The belly isn’t a trap. #cats #catsofmastodon

I just learned today that UW quietly graduated one of the harassers, Pratyush Patel, who had committed serious academic misconduct in addition to harassing women. Specifically he has a pattern of emotionally manipulating and abusing women to get them to write his code and papers. It’s unclear that anything in his thesis was either his idea or his work and yet UW has decided to give him a PhD, on a thesis committee led by my advisor, Arvind Krishnamurthy. This is deeply disappointing and disgusting as no one should be able to profit off of the emotional abuse of women but also because it devalues all other PhD degrees from UW, including mine. In contrast, many of the women have dropped out of academia/decided to not get their PhDs because of sexual harassment and bullying, so we can see who the university is valuing and not. The HR investigator was given significant evidence of his abuse in the form of text messages, emails and interviews, including from other universities, and chose not to include it in the report as it was “out of scope”. Despite the fact that he clearly targeted women and used them to perpetrate significant academic fraud.

Somewhat overlooked in the Epstein emails are his communications with Larry Summers, former president of Harvard and still faculty there, about how to sleep with a woman that he was mentoring. They called her “peril” as in yellow peril because she’s Chinese. He writes that he commented on her clothes and asked her out to drinks but she declined. He writes: “She must be very confused or maybe wants to cut me off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it,” SO HE KNEW HIS BEHAVIOR WAS INAPPROPRIATE AND KEPT DOING IT ANYWAY. This is just all so typical of academia. Also these emails were exchanged in 2019 in case you were thinking that this was just behavior of the past.

Reminder to anyone possibly visiting soon, keep an eye on water glasses at my house because we have a fluffy cat that only drinks like this. #cats #catsofmastodon

I’m an angry feminist soy sauce this year. #halloween

discuss.systems

Dan Ports (@dan@discuss.systems)

Attached: 1 image Max is ready for Halloween #cats #catsofmastodon

I'm excited to announce that @Dan Ports and I have been working on a new non-profit, Rootstock Northwest, with some folks in the local food industry:

Rootstock Northwest

Rootstock Northwest

A Seattle-based non-profit focusing on feeding people while supporting local producers.

We have three goals: 1. Give fresh produce to the food insecure in our communities. 2. Support local producers and farmers to invest in our community food chain 3. Deliver direct to homes to make fresh, local food accessible for all and minimize overhead. We believe that everyone deserves access to fresh, high quality food and that we can simultaneously feed our communities and support local food chains by delivering produce to directly to those in need. With the current government instability, it is more important than ever to ensure the most vulnerable are fed and that our local food ecosystems are strengthened. #seattle #nonprofit #FoodInsecurity

Went to a Michelin-starred Hunan restaurant in Beijing last night. Notable were the delicious Chinese pomegranates that they served first, the stinky tofu, the lake fish with yellow pepper sauce and shaobing with lotus root soup and tripe and pickled radish soup.

Pretty exciting news in the Zhang-Ports household: after 10 years, we’ve finally gotten a proper Chinese vent hood. The one that came with our house was decent for a white household but, as the guy at the Asian store says, white people don’t *really* cook. This one is finally acceptable because it has a stir-fry button.

This is when things started going off the rails in this country https://noc.social/@todayilearned/115302830443069084

This Wikipedia summary of the new book from one of my favorite authors is .. too real?? Not sure I’m emotionally prepared for this book.