If you ever loved a link…

Wondering what people actually do with that liberal arts degree?  Here’s a link for you.

How to get at-risk kids to graduate college with nudges, linked from this excellent Ferule and Fescue post.

Is the right to bear arms really the freedom to hunt your slaves?  Given how guns are used these days and the punishments (not) incurred… the story makes sense from a modern perspective.

To the internet misogynists.

Dame magazine notes that no, it’s not all men, but it is men.

Every time the men in your life do something that is not actively harassing you, it’s cause for applause!  From the same oniony site, 70% of real women fail the Bechdel test.

this is some good rage right here

Female characters in 1960s tv.

Captain Tightpants wants to talk.

Not sure what we think about this.

These are good books.

Is the novel dead yet?

holy crap i went here and now my wishlist is exploding!!

this is great, really great

the last panel here made me lol

From something remarkable.

I find this blog interesting

mischievous uncle

A journey into type a personality land and back

 

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Ask the grumpies: Tv for toddlers

Dana asks:

My son just turned two years old and had his first television experience watching the movie “Cars” on my laptop. He mostly watched in 5-7 minute chunks as his attention span isn’t very long and he is very active. We aren’t sure what to let him watch next.  I think his attention span might be up to 15 minute TV shows and was wondering if you had advice for shows your kids liked as toddlers that aren’t too painful for parents to watch too.  Obviously not looking for violence and educational is a plus but not required.

Well, this is going to vary a lot, so check the comments for what other two year olds are watching!

DC1 was really really into frogs, so the LeapFrog dvds (particularly the early ones on phonics) were super popular at Casa Grumpy.  Dora the Explorer, also popular.  Closer to 3 ze picked up Caillou (one of DC2’s current picks) and Kipper and Blues Clues and Word World (though many parents dislike Caillou because in the earlier episodes he’s kind of a brat).

In addition to PBS Kids, where DC2 prefers Curious George, DC2 has just discovered Youtube, which has many kids tv shows uploaded to it.  Ze is currently a big fan of:  Dora the Explorer, Pocoyo (these are nice because they’re short!), Peppa the Pig, and a bunch of seriously annoying children’s shows made for Youtube.  The best of these (from the not annoying the parent perspective) is Miss Tracey singing nursery rhymes.  The worst of these is Mr. Mike doing the same thing but with his own twist.  (Licking up the baby bumblebee?  Seriously Mr. Mike?)  In between are: Mother Goose Club and Busy Beavers.  Actually Busy Beavers will annoy the heck out of you with its repetition while the Mother Goose Club isn’t so bad.

Grumpy Nation:  What are your recommendations and opposite-of-recommendations for two year old tv watching?

RBOC

• Dear sports writers saying that Don Sterling’s big mistake (compared to other less well-publicized racists, I guess) was that he can’t “control his women”?  You know how black people aren’t property?  Turns out women aren’t either.
• Actually, we’re sickened by all of the sexism and misogyny in the discussion of the Don Sterling thing.  All the gawd-awful comments about his wife and the woman on the tape.  Yet another way that the patriarchy is preventing anything actually being done about wide-spread racism, while bolstering its entrenched sexism.  Thanks patriarchy!
• I looked up Don Sterling and misogyny because *surely* we weren’t the only folks to notice the misogyny in the commentary.  Well, turns out even the original story is full of sexism and misogyny too (note:  we hadn’t listened to the tapes, just the reporting about them), but nobody is paying attention to that, because wimmin, who cares, they really are property.  Here’s some [possible triggers] commentary.  Which is not to downplay the racism AT ALL.  But neither racism NOR sexism (nor their intersection!) should be tolerated.
• I got a haircut.  The first after um, 14 months.  It’s a bob, because everybody else is getting bobs.  It took a week for anybody to say anything about it at work.  And another half week for anybody else to say anything.  Talking to my two RAs about it after the second person noticed (one of my RAs was the first person to notice), I said, “Either it doesn’t look any different from before and nobody has noticed, or it looks terrible and people are just being polite by not saying anything.”  One RA (the one who noticed) said, “People probably just aren’t noticing because they’re busy and the school year’s over.”  The other RA said, “Who knows?  It will always be a mystery.”  I told the first one, “Good answer” and the second, “Bad answer.”
• In case you were wondering what this economist thinks about the Ta-Nesi Coates article in the Atlantic.  It’s excellent.  It actually gave me a lot of flashbacks to when I took Race in the Economy as an undergrad– Reparations were in the news back then too, and again, used as a starting point for discussions about what is actually feasible (IIRC, reparations were not feasible just from a logistical standpoint) and how and why we need to still do things to level the playing field.  My prof had been a beneficiary of affirmative action hirself and a big takeaway from that class was also that housing segregation has terrible consequences on many levels.  We read a lot of William Darity Jr. (Sandy to his friends) in that class, and Coates has as well.  Since then I’ve read a lot more and taken more classes and taught a lot more about disparities and discrimination.  An important and complicated subject and yes, we need another War on Poverty.  Inequality is getting worse, not better, in this country.  And we’ve had periods of time in which it was getting better.  It’s not impossible to make things better, even if we might never get to perfect, there’s a heck of a lot more we could be doing, and a lot we could stop doing, to bring back the American Dream for everyone.
• My mom sometimes depresses me by talking about the state of the world.  It’s in pretty terrible shape, but she has hope that it’ll get so bad that it’ll turn around.  She lived through the 60s, after all.  I fear it’s already gotten so bad but we haven’t turned around.  We haven’t rebelled against our 1% overlords.  We’ve had chances and they didn’t work out.  And I wonder how the world would have been different in 2014 if Al Gore had been president.  Would 2014 be more like what my naive self thought it would be, moving forward instead of backward?  Or would it just have been 4 years delaying some inevitability.  (But maybe it would have been Jeb instead of W… who knows?)
• [update]  The news depresses me.  And never ever read the comments section.  Especially when the article is about women.
• I want to show you a video that DH and DC1 made, but WordPress says I would have to pay to do it (and I’m too lazy to remember my login to photobucket).  So no break-dancing Lego squirrel for you.

I like complex music

As the post title says.  I like bagpipes with 3 kinds of drums, picking the different rhythms and types of drums.  Mozart (yay), not Haydn (boo).  Not Chopin or Debussy, ew.**  Handel hella-yes, Bach hella-yes!  Fugues and Baroque music yes.  Rap music, yes.  Patter songs.  MC Frontalot, Salt N Pepa, Macklemore (sorry, I know he’s Wacklemore*).  My brain finds it interesting.  Things that are too simple allow my mind to wander towards my worries; things that are complex allow my mind to relax.  It’s interesting to think about.

I’m with Dr. Crazy that Dark Horse is a weird song and yet, I have memorized all the words to the rap section of it.  Although the lyrics are problematic, I find wordplay amusing.  I like to listen to a song I’ve heard many times before and find something new in it.  I also find it so useful how rappers usually announce their name in the song, so that if you like it, you know who you want to listen more to!

#2 has also been wanting to write a post about how much she likes patter songs, which, of course, includes a lot of rap.  Though only the not-misogynist stuff, of which there is a lot (though man does she miss the girl rapper groups of the 90s).  #2 hates techno because the repetition is boring and hurts her brain.  #1’s not much on techno either.

*#2 likes Thrift Shop but finds Same Love to not be that clever, although it may be well intentioned.  Still…

 

**#2 finds Chopin to be complex, and also likes Debussy in moderation.  Pretty pretty.  Though with classical, #2 is really a Romantic at heart even though that’s separate from patter.  Now she has Rossini stuck in her head because patter is awesome.

Tell us whether you like complex music and if so, what we should listen to!  Esp. female rappers.

Your Ideal Work Day

A few years ago, get a life phd asked readers to think about what their ideal day would look like.

My ideal work day definitely does NOT include teaching or ANY emails from students.  It does, however, include research and friends.

I was at this conference when I realized I was having my ideal work day.  No students.  No student emails.  I talked to colleagues about research:  theirs, mine.  I got inspired to learn about a new statistical technique.

I saw good friends I hadn’t seen in a long time.  I ate good food.  I had time for a nap in the middle.

I met a new research collaborator and we talked about what research we do and could share.

I could choose what was most interesting to go hear talks about.  Setting my own schedule is awesome.

That is an ideal work day.

#2

I think mine would start off with me checking my email to find a desk accept.  :)  Or an R&R from a top 2 journal.  Follow it up with a request to do something relatively trivial using my expertise for a large sum of money (like reading a proposal or giving a discussion).

These ideal day exercises aren’t so useful to me because my fantasy scenarios mainly depend on things that are outside of my control (last week was not an ideal week– the summer started with two conference rejections and a journal rejection, also our unscoopable paper that coauthor sat on for two years got scooped), and because I’m pretty happy with my life as it is and trying to optimize instead of satisfice just makes me grumpy.  It may not be a perfect life, but spending time and mental energy trying to make it better tends to make it worse and take time and energy away from things that actually help my life improve.  I remember the morning that I first heard about the willpower research on only being able to make a limited number of decisions each day, I was completely useless because I’d second guess making any decision instead of just making it, thus adding to my mental load.

Now, if I were miserable or unhappy, then the amount of time thinking about what makes me happy would be totally worth it.  A little bit of introspection might be able to make big short-term changes.  Fortunately for me, that’s not where I am right now (rejections aside).  We will see what the future brings.

What’s your ideal work day?

Link love again

So remember how last week #2 had bronchitis?  This week she had pneumonia and grading.  But her grading is done and her fever broke, so hopefully she’ll be providing some ranty goodness again in the near future (including Monday’s money post which totally hasn’t been written yet, *cough*).  Until then, here’s some links.

Oregon and larping.  It is the worst thing.

Famous nude paintings get photoshopped to fit today’s beauty standards.  (Contains Nudity)

Pharyngula explains why race is important as a social construct.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about this GOP bill for a pilot school lunch program that only feeds rural kids.  It is true that the challenges for getting food to kids over the summer are different in urban vs. rural areas.  We ought to be feeding all kids, period.  So, as a policy, and I think there was an excellent NYTimes series on this topic last summer (that I can’t find), yes, we do need to work on the question of feeding rural kids over the summer using different methods than for urban kids.  But we should not be cutting food to urban kids.  I’m really not clear right now what this bill actually is trying to do– the media makes it sound like it’s a big program to help rural white kids while cutting funding to black and Hispanic urban kids, but the description of the bill sounds like it’s a tiny pilot program in the state that has the worst health outcomes for rural kids (WV– also why Jamie Oliver shot a show there) and isn’t touching urban at all.  This article explains a bit more, it looks like it actually is a cut on urban pilot programs.  Though these programs are pretty darn small, far too small for the need.  I am glad though that there is a big outcry starting to happen on these issues because ALL KIDS should get enough to eat.  I hope that this backlash continues to grow and that we end up with another War on Poverty, because by God, we need one in this country.

This is a new one.

Presented without comment.  Also this.

Public Image of a mathematician.

I agree with the person who said it was probably just back and forth to the pub.

Because there haven’t been enough grumpy owl pictures lately.

Partner: who needs pizza when you can have pepperoni puff pastry waffles
Me: That just seems wrong somehow
Partner: Really? Because the more I think about it, the righter it seems.

Confidential to Fussbudget:  We would strongly recommend miser-mom to that meta-filter asker.

Most of these other links that we’ve sent to each other this week seem to be discussing the efficacy and contraindications of various prescription cough syrups, which were plenty interesting to #2, but not so interesting to you all, most likely.

#2 says:

Calling Google

Q:  is interest a waste of money

A:  Interest is the cost of renting money.

Q:  do you wanna have another baby after

A.  No, but thanks for asking.

Q:  what they use to wash dishes in america

A.  Water?  (And soap…)

Q:  don’t you still love me?+grammar

A.  Don’t worry, grammar, we’ll always love you!

Q:  do you think high school students should be allowed to work only during their summer break? would it be better for students with free time to do volunteer work or internships instead of working for salary?

A:  “Allowed” or “should”?  Define “Better”.  Better for whom?  For what outcome?  In what situations?  #2 notes that according to a nifty new paper, yes an internship is better for being hired later than a crappy job is.

Q:  why you agree or do not agree with i/o theorist

A:  do your own homework

Q:  how can i sell my soul for education

A:  online?

Q:  can undiagnosed sleep apnea cause failed sobrity test

A:  it’s certainly possible, but I wouldn’t bet on that in court.

Q:  why does anyone ever have a second child

A.  Temporary amnesia?

Q:  why do we judge messy houses

A:  *We* don’t.  *You* must need a better hobby.