spellbanisher

To get in my belly.

Forgot about the wild gangs of turkeys roaming the streets and the black widows crawling about at night.

Cows

Rarely are they the primary advisor, but they do usually serve on dissertation and comps committees. The chances of you getting accepted into a grad program with an assistant professor listed as your person of interest is not very good, as they no seniority in the department. I've been told even applying to work with associate professors can be iffy for departments with larger pools of applicants.

Considering that agriculture accounts for 80% of California's water consumption, the most significant impact of the drought will be higher fruit, vegetable, and nut prices, which, when you consider that California grows most of the food that people in the US eat (most other ag states grow food for feed), means that the impact of the drought will effect pretty much effect everyone in the United States who consumes produce. Although it will also mean more wildfires, but except for Santa Cruz, I'm not sure how many of California's research universities are located in fire-prone areas.

I know several grad students who live in Sacramento with their families, so I think it is doable. You might also consider Woodland, which is also a lot cheaper than Davis, and the traffic on 113 is probably much better than I-80.

https://localwiki.org/davis/Night_Time

It is the decisions thread in the same way the Americas is Indian land. And hating is a critical tool in the historians toolkit. That and writing ridiculously complimentary dust jacket blurbs.

What is this doing in a thread about languages?

I don't know who said that, but sounds like how a scientist would characterize a historian's criticisms of guns, germs, and steel, although maybe I could imagine a cultural historian saying that if he was pressed for time. But environmental history is a big part of the discipline, and many, including luminaries such as Donald Worster, argue that culture is an adaptation to nature. The criticism of GG&S, as far as I know, come in three veins. One, geographical determinism obscures the consequences of human decisions. From this perspective, every shitty thing that has ever happened in history, from slavery to imperialism to genocide to environmental degradation, was preordained in the shape and composition of the continents, thereby absolving all the individual and collective actors responsibility of their conscious decisions. Second, a huge amount of criticism has come from specialists noting the voluminous errors in GG&S on the many different regions and periods it tries to cover. Third, there are those who say that much of the science and geography in GG&S is wrong. Just to provide a few examples from James Blaut's critique in Eight Eurocentric Historians, Diamond argues that agriculture was productive in Eurasia because it had a common temperate climate along an east-west axis which allowed diffusion, ignoring the fact that most of Eurasia is desert and inhospitable mountains, that diffusion very commonly took place on a north-south axis (think of corn being domesticated from Canada to Peru, wheat from northern Europe to Ethiopia, rice from northern China through southeast asia), and that when there was incentive, crops could be easily adapted to different environments (think of the potato and sweet potato, both domesticated in tropical climates and spread to cold and seasonally dry areas). He revives the long-debunked argument that China became a despotic empire because of its unified geography, in contrast to Europe, which could not be unified because of its indented coastlines. This ignores the fact that it was Southern Europe with the peninsulas and separate geographic cores. The region responsible for most of the major developments in the last 500 years, including the industrial revolution, was Northern and Western Europe, which is mostly flat, with the Northern European Plain stretching from France to Russia and from France almost to the Spanish border. The boundaries of most of the nation-states that formed in this region do not reflect topographic barriers. His assertion of Chinese stagnancy in the early modern period is also decades outdated and discredited. The popularity of GG&S highlights the tension between the hard and social sciences, as well as the pretensions of the populizers of the former. Why is it that despite all of the inaccuracies pointed out by various specialists this book is still so highly regarded by the general educated public and by those in the sciences? I think it is because the book purports to be "scientific," in contrasts to the works of those woolly headed specialists in the social sciences. Therefore, the information in the book occupies a higher plane of knowledge than that produced by the specialists. As Blaut put it, Diamond's argument is "scientistic" in that he "claims to produce reliable, scientific answers to [historical] problems when in fact he does not have such answers, and because he discards wholesale the findings of social science while inserting old and discredited theories of environmental determinism."

I developed it all by myself.

Anyone can be a historian, but some are more historian than others.

But seriously, pick the school with the beach. If your gonna be poor, you might as well get a tan.

I prefer modern, scientific, technological methods, like the magic eight ball.

Not a fan of coffee, but I love coffee flavored foods. All alcoholic beverages taste like piss to me (or at least how I assume piss tastes). Weaker alcoholic beverages, like cider, don't taste completely horrible, like a delicious cheese cake with a smidgen of dog shit in it.

ouija board.

Choosing partners based on physical attraction is so shallow. Looks fade, a large diversified investment portfolio lasts forever.

I went to the recruitment dinner, although I was very bad and didn't talk to any of the prospects. I was just there for the free food. But I did get to talk to some of the professors and older grad students that I hadn't met yet, so good dinner.

So, aliens?

We're exceptionally confident in our exceptionalism. Actually, there's nothing more banal than thinking your country is exceptional.

Having been a mediocre high student from California, there is lots of name brand schools which I knew nothing about(including all the ones you listed) until maybe a few years ago when I started thinking about grad school. I had I think an idiosyncratic path to learning about many of the big time schools in the United States. -It wasn't until about two years ago that I learned that Penn St and University of Penn were two different schools, after reading in an internet forum a recruiter mention that they always had to educate California students about the difference between Penn St and the University of Penn. When I told someone from Pennsylvania this a few weeks ago, she looked at me like I had just drowned a puppy. -I first learned about Brown from an episode of Fresh Prince of Belair, when Carlton, who is from a Princeton legacy family, told his father, "what if I don't get into Princeton. What if I have to settle for Harvard, or (shrieks), Brown!" -I learned about Dartmouth about a year ago when, in an discussion thread about the costs of an Ivy education, someone pointed out that at Dartmouth the expected family contribution for students from families making less than 70k a year was 0. -I only know about Cornell because one of my favorite shows was The Office (US version), and one of the douchiest characters on that show always brought up the fact that the went to Cornell. -I learned about Columbia about 4 years ago in my senior year of Undergrad, when I looked up the webpage of one of my favorite professors, who went to Columbia, to which I asked myself, "oh, is that a good school?" -I once thought that Caltech was like some kind of for profit technical college, like ITT Tech. That one is a little embarassing, because I'm from California. -Until about two years ago I thought that the University of Michigan and University of Wisconsin Madison were just schools for sports fanatics and jocks. UNC Chapel Hill, College of William and Mary, and The Johns Hopkins have only entered into my consciousness in the last few years.

So many typos. But the one that sticks in my craw is "in every era of American exceptionalism..." I meant to write, "in every era of American history" and I probably should have been more moderate and wrote, "In most eras of American history..."

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My reasons I call the Three Ps of history: perspectives, parallels, and persistence. Perspectives: What does a fish know about the water it swims in? History helps us understand the present better by giving examples of how people have acted, felt, and believed in the past. It shows how the present is unique, as well as how it is not. It helps increase our vision of what it means to be human. For this matter, history as a discipline is a method of negotiating with competing claims, beliefs, worldviews, and interpretations in a hopefully tolerant but still rigorous way, something that one has to do in any complex society. Unlike other social sciences, which also give perspective (especially anthropology), history is much more attuned to how things change over time, to the dynamic qualities of human societies. Parallels: This would roughly fall into the "those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it," or "history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes." While I think this is actually the weakest reason for studying history since our views of the past are interpretive, I still think it is helpful to be mindful of parallel events in history, how people have fought for change, created movements, handled various economic, social, and environmental crises, and so on. Persistence: Whatever one believes, it based on some interpretation of history, no matter how nebulous or unformed that historical vision might be. Even someone who says that the past does not matter, that we should be focused on the present and future is basing that claim off an understanding that technological, social, and political progress in the past was the result of forward thinking. Think about how frequently historical interpretations have played a central role in political discourse over the last 15 years in the United States. We must depose Saddam Hussein because he is a gathering threat, and the last time we ignored a gathering threat a world war resulted. We can't have universal healthcare because that is communism, and we all know that communism doesn't work. Employers should heed the lessons of the five dollar day and pay their workers more, because any government solution to inequality is worse than the problem. And then there's the tea party. I could go on and on. The point is, these vital political positions were driven by historical interpretations, and whether one believes they are good interpretations or bad ones, the fact is, to quote Faulkner, the past isn't dead. It isn't even past. Or to put it in another way, the past persists. We might as well deal with it.

Yes, if you are considering Davis, or have already decided on Davis, Davis wiki is your friend. https://localwiki.org/davis/