Achintya Rao • ಅಚಿಂತ್ಯ ರಾವ @RaoOfPhysics@scholar.social

Attn professional network people: If you post an announcement about your new paper, it’s some bullshit if it’s going to cost 42$ to read. You’re not contributing to the global scholarly convo, you’re just fooling yourself, with that subscription “journal”. I will nicely comment asking if it’s open access anywhere, but be warned that I kind of want to fight about it 😈

Scientific conference poster sessions: what you need to do.
Step 1: Remember to bring your poster with you.
Step 2: Make sure it's securely fixed to the board.
Step 3: Stand nearby in case someone has questions.

2018 article w/20 citations: "The complete overview of our model can be found at [URL]"

Today: URL = 404, nothing in Wayback Machine, no trace found manually browsing web domain, research group's site, or first author's site

Off goes another email to the author...

You can find a preprint version of my paper "How to Define Games and Why" here:

https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/abhdm

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions on how to make it better, I would love to hear them.

#GameStudies

The thing is, astronomy research has no inherent profit in it. The work astronomers do can (and often does) eventually have a strong impact on human technology and society but, at the time the scientists are still doing it? Not really.

Astronomy research is not done for profit and frequently involves collaborations which straight up ignore national borders and political matters, focusing on acquiring knowledge and sharing it freely.

Honestly, capitalists hate it.

Are we always going to assume everything important is measurable? It may be the case that it is actually the opposite, as Peter Drucker already said in his book "The effective executive", most important things cannot be measured.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/07/uk-businesses-using-artifical-intelligence-to-monitor-staff-activity

I'm extremely uncomfortable with the implications that it's morally suspect taking EU money for research. Is it worse than corporate money? Should research all be self-funded and thereby limited to rich people? I'd assert that public money is the least suspect money.

Your taxes pay for your transport infrastructure, they pay for unis, they pay for research. Paying for this kind of stuff is why I don't mind paying taxes. Indeed, I wish I paid higher taxes for more social services.

I found a useful, handy guide geared towards steering doctoral students towards not graduating for as long as possible, and thought I'd translate it to a language actual people can actually read

enjoy. and, also, stay in school!

https://streetremix.blogspot.com/2019/04/how-to-avoid-graduating-guide-for-phd.html

What kind of a world have we built where we have to justify, in writing, something as natural as parents visiting their children? That’s exactly what I just had to do so my Turkish parents can get a visa to visit me in Ireland. Here’s the letter of invitation I just wrote.

April Fools day, one of the only days where we all critically evaluate everything on the internet before beliving it

I think I found a game for scholar.social.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/game

Which are the things you learned/are learning during your PhD, that you value the most?