169 posts
Personal WordPress blog (2010–2014) on science, FLOSS, open government, gender, teaching, and everyday life. Originally at www.shaunagm.net/blog.
A few months back, a friend recommended watching the videos from a Coursera course, A Brief History of Humankind. I recently finished, and I second the recommendation. The lectures are engaging and encompassing without being overly shallow, and I like Yuval Harari's approach of describing theories while continuously pointing out their contradictions and uncertain nature.
I received a number of comments regarding my recent posts (1,2) about how abstraction/quantification of trust leads to negative consequences such as competition, social judgment, and "gaming the system". This does not surprise me, because my model for quantifying trust is money. And it is hard to find a technology more profoundly impactful and more deeply flawed than money.
I have a habit of qualifying my statements with estimated likelihoods and error bars. "I think about ten people are coming, plus or minus two." "I'm, like, eighty percent sure that it runs on Windows." I worry that it comes off as an affectation, but I also worry that I'm not conveying my level of certainty effectively. *I* know how certain I am, and it pains me when that information gets lost to the ambiguities and inefficiencies of the English language. (I'm told that qualification by certainty is built into Lojban, which I believe with 99% certainty.) When I send my female friends cover letters and grant proposals, they strike out words like "I think" and "I believe" and "probably" and "try". I let them do it - we all know that there's a confidence gap that disadvantages women - but it chafes. Aside from dangly earrings, uncertainty is the aspect of femininity I am most comfortable with. Perhaps too comfortable.
A friend shared with me this 15-minute Planet Money segment called "When Women Stopped Coding". From their intro:
Building on my post about verification a few months ago, I want to talk about quantifying trust. As full verification of all knowledge by a single individual is as impossible as drinking the sea, we are faced with two options: paranoia or trust.
In between weddings both this weekend and last, I made it out to Phoenix for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. I gave a talk at Open Source Day about starting in open source. Rikki Endsley of Red Hat wrote up a summary of my talk, and Serena Larson of ReadWrite wrote an article based on the talk and a brief interview we did beforehand. My slides are here.
Things I've accomplished recently, and future plans, offered up as justification for the lack of a "real" post:
I've long known the adage "When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" but I've only recently come to appreciate its truth.
If you've never been to a feminist conference, you're missing out. If you've never found yourself surrounded by dozens of brilliant, empathetic, creative and determined women, you should consider giving it a try. If you've never gone from learning about how open source cloud computing platforms work straight to a discussion of microaggressions and how to deal with them, finishing things off by sharing your favorite feminist response gifs - well, maybe you should come to AdaCamp.
A while back I interviewed some core contributors to Wikipedia Project Medicine. While I'm wildly enthusiastic about their work, I can't help feeling that Wikipedia falls far short of being an ideal medium for sharing medical knowledge.
A few months ago, I joined a project called Crowdstorming a Dataset. It's a project affiliated with Center for Open Science and its basic premise is this: what if you gave a single dataset to dozens of researchers, and asked them to prove or disprove a particular hypothesis? What are the different analytical approaches they might take? Would they all give similar answers? Once they're given the opportunity to give and receive feedback, would their answers and methodologies converge?
I could write plenty about my experiences at Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) this weekend, and I probably will, later. But I had a quick thought during Steve Rambam's talk on privacy loss yesterday that I wanted to share with you all.
A little over a year ago I did a survey at the job fair of a major tech conference. At each booth I asked whether they were hiring people part time. The response was almost entirely *no way, nuh-uh, never*.
I got interviewed about OpenHatch / Open Source Comes to Campus for an article in Wired. Pretty cool!
I did a lightning talk at AdaCamp called "how to hit a softball". This talk was born of frustration: the only activity I participate in which is less gender-diverse than open source software is softball. I've played in games where I'm the only woman on either side, out of 20+ people.
Three things to share from Open Source Bridge, which I went to this week.
I don't like making quick low-content posts just to avoid paying \$5 to the Iron Blogger pool. (No shade on those who do!) But I am so exhausted from AdaCamp.
I feel vaguely indignant that, despite working hard on a number of projects this week, I have nothing in particular to post about.
Earlier this week, after the UCSB shootings, Deanna Zandt started a tumblr to document violence against women who refuse or reject men. She was inspired by Kate Harding, who had been tweeting links to some of these stories as a way of explaining that violent male entitlement was not unique to Elliot Rodgers but is endemic to our culture.
I decided recently that I want a reproducibility-themed t-shirt. Technology being what it is, I was able to make one in a matter of hours:
I am borrowing a very nice camera for work. I'll be returning to my regular (broken, fuzzy, cell phone) camera tomorrow, so I thought I'd grab the chance to explore how manual focus works. These are pictures from my Sunday morning walk.
Back in March, at LibrePlanet 2014, I organized and participated in a panel session on the intersection of open science and free software with Jeff Warren of Public Lab and Madeleine Price Ball of Open Humans.
I made a thing:
There's a joke you probably know:
Spending as much time as I do teaching, writing and thinking about technology, I come across solutionism a lot. (From the link: Morozov defines solutionism as "a pervasive and dangerous ideology\... that recognizes problems as problems based on just one criterion: whether they are 'solvable' with a nice and clean technological solution".)
A while back, when I was still volunteering for Samaritans, I had a particularly rough evening. I don't remember why: might have had a long conversation with a desperate caller, or a run of calls from harassers. (Yes, that's a thing. A really unfortunate thing.) Or perhaps I was in a bad mood from something else entirely, some other aspect of my day. In any case, I decided to immerse myself in things that made me simply, inescapably happy. So I started this tumblr. I've added to it on and off ever since, whenever I come across something that makes me deeply happy to be alive. Like frost flowers:
\* A friend asked what SCaLE stood for, and I got everything but the 'a'. He laughed and said, "It could mean literally anything!" For the record, it's the a in *Ca*lifornia.
My good friend, a theater professor, is interested in sports as performance, but isn't too familiar with most sports. I collected the following links to send to her, and thought I'd share them here as well:
I came across this image today and was struck by the opposite paths of Perl and Python. Specifically, how they cross over in late 2007 and early 2008.
My aunt died this week. She was a private woman who tried to keep her internet presence to a minimum, so I won't memorialize her here, except to say that she was an incredibly gracious, giving person and a loving aunt.
Another year, another Mystery Hunt. This iteration was especially nice. For the first time I was able to finish the hunt.
Time for another list of excuses for shamefully neglecting this blog:
*Recording this for posterity, in case it helps someone the way random websites helped me today.*
Here are two stories about conversations I didn't have this week:
Friends, romans, civic tech enthusiasts, lend me your eyeballs. I come to bury hackathons, not to praise them.
Today, September 11th, is the anniversary of a number of events, but two in particular are being talked about today: the twelve year anniversary of the World Trade Center/Pentagon attacks, of course, and the forty year anniversary of the overthrow and forced suicide of democratically elected president of Chile Salvador Allende.
If I was the Supreme Dictator of Science, able to marshal all sorts of resources to support my decrees, I would require that every single journal article contain, in its supplemental materials:
My sister came to visit this week and one of the places I showed her around was the Media Lab. She was curious about the display near the front door, which I had never really investigated. We ended up spending half an hour playing with it. It's called Immersion, and it's online as of today.
I've been doing Iron Blogger, in one form or another, for almost two years now. That's over a hundred weeks of posts, with a few misses here and there, paid for in beer. I try to make each post substantive, meaningful to someone, even if just to me.
There's a letter in the Guardian today calling for study preregistration. This is super exciting - I've been wanting this for years.
When I was a young teenager, twelve-thirteen-fourteen, I played fairly high-level softball. I enjoyed the challenge of trying to hit sixty-mile-an-hour pitches. I enjoyed practicing and playing constantly with my teammates and the bonds that naturally arose. I enjoyed figuring out the optimal play, the optimal position.
Ever since I first heard of Victoria Woodhull about a year ago, I've been meaning to read the weekly newspaper that she put out with her sister, Tennessee Claflin, from 1870 to 1877. I found a library that claimed to have the complete collection in microform, so I made my way over there this week.
My new favorite thing on the internet is math gifs.
It turns out the soil in our back yard is fairly toxic. My housemate Molly, rather than give up gardening, decided to invite a bunch of people over to help make raised beds in which to grow edible plants. I helped in the best way I knew how: by making a themed cake.
I ran into Adelaida on the train yesterday morning, on my way out to Amherst for an OpenHatch event. We struck up a conversation which eventually turned to the book she was reading, Unlocking the Clubhouse. This made me think of Top Secret Rosies, a documentary about women computers during WWII which I bought on a whim recently and which I'm hoping to show soon at BoCoup Loft.
I'm afraid of flying.
I've been hearing good things about the Capitol Words API for months now, so I decided to try doing something with it. I wrote a script which queries the API for instances of a given word and returns two text files: the first is a compendium of sentences from every time a Republican has said that word (in a given date range), and the second the same but for Democrats. I fed the results into a word cloud generator I found on github, which I modified slightly to suit my purposes.
I spent the last week and a half at PyCon. I have a lot of things to say about it - too many, really, to form a coherent narrative. So here are some scattered thoughts.
A round up of recent goings on:
This Saturday, February 23rd, is Open Data Day, "a gathering of citizens in cities around the world to write applications, liberate data, create visualizations and publish analyses using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption open data policies by the world's local, regional and national governments."
Modern dating is full of choices: whether between dozens of handsome strangers out at a bar, hundreds of friends and friends-of-friends on social networking sites, or thousands of profiles on OkCupid or Match.com. With so many options, it's important to be rigorous in your search for a statistically significant other. Here are some tips to help you correlate with others.
As I mentioned in my last post, I chose to look at the EPA Toxics Release Inventory this month. The full dataset was way too large for my little netbook to handle, so I filtered the results to my home state of Massachusetts, and downloaded it in csv format. I used this helpful pdf to identify the variables I was most interested in: year, total release of toxic substances, and whether the substance released was a carcinogen.
I try to explore a bit of government data every month. Previously, I've just grabbed data from the Sunlight Foundation's cleaned up APIs. This month, I tried out data.gov. It was a much more harrowing experience.
At last year's Mystery Hunt, when I woke up early Sunday morning to discover that the coin had already been found, I turned to a teammate and said sadly, "I wish Mystery Hunt could go on forever\..."
My father forwarded an article to me this morning: Clinical trials flawed by biased reporting. It's a write up of Bias in reporting of end points of efficacy and toxicity in randomized, clinical trials for women with breast cancer.
I had a conversation with some of my housemates earlier this week about our favorite games, and I thought I'd expound on a few of mine for just a bit. These are all browser-based games, so they're only a few clicks away.
I have a tumblr, Dismal Science, which I use to keep track of newspaper articles, journal articles, and blog posts on the topic of how scientific research is practised and the flaws and problems that have arisen. Before the archives grow unmanageable, I'd like to take a stab at organizing what I have so far. So here's a summary of the material I posted last year. (Many of the links themselves were not published/posted in 2012.)
Massachusetts is not a great place for transparency. We have some of the worst public access to information of any state in the country, and legislators have barely any oversight or accountability. I've heard people talk about trying to get access to information from closed meetings where no attendance is taken and no minutes are kept.
David Salsburg's The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century is a book that doesn't know its audience. Billed as a history of statistical theories, it is more like a biography of the various statisticians who proposed those theories. Salsburg describes his intentions fairly well in the second to last paragraph of the introduction:
I made five kinds of truffles last Saturday.
When Nate Silver correctly called the winner of all 50 states in this year's presidential election (and 31 out of the 33 Senate races), how many people rushed out to buy his book, eager to learn how to make such spot-on predictions? How many were disappointed?
On the six hour drive to New York City last week, my family somehow got on the topic of political campaign songs. Campaign songs today are pretty boring, because politicians just use popular music. Although it's kind of fun to watch Republicans try to find music made by artists who won't sue them to get them to stop using it.
I spent last Saturday teaching neuroscience/psychology to 100+ kids via Splash. It was a survey course, so there were a lot of references and recommendations I made, and some of the kids asked me to put them all in an email. It's a good list, so I thought I'd also share it here.
This post lists common ways that people used to die from their jobs. They're mostly due to inhaling toxic chemicals. One of them, Soot Wart, is a type of cancer that was commonly found among chimney sweeps. The discovery of this link between job and disease, in the late 18th century, was pretty vital in our early understanding of cancer.
I tend to have complex feelings about elections.
I've been a bit busier than usual the last few weeks. Missed last week's post. More beer for everyone! Here's a list of things I've done between my last post and now. (Why yes, this is a pretense for skipping another week. Glad you asked.)
Some of you who read this blog may know that a close relative of mine has been dealing with an aggressive cancer for the last year or so. When I say I admire the young women in this post, I don't just mean because they're intelligent, dedicated and accomplished. I also admire them for choosing to spend their time researching cancer, which is the leading cause of death in the developed world, and the second leading cause of death worldwide. Few people end up helping others as significantly as these young women have already managed - while still in high school.
Last weekend I flew out to Urbana Champaign to give a talk at their annual Reflections \| Projections conference. The talk was on how to get started contributing to free software, and a big portion was on bugs - how to report them and to fix them. It was therefore painfully ironic when the free software I had used to prepare the talk - LibreOffice - essentially deleted the presentation an hour or so before I had to give it.
This week I visited New York and stayed with my cousins while their mother was in the hospital. Over the course of several days, my younger cousin, K, and I hacked the board game 'Guess Who?'
My sister asked me to make a puzzle hunt for her bachelorette party. While it's tailored to her interests, it should be possible for anyone to solve - and hopefully pretty fun, too.
I'm marrying my sister next weekend.
Life has been super busy lately, so here's another link-and-run:
My post for the week is aaaaaaaall the way over at the Sunlight Foundation blog.
*(Written for a friend.)*
A week or so ago the founder of a feminist blog I lurk on asked if anyone could help update their commenting system. It was a real pleasure to realize that hey, this was totally something I could do.
Made some cakes. The first was for my friend Lisa's birthday, and was conceived on this very blog!
Just finished off my three weeks at camp with an afternoon of making chocolate gears, legos, and chess pieces using the latex molds we created during the week. The chocolate gears did not actually function as gears, so I am 0 for 1 on attempts for my friend Dan's moving wedding cake, but I'm going to try again with better gears. (Also on the list of ideas to try: a sterling engine made of rock candy, and a helium-filled fruit leather balloon. I still like the chocolate gears idea best, though.)
Missed last week because I was so busy at camp. The first week of the summer is Girl's Invention Week and instead of the usual 7ish:1 ratio of boys to girls, we had forty awesome lady campers. We built a loom and an interactive mosaic from scrap wood, made soda using dry ice, programmed lots of video games with Scratch, went geocaching, had a thoughtful group conversation about gender identity and gender essentialism, and baked some delicious marshmallow bread. It was fabulous.
This story about an elderly woman bullied by middle-schoolers on a bus has been making the rounds of the internet today. There's a lot of things being said about the kids in the video, and most of it is probably deserved, but I don't know that any of it is helpful.
For whatever reason, much of the music that I've found and liked has been by men. My favorite singers/bands/acts - Andrew Bird, Sufjan Stevens, Great Lake Swimmers, Paul Simon/Simon & Garfunkel - are all dudes. Not very cool. So half the purpose of this post is to get you all to recommend me some lady singers and songwriters.
41 years ago today, the US government forcibly ended the nearly two year long occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. Alcatraz was a famous prison which closed down in 1963. A group of American Indians claimed the island while by citing a 1868 treaty which promised to return all abandoned and unused federal lands.
(A discussion at last Tuesday's Iron-Blogger meetup reminded me of this review I wrote a few years ago.)
One of my favorite things to do at camp is to visit the game shelf. It's stacked high with donated games, most of which sit unused for months at a time. Many of the games are for children much younger than those who go to camp. Others are missing vital pieces or are simply way too bland to lure kids away from building treehouses and robots or hitting each other with boffer swords.
I recently watched Miss Representation, a documentary about how limited and disparaging portrayals of women in mainstream media hurt society. While I agree with most of the documentary, I do think it skips right over a number of amazing female characters both past and present (I started to list my favorites, but I think that's a whole other post.) Obviously individual portrayals can't make up for the overall patterns of representation, which tend to feature young, white, thin, able-bodied women playing out tired tropes. There is plenty of room for criticism there. But for me, personally, what I want even more than better female characters on my television, is explicitly feminist shows.
Following up from last week with a more in-depth post. While I heard a bunch of compelling stories and found out about a ton of amazing projects, ultimately what I appreciated most about Tcamp was the chance to talk about the common issues that have arisen for those of us doing open government work.
I just spent the last two days at Transparency Camp. My capacity for coherent thought is pretty much used up after all the talks and sessions, and I want to save what small amount is left for the hackathon tomorrow. So here's a list of some neat things I learned about, and I'll save the insightful analysis for later.
Over the last week, I've come across a couple new 'science experiments' - that is, experiments in improving science by encouraging the involvement of the online public. The first one, Petri Dish, is basically a Kickstarter for science projects:
The other day I was cutting up cauliflower for soup. It looked rather a lot like this:
When searching for recipes for our passover seder - an extra challenge with vegetarians and people with nut and gluten allergies sharing the table - we stumbled across this abomination:
In lieu of writing an actual blog post this week, here are some pictures of our easter keg hunt. (Apologies for the quality, it's a camera phone.)
I love making cakes, especially for friends' birthdays. Yesterday was my housemate Mitchell's birthday, and he requested a carrot cake but did not specify a shape. Given his ardent love for sea slugs, I decided to make him a sea slug cake:
It's Women's History Month, which I'm going to use as an excuse to ramble about a very cool historical lady I learned about only recently: Victoria Woodhull.
Too Hard for Science? is a series on a Scientific American blog asking researchers what experiments they would do if money, ethics, or the laws of the universe weren't an issue. I think the idea for the series is brilliant, although somewhat disappointingly executed - the articles are all way too short, and some of the interviewees fail to actually propose impossible experiments, and just describe hard problems. That said, there are some real gems:
There's another article out this month on all the false positives being published in psychology [pdf].
I had friends over for Valentine's Day, as I frequently do, and this year I decided to make a playlist of songs about friendship, which were astonishingly hard to find. Although to be fair, I did exclude some songs 'cause I didn't like them, but I should have been overwhelmed by options! Anyway, here is the playlist:
So. Correlations. They're fairly simple creatures: they measure the relationship between variables, without making any assumptions or assertions about cause and effect, dependence, or direction. Correlation coefficients range from -1 to 1, with -1 meaning a perfect negative correlation, 1 being a perfect positive correlation, and 0 meaning no correlation at all.
The other day at work, while I was hanging around the coffee machine, I saw a flyer for an IAP (read: Jan Term) course on "Serious Games". It looked neat, so I emailed the instructor to get the syllabus, and I've started playing my way through. I figured I'd post my half-formed thoughts about how these projects work both as games and as tools to educate/persuade/mobilize people.
The Mystery Hunt was last weekend. It was unexpectedly musicals-themed and expectedly exhaustingly awesome. I wanted to briefly highlight my favorite puzzles from this year:
I'm usually one of the first to criticize Facebook, but I'm really pleased about the new suicide prevention initiative they've rolled out.
I like the word cool. Unlike other positive adjectives, like groovy, gnarly, or dope, it's been around for 50-150 years (depending on whether you count this use by Abraham Lincoln) and always stayed, well, *cool*.
My previous post about p-values has reminded me that I've been meaning to brush up on my statistics. I'm hoping to do this by writing a series of tutorials for this blog, and to keep things interesting for my less statistically-inclined readers, the datasets I'll be using will be campaign finance and lobbying information from Open Secrets and Sunlight Labs. So come, join me as I learn about quantitative analysis and also the pervasive corruption of our government\... The data in this post are from .OpenSecrets.org and represent the total contributions from commercial banks to individual house members in the current (2011-2012) election cycle.
 *"You keep using that statistical test. I do not think it means what you think it means."*
It's my birthday today! My present to myself is a quick, fun post.
On the road back from Thanksgiving, my dad and my sister's boyfriend Alex were discussing the NBA lockout (which was just resolved yesterday.)
There's a dispiriting article being passed around feminist-friendly corners of the blogosphere today. What makes this article different from all the other tired, sexist articles I've come across recently - and therefore what makes this article worth posting about, for me - is where it was published: Nature. Yes, *that* Nature - "the world's most highly cited interdisciplinary science journal". The same journal that first published the structure of DNA, first proved there was a hole in the ozone layer, first documented nuclear fission and the cloning of mammals, is the source of this drivel:
I'm in the middle of an incredibly busy month, so I thought I'd be efficient and document one of my favorite procrastination activities as a blog post. I call this activity "finding shiny things on the web". Today's theme is science and nature photos.
I was a mid-90s geocities page for Halloween. It was a fairly mediocre costume - I had a bunch of ideas for it, some of which worked and many of which didn't. I don't usually repeat costumes but I think I want to try to improve on this for next year.
I've given three public talks in the last six months. What really strikes me is how different these talks were, in content, structure, and intent.
Last night at a dinner party made up mostly of science folks, I pitched an idea that's been stewing in my head for a while: results-blind submissions reviews for journals.
For Ada Lovelace day I thought I'd go back to my roots and write about a psychological scientist. Being as I am prone to digressions, I ended up writing about two - one historical, one current. We'll go chronologically.
I have an idea in my head for an interactive fiction story: a depressed young man sits in a cafe, waiting for a phone call from his girlfriend. Depending on what happens - what she says, whether he even gets the call, whether he talks to the older man reading a paper or the little girl playing with his shoelaces, whether he springs for the expensive sandwich and finds out he's overdrawn his account, whether an overheard phrase or a stray shadow spark a memory - the young man experiences a different future. Sometimes he reaches out for help. Sometimes he goes home and kills himself. Sometimes he lashes out in anger and hurts someone. Sometimes an instinctive, kind reaction on his part saves someone else's life.
There's a conversation going on over at metafilter about how people cook and eat in this country.
"But congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?" *Debate moderator to candidate Ron Paul. The audience with cheers and shouts of "Yeah!"*
In what is surely the longest and most informative comment I've ever gotten on this blog, Stone points out that the story of oppression and reform I describe in The Cry of the Crow is the first of many in recorded history:
I took the overnight train last night from DC, where I was visiting my family, back to Boston.
This interview with anarchist/anthropologist David Graeber, who has a book about the history of debt coming out, is pretty interesting. In it, he talks about the old practice of jubilee: the forgiveness of debt and the freeing of slaves and prisoners.
The last two weeks my attention has been pretty well captured by Parts & Crafts, the summer camp my housemates run. They invited me to come teach this past session, which was themed 'Imaginary Worlds'. We made card games, choose your own adventure books, chocolate aliens, telegraphs - but by far everyone's favorite activity was the Puzzle Hunt.
The last couple of days have been FULL of cake. My friends' theater company turned five this summer, and they requested a cake from me to have at their celebration. They're called Flat Earth Theater, so the design for the cake was obvious:
Story a Day projects frequently result in large clumps of dross - I should know, I've done one myself. So when I stumbled across Ommataidia, an archive of over 1000 bite size stories written daily for years, I expected the same.
There's a thing I like to do, whenever someone says something is "like riding a bicycle".
The other day I was talking with one of my housemates about putting shelves up on the wall outside my room. Now, I had a totally underhanded reason for wanting shelves there - I want the challenge of building them and putting them up. But her arguments were equally out of left field to me: she thought that walls of books were tacky.
I think bodies are neat. I always have, especially the insides. I think I'm the only person in the world to enjoy a root canal, thanks to the awesome dentist who explained to me what she was doing as she worked. (Did you know that the roots of a tooth are like a plant's, sucking up nourishing water?) A few years ago I lived with a med student. She snuck me in to their anatomy lab and showed me everything they'd been learning; even better, she let me hold and explore a human heart. !Heart and lungs from Did you know that you can carry tons of weight with your hair? That you can dissolve razor blades in your stomach? Your body is badass! Your liver especially. It performs over 500 different functions; it helps you digest, metabolize and pee, it directs your immune system, regulates blood pressure and blood coagulation, it's a storage house for vitamins, including years worth of vitamins A and B12 and of course, as everyone knows, it breaks down alcohol at the rate of roughly one margarita an hour. (And that reminds me - I'll spare you the details, but just so you know, the way that vomiting works is really, really cool.) Also, the liver can regenerate itself, even if over half of it is diseased or lost. The liver is like the undercover superhero of your internal organs. That said - I am, of course, a total brain partisan. Full of soft grey-white nerves winding and flashing, swimming with hormones and neurotransmitters, with a cobweb-like membrane that hugs it tight and washes it with fluid. The most beautiful part of the brain is the cerebellum, a primitive structure handles motor control. When you cut it open, you can see neuron bundles branching upwards and outwards like a thriving old oak tree. I even love the names scientists have given areas of the brain. The almond (amygdala, associated with fear and anger); the seahorse (hippocampus, associated with memory); the fornix, which yes, comes from the same root as fornication. "What?" you ask. In ancient greece, prostitutes frequently loitered underneath archways. *Fornix* is the greek word for arch, an apt description of this gently curving section of the corpus callosum, the tough bundle of nerve fibers which connects our left brain to its right. !Hot. I'm getting carried away here. I could go on like this for a while, but what I really want to talk about is a moment several years ago when I gave blood for the first time. As the nurse was labeling the bag, I asked her shyly if I could hold it. It was hot to the touch, in a weird but totally neat way, and my delight at the experience must have shown on my face because the nurse said, "No one ever asks to do that! You must be so comfortable with your body." And I just sort of gaped at her because that wasn't true at all. Not even close. Like many women - like many *people* - I grew up internalizing all sorts of little hatreds. I was too fat, my face too plain, my skin alternately too flaky and too oily, as if it too was fighting its own private war with itself. My front teeth were damaged from a highly competitive game of freeze dancing; like others, I spent years refusing to smile with my lips open. Like others, I avoided the mirror, hating what I saw. I never thought these two things were related. I mean, they weren't for me. I loved my insides, loved learning about them and imagining them. And I hated my outsides. I hid them as best I could, and when I thought of them, I disparaged them. For me, a huge part of accepting the quirks of my physical appearance has been learning to approach them with the same sort of curiosity and enthusiasm as I do the rest of my body. !a representation of a triglyceride Sometimes when I'm "feeling fat", I put my hand under my shirt and feel the soft, jiggling roll of my belly. I try to picture the fat cells - the adipocytes - that swell and deflate as fat is taken in and out of them. I picture the fat itself, in it's smallest form, triglyceride. Just a chain of atoms, far too tiny to even see, but there, resting below the surface of my skin, waiting to be broken down and released into my blood. I think of every missed breakfast, every day-long hiking trip, every teenage starvation diet. Without those little chains of atoms, the triglycerides my body so thoughtfully stored for me, I would have died. *With* those chains of atoms, I can go for weeks if I need to, living off of my my own body. Like the migratory birds who fly for days without stopping, I hold a tremendous storehouse of energy in the palm of my hand. Then there's the acne. I was told it would go away once I grew up, but it remains, ugly and sometimes painful. I went once, in college, to a makeup counter at the mall. The assistant there clucked her tongue and then smiled, coating my face with concealer from neck to temple. I looked at myself in the mirror and couldn't see the acne, but I couldn't see my own skin either - the light hairs of my cheeks, the little moles and freckles, the scar by my eye that I've had most of my life. I didn't buy the concealer. Now when I look in the mirror, I seek out the raised red bumps. I try to see them as a message from my immune system - the same one that's fought off chickenpox, pneumonia, and the common cold. I picture my white blood cells rushing to the pimple, throwing their arms out and shouting like Gandalf in the mines of Moria: "You shall not pass!"
I've been sporadic about blogging lately, but that's all about to change: my friends/housemates Molly and Asheesh and I are doing "Iron Blogger". Basically, we try to post weekly, and for each week we miss we contribute \$5 to a communal pot. Once the pot's sizable enough, we split it three ways and go out drinking together. I plan to update with regularity and fervor, and laugh at Molly and Asheesh all the way to the pub. (It occurs to me that a *real* Iron Blogger competition would involve being given a random topic and 60 minutes to write a blog post. But it seems like the readers would be the real losers there\...) Anyway, on to the first blog post of a new era.
I've been doing a lot of baking lately. Last weekend I made banana bread, mango bread, and a vegan gluten-free chocolate raspberry torte all within a 24-hour period. This weekend, I devoted myself exclusively to a very important task: the making of my littlest friend's first birthday cake.
Yesterday my friend Nagle and I ran an activity at Bring Your Grandmother To Math at the MIT Museum (a part of the Cambridge Science Festival). A few days earlier, we'd spent an afternoon reading through Vi Hart's blog for inspiration. We looked at the Mobius strip music box, Penny sierpinski triangles, and followed a link to a tricycle with square wheels. We were briefly entranced by various foods in various shapes before finally deciding on a less messy version: balloon geometry.
I have another old story of mine I'd like to share. But first, let me explain something: for years and years I've been obsessed with ancient Sumer.
Occasionally I come up with puns that are, shall we say, executable? And although it may take me years to follow through on them, eventually I do. I'm not sure how many pesaschs have passed over without these, but finally! Here they are:
Monday even horseradish tastes good eaten near loved ones well maybe not *good*
I was at a parade a few days ago when the brass band marching by played what I'm sure they thought was the Battle Hymn of the Republic. What fewer people know is that the song was popularized during the Civil War with completely different lyrics:
I spent pretty much all my free time last week studying for the psychology GRE subject test, and I have to say that I resent how much I now know about Freud. It's not that I think studying the history of a discipline is pointless - far from it. But the history of psychology that the GRE tests is, how shall I put this\... painfully white and Western.
I've been tutoring a friend of a friend in Matlab, and we spent a good hour this afternoon chasing down a bug in his program. He asked how I can stand it, the constant trouble-shooting spiced up by the occasional epic search for a minor flaw\*. "Doesn't it drive you crazy?" he asked.
The blogs of my writing and editing friends have been buzzing today with the story of a YA author who was told by the editor of an anthology to change the romance in her story from gay to straight. It's satisfying to see the online community rally around the author, and I hope that something tangible comes out of this - say, a new commitment to encouraging work with gay protagonists. Perhaps an anthology!
There's a provocative short story by Ursula Le Guin called *The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas*. You can read it online here, and I suggest you do so before going on, because I'm about to spoil it completely.
I've never really been a connoisseur of the visual arts. I'm not drawn to them the way I am to music or writing, so I don't really know much about them - any artists beyond the famous ones, the terms for techniques, movements, styles.
I share other bloggers' hesitations towards Women's History Month (and International Women's Day). It seems, sometimes, like a sop to distract us from the ongoing problems facing women.
A few days ago I was browsing around Play This Thing, looking to find a present for a friend, when I stumbled across something else entirely: a review for Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker!, a board game made in 1969 in honor of the Columbia riots. According to Play This Thing's review, the game is a fun, maybe even thought-provoking, but has roughly zero replay value.
I've put off posting my original fiction to this blog, because most of the stuff that I think is really good - that I'm really proud of - I'm trying to polish and submit for publication. Which leaves the 'halfway decent' and the 'truly terrible'. No one will ever get to hear the truly terrible, except for maybe my cat, but the halfway decent\... the halfway decent I'm going to start sharing here.
The Great Lake Swimmers are one of my favorite bands, although I didn't really understand just how incredible they are until I got a chance to see them live. Sitting in the front row of a small theater is the best way to experience them - unless you can somehow convince them to play you a concert in the middle of the woods somewhere, or on a beach, or a mountaintop. Because the Great Lake Swimmers write love songs to, for, about nature.
Several years ago I read an article in the Atlantic Monthly that has stayed with me: Lincoln's Great Depression.
Found via a friend: the Electronic Literature Collection is a treasure trove of stories, statements, and pieces of art that use their electronic medium to confuse, provoke and entangle the audience.
I've only been semi-following the PAX east/dickwolves controversy, so I'm not going to write a novel about what happened and who was in the wrong and why.
This gorgeous graphic has been making its way around the internet lately:
*Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and reexperience again. They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order in their experiences - "which is the mostest? which is the leastest?" They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness: they heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart.* \~ Buckminster Fuller
Reading a novel or story by Milan Kundera is not like reading anything else: he has a languid style which slides imperceptibly from narrative to essay and back again. His books are full of delicate caged moments set side by side with off-hand philosophy. He's never made me laugh or cry, but sometimes when I read him I have to put him down and close my eyes and just swim in his words for a while.
It's been about a year since I started this blog, and I'm slowly getting a sense of what I want it to be, on multiple levels.
Parts and Crafts, the kids' hackerspace that I've been working with on and off since the summer, has launched a kickstarter. They've made an awesome video to go with it:
Hannukah has always been my favorite Jewish holiday. No fasting, no seders - just candles, latkes, and dreidels. Here's a confession, though. I don't like the dreidel game. It's - well, it's boring.
Ah, Christmas Eve in a Jewish/agnostic household. My tummy is full of Chinese food and my stockings stuffed with feet.
My birthday was a couple of days ago. I got obsessed with making the electrically conductive cake described in The Hungry Scientist, only I didn't get a chance to re-read the recipe until the morning of, so when I discovered that I needed the rare (and expensive!) cake decoration silver leaf, I thought for sure that crushing disappointment awaited me.
My family and I watched Agora, the new movie about Hypatia of Alexandria, over Thanksgiving weekend. We were all very excited about this, having been intrigued by Hypatia ever since we watched the segment of Carl Sagan's Cosmos on her - the same clip which apparently inspired Alejandro Amenábar, the director of and force behind Agora.
A few nights ago, Sprout had their monthly spaghetti dinner. Every month is a different theme, and I had been looking forward to this month's - mythology - with what might be considered excessive enthusiasm. The evening was heavy on puppetry, with an accordion-accompanied retelling of an old Yiddish folk tale, as well as a surrealist examination of a precious American myth: the failure of Reconstruction. (I am now tempted to go off on a rant about the election of 1876 - one of my favorites rants! - but I will save that for later.) There was also a performance by Molly Allis whose new album is a transformation myth. It's such a fertile topic, with so many people having so much to contribute, that they may even do a reprise (a retelling?) in the spring.
I went home last weekend, and I was excited for a chance to snuggle my cat, cook with my mom, and engage in the endless after dinner conversations my family manages so frequently to have \-- you know, the kind where your butt gets sore from sitting still and you go for thirds and then fourths because you've just had that much time to digest, but you can't quite bring yourself to say, "Okay, that's enough dissecting of Dr. Who/Beatles' rockband/the decline of rationality in modern political thought."
Over the last month or so, the folks at Sprout have been putting together a walking machine based off of Theo Jansen's models.
A few weeks ago, I spent the afternoon at Parts and Crafts, the learning-by-doing oriented summer camp a friend of mine co-founded. I wanted to try out a style of teaching I've been thinking a lot about lately. Inspired by role-playing and puzzle-hunting, I want to create expansive, immersive learning experiences which allow kids to "re-invent the wheel" as well as to see the cultural context in which technology is created and scientific advances are made. It's my hope to incorporate into each "experience" two or more of the following: science and technology, philosophical and political history, arts and literature, themes of social justice.
A few months ago I was browsing through a comic book store with my friends Orli and Skim. You'd think a nerd like me would be a devourer of comic books/graphic novels, but I've actually only read a few series. Although those series (Y: The Last Man, Sandman) & Transmetropolitan, for the curious) have been pretty roundly fabulous, I've just never started reading regularly. In fact, at that point I'd never bought a single comic book.
I ask a lot of questions. I get curious about things I don't understand and, fortunately or unfortunately, I don't understand a lot of things around me. Sometimes I get lucky and I'm surrounded by people who can answer my questions. (For instance, last night at Sprout, I had, "How does a chop saw work?" and "What is polynomial time?" and "What is in this delicious soup?" answered quite satisfactorily.) Sometimes people don't know and just shrug. It is in these moments of great need that I turn to google.
As a psychologist, I find it extremely frustrating when people attempt to explain away gender differences as genetic or evolutionary, rather than exploring the role of socialization by an imperfect society. For one thing, it gives people an excuse not to confront injustice. After all, they're just doing what they're biologically programmed to do. For another, it's frequently shoddy science.
The other day I was visiting my friend's summer camp when I saw a young camper fiddling around at the electronics table. She showed me the bracelet she had made by twisting wires together in patterns, and said she liked to have "a different take" on electronics from the boys at the camp. After talking a little bit about conductive thread (her mind, it was blown) we set about making a bracelet that incorporated a basic circuit. From our experiences, this is how you do it:
I've been an avid science fiction fan since I read Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle In Time" when I was a teensy one. Since then I've read Asimov and Bradbury, Le Guin and Heinlein, and countless others, and despite the feats of imagination and storytelling they've achieved, I have to say, you seldom see a depiction of an alien that beats real life earth creatures for their strangeness.
The transition from Bush to Obama has been a strange one for me. There is a certain ease to opposing someone whose ideology is so different from yours. There is no need to be subtle, to try and tease apart where things are going wrong - you know why they are doing this thing that you hate: because they don't value what you value.
When it comes to social psychology, everyone seems to know two names: Milgram and Zimbardo. It's funny, because they both studied essentially the same thing - under what circumstances otherwise normal, compassionate people will act to hurt others.
The ever-insightful Echidne has up a though-provoking post on genealogy and how patriarchal naming practices cause women to "disappear into the midst of time".
I've been fascinated with volcanoes ever since I was a little kid, so of course the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland has got me pretty excited. This picture from APOD is absolutely glorious:
*Today is Ada Lovelace day, which means its time to celebrate women in technology and science! If you have the time, consider writing a blog or facebook post about a woman who has inspired you. Otherwise, feel free to browse the posts at Finding Ada and learn more about the women who've advanced our knowledge of the world. You can start with my post below, about pioneering cytogeneticist Barbara McClintock.*
The other night I gave a talk at one of Sprout's Spaghetti dinners. I thought I'd throw it up here for everyone's enjoyment. I've edited it a little bit, because a good portion of the presentation was two experiments I did with/on the audience, which doesn't translate, but aside from that and the inevitable rambling that happens when I speak in public, this is pretty much the talk I gave. Watch for asterisks (\*), they'll be links to pdfs of the studies I'm citing.
Last night, after much fun during the day, Orli, Russ, Keith, Cora and I sat down to play Morton's List. Now, for those of you who've never heard of this game, it's basically a list of hundreds of different things to do, and you roll a set of dice to randomly select your task for the evening. The trick to the game is that you can't back out, or switch to another task, unless it's physically impossible to complete the first one. The tasks are very varied - the last two times we played we got "relax" and "protest something".
With a subject as complex and influential as Alan Turing, how could this biography fail to be fascinating? The premise of the book is an examination of Turing as an outsider, someone prone to working alone, a trait which helped him come up with outside-the-box ideas of universal machines. It explores Turing's deep-seated sense of isolation and to what extent it was caused by his position as an unashamed but closeted gay man and how he feared his homosexuality would be used to discredit his ideas. As Turing once wrote in a syllogism:
I've had a couple of really good conversations lately about the value of doing. By doing, I mean creating: baking, sewing, hammering, soldering, writing, programming, composing. Wires in your hands, words on your lips, dough beneath your fingernails - these are all reminders that you can still influence some small part of the world. That you can make some tangible change in your surroundings. In a world where people are encouraged to acquiesce to conventional wisdom, to give in to frustration and not fight the system, and to ignore the suffering going on in the world because "there's nothing you can do to help", simply getting your hands dirty can be a kind of revolution.
Hi everyone! Welcome to my blog. I wanted to put this post up as a place for people to comment on the blog as a whole. I've written the code for the blog from scratch, so there may very well be problems that emerge. Please let me know if you have any issues, and your feedback is always welcome.
