The Fora: A Higher Education Community

On the bird walk where we saw ospreys aplenty, we also saw several dolphins merrily splashing in the ocean, with one of them quite close to the shore.

T1 or referee reading today. Time is short.

Saturday's post seems to have disappeared, so am reposting a list of the birds I saw. Plenty of purple martins on the birdhouses built for them in the refuge--they were noisy!. One osprey carrying a fish, another sitting on a short pole along the shore munching on a rather large fish. Several more ospreys flying overhead, a turkey vulture, several foster's terns and swans, at least five swans sitting on nests. This was Saturday's count--left out the usual birds.

On Sunday I stopped at the birding hotspot to take another look at the birds. This refuge is on a fairly small strip of land between the ocean and an inlet, and the access to it on an overlook on a rather long bridge, so that the trees are at eye-level or lower. If you go down the steps you're just a path away from the refuge, which gives you a street-level view of the birds and their habitat. There were the usual snowy egrets, glossy ibises, on trees and also flying over in typical goose formation of more than 200 (probably more than 400 individuals in the same area), white ibises, a few yellow-crowned night herons, several black-crowned night herons, and what appeared to be a little blue heron. I stood at the overlook for quite some time, seeing the fights, the birds carrying nesting materials, mostly twigs, and the reason for some of the fights, birds alighting and taking off from their perches and nests, birds just milling around, and all of them just co-existing peacefully--I thought that this was DEI in actions. The highlight was seeing a glossy ibis alterate between standing and sitting on her nest, which contained two large eggs in a lovely Easter egg-green color.

Quote from: Hegemony on Today at 01:03:17 PMThat last moment of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is a classic.

So true! They nailed it.  Have you seen either of the remakes?

Afternoon!

Pangram and above genius.

It was a good trip, but exhausting as I was trying to get plenty of birding done in addition to the main reason for leaving town for the weekend.

Happy solving!

In recent months we've had a staff member semi-retire.  She has gone to part-time.  This means we're paying for fewer hours of staff time, and this staff member has been dropped from our staff employee benefits.  By not hiring another part-timer to cover the hours she's no longer here for, we have saved some money.  That will help our budget situation without any lay-offs.

The fact remains that we now have fewer staff hours with which to serve the public.  This is putting us in an awkward position at times.  We're now trying to put together a plan for the next Board of Trustees meeting to reduce our evening hours during the week slightly.  Most evenings there's nobody here at closing time, so we could amputate an hour from most evenings during the week without inconveniencing too many patrons.  By adjusting work schedules, we should be able to cover our hours pretty well.

But it's going to require quite a few adjustments in schedules.  Some lunch breaks may have to be reduced.  We need to put a good deal of thought into the best schedule.  I hope we can come up with something that won't antagonize anybody too badly.

I thought we could shorten Saturday schedules by an hour as well, but in studying patron activity on Saturdays I don't find any reliably slow hours at either the beginning or the end of the day that would be an obvious hour to sacrifice.  So it looks like we won't be shortening our opening hours on that day.

I've played a few Fallout games and I loved the series too.  They really captured the atmosphere of the video games.  And Walton Goggins is always a joy to watch.

Last night we finished season 2 of Extraordinary on Hulu.  1/2 hour comedy series centered on a 25yo with issues who lives in a world where everyone (except her) acquires a superpower when they turn 18.  I thought the premise seemed kind of interesting and when ads for season 2 started showing up I thought, "oh, this actually looks really funny!"  So we watched it, it's very well done, very funny if a bit cringe at times.  And the actress who plays Sister Michael in Derry Girls is in it.

Quote from: marshwiggle on Today at 02:15:58 PM

Quote from: Wahoo Redux on Today at 12:51:02 PMI don't think you quite understand what that phrase means, Marshy. 

Why do you say that? The point is that how anyone wants to be treated flies in the face of a society that strives to treat people fairly. In the latter case, if everyone is treated the same, then that effectively means doling out available resources equally. But in the former, if everyone (or every "group") gets to decide what they feel they deserve, that makes no reference to whether that is compatible with the available resources in the context of what everyone else feels they themselves deserve.

It's Kant's categorical imperative simplified.

All it says is treat other people the same way you would want to be treated.

Kind of in a holding pattern waiting for readers' responses on the monograph and doing a kind of scattered job search.

Been editing an old revise & resubmit, picking away at the writing, rethinking it a bit.  One reader's response was so all over the place that I don't know what to do with it; hu threw in everything possibly associated with the subject matter including the kitchen sink.  Considering including a note to this effect if and when I send it back.

Hoping for great R&R, darkstarry.