I’ve already gotten some feedback about my previous entry urging people not to do a doctorate. Not here — nobody ever comments here — but on Facebook and on my cousin’s blog (she’s one of the three people I was thinking of). To my great surprise, none of them wants to kill me (so far as I know; they all seem pretty devious to me, and could get me when I’m not looking).

I wrote that post quickly and not necessarily coherently, and I left some ideas out; the feedback has helped me think more clearly about my point. Let me try to restate it more cogently.

Getting a doctorate is something that involves an awful lot of effort, but not necessarily a lot of reward — especially if you can’t get a tenure-track position, or a job requiring a Ph.D. and paying accordingly. You don’t get a Ph.D. unless you are compelled to do so — you’re wired so that you have no other choice. From my perspective, if you already have a career, you’re lucky: in a way, you’ve dodged a bullet. What mystified me was the notion that someone who already had a career, one that paid well relative to a starting professor’s salary, would want to spend several years in poverty chasing a degree that wouldn’t necessarily improve their material circumstances or change their career path.

But that’s the general principle. Reality is more complex. Of the three people I was thinking about when I wrote that post:

• One (my cousin) makes a very good living at a successful career and is having second thoughts, though loves the idea of being a university professor.
• One describes herself as “underemployed” — the income level of a Ph.D. student wouldn’t be that much of a pay cut, apparently — and is strongly motivated to do something that requires the degree.
• One could take paid leave (at reduced pay) for a year to get her coursework done, and would still be able to pay into her pension; moreover, she believes that a Ph.D. fits into her overall career goals.

Which reassures me a bit.

One commenter argued that I was focusing too much on finances — that as long as you can make enough to live, it’s worth it to do something you love. It’s very hard to argue against that. The key, I think, is going into it with eyes wide open: knowing, for example, that you’ll be poor, busy, and stressed for years, and that you might not be able to find a job, doing something you love, once you’re done. Only you can decide whether the sacrifice is worth it — whether the reward is worth the risk.

(It’s quite possible that I’m too focused on harsh realities and not enough on chasing your dreams; it was a long time before I was able to allow myself to take the time to work on my writing, for example.)

It’s axiomatic that you shouldn’t go to graduate school unless you receive funding. A decent scholarship, a full teaching assistantship, or a combination of both, plus a tuition waiver, should be enough to keep you alive, though not in style. I was comfortable enough on what I was given. (Under no circumstances should you attempt a Ph.D. without full funding. Living in poverty is one thing; massive indebtedness is another.)

But I’m not just focusing on the finances. No, for me the issues is the finances plus the ordeal. I have to confess that I see this subject filtered through my own experiences, which were unpleasant. Grad school was simultaneously the most stimulating and the most stressful part of my life. (Hopefully, if you’re considering a Ph.D., you’re not quite the stress monkey I was.) The comprehensive exams alone were soul-crushing for me, but then I was given a reading list of 399 books, received minimal guidance, contracted ankylosing spondylitis in the middle of it, read five books a day in a vain effort to catch up, panicked to the point of paralysis during the last month, went blank during the orals, and flunked magnificently. After which I rapidly lost the will to continue.

So from my point of view, if you can get to a decent career that you’re happy with without having to go through that, you’re lucky.

And if you’re prepared to go through that for no good purpose — without a specific goal that absolutely requires that Ph.D. — you’re crazy.

Centauri Dreams: Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration by Paul Gilster summarizes the current research and thinking about interstellar travel — the challenge, in a nutshell, is how to send a probe to Alpha Centauri and have it arrive during the lifetime of a single researcher. It’s mostly about propulsion, but also about materials, communications, AI and nanotechnology. Useful stuff for a science fiction writer hoping to bone up on the subject (ahem). Indeed, the book is a lot more SF-friendly than I expected, with references to authors and Analog articles; I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. Gilster’s website.

Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Volume I, 1907-1948: Learning Curve by William H. Patterson, Jr. First half of the massive bio of science fiction giant Heinlein, who died in 1988. Despite the fact that Heinlein was extremely private — and, we learn, had a lot to be private about — this authorized biography (by his widow, who died in 2003) reveals much that was previously hidden, but is hampered by the fragmentary evidence that survives from the period (Heinlein burned a lot of material relating to his second marriage, for example). Patterson does well as a historian, and the book is gripping and a must-read, but hero-worship is a factor here. See a series of blog posts on Tor.com about Heinlein and this biography.

Centauri Dreams by Paul Gilster

Amazon.ca • Amazon.com

Robert A. Heinlein by William H. Patterson, Jr.

Amazon.ca • Amazon.com

Three people I know have expressed an interest in going back to school to get a doctorate in their respective fields. My private reaction in each case was: “Are you crazy?” These are people with good jobs, possibly even tenure and pensions — and they want to go back to eating macaroni and cheese?

From a strictly financial perspective, getting a doctorate isn’t a good idea. It takes you out of the workforce for at least five years; most people I know have taken eight (because they’re trying to earn a living while they work on their dissertation, which stretches things out even more).

That’s a long time not to be at full salary (for people making a teacher’s or bureaucrat’s salary, the best-case scenario — tuition waivers and full scholarships — would still involve a 60 percent pay cut) or not to be contributing to an RRSP. And I don’t believe that the first two years of a Ph.D. — the coursework and comprehensive exams — can be done part-time.

It’s one thing to continue to be a student, quite another to graduate to adulthood and then have to throttle back your spending to the poverty line after getting used to certain comforts. (You think you’ll still be able to afford that iPhone? When I was in grad school, I couldn’t even afford cable, and I was better off than most of my colleagues.)

And that’s assuming you’re paying Canadian tuition fees, or have a full scholarship — I’m not even taking student debt into consideration, or how long it will take after you graduate to pay it off.

For people already in the workforce with a halfway-decent career, the sad thing is that the best thing they could do after finishing their doctorate is often to go back to their old job. In many fields, the supply of freshly minted doctorates far exceeds the number of open positions. (What, you thought it was bad in the public school system?) Too often, recent graduates end up teaching as sessional lecturers — if they’re very lucky, they’ll make more than their teaching assistants on a per-course basis.

This situation gets a little better if you’re willing to move absolutely anywhere for a job. Many of the sessional lecturers I’ve known were teaching at the university from which they received their Ph.D. — they’re there because they can’t move elsewhere, usually for family reasons (e.g., their spouse’s job), so they’re stuck.

And it’s not like a tenure-track assistant professorship pays that well either. A high school teacher at the same point in life probably makes more: during the time that the university professor has been going through grad school, the teacher has been working and building up seniority. By the time the prof gets hired, the teacher has been working for years.

But if your career prospects aren’t significantly changed by getting a doctorate, why get it at all? Often I’m told it’s for personal reasons. But it’s an expensive thing to do, I think, in the middle of your prime earning years. And considering the amount of work, stress and poverty involved, it’s a punishing sort of luxury.

Of course my opinion is coloured by my experience: in the end, graduate school delayed my entry into the workforce by five years and helped wreck my health. (Remind me to go on and on about the connection between stress and autoimmune disease.) And I still didn’t get my doctorate. (Not for nothing is the drop-out rate for graduate students about one in two.) No job I have held since then has required my M.A.; then again, the process of getting that degree developed some marketable skills (and it certainly doesn’t look bad on the résumé).

All the same, I would probably have been better off in the long run if I had stopped at my B.A., or even my M.A., and entered the job market from there.

Of course, my friends with doctorates, and those thinking of getting one (including the very people I’m thinking of), will have a different take on this subject. Am I wrong for being so down on getting a doctorate? Tell me why.

The dromaeosaurid dinosaur family — which includes such fan favourites as Velociraptor and Deinonychus — continues to offer surprises. Known for the sickle claw on one toe, dromaeosaurids have also been found to have feathers — and quite possibly venom. Now a new, strange dromaeosaur has been discovered in Romania. Balaur bondoc, a close relative of Velociraptor, had two sickle claws on each foot — it re-evolved its big toe: it has four toes on each foot, very unusual for a theropod dinosaur — and gave it a big claw too. Paleontologists were expecting some weird stuff out of late Cretaceous Europe, which was at the time a series of islands — and natural selection gets funny in insular populations. Not this, though. (Frankly, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this turned out to be a case of prehistoric polydactyly — this is just too weird.)

Links: AMNH press release; NSF press release; AP; Discovery News; Grauniad; LiveScience; Not Exactly Rocket Science; Wired Science.

A few weeks ago, one of our two male Red-sided Garter Snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis parietalis) — the last of the great litter of 2002 — decided to bite himself, at which point he recoiled in alarm and surprise. He and his brother are curious and friendly (albeit very ravenous: they’ll bite your fingers, though it’s not personal; they’re just hungry), but they’re just not very smart.

By no means is that the first time I’ve seen one of my snakes bite itself. Normally it’s something I associate with Common Kingsnakes (Lampropeltis getula); I recall seeing both California and Speckled Kingsnakes chew on themselves. Apparently it’s more than a kingsnake thing.

Last week, though, I was summoned to answer a question on Ask MetaFilter from someone whose son’s California Kingsnake chewed on its own tail on more than one occasion. You can read my answer there; I’m going to flesh it out a bit more (and organize it a bit better) here.

To understand why some snakes might bite themselves, you have to keep the following three points in mind:

1. Snakes aren’t very smart (and kingsnakes aren’t very smart even by snake standards).
2. Some snakes freak the fuck out when eating.
3. Snakes are never hungrier than just after they’ve eaten.

Let me explain each of those points.

Snakes aren’t very smart (and kingsnakes aren’t very smart even by snake standards). I’ve often joked that a snake’s brain functions can be expressed in about 30 lines of Perl. My pet theory — which itself isn’t much more than a joke, either — is that kingsnakes are even stupider than the average snake. Kingsnakes are known as snake eaters (which is why you can’t have more than one in a cage as a rule), but will pretty much eat anything. They don’t, in other words, discriminate in terms of what they eat; the part of the brain that asks whether something should be eaten has been replaced with a simple NOM! I suspect that if it moves and is small enough, they will try to eat it.

(They’re also immune to rattlesnake venom; I also suspect that it was easier for kingsnakes to evolve immunity to venom than it was for them to grow additional brain power.)

Some snakes freak the fuck out when eating. I’ve observed that captive kingsnakes tend to go a little crazier than other snakes at feeding time — they tend to lose what little mind they have when attacking their food. Corn and pine snakes, for example, tend to be pretty placid feeders, so much so that I’ve been able to feed them on my lap; I wouldn’t dare do this with a kingsnake. They. Just. Freak. Out.

Now, remember how one of my garter snakes bit himself earlier this month? I’ve also noticed some garter snakes freaking the crap out during feeding time — especially that one, his brother, and his father, all of whom would bite willy-nilly at everything that moved (and some things that didn’t) — except, of course, the mouse that was dropped in front of them.

(Among garter snakes it seems to be a male thing: males are pretty hyper to start with; females are much calmer and matter-of-fact about eating, though they have much bigger appetites.)

Snakes are never hungrier than just after they’ve eaten. At least that’s what I’ve observed in our collection: snakes that have just eaten a pretty big meal seem awfully eager to have another one. They’re often looking for more, and there’s an explanation for that. In the wild, snakes tend not to eat at regular intervals: they raid an entire mouse or bird nest, or gobble down many frogs just after they’re transformed. Food is not available regularly, so they tend to gorge when it’s available — after all, there might not be another chance like that for a month or two.

Feeding mode, in other words, is like a switch that is left on for a while. It’s most often during this time, then, that a wound-up snake might get confused and bite itself.

A related scenario I’ve observed is when snakes bite their cagemates immediately after feeding — but only then. I’m talking about snakes that have shared a cage for the better part of a decade, and are fed separately: sometimes one of them is still a little wound up when put back into the cage, and tags his or her cagemate. Usually only once, and usually the snake settles down pretty fast, but in the meantime we’re watching that snake very carefully, and making a note to give that snake more time by itself in its feeding cage before putting it back in with its roommate. I’ve seen this happen with gopher snakes and rat snakes, neither of which has a reputation for cannibalism. It’s just something that can happen when one of them gets wound up.

So my best guess is that certain snakes lose their shit when feeding, and in the confusion bite themselves (or their cagemate), thinking it’s more food. Eventually they settle down, so it’s not like people have to worry about their pet snakes turning themselves into Ouroboros at any moment.

Just keep an eye on them after they’ve eaten.

In 1948, the Library of Congress purchased a collection of colour images taken by Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944). Taken during a series of surveys of the Russian Empire on behalf of the Tsar prior to World War I, these photos were produced by taking a series of black-and-white photos through red, green and blue colour filters; Prokudin-Gorskii created colour images by combining the images with a special projector using the same filters. (This method is still used by astrophotographers, who use specialized monochrome CCDs to take a series of images through special filters.) The result, when processed with modern-day tools (hello, Photoshop), is a series of stunningly vibrant colour photos from a period otherwise remembered in sepia, and from a part of the world not often seen in the West, even at the time. A total of 2,607 images are available in the LOC’s Prokudin-Gorskii Collection; an online exhibition from the LOC and The Big Picture offer some of the more stunning examples. Above: a portrait of the Emir of Bukhara.

Ray Bradbury is 90 years old today. Coincidentally, this not-remotely-worksafe video and song celebrating Bradbury (sort of) has been circulating lately — it keeps turning up on the blogs of science fiction writers, who seem jealous that a song like this hasn’t been written about them. (The song is also available on iTunes.) Let me reiterate: Ray Bradbury is 90 years old. (Is she trying to kill him?)

I don’t know what it is about small-town councils that compels them from time to time to issue by-laws that are both ultra vires and unconstitutional, but they never seem to stop doing it. It’s not just teen curfews, either: the council in Lillooet, British Columbia has introduced a by-law that would, among other things, ban “unauthorized performances, marches, meetings and formal gatherings in public places” — a by-law that, according to one civil rights advocate, would not survive a Charter challenge.

If Mayor Dennis Bontron and the councillors of Lillooet District have a problem with paragraph 2(d) of the Charter, which guarantees freedom of peaceful assembly, they should ask the provincial or federal government to invoke the notwithstanding clause. (Good luck with that.) Other than that, they should maybe hire an actual lawyer to look over the drafts of their by-laws so that they don’t make them look like a bunch of drooling, jack-booted busybodies. Honestly, I don’t know why town councils even bother drafting crap that even laypeople can tell is beyond their authority and their competence — are they really this stupid?

Behold Beelzebufo ampinga, the Devil Frog — a prehistoric frog 40 cm long, larger than any present-day frog. The news of Beelzebufo’s discovery was announced more than two years ago, but I only heard about it last week.

You’ll note that in the above image from Wikimedia Commons by Nobo Tamura, it’s shown eating a small theropod dinosaur — because ancient creatures that could (or did) eat small dinosaurs are inherently interesting for some reason.

Beelzebufo will look familiar to people who know their frogs, because it was a ceratophryine frog: South American horned frogs, sometimes sold as “Pac-Man frogs” in the pet trade, and known for their general belligerence and willingness to nom. But Beelzebufo was different: it was larger, of course; but it lived 65 to 70 million years ago — in Madagascar, and ceratophryines were thought to be native to South America.

As a result, Beelzebufo’s discovery is significant in terms of the timing of the breakup of the Gondwana supercontinent. South America and Madagascar were parts of Gondwana that were isolated from the rest of the world, biologically speaking, until relatively late. India and Africa met Eurasia tens of millions of years ago, but the Great American Interchange only occurred three million years ago when the Panamanian isthmus formed. Prior to that point, South America maintained some deeply weird fauna, some of which is still around.

The neat thing is that there is at least one other group of animals found only in relict areas of Gondwana: boas. More specifically, true boas, such as boa constrictors, rainbow boas, and anacondas. Boas moved into Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean during the Interchange, but they’re also found in Madagascar and Réunion (such as Dumeril’s Boa) and on certain islands in the Pacific (Candoia). There were probably true boas elsewhere in Gondwana, but they’ve since been displaced by pythons.

Compare a boa constrictor and a Dumeril’s boa, and you’d be hard pressed to guess that they were separated by thousands of miles and tens of millions of years of isolation. And they’re not the only ones.

Our yard continues to turn up interesting and surprising inhabitants. On Sunday, Jennifer discovered a couple of great golden digger wasps (Sphex ichneumoneus), and managed to get some pictures. Above, one of these wasps is doing what great golden digger wasps are known for: capturing an insect — in this case, a grasshopper — and paralyzing it, before dragging it back to one of her burrows. There, she will lay an egg on the hapless creature, which will serve as food for the larva once it hatches.

Her photos of another wasp feeding at the oregano flowers turned out a little better, but you have to admit that catching a wasp catching a grasshopper for gruesome purposes is way cooler.