out-selling

friday and yesterday i put in a few hours' worth of work and made 100 smackaroos (if i understand the rate correctly).  pound out a python script, tweak it for a while, then plug the output into r, export a couple plots, and that's it.   get a few pats on the head for being half-competent at something that web folks don't really do.

and thusly beckons the hand of satan (i.e. the private sector).  could i leave academia?  leave the comforting research lab and the low expectations and de-emphasis on deliverables?  given the state of funding, the swollen market of biological phds, and the unlikelihood of positions in geographically favorable locations, one can't be too sanguine about science.

unremunerated

Discrimination denies small-scale female farmers the same access men have to fertilizer, seeds, credit, membership in cooperatives and unions, and technical assistance. That deters potential productivity gains. But the biggest barriers don’t even have to do with farming — and yet they have a huge impact on food security.

As sole or principal caregivers, women and girls often face a heavy burden of unremunerated household chores like cooking, cleaning, fetching water, collecting firewood and caring for the very young and the elderly. These uncompensated activities are equivalent to as much as 63 percent of gross domestic product in India and Tanzania. But they result in lost opportunities for women, who don’t have the time to attend classes, travel to markets to sell produce or do other activities to improve their economic prospects.

civilization, hot damn.

"The original Greek symposium was a meal at home where the host would provide food, conversation, and the occasional pole dancer. "
-G. Murphy Donovan, via Andrew Sullivan.

beautiful!  judging by the sidebar he's probably some neocon asshole, but quotes don't come any better than that. 

also it's now legal to smoke weed where i live.  so i did, because it was legal.  it had been a while.  and then i was useless for 6 hours, stayed up too late, and was useless for most of the next day because i was tired.  

and i was like "oh, yeah, that's why i stopped doing this."  
basically.

well, must get along and get my life in order.  ta-ta.

e-yess

been a while, huh?  you don't have to lie and say that you missed me.

so i just decided to bite the bullet and try to use this dang c++ contraption that i've heard so much about (after running across a big beautiful 3rd edition of "N– R–", on which one of the authors is the esteemed Dr. W. P., whom I'm pretty sure is the one I found on wikipedia who looks exactly like my forebears.  but that's neither here nor there).

thing is, it's apparently unstraightforward to work in c++ on spit and string, the way one can do with python or whatever.  fucking compilation...

so you need either the ms visual studio or xcode.  i'm on my pretty little air, so i'm using xcode.  to someone unused to it, xcode blows.  not a good way to learn this....

##update on cpp:
got xcode to work- a case of clicking on the wrong thing when there was no obvious way of knowing that there's a right thing.  in my opinion, a classic case of overdesigning a tool which then becomes the standard because people are afraid of doing things simply, over the command line. on that note, i soon learned that compiling from the command line is a snap with the g++ compiler:

(my stupid little program is fail.cpp, which takes input from the user and then insults them)


/Users/~/cpp_failures
==> g++ -o failure fail.cpp

/Users/~/cpp_failures
==> ./failure
write it, bitch: wicked
fuck you, wicked
this is C++ talking.


i do not anticipate using xcode again for cpp, unless i get into software development by some strange and unforeseeable twist of fate.  my needs simply aren't that complicated.

##

otherwise have been writing many papers.  also doing a journal club talk.  also preparing for committee meetings and general exams etc... oh and also c tells me that i need to repeat an experiment doublefast which i don't have seeds for... so it can make the paper go to nature, which will maybe piss off su?

so i'm feeling a little tense, is what you could say.

goldang leftist intellectual types

i make the mistake of subscribing to the blogs of a couple of liberal rags- n+1, NY rev. books, etc.  and then sometimes i commit the ultimate crime of actually reading the damn things.  gets one's hackles up, i tell you.

just finished a scathing little number in n+1 calling for the abolition of the prison system.  that's right- total abolition.  says that what we've effectively done is outsourced our crime into a system of contained 'hyperhells'- places where the concentration of ne'er-do-wells has overcome whatever threshold allows an equilibrium level of misery, and consequently functions as a positive feedback loop of all the worst things that can happen to people.

which is obviously true, as a simple observation.  apparently stalin still beats us in incarceration rate, but only just.  all the same, the modest proposal leads one to realize just how interested one is in one's own skin.  as a naturally bashful and timorous person, i have to say that the idea of sitting down at a bar next to some enormous peckerwood just let out of walla walla raises the hackles substantially.

but this is exactly the sentiment that gave us human rights violation central in america.  the desire for a sort of societal sterility- analogous to the pine-solification of the suburban home.  the urge of the bourgeois to purge the unbourgeois.

the difficulty i face here is that i am fantastically bourgeois- a sort of perfection of the form.  i'm really only comfortable on capitol hill in seattle, where i can live and work and read in peace, able to walk within my neighborhood to find fine coffees and foods available at premium prices.  the only problem here is that some of the hipster people (who are, let's face it, my tribe, so far as i have one) are just too damn flamboyant.  those jeans are impractically tight, that 80s ski jacket with the aqua/hot pink paneling is really quite garish and tacky.  throws off my equilibrium, you see- i suffer from neurasthenia, like so many of my generation...

(what a fantastic idea- get kate beaton to do "neurasthenia comix" on the poufy young men of the 19th/20th turn of the century!! a la thomas pynchon's obsession with them in against the day)

so who am i to support this?  someone with an overdeveloped sense of guilt and moral shame?  because, you see, this is exactly what i feel in these moments.  SHAME.  SCHADE.  GROSSENSCHADE.  i think that it would be fair to ascribe my entire moral sense to no actual code of ethics or behavior, but rather to the simple fact that the institutions which make my life easy make most people's lives hell.  that they are, in fact, designed to do so, because in this country, the people who make rules tend to look like me.  and, of course, i participate in these institutions.  rules are to be followed, i learned; make that one decision, and things become easy.  SHAME.

...

nueva computadora

yeah.  just read about how macintosh is now the largest company in the world or whatever, and how it's exploiting workers in china and stuff.  and, you know, steve jobs is a scumbag burning in the fires of hell etc.

but here i am on the macbook air.  chillin.  a sweet machine- all 11 inches of it.

got it set up to run what i need from it in about half a day- which is nice.  maybe i'm learning after all.

am now being antisocial in front of my family on christmas eve by playing with it.

what kind of a person am i anyways?

the pallas cat

last night i dealt with the weight of the world by getting drunk and looking up pictures of different cat species on wikipedia.  i have decided that the silliest is the pallas cat.  i don't have the motivation to link, just fucking look it up.  

the girl was writing a paper for grad school due at midnight.  this was at around 10.30 that i got seriously into this pursuit, and insisted that she look at pictures of caracals etc.  i got a pretty good reaction out of her for most of them.  i don't know what the paper looks like.  i don't think she was too invested in it.  

i technically have some sort of examination tomorrow.  i've decided that it's too late for me to really do much in the way of studying, and thus that i had best prepare my mind by listening to the smithsonian collection of appalachian folk music and venting about various things on my readerless blog.  

i want to feel my savior near

i want to die a-shouting

i want to live a christian year

till soul and body's parting

alternately:

to insist on facing the salt 

and it stings

and certainly, this changes things

compare and contrast.  discuss amongst yourselves.  look at cat pictures.