Science

I haven't posted in a while, but I came across this http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science the other day. It's not so much about women in science (it starts out with the Larry Summers thing, and discusses a little bit about opportunity costs being greater for women), but more science careers in general. Excerpt: "Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States." This is true, especially for young scientists, i.e. graduate students and postdocs. I could be making $50,000/yr with benefits and the possibility of raises while working 40 hours/wk in industry instead of the $20,000/yr with benefits for working 50-70 hours/wk right now. However, would I be any better off? I don't live below my means and can still live a middle-class lifestyle, and I have access to wonderful resources like the university library and have stimulating colleagues with whom to converse on a regular basis. Graduate school offers much more freedom in terms of working hours/places (if I want to work from midnight to 10 AM every day nobody would care as long as stuff got done, "work" can be defined as reading or writing or editing papers at Starbucks). If monetary reward is is all that someone wants, and a person is indifferent about intellectual stimulation, then sure, careers in American science, at least in academia, can be considered unwanted. The problem is that science is necessary for society to advance, and we need some nontrivial segment of the population doing science.

Winning

The Physics Grads Team won the May 6th Trivia Night at the Pub competition. Winning freally eels good. My life is now complete.

Lab continued

I found out that the post-doc in my lab has renewed her funding and will be here for I don't know how much longer (originally she was supposed to be done in May). This is a post-doc who doesn't speak English, doesn't talk to anybody in lab and monopolizes some of the equipment. Lab is going to be really crowded this summer with two (maybe three) more students joining. At least two of them are pretty cool and do things like speak English and attend pub nights so things should improve.

Life

Research is going fairly well. Slow right now (waiting on wafers so I can get new samples), but going well otherwise
My main problem is my adviser's apparent lack of desire to publish anything - it sucks getting good results, having my adviser tell me to write a paper, making figures and writing a draft, then having my adviser sit on it for a month and longer. Oh well.

crossword

The UCI student paper's crossword puzzle takes me an average of 10 minutes to do. I need to be able to waste more time than that on my various nonacademic pursuits.

Philosophy

When a broken heart heals, does it build up emotional scar tissue?

3:00 AM

The Major League Baseball regular season started today. Notice that it's almost 9:00 AM and I said "started." This is because the opening game was played at 3:00 AM PDT in Japan. I don't object to broadening the world audience, but it seems that MLB's doing this is a big digitus infamis to the fans in the US and especially those of Oakland and Boston (I won't discuss the ethics of torturing Red Sox fans or say "what Oakland fans?"). Also baseball is already very popular in Japan. Will playing a major league game there increase interest and, in the long run, revenues to MLB from Japan? I'm guessing maybe, but not much.