?

Reading the book is relaxing. It is massively complicated, a twisted anti-chronological structure with endnotes, and sub-endnotes, and sub-cross-endnotes forming a tangle of contextual connections and free-wheeling dissociations, interchangeably and with little warning. Everyone in the book is tense and anxious, balancing carefully their internal monologue with their external appearance. I find that this creates a calming reading experience. It is psychological bloodletting --- it draws out all anxieties and tops them with such extremity that they seem minuscule and paltry in comparison.  (Some rereaders have the diametrically opposite theory.)

Endnote 24 occurs only 7% of the way into this gigantic tome. It is easily my favorite part, though far from a climax or even a narratively important fact. It's not even a scene; it is simply an annotated filmography. The subversion of such a formulaic, structured text adds to its humor. The entire lengthy endnote is a wry grin, an extended wink, a game of authorial self-one-upsmanship which makes me laugh out loud. I love the academic-ese writing, forced to describe academia-subverting nonsense.

This time around, I started taking notes, then abandoned the project as too large and a probable duplication of earlier fan work. So I turned to the internet to find a chronological version of the story. And to find out what happened, although a lot of that seems to be hypotheses from close-reading fans.

If my twisted sentences and phrases above have not given it away, and their very content has not given it away, let me make it clear: I have been reading Infinite Jest for the past several weeks, and it permeates my idle thoughts.

Hooray!


This post's theme word is otiose, "serving no practical purpose." The novel is lengthy and abstruse, but far from otiose. Unlike this otiosest blog post.


*the Canuck/Lenz showdown, whose radical violence and dissociation spurs me to read faster, faster, through everything that follows. Perhaps to overwrite in my mind the violence, or perhaps because I am impatient to see that the heroes survive and cope with the physical and psychological and logistical fallout.

The inspirational cat?

A local artist paints many portraits of cats. The storefront window is full of these paintings, and one extremely lifelike statue that I stopped to watch for a moment. Then it moved!

Perhaps this cat provides the inspiration for the others?

Or maybe he just stopped by to spend some time with buddies.

This post's theme word is limn, "to portray in words," or "to draw or paint, especially in outline." I cannot accurately limn my surprise at the sudden motion of one cat among many.

Rationally changing one's own behavior; or, withholding judgment

Context

I have been slowly reading my way through the thoughtful series How To Actually Change Your Mind, which describes itself as "a sequence on the ultra-high-level penultimate technique of rationality". I recommend it as interesting and clearly written (plus in small, digestible chunks which gradually accumulate in the corners of your mind to build a central thesis). I encourage you to sample the text, although I don't necessarily endorse every opinion expounded therein.

Content

This advice on rationality reflects my own behavior.

Since ~12 or so I have observed myself gradually become a quieter person. It's an interesting development to watch in the first person. Yes, I am aware of the weirdness of separating my own behavior from the self which is observing said behavior. And yet. Here I am, typing, and you unseen-yet-anticipated audience are reading. Shall we continue?

Through no conscious campaign of my own, I have been gradually converging on the same approach advocated by the rationalist "How To Actually Change Your Mind" program. Namely, to quietly observe and hold off loudly expressing prefabricated thoughts or proposing solutions.

Historical progression

At first, in middle- and then high-school and college, I thought I was choosing to be quieter in social situations because of a reluctance to be judged until I had observed my observers. I wanted to have the benefit of informational power (imbalance), as it were --- basically everything I do and think eventually works its way around to being expressed as information and privacy, so: I wanted to observe and judge others without actually revealing much about myself. I'm fine with being judged; I just want to get the measure of my judges before I am subjected to their judgment.

Social acceptability

And this makes a certain amount of sense. Plus it is more socially acceptable to be a little quiet, and otherwise pleasant and smiling, than to walk around with a videocamera and a field notebook and obviously take indelible records of transient social interactions for later perusal and processing. So as long as my observation is discreet and entirely in my own mind, it seems socially acceptable. (Now you have an inkling of one of the many sub-processes that is always running in my background; but this is so abstract that I think it unlikely your interactions with me will be affected.)

Crux

But it's not as if I have become a shy or retiring person. I am still able to carry on high-volume conversations and hold my own in, say, a loud bar or a party of Americans. The change is probably most perceptible to me, and as an internal process, and entirely the opposite of the judgment I suggested above.

Here is what it is: I don't judge, I just watch.

I've noticed this tendency more abroad, of course, where I am consciously aware of the possibility of cultural differences leading to weirdly-crossed social expectations. So I probably watch more on this continent than I would on my home continent. But unlike many, many expats' accounts, my ongoing first-person narrative doesn't have much judgment. I see something strange, I try to  figure out why it seems strange and what is happening. Often I learn a new vocabulary word or idiom. And that's it. I move along, things don't bother me or irritate me, I am my own calm little center, I am a zen master. Well, mistress. Rather than accumulating a series of judgments or stereotypes, I am building a library of actual observations; when I am called on for a generalization, I can go right to the observations without the added-rounding error of trying to generalize from judgments with all sorts of extenuating factors hidden.

And I quietly and with a snicker of self-awareness congratulate myself on implementing one step of the carefully-considered rationalist's paradigm without any specific outside guidance. I'm in a fairly content and self-satisfied and cheerful place in life. Whence I blog.

Huzzah!


This post's theme word is a tie between expostulate, "to reason earnestly with someone in order to dissuade" and tergiversate, "to change repeatedly one's attitude; equivocate." I recommend their combined usage in silly poems. I wanted to expostulate, to press you to tergiversate; so long did we prolong debate, that hours have passed and it is late.

Pi day

Happy π day!*

Adapting to my locale, I used mirabelles (illegal to import to the US!) and a toaster oven to celebrate. The severe limitations of my micro-kitchen and single pie dish mean that I was limited to one celebratory dessert, and not the usual half-dozen-plus-board-game-party.

Happy dessert! Celebrated on nerd forums everywhere. You may also be interested in these resources: (1) Sad that pi day is over? (2) Rant against pi day: Vi day.


This post's theme word is diktat, "an order or decree imposed without popular consent or upon a defeated party." The Gregorian calendar's vagaries of calculation and representation compel the diktat: pi day occurs on a bleak, cold day in March, when pie fruit is least available in the northern hemisphere.

*It is π day for places that write the date US-style: month/day/year. For European-style dates (day/month/year), π day either doesn't exist or will take place the 3rd of February, next year (which, after all, will be the 14th month of 2015, in a manner of reckoning). I also like Vi Hart's "Engineer's Pi Day" on 3/14/16... see you next year!