Weeks 12 & 13 Recap

Quickly, the last two weeks at ASU:

Monday (Nov. 10): Endured perhaps the most boring lecture on sustainability of my life for monday seminar. No offense to the speaker or the field, but man oh man, he was describing "ethnographic" work he did by observing sustainability engineers from various fields and settings, and it was just horrendous - at one point he showed a video clip of a conference where people had split into groups and were all talking simultaneously. It was just as stupid as being at one of those conferences where they split you up and make you write on a giant pad in big fat marker, only less exciting because it was a freaking video of that mundane activity, and you couldn't understand anything anyone was saying. His comment afterwards was, "as you can see, it's hard to figure out what's going on." Pretty much wanted to smack my head with a book right there.

Law class - ugh, this guy came to give a guest lecture. The lecture was on performance enhancement in sports, and his basic take is that performance enhancing drugs are in no way different from anything else, and there actually is no ethical argument against them. I presume he thinks it will all just work itself out. He supports his argument with a spurious collapsing of various sports medicine, technologies and practices, honestly equating things like anabolic steroids, aluminum bats, overtraining and carbo-loading at various points. He was dismissive of questions and generally unpleasant; apparently he kept this up at a meeting with undergrads in the Bioethics Club meeting later in the week. Just a pompous guy, not a very fun exercise at all.

Tuesday - spent the majority reading evolutionary psych papers for a project I'm working on with Jason.

Wed - Finished reading those papers, only to have Jason cut our meeting short and then redirect it to a completely different topic. Too busy that guy is. We also talked about institution creation in law class, which was interesting only in its discussion of icann, the internet "governing" body, which is apparently just some dudes in California who more or less rule the world. CRAZY.

Thurs - started some more serious work on my seminar paper (it's on science communication and assumptions regarding the "scientific laity" in the Sociobiology controversy, wahoo) and did my reading for seminar. Reading was all about systems of organization during the progression of the Industrial Revolution and into the early 20th century (Fordism, Taylorism, etc.). Interesting stuff, and it set up

Friday - Holy Awkward Batman. Andrew was back for seminar and Clark was absent, which represented a distinct shift in professorial attitude. Melissa gave a presentation on the aforementioned systems organizations, and it was admittedly pretty muddled. Difficult to figure out her structure, what she was driving at, and there was no real narrative going on, just a slew of disparate notions. Andrew, tired of muddy presentations for the semester, all but heckled her during her presentation and then took the opportunity to give a short professional development talk about how one should give a conference talk. His points were all excellent and well-intentioned, but man did Melissa take the brunt of a response that was really to a semester's worth of bad talks. Melissa took it well but understandably got a bit defensive; then the class got defensive ("We didn't know what kind of talk we were supposed to be giving, it's not fair!"), and all the while Andrew was trying to point out that he wasn't concerned about this class, just everyone's ability to show up at a conference and pull off a good presentation. The subtleties here went unnoticed, and a lot of bad blood seeped out. Pretty ugly, actually. Melissa needed a beer at lunch to decompress.

Andrew is a really interesting guy. Funny, engaging, smart, passionate, but also carries a weird sense of "does not care" that reminds me of certain suitemates from my past. He can alternatingly come off as borderline asperger's and the life of the party. And he's also a sort of mover and shaker, but definitely of the rough joke-telling kind. So he can come off as blunt and a jackass. Example: he routinely responds to an unclear question in class by saying "In English, that would sound like this." He then "translates" the question into something more concise than whatever random spewing you just did. Okay, fine, it's a stock joke, and he goes to it frequently; it's pretty rude but it's all in good fun. The problem is, when he tells it by reflex after a German girl who barely speaks English struggles to ask a question in class, WOW. Awkward. (Incidentally, she played it off, saying "Oh, it's a joke, HA HA" in a sternly German way. Brilliant).

Anyhoo, Andrew's a good guy if a bit rough sometimes. We share an impatience for incompetence. He's also highly supportive of his students is his own way. Good times.

Monday (Nov. 17) - Heard from Donna Dean, a cool scientist with lots of high end NIH experience with all kinds of ideas on policy and the like. She just happened to be in town for the day, and it was probably the best class of the semester. Education by serendipity. Hey Ya. Hey Ya. Law class was law restrictions on science research, which essentially turned into industry practices and unwillingness of scientists to share data. More of the same. I got my paper back that day, and Dr. Marchant seemed to like it with only a couple of paragraphs that need reworking (and some miscellaneous typos and the like). Good stuff.

Jason had shoulder surgery in here, so he's been out all week.

Tuesday - Gathered everything and started buckling down for the sociobiology paper. Also did some of the reading for our seminar class which got moved to Monday. Long day of intense reading.

Wednesday - Read for seminar, worked a bit on my paper, and then decided it would be a great day to check out Andrew's lecture on The Selfish Gene. It was in his Science and Society class, TA'ed by the ever-awesome Jenny, and I was more interested in seeing how to teach a book like that in a large lecture format than anything else. Things gleaned: 1, an Andrew large lecture class is kinda like a standup set. He's hella funny, even if his class doesn't always get the jokes. 2, he went soooooo slooooooow. Which is good thing to do to make sure you keep everyone in a room of that size with you - but man is it painful if you've read and understood the book. I don't remember my Rice lectures being like this; then again, we didn't really have too many classes with 140 people in them. So a good and worthwhile experience; I'm definitely planning on attending again on Monday.

Law class was actually a reasonably interesting guest lecture on digital discovery. Law in the digital age is NUTS is the general message I'm getting - you can essentially get sanctioned for not backing up your e-mail in certain scenarios. Yikes.

Seminar was decent - we read Noble and Latour, and Johnny gave a fly-by talk on Noble (the military has shaped our production economy) and Katherine BS'ed her way through a talk on black-boxing science. The class was theoretically on standardization, so we waxed a bit in that vein. Then we covered our paper topics (mine seemed at least mildly interesting to all involved, though I got the ever-annoying "why does this matter?" question that I need to articulate better). And then Clark and Andrew teamed to give us a talk on how to write a prospectus or a grant proposal. Useful stuff, if a little weird to be coming three weeks before our papers are due.

Grabbed dinner with Johnny, Katherine, Andrew and his fianceé Shannon (who is super nice). Great time at Casey Moore's, and Andrew picked up the tab. What a guy!

I wussed out Thursday and worked from home. The reason we had class on Wednesday instead of Friday is that most everyone has checked out for the holidays already. Weird. I got a fair amount of work done and then headed over to the frisbee event. Bringing us to:

This second - I'm gonna head into the school to go to the library real quick, but other wise there's no real reason to work at ASU when I can do the same stuff in the company of my dogs. So I'll run down there quick, do some work, then head back here to do some work, then head over to softball for a light, light, good-lord-don't-hurt-yourself doubleheader with No Drama. And then on to the the tourney tomorrow... and a follow up Guitar Hero-fest over at D&C's. Fun times ahead!