JBYodr

Jeremy B. Yoder, going on at greater length than allowed on Twitter, but to less serious ends than my other online haunts. Science, nature, running, gaiety. Probably a lot of Star Trek, tbh.

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OH WAIT WE DID THIS.

In which we discuss the first three chapters of THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, ponder how we’d spend our final 12 minutes or so before the end of the world, and complain about postal service.

Next time: Chapters 4-7, a new friend who is not impressed with either of us, and lots of Beethoven.

MUSICAL BITS

- Johann Sebastian Bach’s Prelude in A minor, BWV 922, performed by Sylvia Kind, via Musopen: musopen.org/music/3214/johann-s…in-a-minor-bwv-922/ - William Babell’s Prelude in G major “from the Frontispiece”, performed by Richard Kram, via Musopen: musopen.org/music/3152/william-…m-the-frontispiece/ - Felix Mendelssohn’s “The Hebrides (Fingal’s Cave)”, Op 26, performed by the Musopen Symphony, via Musopen: musopen.org/music/3152/william-…m-the-frontispiece/

STILL CATCHING UP?

You can purchase an omnibus copy of the Hitchhiker’s novels on Amazon in many formats: http://amzn.to/2BFtXxU —or you will almost certainly find copies at your local library or a real-world bookstore, which will be glad of your business.

You can download mp3-format copies of the 1978 BBC radio series here http://www.induceddyslexia.com/hitchhiker.htm, or buy them on CD from Amazon http://amzn.to/2oZitT1 — Nick Page has been using the radio play as audio for an animated film adaptation, and he’s posting it to YouTube https://youtu.be/88lhjT7zJHo

YouTube also has substantial portions (possibly adding up to all of) the BBC television series: https://youtu.be/L4q6qBuSjHk, or you can buy it on DVD at Amazon: http://amzn.to/2kRzedB

[jbyodr]

Woo, podcast

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EPISODE 0: Don’t Panic

We’re Colin J. Carlson and Jeremy B. Yoder. We were Internet Friends and then we became Real Friends, and then we decided we should make a podcast. That’s the usual progression, right?

One of the things that brought us together was a love of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — so we’ve decided we’re going to re-read Douglas Adams’s comic science fiction masterpiece and talk about it. Maybe at some point we’ll have other people on (god we hope we have other people on) and maybe at some point we’ll tackle other books and culture that mean a lot to us.

In this episode, we introduce ourselves and the podcast and attempt to give you, the listener, a good sense of what you’re in for.

Share and enjoy!

NOTES ON THE EPISODE

Keep reading

[jbyodr]

Woo, podcastage. 

[missingpresumedfed]

We’re Colin J. Carlson and Jeremy B. Yoder. We were Internet Friends and then we became Real Friends, and then we decided we should make a podcast. That’s the usual progression, right?

One of the things that brought us together was a love of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — so we’ve decided we’re going to re-read Douglas Adams’s comic science fiction masterpiece and talk about it. Maybe at some point we’ll have other people (god we hope we have other people) and maybe at some point we’ll tackle other books and culture that mean a lot to us.

Our first episode will be online on a not-too-distant Thursday! Share and enjoy.

(Music: Beethoven’s Symphony Number Seven in A major, Op 92, played on piano by Luis Sarro, via Musopen)

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Heeeey so this is a thing that is happening, I am not even kidding.

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Ostensibly assaulted by campus protests, battered by arguments about intersectionality, and oppressed by new bathroom rights, a blameless white working class did the only thing any reasonable polity might: elect an orcish reality-television star who insists on taking his intelligence briefings in picture-book form.

Donald Trump Is the First White President - The Atlantic

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My experience on the market was just one data point, not a complete description of a highly stochastic process.

Me, in Vitae, following up on my account of how much application effort it took to land a tenure-track position.

I tried to make clear in that essay that my experience was just one data point, not a complete description of a highly stochastic process. Since that post went up, the responses to it have provided a somewhat fuller — though still far from complete — picture of the tenure-track market. I asked other folks who’ve been through the faculty-hiring mill to post their own job-market counts (their numbers of applications and interviews) on Twitter with the hashtag #TotalToTT (for “Totals To the Tenure Track”). More than 100 academics did just that — not nearly enough for a really in-depth analysis, but enough for some descriptive statistics.

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Okay, this is a BIG improvement over the first draft. (via SDCC17: ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Concept Art Details Klingon And Federation Ships – TrekMovie.com)

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An interview with Jeremy Yoder

Name: Jeremy Yoder Current Job: Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Sally Aitken’s lab (Forest and Conservation Sciences, University of British Columbia); starting in fall 2017 I’ll be an A…

It is, as they say, me.

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My First Time Being Sober in a Gay Bar

"It's a little like coming out," a lesbian friend told me when I admitted I was going sober

A lot of points in this essay that I’ve thought about myself. 

It can be a tricky call to make. While booze has spawned plenty of guilt and regret in my life, I can honestly say that it's also helped me access parts of myself that I might not have otherwise. Liquor played a key role in my ability to come out; two or three drinks in, I could let slip how hot I thought a male friend was, or I might try striking an unfamiliar femme pose.

I am really there for the health and financial reasons to abstain — but in moderation, booze helps me unwind in ways I’ve never quite cultivated otherwise. Baseline me is grumpy because it’s past 9, and worried about that grumpiness and about my ability to keep names and faces straight and how I look tonight and whether I’ll meet anyone nice and how I’ll ever manage to say hi. A lot of that settles out once I’ve had a gin and tonic, and I’m inclined to think that this is a reasonably healthy social function that alcohol has performed in human society ever since we figured out fermentation. 

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So the adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time looks gorgeous and excellent.

Oh hiya, Chris Pine.

How did they sneak into my house for filming, though?

Creepy perfection, perfectly produced.

Squad goals.

Run don’t walk &c.

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Your car has just been crushed by hagfish: Frequently Asked Questions

Wait, what? Earlier today, Oregon State Police reported that a truck carrying a shipment of live hagfish overturned, spilling it’s slimy cargo all over the highway and damaging at least one v…

Man, remember when science blogging was just about trying to be funny and informative and pointing out how weird and wonderful the world is and not about how the US government is selling off our national scientific and natural legacy for parts? Yeah, #ThrowBackThursday to that.

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Hunting for Antibiotics in the World’s Dirtiest Places

“Compost bin. Pig trough. Dog-food bowl. Laptop keyboard.”

Environmental sampling in the service of antibiotic-hunting. Apparently this is what drug companies did for ages before they switched to synthesis-based approaches, but it’s making a comeback as synthetic antibiotics aren’t keeping up with the evolution of resistant bacteria:

“Toilet in the third tier of the football ground in Manchester,” Roberts reads. (That one arrived with a sketch of a football fan using the toilet.) “Fridge puddle of yuck from a forgotten and moldy lettuce.” We’re sitting in his lab. Roberts is opening petri dishes that have been incubating overnight and transferring samples of whatever bacteria have grown into 96 tiny indentations in a culture plate. He is repeating a process that the scientists of the 1940s followed, growing bacteria in the lab to see what they could do.

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Being queer in the jungle: The unique challenges of LGBTQ scientists working in the field - BioMed Central blog

The Stonewall Riots occurred on June 28, 1969. It was this summer evening that sparked the Gay Rights Movement. Now, forty-eight years later, the world celebrates Pride Month every June to celebrate, honor, support, and fight for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) community. The queer community is resilient. No matter what obstacles... Read more »

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After Transitioning, I Want to Blend In. But My Lesbian Wife Still Wants to Be Out.

About an hour into an informational meeting on becoming foster parents, the woman giving our talk got to the slide on LGBTQ acceptance. With hesitation ...

Probably the best piece (certainly the most complicated) in Slate’s great “Visibility” feature for Pride Month.

For most of the first thirty years of my life I maintained a grudging relationship with the knowledge that when people saw me, they saw a queer, butch woman. It never felt quite right to me, but it felt even less right to make myself feminine to pass as straight, and so I accepted being recognizably queer as a fact of life. Transitioning has changed all that—for the first time in my life I can be an unremarkable man instead of an odd-looking woman. By an odd coincidence, my wife is my mirror opposite—she’s commonly perceived as straight, but feels invisible and awkward when people around her don’t realize that she’s queer. She comes out as a lesbian early and often to the people around her, or at least she did, until my transition made things much more complicated. Nowadays, she can’t come out as queer without also outing me as trans—and I can’t pass as a cis male without dragging her into the closet.

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Rooftop Solar Dims Under Pressure From Utility Lobbyists

A concerted effort is underway in dozens of states to roll back solar power incentives. One of its architects is now a top Energy Department official.

So hey, this is a great reason to vote in non-Presidential elections: getting rid of state legislators who rubber-stamp corporate initiatives.

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Pleuni Pennings, one of the coauthors of the original “soft sweep” paper, provides a nice explanation of adaptation from standing variation — when natural selection acts on genetic variants that are already in a population when selection begins, rather than waiting for a new beneficial mutation — and the probability of soft selective sweeps, in a video released alongside a new open-access review of these issues.

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Democrats Must Become America’s Anti-Gerrymandering Party

The opposition party should embrace a sweeping reform agenda that embraces the promise of voting rights, competitive elections, and genuinely representative democracy.

This plan to reform Congressional elections looks pretty clever. Probably totally un-do-able, but clever.

Smaller states with five or fewer members will elect all representatives from one statewide, at-large district. States with more than six members will draw multi-winner districts of three to five representatives each. Congress will remain the same size, but districts will be larger.

They will be elected through ranked-choice voting, an increasingly common electoral method used in many American cities, whereby voters rank candidates in order of choice, ensuring that as many voters as possible help elect a candidate they support. 

...

Using this approach, four in five voters would elect someone they support. The number of voters in a position to swing a seat would immediately triple—from less than 15 percent in 2016 to just under half.

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If the attack on Trump focuses on him as being a corrupt maniac, which is all true, it’s probably not enough to help build a Democratic Party for the future.

Can the Democrats win again?