How many people have married their spouse in both senses of the word?
Chickens We said goodbye to Bertha on Sunday. She got all the Forbidden Snacks, cuddles, sunshine, and dirt she wanted. I'm honored to have had her in my life and happy that she can rest easy without pain or discomfort. Lion, our rooster, moved to my metamour's sister-in-law's flock of easter egger hens Monday night. I spent all Monday with him and even though we had a nice time I could tell he was already lonely. Now he has a rooster man job to do and another family that adores him :) We'll definitely visit, if nothing else to make friends with all their hens. My wife pointed out that we actually gave a pet to a big farm upstate with lots of friends and space to run around and no phone service. Unfortunately, this is the last regular chicken update for a while. We will definitely keep birds in the future, but we are going to wait until we move somewhere slightly more permanent than our rental. Life feels weird and empty without them. I'm such a different person than I was before we got them. Everything else I've spent so much time on chickens these last couple weeks that I've done basically nothing else. My wife and I have gotten some time in on the lathe making jewelry from scavenged oak tree branches and trunks she found in the woods behind our house. I made a nice round medallion for a necklace that I'll post pictures of when I get the finish on it, and maybe I'll do a post about some of the other stuff we've been making. Next in line is I think pushing one of my project cars into the basement so we can start fixing it up.
The local Black Lives Matter protest turned out 1.5% of our town's population and, like, this is rural flyover country. Folks showed up with "Defund the Police" and "Black Trans Lives Matter" signs! What the heck! I'd been hoping for 100 people to turn up and this was way more than that. Presented a paper virtually at a conference last night. Due to timezones, I was up until 4 AM so today's schedule is just a mess. But the presentation went well and folks seemed to be interested, so that's nice. Grad school, though, is killing me and I am so tired and ready to be done. Soon, hopefully.
Getting out I started college in 2009. That was the start of 'getting out' of my conservative fundamentalist family. Unwinding all the parts of that upbringing has taken me a decade and I'm not done yet. I learned that the earth is not 10-15,000 years old. My politics keep getting more left as I learn more about how people are treated. Growing up, between the constant admonishment that I need to deny myself to be a good christian and trying to avoid notice by the angry people in my home, I got pretty good at ignoring everything I needed and just doing what I was 'supposed to' do instead. I've spent this decade slowly learning how to listen to myself and what I need instead. Staying alive I'm doing alright now. I didn't think I'd make it through high school, and I didn't think I'd finish my undergrad degree, and I definitely didn't think I'd survive grad school. So I'm a bit surprised to still be here and even more surprised that I don't have that sword hanging over my head anymore. Obviously, I still have difficult days — those paths in my brain are well-worn and familiar; I can't just suddenly never feel that way again. But, it's less and less bad now. Family now In 2009 my relationship with my parents was bad. Then I got married, which didn't help things. It still isn't good now. When I left, I didn't trust them and they didn't respect me. Nothing about that really changed over the years. The past year-ish, I've tried to trust them, to put in the work to help fix up our relationship; even after that, I still don't trust them and they still don't respect me. They're the kind of people who will tell you to your face "we respect you!" and "we're so sorry you've felt disrespected by us in the past" but little changes. Then again, they'll tell you they love gay people but also gay people are going to hell and can't see why those two views might be contradictory. More positively I'm lucky to have gotten married and had someone to support me and for me to support through our various adventures this decade. Also, 2030 I spent most of last decade learning how to take care of myself. I want to spend the next decade learning how to take care of others. Also, I'd like to not spend it all in this town. That one may not happen, but I can hope.
Even my little town is protesting police violence right now. I'm planning to go to the next one now that I know they're happening! It feels like there's a particular kind of brain rot endemic to academia. I know far too many intelligent, driven folks who cannot think clearly and have little long-term memory because something is always on fire and anything without a short deadline never gets done. I'm not really sure what to do about this but it sure does make my life difficult. The cherries on our cherry tree are just about ripe and I am pretty excited for whatever we end up making from them!
Couple weeks back, one of the local titmice ran into our window and spent about an hour resting on our porch before flying off into the trees. I love these lil friends; they're always up to some kind of antics: chasing each other around or hanging on my windowscreen and watching me through the window. I have all the pictures for truck drum brakes, but I have yet to do the writeup. Since she's a 4x4 truck, the front brakes are extremely non-trivial and since the wheel bearings are due for replacement anyway I am going to get a local shop to do both. Book time is 3 hours so I am feeling like not doing it myself was perhaps a good choice; plus, when something rusted breaks it's not my problem! It still feels weird that we actually have enough money to afford hiring a shop to do it. Spent last night digging around in the dashboard of my metamour's car and hopefully rehabbed a couple of servo drives that were "getting lost" due to a weak internal connection. They're part of the AC system, so not a big deal if they fail again, but hopefully that saved about $350 in parts. I'm getting very close to being done with my part of a big paper and I'm quite excited to pick up my research again.
Chickens My dear Annie passed away suddenly last Friday. I knew something was up on Thursday night; when I brought her in Friday she just curled up in my lap and drifted off. We built an enclosure downstairs for Bertha and Lion so they can be warm during the winter. Put it together from stuff that was lying around! I also put a 'ladder' I made from some tree branches screwed together where I'm standing in the below photo; Bertha loves to have something to climb on. It took probably half an hour for them to stop playing 'the floor is lava' with the pine shavings but they're pretty comfortable now: Shop My wife wants to make something with the lathe, which means I need to fix the spindle. It runs fine but after a few minutes the bearings heat up and slowly seize. I had cleaned and lubricated them as best I could without taking the spindle apart and that didn't quite fix things. The disassembly went pretty easily, although whoever was in there last did not have a pin spanner and really boogered up the holes in the collar for the spanner with a punch. It has two taper sliding bearings which can seize in their races if there isn't enough running clearance. They both can be adjusted independently, so once I get some shim stock in I can tweak the clearance for both. The bearing surfaces themselves look quite good for being 100 years old, although I may eventually get some lapping compound and try to lap them in a bit. I'll take some pictures when I put it back together so you all can appreciate how neat the design is.
Bertha continues to get better! We are going to build an enclosure in the basement and move all our birds down there so she can have chicken company during the winter without having to endure the cold. She loves us but I'm sure she misses normal chicken life --- and her flockmates miss her, for sure. Lost in the sauce Annie likes to perch on my shoulder and groom my hair I'm getting some potting soil to attempt to plant some pothos cuttings I've been growing in a cup of water for a month or so now. I did this with four basil cuttings and only one made it, but I will try a little harder with these and see if I can get more lucky. I also planted some huge aloe cuttings from a professor at school and they seem to be doing quite well. I should also start thinking about if I want to try to grow more office plants this spring --- I have quite a few but you can never really have too many! I guess I am going to make some time to talk to my parents after thanksgiving. I still don't really know what to expect or what I actually want from them.
Bertha continues to be a very good houseguest. She's putting on weight despite the occasional setback, so I continue to be optimistic. She tries her hardest to be a human: in the morning, she stands in the bathroom with me and preens while I do my routine; when it is time to do things around the house, she walks around enjoying sunny spots and scratching for crumbs; when it is time to eat, you bet she is there begging for food or perched on my shoulder trying to steal it from my mouth; when it is time to relax on the couch, she snuggles in my lap. I got a baofeng finally since I got my technician's license a few weeks back. So far all I've done is listen to the NOAA weather radio. My wife has finally hired and trained some new people so she is not the sole person doing everything in her department. She's still really busy, but she has a bit more energy when she's off the clock. It's nice to have her back.
Lion's settled in with his new flock and everyone seems to be getting along quite well! I'm not talking to my parents anymore because they're trying to pass off shitty behavior as respect! The spring semester starts next week! My wife's engaged! I have to get downstairs and take pictures of their rings so I have something to post in kingmudsy's next craftski thread.
Chickens Bertha (the very hugged chicken in the above photos) has sour crop (a kind of yeast infection), so she's inside for the next few days. No food today; hopefully everything will clear up and we can get her back out to the flock in a couple days with no trouble. Research Conference next week! I guess I should finish the poster for it, huh? I have at this point four projects going, which is about three more than I probably should have. But, at least it is all interesting and several things seem to be going directions. I am eternally grateful to the four-month-long checkout times from the university library because there's a lot of reading to do and sometimes it takes months before I get back to something.
I first started seriously thinking about gender in July-ish 2017. My wife had started developing a serious relationship with her girlfriend at the time and that pushed me to actually think about plenty of feelings that I'd otherwise have just ignored. It was by that point pretty obvious that doing so just kept a distance between us that neither of us wanted and that I needed to do something about it. It wasn't fun to sit down and think about why I might feel jealous or inadequate or unhappy with myself, but I felt like I had to do something, even if that was just to be able to talk semi-constructively about those feelings with her. Sorting through all of those feelings it occurred to me that maybe some of that was gender dysphoria? But I really didn't want to be trans, mostly because it seemed like a really hard time based on what I'd seen my trans friends go through. For perhaps a year or so before this my wife had been calling me 'wife', I think first as a joke but by this point it just felt right. In October I wrote her a long letter that basically said "I'm not trans but I really like being your wife" and shortly thereafter I was finally like "I guess this is happening". I got lucky in that by the time I figured it out I was in a position to do something about it pretty quickly. Things kept feeling right. I did feel some pressure to be "out" quickly since IEEE won't let you change the name on papers after they've been published and they only let you publish under your legal name. But on the other hand there's never a perfect time to come out and being done with it has taken a lot of uncertainty out of my life. There's of course plenty more to it than that so feel free to ask more :) HRT has been fascinating. Of course there's the expected physical changes but also I feel sensations that I hadn't felt since...I guess puberty? My skin is a lot more sensitive too; now I can feel mosquitoes biting me. Feelings-wise, I don't think I have new emotions, but definitely the ones I do have I feel more strongly, which certainly took some getting used to. I feel more happy and content than I've ever felt before and I get to feel that way more often, but I can't say whether that's hormones or general personal improvement.
This is a really interesting question and I suspect the answer is highly variable depending on who you ask! At least for me, I did not entirely feel "like a person" before (and depersonalization seems to occur in at least some trans folk). I feel present now in ways I never had before. Being a woman comes with a whole different set of social expectations and ways that people interact with me, and that's certainly shaped my personality in ways that they never would have if I hadn't transitioned. Make of that what you will, I suppose? There's also a strange sense in which a lot of my male-coded experiences — stuff like being in Boy Scouts — are difficult or impossible to talk about with people who I'm not explicitly out to. Or, you know, folks I'm out to but not sure how comfortable they are with me I prefer to not remind too much about that part of me because it's easier to get along with coworkers if I just don't bring it up. I don't really like that but it is what it is.
Working from home means I've been getting a lot of bird watching in! There are a bunch that stop by our feeder including cardinals, jays, a couple kinds of woodpecker, a red-winged blackbird, and several very round mourning doves. My conference paper did get accepted! I handed in the camera-ready copy last week and posted it to arxiv.org, but it's 'on hold' and I'm not sure how long to wait before talking to them given waves hands the general state of things. A week? Two weeks? It's been intermittently really hard to focus but my advisor expects a lot of progress so I'm trying my best. My wife and metamour are both working from home and their managers are all "take lots of breaks" "don't work too hard" which is just furthering my desire to be done with grad school one way or another.
We've acquired hammocks and despite it being regularly 90+ degrees F they are quite nice for relaxing in. I'm working my way through Queen of Science which is a memoir by Mary Somerville, a well-known scientist and scientific communicator during the 1800s. It's not the most riveting read but quite enjoyable. I also read another short story by Ted Chiang that inadvertently helped me reflect on some of my own life and actions. I'm tempted to make a sci-fi club post about it but I don't want to horn in on your thing, zebra2, especially to post an author you aren't terribly excited by! My school has at least reversed course a little and while everything is still in-person, at least they are going to require people to wear masks and provide masks for instructors to give to students who forget theirs. We'll see how that goes in practice, as I haven't seen a lot of compliance among the staff yet.
Chickens Bertha is making a good recovery! I was so worried for her before I left, but now she's eating well and gaining weight a little bit at a time. She came with me to lab on Monday and seemed to enjoy it so I think she'll be making more visits in the future. Research My presentation went really well and several people had interesting questions afterward! It's nice to feel like other people find it interesting and valuable, since I worry a lot about both of those things. I am supposed to take my comprehensive exam (like a thesis defense, but before you've written the thesis) this semester but there are three and a half weeks left in it and my advisor wants me to get two more papers out the door before I do the exam. I have been treating research more as a 9-5 job than a lifestyle and I think I am going to have to start working harder if I ever want to get out. We'll see if my mental health will tolerate that.
Classes are back in session and mostly in-person. We didn't require any testing or quarantining before returning to campus. The university's covid hotline rings only 9-3 on business days. Contract tracing takes "a couple business days". Student health staff aren't really all that concerned. I'll be surprised if we're still open in October. My university's council of graduate students, the one crumb of representation we get in the administration, has been effectively dead for the past couple years; this year the grad student body voted on a new constitution. I went to the officer election meeting and, uh, ended up running unopposed for one of the department representative positions. Hopefully this turns out well and isn't a waste of time!
This is a big reason I want out of academia. It sucks to really care about something, put a ton of work into it, and get all of jack and squat in return because the higher-ups don't give a fuck and are only interested in making numbers get bigger.Ironically, the one cohort that utterly failed to benefit from the boom times was the professors, who are really the only people adding value and remain vastly underpaid. When the cuts come, they won’t come for the administration or the diversity staff. Academic programs will be the first to go, which raises some interesting questions about what the purpose of a university is.
Last week, Bertha's abdomen started swelling up. At first we thought it was a side effect of bumblefoot or maybe she just ate a bunch of pine shavings and got constipated. It didn't improve after a couple of days so we did some reading and figured out that there are many reasons this happens to chickens — old age, cancer, organ failure, un-laid eggs, infections...not great news. She was still alive and eating at that point so we could rule out some of the worst possibilities. We took her to a vet to get x-rays and bloodwork done. The x-rays were pretty inconclusive — there's something in there that's squishing up on her lungs and organs, but we still don't know what it is and if it's fluid or mass. The vet gave us some antibiotics for her while we wait for bloodwork to come back. She's a tough little bird. Even though breathing is not easy for her and she kinda waddles when she runs, she's still running around, pecking for snacks, hopping up on perches and laps, preening — all those good chicken things. This morning she feels a little less swollen so hopefully that's good news. And, regardless of how long she has left, my metamour's sister-in-law keeps chickens and has had a lifelong dream of having an easter egger rooster, so when the time comes our little man will have a good home too. At the vet: This morning Lion ran up to me like he was going to peck my feet, then stopped and looked up at me — his way of asking for a hug. He's a little new to the whole affection thing but he's starting to figure out that head skritches feel nice. Happy new year, y'all. May you more than survive this upcoming year!
Chickens Personal Dammit I'm still tired from last week. Research keeps moving forward -- I went through the paper that got accepted and was surprised; at the time of writing I thought it was mostly garbage, but it's not half bad -- and plenty of space to extend the work into a bigger publication. (Hard to do much of significance in 7 pages!) I figured out that I'm going to send that letter, and I figured out what the end of it is. It's not "never talk to me again", but it is "your willingness to change, or not, determines what happens to our relationship." Que sera, sera.
Good morning fellow Hubskiers and welcome to the ersatz pubski! It has been a long week for me. I spoke with my parents for a while on Friday and now I am writing a letter to them. I'm not sure what I want the conclusion to be yet or if it's one of those letters you write and never send. I served on a jury (as a back-up juror) Monday and Tuesday. It was a he-said-she-said statutory (and actual) rape case. The testimony was harrowing even just to listen to. This morning I called and discovered that it was declared a mistrial, which I assume means the jury hung. And people wonder why sexual assault victims don't bring suit against their abusers. In positive news, a conference paper I wrote this summer got accepted and the revisions look minor! Hope you all are well.
Chickens Annie has a little bit of bumblefoot, so every couple days she comes inside for a bit so we can change her bandages. As far as she's concerned, she comes inside for a bit to get extra snacks and attention. She can't see well, so new things and places are even more scary for her than for the average chicken, but she feels safe and loved snuggled up against me. (she gives very good hugs with her body pushed up against me as firmly as she can!) Research I met up with a new student who's working on a project that I'm interested in. I'd talked with her advisor about it before, but haven't had much time to actually do any work. We're planning to meet up and study together, which I'm looking forward to -- it has been a while since I've had other students working on the same thing I am. The financial aid office, which manages the fellowship I'm funded through right now, is threatening to cut off my funding if I don't take "corrective action" to fix the problem that I have taken "too many" credit hours. Most of those credits are research credits I've taken just to meet the "enrolled full-time" requirement to get funding in the first place; 80% of their purpose is just bookkeeping for the university. I've got a year or so before I hit their hard limit and my funding disappears, so hopefully I'm outta here by then. Dammit, I just want to do research and write papers and help the newer students as much as I can and not worry about whether the university deems me worthy of $16k/yr, is that too much to ask? Climate Change kleinbl00's post yesterday got me thinking about the future and, in particular, the uncertainty of climate change. We've had a cool summer here and the fresh produce has suffered for it. I have some red pepper plants that just now are starting to make fruit, and it seems like this sort of thing is just going to be more commonplace in the years to come. Am I going to be able to retire? Will the bit I've saved now actually add up to enough, or are the markets going to become more unpredictable too? Last night I finished The Dispossessed. At the end, LeGuin reveals that on that universe's Earth, humans never got their shit together and were almost eradicated by climate change. And, fuck, that book was written in 1974, and here 45 years later we're getting ready to do the same fucking thing and even so we're still arguing about whether or not it's happening, or whether or not we should bother talking about it.
Oh! Due to aforementioned work-from-home, we moved all my lab plants and all my metamour's office plants home. The only place they're safe from the cat is my bedroom, so now I get to wake up to this every morning: The cat does not care for our aloes so they get to hang out elsewhere:
This is an interesting topic, but a clumsy article. "Canceling" takes a lot of shapes, and there's a big difference between people yelling loudly about Louis CK being a sexual predator and your friend circle calling you out for making a shitty joke. If you want thoughtful commentary on the relationship between public figures and the public, maybe start with Ollie Thorn. For the remainder of my time, I'd like to advance a preliminary thesis. The author identifies several aspects of "cancel culture": a dogmatic insistence on a very specific truth, inability to consider the context of words and actions, a crime-and-punishment approach to handling people who have done something wrong, and a resultant culture where people act based on fear. Think of the difference between "calling out" and "calling in". What are all these aspects reminiscent of? Where did they come from? Because I guarantee you folks on twitter did not invent these whole-cloth over the course of the 2010s. This particular way of seeing, to me, reeks of how Protestant American culture approaches "others". Think about how white society and the police "handle" black people. Think about how wealthy society "handles" the poor. Cancel culture is this same cultural heritage writ in the language of everyday people wielding their own power the way the powerful in our society wield theirs. That this happens in conservative/Christian circles is perhaps not surprising. That this happens among liberals and the left too shows that we have not thought through the implications of this way of thinking, that they still shape us in spite of our rejection of their overt values. The rise of modern-day fascism tells a similar story, c.f. All that said, it seems like the online communities I spend time in have, to some extent, matured out of cancel culture. I see a trend towards having a more constructive outlook and spending more energy on supporting people and having good-faith discussions than on being incensed at assholes being assholes. My hope is that Hubski follows this trend too.
This is more than the classification software getting confused. This is more than a couple programming mistakes. This is more than bad software design. Uber failed at even the most basic safety engineering. Not only did they not consider safety when building their own stuff, they even intentionally disabled existing safety measures. The thing that really gets me is that self-driving cars have a lot of hard problems to solve, but all these factors are not open problems! Engineers in safety-conscious fields have been thinking about and preventing problems like these for fucking decades. We know how to keep drivers paying attention even when the thing they're driving is mostly automated. We know how to alert operators of unusual circumstances early so they can make informed decisions. We know, for christ's sake, how to run several unreliable control systems and take the majority vote of their results if we're worried one might be making a mistake! This shit isn't even new -- someone from 1995 could tell you how to do all these things without knowing anything about the last 30 years of technological advancement. But goddamn it, software engineers, if they think of anything, think of security -- how to stop "bad things" from happening. Or they think in probabilistic terms -- 90% accuracy is pretty good, right? Safety engineers, though, they know that no matter what the probabilistic models say, something bad will always eventually happen -- so how do you stop that bad thing from hurting humans. And then, on top of all that, you have some really fucking stupid programming decisions that should never have made it onto a public road in the first place. Jesus christ.
Please enjoy this little hen sleeping under my hat Mostly just trying to get something done every day and not worry too much about what's around the corner. A lot has been happening for the past long while, and too much stress just makes me useless, so as I see it going slow is better than not getting anything done at all. For a bit of "fun" I did a little theorem proving in coq as I'm running a book club that's working through bits of The algorithm book.
I came out to some of my extended family and found out that another one of my uncles is gay and my parents had just kept that a secret for 20 years. And that my parents have been spreading some shitty rumors about me. All in all not really regretting not talking to them right now. University is looking at perhaps a 25% budget cut which is going to be a mess. The chancellor wants to spend money on the landscaping though because that's what attracts new students. At least right now my funding comes from the DOE, but it's evaporated overnight before so who knows what happens in the fall. I don't see this whole situation ending well for universities and it just increases my resolve to get out of academia when I'm done. Putting slides together for a conference presentation that I'm excited about as it finally reveals some stuff I did in undergrad! Breadski, please rate my challah: 
Happy holidays!
good.