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I thought I was over not becoming an academic…
… but this comment triggered me, I guess. I have written on this before as an answer.
Well, f**k…the thing is: Wouldn’t it suffice to excell at what one does? With all due modesty: I’m pretty f’ing good at what I do and my professor agrees. Might be a tough nut to crack, but…is it really more of a utopia? How’d all those professors end up where they are? Money and “Beziehungen”? It didn’t have anything to do with them being good at what they do?
https://www.quora.com/How-diffic…
Ach, Yasin. My heart breaks that you are halfway through a doctorate, and you’re only now working out about Vitamin B. (For non-Germanophones: Vitamin B = Beziehungen = Contacts.)
When I was doing my PhD, and had worked this out, and was bemoaning it to my relatives in Greece, they sadly nodded their heads. They were in Greece: they knew all about a shortage of positions meaning that contacts take priority over merit.
Let me give you an anecdote. I was out of the PhD 8 years, but still hanging around uni (as an IT guy now). I was mates with a current PhD; German, as it happens. We’d learned that a PhD student who’d just finished was already lined up for a postdoc at Berkeley.
—Who does she know?, I growled to him.
—Nick, I must object! said my German friend most Germanly. X is an excellent scholar!
—And so are you, German friend, and so am I. Who does she know?
X was an excellent scholar. She was also the favourite of the head of department, who was well connected. She got a lectureship back in Australia five years later. A couple of years after that, so did my German friend. Also an excellent scholar.
I work in IT. I was no worse a scholar. I was worse at having contacts, did not pick my supervisor strategically, and worked in an area that would never get me a job.
Yasin: Publish. Network. Work on fashionable areas. Rinse, repeat. And like Haidar Abboud said: Perseverance. (Which means have alternative sources of income in the meantime.)
And punch your Doktorvater in the face, next time you see him, for allowing you to think that merit alone is going to get you a uni job.
If you were trapped in an elevator with a trans woman who obviously doesn’t pass, would you feel awkward talking to her?
Heavens, a lot of righteousness in this thread.
I’m going to… well, I’m going to answer this the way I would. I saw the answer before OP clarified, and I’m giving the same answer I would before, but maybe with a bit more details.
I am cis het, and present as such. I’m also middle-aged, so I predate the current increased visibility of trans people. Which means, you know. I’m the group OP is likeliest to be worried about, if they meet me in close quarters.
I have just OK liberal credentials with regard to transgender issues, I guess. I have learned a lot in the past year from being on Quora. I number several transgender and genderfluid people among my online friends, and I make a conscious effort to be supportive of them and to respect their boundaries—which I’m only finding out about now. I don’t volunteer with any transgender groups, and I don’t know any transgender people IRL; so yes, I could do more. But I guess ideologically, I’m aligned with most of the people who’ve responded so far.
Would I feel awkward talking to a transwoman at close quarters, who obviously does not pass?
Yes.
There’s some clear reasons for that, and I’m going to take the time to think them through. OP deserves as much.
First, I don’t actually know any transgender people IRL, so it would be a novelty. Not something to be proud of, but there you go.
Second, I anticipate that, with someone who obviously doesn’t pass, from a group that I have had minimal IRL contact with, I would experience a bit of the Uncanny Valley effect—the freakout people get when they see someone who doesn’t quite match their preconceptions of what normal is.
Of course one’s preconceptions are preconceptions, and nothing to be smug about. Of course preconceptions are battered down by more and more exposure to different images of how people do gender. Of course heteronormativity (cis-normativity?) is a thing.
And people unaccustomed to seeing trans people who obviously don’t pass (can I abbreviate that? TPWODP?) are going to stare a bit more, and feel awkward about the novel encounter, even with all the good will in the world. That’s not an excuse, but it is a thing that you will run into.
But you know, I’ve had that experience of awkwardness before. I’ve had it when I first moved to Melbourne, and saw Asians for the first time. If I stared every time I saw an Asian Australian in Melbourne, I’d never get anything else done; but I did stare at the age of 12. I’ve had that experience when I first met Australian Aboriginals. I’ve had that experience when I first met a butch lesbian.
And I got over it, and in fact I got over it within the time frame it would take me to hypothetically get stuck in an elevator with OP. My best friend for a decade was a butch lesbian. (Well, baby dyke, really, but I didn’t know the distinctions when I first met her; after all, I was unfamiliar.) I was bantering and singing with the first Australian Aboriginal I met within a half hour. The guys I’ve kept in touch with from high school are Asian Australians.
OP, you’re right to be worried about how people will interact with you. Some will not get over their unfamilarity. Some will be assholes. You need to be prepared for that, and you need to seek advice of people who’ve been on the receiving end of it, not just the dishing out side of it. Jae Alexis Lee for example.
But, if this cis het guy can say one positive thing: I stumbled across the transition timeline that my friend Nic posted online. Literally stumbled, actually; she was surprised I found it. (But hey, she did post it publicly, and gave me the address to her blog.)
And what others have said about their transition, well, it was true to see there too. As she transitioned, the light came on behind her eyes. The corner of her lips turned up. The confidence was visible. The joy in experimenting with different kinds of makeup was obvious.
She’s more beautiful now than before: not because there was anything misshapen about her as a boy; not because she is aligning more to heteronormative norms of what a chick looks like. She’s more beautiful now than before, because she’s visibly happier in her own skin than before.
And you know what? Those who do not willingly blind themselves: they’ll see that too.
What would a conversation between planets of our solar system be like?
Originally asked as: What would a conversation between heavenly bodies be like?
Downtown at Brazzers HQ:
—Hey stranger! Woah! Nice sixpack, dude!
—Yeah, gotta work out when I can. Hey, you’ve healed up nice!
—Yeah, you like? I went with the single Ds. Better match for my frame.
—Awesome. So. Standard set of positions in this shoot?
…
Oh, I’m sorry, you meant a different kind of heavenly bodies.
Well, to take my mind from the gutter right up to the sublime, I invoke Michael Masiello’s answer to What was God doing during the infinity prior to creating man? (I’m an atheist.)
The thing to understand is that temporality is the dimension in which finite beings, who undergo change, who begin and end, perceive reality and have their being. It is sequential, narrative-like, a process of generation and corruption.
God is typically conceived as eternal, atemporal: he sees all of what finite, conditioned minds would perceive as “times” uno mentis in ictu, as Boethius would say, “in one stroke of the mind.” There is only one eternal moment, one word eternally speaking. This is sometimes called a nunc stans (see nunc stans – definition of nunc stans in English | Oxford Dictionaries).
What sort of conversation do you have with someone timeless? Someone for whom there is no new information to exchange, nothing to learn? Never mind understanding such a being, how do you even meaningfully talk to someone in the nunc stans?
No, Arrival (2016 movie) did not really cover this off.
Well, what conversations do the heavenly spheres have? They’re just as timeless, just as unchanging: nothing to learn, nothing to forget, nothing to exchange that won’t already have been exchanged. Even in the physical universe, what discourse can there be between bodies whose nunc isn’t stans, but which does measure in the billions of years?
You might say my imaginary discussion between two professionals in peak physical condition, in the San Fernando Valley, is inane. I’d say by our metric, the discourse of Mercury and Mars would be much more inane:
—Orbit.
—Other Orbit.
—I see you.
—Then you won’t. Then you will again.
—Is this over yet?
—Orbit.
—Other Orbit.
—I see you.
—Then you won’t. Then you will again.
How do you know that you are doing your job well? I’m looking for specific examples.
Interesting. I’ve been in a series of jobs and/or avocations where it is very hard to know, because there haven’t been straightforward quantitative metrics. A lot of what I’ve been doing has been government sponsored culture change (promoting IT interoperability), and that is slow.
- Writing policy papers: well, I dunno, I write the papers, the papers get drafted and redrafted, the papers go out. The board and the stakeholders say OK, but policy is normally a marathon; change is incremental, and there’s always another government department and another vendor to try to get on board.
- Writing IT standards: if you don’t get many requests to update the model, you may have done your job right in anticipating the requirements. Or then again, you may not have promoted the standard to the people that would stretch it into new domains. Getting a request for update is also a success, it means they’re paying attention.
- Promoting IT standards: less pilot projects. Thank god. The concept, it is proven, we don’t need to prove it any more. At least not with those clients.
- Writing software. The client tells you that it does what they want. I’m starting to get that freelancing. It’s hard to get in pilot infrastructure programming (e.g. messaging systems), because it’s pilot, and it’s infrastructure (not visible), though we’ve got ourselves a good instant-validation niche. It was hard to get in an unmentionable past job where the boss kept me completely barricaded off from all users, so I made up my own metrics. And was pretty happy with them.
- Scholarly papers. If you get feedback, at least they’re paying attention. If you get recognised in conferences, you just hope it’s because it was a good bunch of papers, and not because you were a fun drinking buddy last conference.
- Lecturing. Anonymous quantitative student evaluations can kiss my hairy arse: I filled those in as a student, and I remember giving the lecturer a 4 out of 5 so they wouldn’t get too uppity. What mattered to me as a lecturer was the qualitatives. One student saying “never allow Dr Nicholas to take a course again”, and three or four saying I was the best lecturer they had in their undergraduate career. University administration had no time for someone polarising like me. And screw them too.
The kids that said that? They got it. And by that, and by polarising them, I knew I was doing something right.
How do I write sonnets?
Read about the sonnet: Sonnet – Wikipedia
Read lots of sonnets.
Get comfortable with writing in metre. Start with blank verse.
Get a rhyming dictionary.
Pick a sonnet scheme. The sonnet scheme determines the structure of the argument you’re going to be making in the sonnet.
- In the Italian sonnet (the Petrarchan), the octet (first eight lines) make one argument, and the sestet (the last six lines) makes a new argument: there’s a volta, a twist, a turn, at the start of the sestet. The rhyme binds the octet tightly together, and the sestet tightly together. The octet breaks naturally into two quatrains, and the sestet into two tercets. So there’s a finely poised thesis/antithesis, and a contrast in rhyming structure between the two.
- In the English sonnet (the Shakespearean), you have three quatrains, each with their own rhyme, and a final couplet; so there is less of a sense of the quatrains being bound together. (In the Spenserian sonnet, the quatrain rhymes are related.) Before Shakespeare the volta was still at the start of the third quatrain (same place as in the Petrarchan). In Shakespeare the volta is in the final couplet, as a badoom-tish. Each quatrain advances the argument, and the couplet is either a summary, or a Woah Didn’t See That Coming!
Why yes. You’re making an argument. That’s a critical thing about the sonnet, whether in Italian or English form. It’s not a spontaneous outpouring of inspiration: it’s art. The scheme corresponds to an ordered presentation of a thesis and antithesis. Maybe with a synthesis in the final couplet or the sestet.
For you, what are femininity and masculinity?
For me, the words are very meaningful, and I do care if a person is feminine or masculine.
But then, noone would confuse me with anyone who’s answered the opposite.
I am also very much aware of the contingency and cultural specificity of femininity and masculinity as constructs. I am aware that there are plenty of people who have difficulty or malaise aligning to them. I am aware that they can lead to toxic consequences unchecked, and that there is a consensus in flux about how they are negotiated and defined and externalised and internalised.
Vote #1 Victoria Weaver of course: Victoria Weaver’s answer to For you, what are femininity and masculinity? I’m talking about the sociological sense here.
Are they real? As real as fashion sense or race or music. They’re all in the head. That doesn’t mean they’re not real. That doesn’t mean they can’t be a source of good in the world—they’re constructs that it is up to us to harness. And they don’t disappear in a puff of smoke, just because we’ve identified their downsides.
To talk of the psychological sense: I’m not going to apologise for finding femininity attractive, or for feeling good about certain aspects of masculinity. I have a socially conditioned sexuality, and having a sexuality is a good thing. In itself, having a straight sexuality doesn’t make me (to pull out some representative examples) biphobic, transphobic, squicked by agender or bigender people, or whatever else. For me; others will see it differently, I expect.
I do not believe that having a sexuality, informed by constructs of masculinity and femininity, automatically makes you a pig; I also have a superego, after all. And the norms that inform that superego, and that determine the sociological nature of gender constructs, are being remoulded and renegotiated. As well they should.
Can you write a sonnet about Quora?
This my 2000th answer could exult
in all the friends on Quora’s paths well met.
(A well trod trope, that I will sing out yet.)
This my 2000th answer could result
in lists of lore here learned, by god and cult:
Kleio, Euterpe, Hermes, Baphomet.
This my 2000th answer could beset
ills I’ve beheld, and insults I insult:
dull aediles, clumsy quaestors, consuls vain
that know their charges not. And I refrain
to write a single ode. They all are one.
Quora gifts wisdom, ire, and amity
to all it hosts—until calamity
unhouses us. Our home. Our charge. Our fun.
What are some common beginner mistakes in Go programming?
They’re minor things, but they’re things I keep slipping up on:
- Sometimes Golang hides the difference between a type and the pointer to the type. That doesn’t mean the asterisk is decorative. Most of the time, Golang doesn’t hide the difference, and you do need to put that asterisk in.
- It is idiomatic to assign
foo, err := xmultiple times in a row. Golang will let you repeaterras the second assigned variable. But it won’t let you repeat it as the first element: that’s always meant to be a new variable. - If there’s any fluidity in your programming at all, the libraries you import will always lag behind the libraries you use.
- Strings are not byte arrays.
Compared to the smoking ruination that accompanies beginner’s errors in C, these are on the benign side, especially as they are often caught by the editor.
Have you ever lied about your nationality while traveling abroad?
Nope.
Australians enjoy a good reputation in the parts of the world I have been to (Europe, North America), and I have not been to the parts of the world where they might not (India, Papua New Guinea?). I have been to New Zealand, but any animus there is jocular and reciprocated. The Austria/Australia confusion did not generate any disgruntlement I could detect while in Vienna or Salzburg.
I didn’t broadcast that I was Greek while in Istanbul, but I found that it would not have made a difference: the Thaw has happened. (I still did not feel comfortable volunteering that my father is Greek Cypriot.)
There are more countries in the world where it would make sense to hide that you’re Greek than that you’re Australian, but I haven’t been there either (countries immediately north of Greece).
What are our intellectual debts to the Middle Ages?
A fair bit of philosophy and logic (and theology, which they were bound up with) was done in the West, and was built on subsequently. The De dicto and de re distinction is Thomas Aquinas’ handiwork, for example.
European nationhood is mostly a Romantic era creation, but its raw materials came out of the Middle Ages. As others have alluded to, modern Western literature and art in some aspects was built on mediaeval foundations (though a lot of it was also reinvented in the Renaissance, based on classical foundations).
The Middle Ages kept a critical mass of the Classics around, although it is fair to say that they did not make as much use of the literature as they did of the philosophy (and history, at least in the East).