Show of Hands

Just sports?

Yeah. I get enough world news from other places.

Do you subscribe to any science journals?

No. I wish. It would be hard to pick which ones, and most of them are too damned expensive.

I miss the days when I had free or cheap student subscriptions - or even better these days (who needs all that paper stacking up?), free access to journals online through my employer’s (a medical school) library. Just go online and find anything.

There are *some* journals that have free online access to full articles, but there are a lot that don’t. You can search the National Library of Medicine for most journals in any life science (at PubMed) and read the abstracts, and in many cases purchase individual articles but the charge is steeper than I want to pay.

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Thankfully we can also go to libraries. Do you have a University nearby?

I used to get Social Work journals. That was after graduation though.

I do, Colorado State University. I can walk there from here (it’s about 2.5 miles) or it’s a quick bus ride. In spite of being associated with college campuses (5 of them) one way or another continuously from about 1982 until I moved here in 2011, I have barely set foot on the CSU campus. Not sure why. Two stories, though:

The only SOH user I’ve actually met was a CSU student, eLucidate. (He left SOH before you arrived.) We had lots of exchanges in comments but only met once, for a beer and some snacks, and then a wander around Old Town, shortly before he graduated, moved to Virginia for grad school and got too busy for SOH. I miss him! But some months before he graduated, he offered me use of his student ID for obtaining digital journal articles through the library. I never used it - I was slightly uncomfortable doing it; didn’t want to get him in any trouble. I do wish I’d been able to take advantage of it, though!

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Do you have to have a student ID to use University Libraries for professional journals that you read in the Library? I don’t think that was a requirement at my university. I remember elderly people reading in the journal section.

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One guy took some art classes and hired me to model for him. He paid me $10 an hour. He was so smart and such a nice, intelligent man.

eLucidate also encouraged me to go to some of the CSU programs for non-student citizens, like events at the observatory. (I’d expressed some interest in it. I haven’t... yet.

Second story isn’t as much about library or journals, but... other scientific resources. I was looking into course auditing opportunities for the father of a friend (the wife of the couple I housesit for). He’s older than I am, moved her recently, & hasn’t gotten out to meet people. He said CSU didn’t have any free classes for seniors. I checked the web site and he’s wrong; if there are open seats in a class when it starts, you can sit in for free.

Then I was listening to an audiobook on a subject that currently fascinates me - the effects that some parasites have on animal and most likely also human *behavior.* I’ve seen other books, but this one is Your Brain on Parasites. The book opened with a chapter about a young female undergrad student in the 70s at Rice University...

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She was taking a parasitology class from a fabulous professor and decided it what what she wanted to major in. She did, and made the parasite/animal behavior connection her life’s work. Then the book mentioned that she became a professor at Colorado State. I looked her up and she’s still here. She’s written a couple books on the subject, won awards, sounds like a *really* interesting woman.

So you can imagine my next thought - I *have* to sit in on a class with this woman. Heck, who needs journal articles? I can go to the *source* of them.

Unfortunately as it turns out she’s in the process of (slowly) retiring, and is no longer teaching. Dammit! Should have read the book a couple years ago. Even so, maybe I’ll be able to go talk to her, or something. Even so, I’m still inspired to find a class to audit.

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I wonder if she has teachers under her that have worked with her to take over and know her work.

You have a lot of local resources available to you.

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I don’t know what the policy is here for just *reading* journals. And if reading is OK, I imagine one could photocopy, also. I really should find out!

I did get kicked out of one university library for “just reading” once, in Oregon. But we were hippies (2 of us) and looked like it. We were actually reading about how to grow bamboo. We wanted to grow it on our land. I though the fact that we were taxpayers (property tax, after all) ought to justify our use of a public institution for that purpose. Apparently not! Security guards made us leave.

A year or so before that, I used to go over to UC Berkeley to pick the brains of entomologists who didn’t mind talking to me (still looking like the hippie I was) about insects I found in my garden. But... Berkeley, I guess.

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There is really a *ton* of interesting stuff going on here. Good thought about other teachers taking over her work. I did see one parasitology course, but it’s a lab course with required prerequisites - I don’t think they allow auditing with lab courses. But I can find out. And the prerequisites might be interesting in themselves, anyway, and also might not be required for auditors.

This is the second time I was listening to an audiobook and found a really fascinating local connection. The first book was No Stone Unturned. It’s about a small group of scientists who decided some years ago that they had specialized skills that could help law enforcement locate bodies (mostly buried) of murder victims. They’ve grown into a larger group over the years. They started with a few scientists meeting in a restaurant (if I remember right) in Denver, just talking over what they could do to help. One of them was a woman biologist from CSU.

I was listening to the book on a bus on my way to the dentist, about two miles north of CSU and downtown. I listened more on my way home. I got to a part where the author talked about the group, now calling themselves NecroSearch, having a permanent home in Fort Collins (my town) with the CSU woman at the help, and giving the address. Um, that’s familiar, I thought. It’s right across the street from my dentist’s office.

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*at the helm, not the help

It’s worth finding out about auditing classes. That would be a fascinating way of spending time in retirement.

I would be interested in finding out what they allow.

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I think so, and I would really like to do it. I don’t know if my current scheme of spending about 5 days at my daughter’s house (where I really can’t get into town for a class very easily) every month, and the occasional housesitting (often for 5-10 days but it’s been up to a month at a time) would make it not feasible. Although the housesitting is usually in the summer now, when I might be less likely to find a class, but who knows. And then I’m gone for about a week every early February... All that is what’s sort of kept me from looking into any regular volunteer position, too.

Even so, it can’t hurt to look at the schedules, and to *ask*.

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Do you get alerts with breaking news?

No, when I tried having the notifications on I don’t think there was ever one time when it was about something I needed to know about right away. At this point most of my notifications are off entirely. But I follow many of the same news outlets the apps are associated with on Twitter, and news seems to break there first anyway. It’s a simple thing to go to their site if it is something interesting - which usually means the iThing will open that app if it is installed, even if I never want it to and always prefer the desktop site.

Not to me, but if that’s all you care about.

Oy! 🤦‍♀️

Dang! Are there any that you like more?

Skimm is good for summaries of the prior day. I like Slate & Politico for analysis.
Then there’s the usual (NBC, Fox, AP, etc) for general coverage.

Do you set your phone to silent while sleeping?

Silent, yes. I sometimes wake up to a bunch of notifications.

I can imagine! If I got that many notifications I might jump out of my skin! Lol

What happens when there is an Amber Alert? Does your phone move itself across a table?
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I get an email from Skimm every business day first thing in the morning. It’s a good short overview of what’s happening. Only takes about 3-5 minutes to read.

I like that. I only thought CNN did that.

Thanks, I’ll try it. 😺

Thank you for sharing my poll. 😺

Look here:

www.allsides.com/news-source/reuters

Thanks! 😺