apss '09 (iii)

5. monday is boring, except for $3.50 martinis complete with the world's most delicious pimiento-stuffed olives. i am not a martini purist. i will drink mine with good vodka, and whatever proportion of vermouth the bartender sees fit to mix in. if this happens to ruin my friendship with anyone, so be it.

6.1. the advisor gives a talk in a symposium where he spends a fair amount of time talking about my work.

6.2. for some reason, this makes me feel extremely uncomfortable.

6.3. squirming, etc.

6.4. at the end of the talk, someone gets up to ask a question about a data slide that i gave to the advisor about 24 hours before i left philly. of course he doesn't know how to answer it, and to my acute horror, he confesses that one would have to ask me to find out.

6.5. this is exactly the kind of dumb thing that happens in academia all the time; people jump the gun on presenting unchecked data from one grad student, and suddenly it becomes the Word, and people everywhere are using it as evidence for their own claims. not what's said, but who says it.

6.5.1. as a corollary: if it's in the science section of the newspaper, it's almost certainly not true.