kate metcalf

@technophobos.bsky.social

200 Followers 150 Following

science studies phd candidate @ ucsd | hermeneutics of postgenomic suspicion | surveillance & sociality | genetic data, research infrastructure, privacy

On the first day of class, Emre plans to give her students a poem without a name or date and instruct them to analyze it. "Oh!" she exclaimed suddenly, grinning ear to ear. "This would be a fun exercise. I'm going to show you my poems, and you can tell me what you think." She pulled them up on her laptop, and my mind immediately went blank, unable to form even the most rudimentary appraisals about verse or meter. "This one sounds, um, contemporary?" I said.
She nodded encouragingly. "Notice anything else? Look at the last word of every line." Her hazel eyes probed me expectantly. "Can you count the syllables on each line?"
Beads of sweat rolled down my forehead in the heat of Emre's dining room. "Are you uncomfortable?" she asked, four poems in. "We don't have to do it if it's not fun."

Self portrait with orange curly hair on front of a painting of a woman with orange curly hair

Text reads: TABLES: 2.1 Horizontal Transfer; 3.1 All 2^2^k=16 Boolean functions for binary elements with k=2 inputs; 5.1 Natural necessity mirrors logical necessity; 6.1 Sherman's levels of analysis; 6.1 Where conflict occurs.

FIGURES: 1.1 Argument structure of the book; 3.1 Directed arrow graph for the case k=n-1; 3.2 A switching network can be transformed to represent a network of honeybees

a painting of a black cowboy in a white hat and red shirt on a canary yellow background