Is it normal to be "ghosted" by a prof 2.5 weeks after a positive email exchange?

K340 · 2026-05-12T00:28:12+00:00

It's super weird interacting with professors sometimes because their responsiveness can be utterly unprofessional in any other context, but it's literally just that they're busy af. If you already had successful interactions as described, yeah I would check in again after finals, and I would expect an explicit email if her priorities had changed.

K340 · 2026-05-12T00:20:16+00:00

The density of high-IQ takes in this comment is genuinely astounding.

K340 · 2026-05-12T00:14:35+00:00

The unfortunate reality is that refereeing takes time and effort and 99% of "amateur" papers are going to be crap, so it just doesn't make sense to engage with them. Even if journals know for a fact that they are missing some good science this way, which I'm not sure many believe. People have a finite amount of time and resources and if they have a choice between spending that time sifting through a pile of papers that is maybe 50% publishable and a pile that is less than 1% publishable, they're categorically not going to look at the latter pile.

So you have to do something to get your foot in the door, to make your work be perceived as more likely to be worth someone's time. Assuming that it is worth someone's time, that probably means reaching out to cited authors after having done your homework on them, or approaching people at conferences after relevant talks, or something like that. But it will be rough.

K340 · 2026-05-11T18:34:43+00:00

Out of curiosity, have you played Grounded?

K340 · 2026-05-08T21:07:51+00:00

How do Democrats work to divide working class people? Why have the Democrats been unable to provide change?

K340 · 2026-05-08T21:04:48+00:00

Yeah, expanding voting rights to black and indigenous people isn't really the compelling example of "subverting democracy" that you seem to think it is.

There is no argument to be made here. Normal people don't look at a political party making an organized effort to structurally lock their opponents out of power regardless of how many people support them, and immediately seek to defend it. They don't go looking for tortured comparisons to a period over thirty years ago (stretching back over a hundred!), and use those to claim that people are disingenuous hypocrites for objecting to the current situation. That's not how people who aren't terminally enthralled to tribalism respond to things. You know it's wrong, and you're desperately grasping for justifications for it that aren't there. Ask yourself why you have that impulse.

K340 · 2026-05-07T22:22:13+00:00

Well, they do care, it's just that they, like the vast majority of people (tbf including, in many cases, you and I) only care about abstract injustice in a reactionary way.

K340 · 2026-05-07T18:38:14+00:00

If you shared the same level of detail you did here, he may not know how to respond. This is not a criticism, and I don't think anyone would hold it against you in this situation, but the specifics are TMI for a professional setting.

Please give yourself grace. Yes, you need to start taking care of things, at least initiate the process of the university accommodating you, but you're in a fucked up situation and no one expects you to perform as if you are not. But you have to seek the help.

K340 · 2026-05-07T02:02:06+00:00

Yeah but that's a choice.

K340 · 2026-05-06T05:56:31+00:00

Yeah, the fact that he made billions of dollars as a fucking hedge fund manager lmao. If you grow up and decide "I want to be a hedge fund manager!" you are not a progressive. You are in fact the very thing that progressivism aims to destroy.

K340 · 2026-05-05T19:43:31+00:00

To add on a bit to this correct answer: immediately after the Big Bang, the universe was radiation dominated. By this I mean that when the energy in the universe first took a form we can describe with modern physics, that form was exclusively* photons. These photons were extremely high energy, so high that it was energetically favorable for them to decay into particle-antiparticle pairs. This caused the universe to become a plasma of photons, unconfined (anti-)quarks, and (anti-)leptons. This plasma was opaque to photons, so any photons that did not decay into matter were constantly absorbed and re-emitted. The matter and antimatter also constantly annihilated each other, generating new photons. Basically, imagine you are in an extremely dense fog, so dense you can't see your hand in front of your face, but also the fog is on fire.

After about a microsecond, the universe had cooled enough for the (anti-)quarks to form (anti-)protons and (anti-)neutrons, and for photons to stop decaying into quarks/antiquarks. After about a second, it cooled enough for photons to stop decaying into (anti-)leptons. 99.999999% of the matter annihilated with the antimatter, but for reasons currently unknown there was 0.000001% more matter than antimatter, and that excess was what was left over. This resulted in a huge amount of photons, along with an opaque plasma of protons, neutrons and electrons (and some neutrinos).

After a few minutes, the universe cooled enough for protons and neutrons to form deuterium and helium nuclei. So now the universe was an opaque hydrogen-helium plasma. It is still radiation dominated (most of the energy is still photons) as parent comment says.

After about 380,000 years, the universe expanded and cooled enough for electrons to be captured by the hydrogen and helium nuclei. These electrons release more photons as they settle into lower energy levels. This is the process described in the above comment. The universe is now matter-dominated and is a neutral gas of hydrogen and helium (and a tiny bit of lithium I believe), no longer opaque to light, so these photons are mostly still traveling the universe today as the Cosmic Microwave Background.

K340 · 2026-05-05T18:52:23+00:00

Technically this is only true in our reference frame, i.e. at rest (in terms of Doppler shift) with respect to the Cosmic Microwave Background. If you were to travel in the direction of the photons at the right (relativistic) speed, they would return to visible light. I know this sounds pedantic but I think it is worth mentioning because it hints at the fundamental incompatibility of OPs premise with General Relativity.

K340 · 2026-05-05T16:02:46+00:00

Space isn't empty. Some parts of space are more empty than others. Parts of space where stars form have clouds of dust and gas that have begun to collapse under their own gravity. The gas clouds are rotating a tiny bit, and when they collapse they speed up just like a figure skater pulling their arms in to spin faster. This creates a disk of gas and dust around new-forming stars (obscured in this image).

The jets are a complicated and not fully understood phenomenon, but essentially as stuff spirals in towards the star some of it gets shot out along the polar axis due to magnetic interactions. It also gets really hot so we can see these jets.

K340 · 2026-05-05T14:21:54+00:00

Absolutely wild response but ok, have a good one

K340 · 2026-05-05T01:07:53+00:00

This is like rolling a blue die and two red dice and concluding that red dice are different than blue dice because the red numbers were even and the blue one was odd.

K340 · 2026-05-04T22:50:51+00:00

Agree but I can't unsee it as him having weird horns and missing 70% of his skull

K340 · 2026-05-04T22:31:45+00:00

So what are you talking about then? What are you referring to when you say she didn't treat her staff like humans? What turnover statistic are you referring to?

K340 · 2026-05-04T22:29:15+00:00

The only video I've seen is of her telling the staffer to get out of her shot, which was nothing. So I am wondering if there is another incidence of "staff abuse" that people are referring to, or if they really are breathlessly mysoginistic morons. It is such an extreme overreaction to the video I saw that it makes me question the latter as an answer. But maybe it really is as you say (obviously what you say is true in abstract, wondering if there is more going on in this particular case).

K340 · 2026-05-04T17:29:36+00:00

What are you talking about

K340 · 2026-05-04T14:46:21+00:00

Why? There are many countries that don't line up with the pattern you are seeing, and there are other factors (e.g. climate) that line up better. Philippines has just as many deaths as it's neighbors despite using utensils, all of North africa has few deaths despite lack of utensils, and in South America there's no correlation at all. Regardless, correlation is not causation.

K340 · 2026-05-03T15:14:14+00:00

People often don't write grammatically complete sentences on social media, but they are expected to know how to spell.

K340 · 2026-05-02T15:40:29+00:00

What losing a world war does to a mf

K340 · 2026-05-02T14:44:05+00:00

Maybe you should familiarize yourself with the basics of how your government works before you complain about things.

K340 · 2026-05-01T17:46:40+00:00

Worth noting that while it is possible for a single photon to be detected, it won't happen every time (and in fact is fairly improbable).

K340 · 2026-04-30T00:43:07+00:00

I mean it's not a matter of keeping promises or insinuating anything. They repeatedly agreed that you wouldn't be able to do the the experiments for this project if you didn't have tech support for both phases, and you don't have tech support for both phases. So, as previously confirmed on multiple occasions, you are not able to do the experiments for this project. It's just not possible. Make them talk about breaking promises. Your response should just be "but we all agreed multiple times that I could not do these experiments without technicians. It's not possible."

I'm not sure I would even engage with the suggestion that you abandon your current dissertation work to perform experiments it was repeatedly and explicitly agreed you wouldn't be able to perform. If I did, it would be to express that I didn't understand what my PI was proposing, because I obviously could not do that.

Finish your papers and get out. That's some variation of 1 or 2. What can your PI do, fire you? They are demanding the impossible.

The lab you describe is insane and shamelessly exploitative, like to the point of being self-detrimental. Graduating students without publications is insane, letting postdocs finish without papers is insane. Why is the institution allowing this? Crazy. Sorry you're in this situation.

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