yetiinabox

pvonhellermannn, 5 months ago to random

Half thinking of starting an #AcademicVenting hashtag here, about the dire, dire state of UK (global?) higher education. Sharing nuggets of senior management decisions, neoliberal language, and overall slow collapse.

Won’t work of course because most of us can’t risk honesty, but honestly: the everyday reality of what is happening deserves recording in all its depressing and damning detail. #Universities #AcademicChatter #neoliberalism

yetiinabox, 8 months ago to random

One child came back from school with a copy of the dreadful Shirley Jackson story "The Lottery" in hand. Along with Lord of the Flies it's a chunk of Cold War libertarian propaganda - so I promptly handed them a copy of Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas". I don't know if Le Guin actually intended her story as a point-by-point refutation of "The Lottery" but it does a magnificent job of exposing the underlying ideology and challenging it, right down to the question of what is acceptable in literature for 12 year olds - "Omelas" overtly discusses sex and drugs, with gentle humour, and condemns violence, while "The Lottery" features prudes who practice ritual murder.
If anyone here is teaching "The Lottery" or has a child for whom it is prescribed reading, I heartily suggest Le Guin's antidote to cultural poisoning.

yetiinabox, 11 months ago to random

Is there any digital data storage hardware and associated encoding that has an intended archival life of at least 1000 years without electricity?

I know it's an old question, but given that paper or palm leaf manuscripts last that long, is there any standard out there which would support civilizational timescales?

No bonus points for guessing why I'm wondering about this.

#hardware #archive #collapse

yetiinabox, 11 months ago to random

Aaaaargh. I wish all webpages came with timestamps. Working out the "now" of breathlessly enthusiastic, but obviously out-of-date, pages for vanished NGOs is needless detective work.

yetiinabox, 6 months ago to random

Unsurprisingly, Science published an attack on academic unions. It portrays successful struggles to improve pay and conditions for PhD and postdocs as anti-individualist (!) and an attack on innocent research group leaders.

https://www.science.org/content/article/student-and-postdoc-unions-proliferate-academia-scrambling-adapt

Among other gems:

'Individual faculty members, who support grad student researchers and postdocs out of their own grants, are having to take a careful look at their budgets as well. “Every lab is in many ways its own little microbusiness,” says Lisa García Bedolla, vice provost for graduate studies and dean of the graduate division at UC Berkeley. '

and

'“less research is going to be produced per dollar of [grant] money,” Nestler says. "This is the way the … research enterprise will have to change.”'

yetiinabox, 1 year ago to random

Vincent Ialenti studied Finnish scientists modelling nuclear waste safety in the distant future. He describes how they learned to cultivate an imperfect awareness of deep time.

He is a cultural anthropologist, now working with Stewart Brand's Long Now Foundation.

https://longnow.org/ideas/02022/06/01/deep-time-underground/

glynmoody, 11 days ago to random

How faith drives bidder for Telegraph who wields growing influence on Tories - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/may/14/paul-marshall-religion-bidder-for-telegraph-influence-tories strange how these so-called christians have no problem promoting a message based almost entirely on hatred; not sure that jesus bloke would have agreed...

yetiinabox, 1 month ago to Scotland

Local question for #Scotland - in the past two months I've seen the wooden handles come off two valued hand-tools, a left-handed Japanese hand-hoe and an old weeding fork. Is there anyone about who could fit new handles to old steel hand-tools? I don't have even the rudiments of the skills needed to turn new hardwood handles and fit them.

yetiinabox, 10 months ago to random

The Verity House agreement is a much bigger deal than it might seem at first. Westminster has effectively exploited the political divisions among the local councils to prevent local government and Scottish government from working together for the benefit of Scottish people. That just got called out. The various layers of government in Scotland now have their own formal partnership.

https://www.thenational.scot/news/23626140.humza-yousaf-signs-deal-councils-bid-reset-relationship/

yetiinabox, 10 months ago to random

Dang, folks. An intelligent, wide-ranging conversation about #hope. Thank you.

@pvonhellermannn @susankayequinn @breadandcircuses @kategenevieve
@NatureMC

Now a question: in the stronger sense of virtue, as in virtues around which one can build a virtue ethic - is hope a virtue? Has Lear's Radical Hope already been mentioned?

yetiinabox, 8 months ago to random

@jon and other border-crossers - what's the present situation for taking a folding bike on EuroStar? Bag it? I'm going from #Aberdeen to #Bielefeld by rail next week for a conference and would like to bring the Tern.

#CrossBorderRail
#foldingBike

yetiinabox, 7 months ago to random

which IPCC pathway had "massive emissions from multiple wars, IPCC process captured by petrostates, nonstate and state actors all act without regard for common good."?

yetiinabox, 3 months ago to random

This morning, I will meet a friend at a cafe near the intersections of

• Western Way
• Pathology Way
• Chapel Lane

and I cannot help but think that this will be a good place to analyse the triple environmental crises in terms of the obsessive and malignant individualism of Euro-American colonial societies.

yetiinabox, 3 months ago to random

Having shifted half a tonne of topsoil yesterday, the dog and I went out to see the garden this frosty morning. There was an unusual two-note call in the air, and after a moment, three curlews flew overhead, whistling.

Then we played with a squeaky ball.

#notAtAllSilentSunday #silentsunday #hashtagfail

yetiinabox, 2 months ago to random

Dancing your PhD winning entry. Just wonderful. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/27/kangaroo-time-anu-scientist-global-science-prize-aaas-dance-your-phd-competition

yetiinabox, 1 month ago to random

As someone who ran the only other #ethnobotany programme in the UK (Aberdeen, which was closed more than 10 years ago), and who taught #ethnobiology at the Edinburgh Botanics for many years, I believe I am qualified to say that the closure of ethnobotany, ethnobiology, and anthropology at Kent is appalling cultural vandalism.

Dark times are upon us, and the custodians of the lineages of wisdom must be careful now.

@pvonhellermannn

yetiinabox, 26 days ago to Scotland

Hey ho. If anyone happens to have a connection to channels through which folks might organise collectively to resist imminent deport-to-Rwanda raids on asylum seekers across Scotland, or indeed elsewhere in the UK, that might be useful information to post.

#Scotland #NewScots #solidarity

yetiinabox, 18 days ago to medical

Tomasz Poprawka: « la recherche est aujourd’hui l’un des piliers politiques essentiels de l’Union européenne ».

Usually science administrators prefer to hide behind a Popperian curtain of political neutrality - even where actual scientists <@ScientistRebellion > get arrested - but the actual disconnect between the scientific consensus and the miasma exhaled by certain political agendas is now so obvious that even the conservative academies of science are accepting that they are, indeed, political actors with moral responsibilities.

«Les élections de juin ne seront pas normales, elles seront cruciales dans un contexte de très fortes incertitudes.» ( Patrizio Bianchi)

https://www.lemonde.fr/sciences/article/2024/05/06/les-vingt-sept-academies-des-sciences-s-unissent-pour-interpeller-les-candidats-aux-elections-europeennes_6231928_1650684.html

#STS #policy

yetiinabox, 1 month ago to random

One of the greatest students of life, peace, culture, and interspecies relations has left us, a scholar of astonishing insight, kindness, and humility.

de Waal's powerful writings about Orientalist bias and the kneejerk Western defense of human exceptionalism by anthropologists and biologists are, I think, essential reading - e.g., https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-003-0197-4

“One thing that I’ve seen often in my career is claims of human uniqueness that fall away and are never heard from again,” he said in 2014. “We always end up overestimating the complexity of what we do … I’ve brought apes a little closer to humans but I’ve also brought humans down a bit.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01071-y

yetiinabox, 1 month ago to Anthropology

There is a challenging job in #anthropology for a DRC expert : https://reliefweb.int/job/4050529/cultural-studies-kahuzi-biega-national-park-conservation-peace-and-reconciliation-local-communities

yetiinabox, 27 days ago to random

Twelve hours yesterday hanging wallpaper in a room with all the challenges - old plaster walls that I had patched and primed, complex ceiling angles, almost nothing true or square, random electrical fixtures. Weirdly, the indicator of success at the end is a total lack of salient features; all the wobbles and skew lines vanish in an anodyne haze of textured wallpaper blandness.

It's some sort of anti-Daoist triumph: enormous effort, no natural quirks remain. I would far rather live among the roots and branches of a vast, gnarled tree on a sunny mountain, but Northeast Scotland is too harsh for such impractical thoughts, and the sun is too weak to sustain them.

yetiinabox, 24 days ago to random

Earlier today, I was in a meeting where one person called for co-production of governance structures together with a disempowered community that would be affected by these structures. Another person picked up on their point and said, yes, what we want is for them to "challenge, engage and inform our decisions". (My emphasis).

And I thought to myself: that is a textbook example of why consultation is not co-production.

yetiinabox, 19 days ago to random

One small positive result in the survey of aviation emissions <https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ad3a7d> is that they find a negative relationship at a global scale, comparing per-country using linear regression, between air traffic emissions and number of railway passengers. Otherwise grim, if very useful, research.

yetiinabox, 17 days ago to random

In the USA, you can see junkyards from the train. Here, I see people's allotment gardens.

yetiinabox, 14 days ago to random

We often complain that the future we have is not what we imagined.

I definitely did not imagine handheld "aurora enhance and share with folk worldwide" devices.

Much better than flying cars.

Thanks all. You and this place are indeed beautiful.

We'll all keep struggling to save it then, shall we?

#aurora