Eliot ânothing offends me more than bad techniqueâ Spencer delivering the lecture/gloat combo

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@victoria666pam
Eliot ânothing offends me more than bad techniqueâ Spencer delivering the lecture/gloat combo
âYou know, somebody locked Jimmy Ford in that warehouse. Wasnât you, was it?â
Youâre not a bad person for the ways you tried to kill your sadness.
(via missmirandaaraee)
A story that may have relevance for others, or then again, maybe not:
When I was in college, about ten or so years ago, I was a history major. I wanted to learn to dance, so I joined a swing dance club on campus. To my surprise, this club had about twice as many men as women (in high school, the last time Iâd tried dancing, the ratio had gone the other wayâlots of girls, and boys only that you could drag by their ears).
But apparently, there had been some kind of word spread specifically to the STEM guys that dance was a way that they could meet girls.
So anyway. I joined the swing dance club, and met a few guys. And at one point, when socializing with the guys outside of dance class, one of them asked me what my research was on. (I had already established that I was an honors history student doing a thesis, just as he had established that he was an honors⊠Iâm not sure if he was CS or Math, but it was one of those.)
So I gave him the thumbnail sketch of my research. Now, to be clear, an honors senior thesis, while nothing like what a graduate student would do, was still fairly in-depth. I had to translate primary sources from the original late-Classical Latin. (My professor said, basically, that while there were plenty of translations of my source material, that Iâd only be able to comfortably trust them if I had at least made a stab at a translation of my own. And he was right.) And there was so much secondary material, often contradictory, that I had been carefully sorting through.
But I was able to sift it into a three-sentence summary of my senior thesis work, you know, as one does.
So I gave him that summary, and then askedâsince he was also an undergraduate senior doing an honors thesisâwhat his research was on.
âOh,â he said, âyou wouldnât understand it.â
Reader, I went home in a frothing rage. Because I had thought we were playing one gameâa game of âletâs talk about what weâre passionate about!ââ and he had been playing another game, which was, one-upsmanship. I had done my best to give a basically understandable brief of my researchâand he had used that against me. As if my research, my painstaking translation, my digging through archives and ILLs of esoteric works, my reading of ten thousand articles in Speculum (yes, the pre-eminent medievalist journal in North America is called Speculum, Iâm sorry, itâs hilarious/sad but also true), and then my effort to sum it up for him, was nothing. Because his research into some kind of algorithm or other was just too complex for my tiny brain to conceive of. Because I just couldnât possibly understand his work.
Now, the important note here is that the person I went home to was my senior year roommate. She was a graduate studentânormally undergrads and graduate students couldnât be roommates, but weâd been friends for years, and the tenured faculty-in-residence used his powers for good and permitted us to be roommates that year. Anyway. My senior year roommate was basically⊠in retrospect I think possibly an avatar of Athena. She was six feet tall, blonde, attractive in a muscular athletic way, a rock climber and racquetball player, sweet but sharp, extremely socially awkward, exceptionally kind even when it cost her to be kind, and an incredibly brilliant computer science major who spent most of her time working on extremely complicated mathematical algorithms. (Yes, I was a little in love with her, why do you ask? But she was as straight as a length of rope, and is now happily married, and so am I, so it worked out.)
(Still, yes, she is my mental image of Athena, to this day.)
Anyway, I came home in a frothing rage to my roommate, the Athena avatar. And I said, âHe made me feel like such an idiot, that I could sum up my research to him but his research was just too smart for stupid little me.â
And she shut her book, and smiled at me, with her dark eyes and her high cheekbones and her bright hair, and said, âIf he canât explain his research to you, then heâs not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.â
Now I hesitated, because Iâd be in college long enough to have sort of bought into the ridiculous idea that if you couldnât dazzle them with your brilliance, you should baffle them with your bullshit. But she said, âLook, Iâve been doing work on computer science algorithms that have significantly complicated mathematical underpinnings. What do I do?â
And I said, âGenetic algorithmsâthat is, self-optimizing algorithmsâfor prioritization, specifically for scheduling.â
âRight,â she said. âYou couldnât code them because youâre not a computer scientist or a mathematician. But you can understand what I do. If someone canât explain it like that, it isnât a problem with you as a person. Itâs a problem with them. They either donât understand it as well as they think they doâor they want to make you feel inferior. And neither is a positive thing.â
So. There.
If you are looking into something and have a question, and someone treats you like an idiot for not understanding right away⊠here is what I have to say: maybe it isnât you who is the idiot.
She wanted something to happen â something, anything: she did not know what.
Kate Chopin, The Awakening (via wordsnquotes)
I would like to be soft and warm. I would be terrified to be that way. I could be hurt if I were soft and warm. I could be hurt by something other than myself. It is harder to be soft than it is to be hard. I could be hurt by something other than myself.
James Frey, A Million Little Pieces (via wordsnquotes)
I will never not reblog this gif set whenever it comes across my dash.
#AfterSeptember11 trended on Twitter today. So real. White supremacy manifests in so many sinister ways. These tweets paint a vivid picture.
Wisdom.
A PSA from Jacob Stone of The Librarians.
I kinda feel like heâs trying to scare people AWAY from libraries the way this promo goesâŠ
Still, heâs right. Reading is awesome! So are libraries!
I AM DYING. OMG. Jacob, you are terrifying the civilians.Â
OMG HE TWIRLS THE AXE LIKE THE ENTIRE TIME AND HIS SHIRT IS SO FAR UNBUTTONED HE MAY AS WELL JUST TAKE IT OFF.
In other words, yeah this is good
Jacob Stone, poster boy for sexiness.
Dean + text postsÂ
#look at how charmed she is by his stupid sticky out ears and his OH HEY NEATO attitude to new things #sheâs like âoh you huge innocent beanpole slice of prime midwest corn-fed beef - your jokes are badâ #âbut i like your bad dad jokesâ #âand your ridiculous earsâ #âand yout jarhead haircutâ #âthis is the dork i have chosenâ #[estelle/kanyeâs american boy plays in the bg] (via harrietvane)
Everyone needs John Cena in a tutu on their blog.
Chris Evans has grave concerns about Chris Hemsworthâs life choices
Thatâs an ok description but a better one would be âChris Evans has a total goddamn meltdown about sharksâ
Or there are 2 types of Chris.