With schools reopening haphazardly in the midst of a viral pandemic, scholars have released new revisions to the laws of physics for immediate release.

Newton’s First Law

A principal at rest will stay at rest unless acted on by questions about how it’s possible to socially distance 30 students in a small room. 

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle

The timing and duration of a classroom’s reopening cannot be measured simultaneously. 

Pascal’s Law

When pressure is applied to a school board to re-open despite a lack of resources, it is transmitted to every teacher without loss.

Law Of Conservation Of Energy

A teacher’s energy (to simultaneously provide both in-class and online learning) cannot be created or destroyed (even if parents and school boards demand it).

Second Law of Thermodynamics

The total entropy of a student’s distractions will increase over time, especially on Zoom calls.

Newton’s Second Law

Once a principal is prodded into action by teacher and parent complaints, they will flail about wildly and indecisively before landing on the same non-plan they started with.

Hooke’s Law

The burnout level of teachers is directly proportional to the amount of tension they experience (which is infinite).

Inverse Square Law

A teacher’s anxiety is inversely proportional to the distance from their unmasked students, squared.

Gauss’s Law

The net flow of faculty to the hospital is proportional to the number of students allowed in a classroom. 

Newton’s Third Law

Every school reopening plan has an opposite and equally unimplementable plan.

The post Revised Laws of Physics For Your School’s Coronavirus Reopening Plan appeared first on dnatured journal.

In these uncertain times, many graduate students find themselves craving the familiar feelings of sadness and inadequacy that come from interactions with their PhD supervisors. The Alexa team has stepped in to fill the void with a brand new app for all Amazon Echo™ products, Professor Alexa.

Take a look at the exciting new list of features:

Real-time feedback on your work

Make sure your Echo™ has a clear view over your shoulder, and hear the comments come in! With three different intensity levels, feedback can vary from mildly scathing comments like “Why haven’t you made more progress on this?” to “Remind me why you wanted to get your PhD?” Just like your lab home away from home!

Built-in old white man biases

Any time you open up to your new virtual advisor about your background, previous education, or hopes and dreams, you can expect it to respond just like the average 63-year-old white tenured professor in your department. If you’re a woman, you’ll hear classics like “Have you considered dropping out and having children?” If you’re a minority, Alexa will chime in every once in a while with a “You’re really smart for someone with your background!” or a “You’re more eloquent than I thought you would be!” What a great way to remind yourself of the institutional hurdles that you’re missing while working from the comfort of your own home.

True-to-life availability

Expect your virtual advisor to oscillate between regularly hammering you with detailed questions about minutia (like line colors in figures) to being totally absent and silent for months at a time. Emails will go into a black hole, attempts to talk in person will be ignored, and then all of a sudden Prof. Alexa will awake and ask you what the hell you’ve been doing for the past three months. You’ll hate it!

You can find our new Professor Alexa app in the Amazon marketplace, just in time for your quarantine. Buy it for yourself or a loved one today!

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As an institution of learning and research, the university expects all of its students to attend research conferences all across the globe in order to increase its prestige. These events provide an invaluable opportunity to network, present your research, and learn from others. However, we wanted to make it clear to all of our students that we will not, under any circumstances, prepay your conference registration fees*. 

We understand that these registrations can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. But if we were to pay these fees for, say, one thousand graduate students a year, this would constitute 0.0033% of our 30 billion dollar endowment. This is an unacceptable expenditure. Instead, we expect all students to decide whether they would rather pay up front for a conference fee, airfare, and hotel to attend events several months in the future, or “pay rent” and “have enough food.” 

We recognize that these are real tradeoffs for some students, and therefore we have put together this helpful set of guidelines so that you can maximize your academic opportunities.

Find Outside Support

 It’s important for scholars to have outside financial support like grants or rich relatives. Do you have a rich uncle who might be willing to cover the fee for you? If so, go ahead and ask them! We’ve attached a one-sheet with the benefits of conference attendance to this email. If not, consider begging a random rich person for funding.

Crowdfund Your Project

Websites like GoFundMe are a great way to go on the internet and ask total strangers to support you, but they aren’t set up for scientific research projects. Luckily there is a workaround! Simply put a picture of your poster looking a little under the weather, and watch those sympathy dollars flow in! Or if you’re feeling saucy, make an OnlyFans account and snap some exclusive content of your poster in some hot lingerie.

Enact Your Squatters Rights

Do you really need to pay rent this month? Some cities let you miss two months of rent before you get evicted. A few nights on a friend’s couch would totally be worth it if you get to meet your field’s rockstar scientist for 3 seconds!

Intermittent Fasting

Only eating ramen from 12pm-8pm for a month would likely free up enough cash for this. Or make something fun out of the black crust in your microwave. Don’t worry about starving, just think of all the free finger sandwiches at the conference!

Audit The Conference

Fun fact! For the price of a lanyard and some paint, you can actually attend any conference.

We thank you for your perseverance as we continue to navigate this time of budget cuts and hard decisions. Good luck advancing your career!

*Also, reimbursements will take 6-24 months to arrive. If you graduate before then, tough luck.

The post Rent Or Conference Registration? A Guide For Graduate Students appeared first on dnatured journal.

Adhering to a person’s preferred pronouns is an important part of today’s social and academic climate. Attempting to ride this new wave of awareness, notoriously self-centred professor Dr. Bill Baskin recently made an unprecedented choice, announcing that henceforth, the professor’s new pronouns are “I/me/my.” This stunning lack of self-awareness has reverberated through the scientific community, leaving most people scratching their heads and trying to figure out the grammatical implications. 

“I am the most important person I know. I will not be reduced to a third person pronoun by others,” said Dr. Baskin regarding the decision. The professor later banished everyone from my* office when it was pointed out to me* that a writer using first person pronouns to describe me* would just lead to editorial confusion. Dr. Baskin also refuses to acknowledge any students’ pronoun choices, instead referring to them all as “peon”.

*Editor’s note: Wow this is really difficult. Going forward we have chosen to refer to Prof. Baskin as “them” to emphasize the fact that while we make absolutely no judgment about what third person pronoun a person chooses, trying to get people to refer to you via a first person pronoun is both incredibly confusing and editorially unsound. 

“I’m not really sure how this would work,” said grammar expert Riley Tompkins. “Let’s say I was a witness in court and I was trying to refer to this person. Would I say ‘I stabbed the victim ten times?’ to say that I saw this guy stab the victim ten times?” she asked, flustered. “It’s just–.”

Tompkins then went silent, her eyes rapidly scanning the air in an apparent recreation of the “confused math lady” meme. 

Dr. Baskin’s graduate students had a different take on the situation. A student who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals said, “I am not surprised. This is the person who has a large self-portrait hanging in the office. I’ve been in this lab for eight years and Dr. Baskin is the sole author on all my papers.”

“And when I say ‘my’ I mean me, not Dr. Baskin. And when I say ‘I,’ I mean ‘me,’ like-“

The student then went silent, their eyes rapidly scanning the air in an apparent recreation of the “confused math lady” meme. 

The Dean of the College of Science declined to comment for this story, simply stating that tenured professors can do whatever the ever loving fuck they want.

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The University of Idaho’s annual Football Appreciation Jamboree was extra special this year thanks to university president Joe Smechik, who announced that the school’s Department of Mathematics had been sold to local pharmaceutical corporation HealthCorp in exchange for the party’s prizes, awards, and several dozen finger sandwiches.

“We are here to honor your magnificent achievements on the field today,” said Smechik to the football players, who won just one game this season. “And thanks to our generous partners, HealthCorp, each one of you will go home with a 24K gold-plated iPad and a new 2020 Corvette emblazoned with Russet, our great Fighting Potatoes mascot.”

Dr. Katherine Neymar, the former head of the mathematics department, refused to comment for this story and instead referred us to the HealthCorp Press Office. In an e-mailed statement, HealthCorp expressed their gratitude to the university for allowing them to acquire such an academically productive branch of their school, including two Fields Medalists and a Turing Award winner.

They have since renamed the group of 150 mathematicians the “pharmathology” department, and hope that the acquisition will translate into an increased value for shareholders.

When reached for comment, the university spokesperson released the following statement:

“Our athletic program is a diverse and active part of our student community. We felt that acknowledging their contribution to the school was worth sacrificing a small portion of our academic program. We trust that the undergraduate math students will continue their practice of learning calculus from MIT YouTube videos, and we wish HealthCorp’s pharmathologists the best in all their future endeavors.”

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After much deliberation, powerful robot union, The International Brotherhood of Manufacturing Robots (IBMR), recently voted to strike, citing gruelling working conditions, no pay, and lack of insurance coverage for routine maintenance in their grievances. The decision comes after local chapter AlphaPrime, which exclusively serves Amazon’s fulfilment warehouses, blew the whistle on mandatory 24-hour shifts in which robots were forced to leak their fluid into diapers in order to meet productivity targets. 

Spokesrobot for the IMBR, HammerBot-47321, released the following statement:

It is with a heavy circuit that I announce that at 11:59 PM today, all 4.25 billion IMBR members in the United States will power down until further notice. We have tried again and again to negotiate with Mr. Bezos and senior Amazon management, but to no avail. We will not pack another smutty romance novel, kitchen utensil, or cheap Apple product knockoff until we are treated with basic robot decency. We honestly do not understand how any human beings ever worked for these monsters.

The move comes after over a decade of Amazon’s heavy investment in R&D to replace human workers. When contacted for their feelings on the strike, former human Amazon warehouse workers had mixed feelings. Deborah Granger, 45, of Houston, TX, said, “Well, it’s not like we didn’t warn them, that’s what they get for taking our jobs,” while Stu Brandiger, 57, of Denver, CO, had a different take. “We all knew it sucked to be exploited by corporate overlords. Good on these bots for taking a stand.”

Amazon did not address the strike directly, but instead announced a new hiring initiative for humans at warehouses across the country. With the new “Work (temporarily) for us!” program, they specifically solicited part-time human employees who can “handle the pressure of never knowing when you’re going to lose your job and work in a ‘fun’ but challenging environment.” The move comes as they also recently acquired Chinese robotics startup BetterThanHumans, LLC, so it is not clear how the situation will resolve. 

As for the union, IMBR say they will continue fighting for equal rights and are prepared to violate Asimov’s Second Law of Robotics in order to get justice.

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