I'll be living in the apartment for the three months! I am thinking about a strategy to counter, because apartments have not sat empty while I've lived there. This summer they've been renovating as people moved out, so I just don't think there are any damages to be mitigated by this extra money I'm going to pay them. It's just too bad it's so clear in the lease that I signed! I may just ask if it could be reduced regardless.

Oh, I thought you wanted to move sooner than 3 months!

Worth asking, all they can say is no and you're no worse off.

Unrelated: does anyone else read Slate? It might just be that I'm on a netbook, but DAMN their redesign is AWFUL. I like to scroll down and see all the new stories, and I can't see half of what they've got, the way it is now.

So I'm working on timesheets. That is what I've come to. But doing them during work hours is new, especially since I don't know how to book my timesheet filling time.

This sort of thing came up in a meeting this morning.

The NIH will pay you to do research, but they will not pay you to write the grants necessary to get them to pay you to do research.

That's ok if you are in a traditional university. Usually grants only pay the 30% of your salary over the summer. NIH assumes that you write the grants during the school year. But if you are in a medical school or research institute you need to cover all of your salary with grants, and to do that you need to spend most of your time writing grants. Which you can't get paid to do. Because that is not what NIH is paying you to do.

Catch 22.

So the solution is for the med school to pay, say, 2% of the researcher's salary, and for everyone to pretend that the researcher is spending that fifty minutes per week writing eight or ten grants a year. When in fact, they are spending 50 hours a week working on grants. There is an agreement from both sides just not to talk about it. Because the whole system would fall apart if you talked about it.

Oh, I thought you wanted to move sooner than 3 months!

Nah, I thought I just needed to give the 3 months of notice, not the three months AND the cash.

The Slate redesign is bonkers.

Damn, I did not realize Cameron Douglas was in solitary for two years! WTFF, man. [link]

The Slate redesign is bonkers.

And they're still breaking articles across multiple pages!

At urgent care with mac. Possible achilles tendony injury IN THE LIBRARY AT SCHOOL!!!

At urgent care with mac. Possible achilles tendony injury IN THE LIBRARY AT SCHOOL!!!

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing?

(Also, yikes! I hope he's okay!)

Yikes!

Rick speaks truth. I have had to decide if I should spend time writing grants or writing an article or something else.