Burns My Shorts
thusspakezuska | July 9, 2007One of the perks of being a Scienceblogger is getting a free subscription to Seed Magazine. Last week, issue 11 August 2007 arrived, and I happily began sampling its good stuff. There's a new feature this month called "Incubator" that tries to "capture the multifacted nature of science itself - from the minutia of the bench, to the personalities behind them, to the oversized ideas that propel us forward." One item included in the new feature is Workbench, a photo of a "scientist's natural hangout". The inaugural, and annotated, full-page photo is of the desk of 3rd-year grad student…
thusspakezuska | June 29, 2007I've been doing some reading over at Twisty's place this afternoon, and, you know, it's the usual patriarchy-blaming that helps raise your blood pressure. I do admire Twisty's way with a phrase.
Then I came across this post. And it was more than the blood pressure; I wanted to scream in frustration and anger. A precocious 9-year-old girl who's taking classes at a high school, and who has been "singing over her chemistry equations". But then, in an ill-considered move, she turned 10, which apparently was equivalent to posting a sign on her back that read "All males may feel free to…
thusspakezuska | June 6, 2007N.B.: Nature Physics (3, 363; 2007) has an editorial on a recent American Physical Society workshop, Gender Equity: Strengthening the Physics Enterprise in Universities and National Laboratories. This post is based** on that editorial, which is behind a paywall; you can read part of it here.
So, the American Physical Society had a gender equity workshop, and all the bigwigs came - chairs of 50 major physics departments, 14 division directors of national labs, leaders from NSF and DOE. "After all, if there is to be change, it has to come from the top." Sounds good on paper. There was…
thusspakezuska | June 3, 2007I sat down on my front porch this afternoon with a cup of coffee and the Philadelphia Inquirer and I was shocked beyond belief to find Jonathan Storm , the Inquirer's tv critic, offering up a critique of not just one new fall tv show, but the entire new fall lineup of all three networks, based on nothing more than "clips and the networks' hyperbole-heavy presentations to advertisers (all a critic has to go on at this early stage)".
Well. This is an outrage! I am particularly hoping that Chris over at Mixing Memory will get on the horn ASAP and let Mr. Storm know just what he thinks of…
thusspakezuska | May 31, 2007From the Chronicle daily update:
The White House announced on Tuesday the winners of the 2005 National Medals of Science, the nation's highest scientific honor. The prizes recognize achievement in the physical, biological, mathematical, social, behavioral, and engineering sciences.
I'm shocked, shocked! to discover no women's names on the list of honorees.
And now...let the comment whiners commence whining
thusspakezuska | May 22, 2007I would not have believed this would be possible in 2007, and yet, here it is.
CBS is bringing to your television, this fall, a series so full of stereotypes, so dazzingly stupid, so ridiculously puerile, that it must surely offend the sensibilities of everyone in science.
I am talking about "The Big Bang Theory".
Dubious thanks to alert reader Maggie W. for letting me know about this. My life would have been happier had I been in blissful ignorance, but alas, it is my mournful duty to skewer the moronocity of things of this ilk.
Here is a quote from the show's web site:
"The Big Bang…
thusspakezuska | May 7, 2007A long-time reader tipped me off about a recent New York Times article poetically titled
Getting the Most Bang Out of Quarks and Gluons.
It's all about the really nifty guy-physics going on at Brookhaven National Lab and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC or "rick". Hah.)
I'm not sure what I find most annoying about this article. Is it the doofus-y physicists pretending to be Captain Kirk, Scotty, Spock et al. aboard the Starship Enterprise? (You may not be surprised to learn that there was no Lt. Uhura in the group.)
"That's Captain Kirk over there," said Dr. Trainor, pointing…
thusspakezuska | May 1, 2007The 5th Scientiae Carnival is up at Clarity. I've been so out of it most of this month that I had nothing to contribute to it this time. The carnival theme this time is why and how do you labor at what you do?
There's lots of good stuff on the carnival, as usual. You might want to check out this horror story, I mean nightmare, I mean descent into hell and back, I mean tale of a graduate student's struggle to wrest her PhD from the slimy paws of her advisor and committee.
thusspakezuska | April 27, 2007You'll recall I posted about fellow Scibling Shelley Batts's run-in with Wiley over fair use of a figure and graph from a journal article. This incident created quite a firestorm in the blogosphere. You'll find a good summary and a nice link roundup provided by Bora over at A Blog Around The Clock. It's a big deal because it gets to the heart of science blogging and science reporting.
It generated enough attention that both Nature and Scientific American posted about it.
Now Nature's blogger reported on the issue as follows:
A few days ago Shelley Batts at Retrospectacle reviewed a…
thusspakezuska | April 26, 2007All last week I was silent on my blog because I wasn't feeling well enough to spend much time on the computer. So I didn't post anything when many other people were writing about the horrible tragedy at Virginia Tech. I thought about what I might say if I were well enough to blog and I concluded that I was not up to the task. I just didn't have words that seemed adequate, beyond expressing my grief and shock, and my sympathy for everyone at Virginia Tech. I know some people who work there and I can't imagine what this has been like for them. And I can't think of anything I can possibly…
thusspakezuska | April 25, 2007UPDATE: There was a veritable blogswarm on this issue, and Shelley reports that it seems to have generated results. Although, I will note that "granting permission" is not quite the same thing as acknowledging that her original post fell under fair use.
Shelley Batts at Retrospectacle wrote a post the other day analyzing a journal article that has been reported misleadingly in the popular press under headlines like "Alcohol Makes Fruit Healthier". In her post she had reproduced a part of one figure and a table from the original journal article in order to analyze what was going on in…
thusspakezuska | April 24, 2007I have never been a huge fan of the comic strip "Cathy". In the comic strip office world, I had Dilbert on one hand, as exemplar for engineers, and Cathy on the other hand, as the model for professional working women. Neither was particularly appealing to me. Dilbert personifies all the negative geekoid engineering stereotypes, but seems to be taken by the masses as a hipsterish anti-hero. Cathy, much of the time, seems to be a blithering idiot who is way too fixated on her appearance, the need to cram the body she doesn't love into the latest skinny-minny fashions, and the desire to eat…
thusspakezuska | February 26, 2007So, you've probably heard about this by now: the sorority at DePauw University where 23 members were asked to vacate the house because they weren't "sufficiently dedicated to recruitment". It just so happens that the cadre of insufficiently dedicated members included all the sorority's black, Korean, and Vietnamese members. It included all the members who were overweight, we are told. Seemingly, it also included a large number of women who were math and science majors as well.
...the chapter appears to have been home to a diverse community over the years, partly because it has attracted…
thusspakezuska | February 11, 2007What is it with the techie women pin-up calendar business?
First, we had the loathesome Geek Gorgeous calendar.
Then came the misbegotten IT Screen Goddess calendar.
Now Skookumchick brings us news of young women engineers at the University of Illinois who have posed, scantily clad and nearly naked in some cases, for a pinup calendar.
Here's what I had to say in the past about such calendars:
The participants think they are saying to the world, "Look, I'm smart AND sexy!"
But what they are actually saying to the world is, "Look! No matter how smart I ever am, you can count on me not to…
thusspakezuska | January 29, 2007So, I have insomnia. I'm catching up on some blog reading. I come across this courtesy of Asymptotia. It's one of those quizzes; this one is "Which Science Fiction Writer Are you?" It's fun, it's harmless, more or less; I came out as
I am:
John Brunner
His best known works are dystopias -- vivid realizations of the futures we want to avoid.
Which science fiction writer are you?
More or less appropriate, I'd say.
But what's really interesting to me is this item in the quiz:
5) Are you a total dork when dealing with the opposite sex?
I'm so smooth, I couldn't possibly be a…
thusspakezuska | January 25, 2007Dr. Free-Ride has graciously put the slides from her talk at the Science Blogging Conference on the conference wiki, so I'm thinking I can go ahead and blog about the stuff I thought I couldn't blog about in my earlier post.
Specifically, Dr. Free-Ride spent some time talking about conversations that happen in the blogosphere that might not otherwise take place. She enumerated and categorized these. Her basic categories were as follows:
Educational Conversations
Political Conversations
Conversations About the Scientific Literature
The Virtual Scientific (or Lab) Meeting
Conversations…
thusspakezuska | January 24, 2007Hunt Willard spoke at the NC Science Blogging Conference about "Promoting Public Understanding of Science". Willard is the director of the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy. He made a distinction between getting people to actually understand the science itself - which he felt was really hard to do - versus getting them to understand the implications of science. He felt it was very easy to get people on the bandwagon with implications.
I'm not sure, however, that you can do an adequate job of getting people to understand the implications of this or that bit of science without…
thusspakezuska | January 8, 2007There's an interesting new ad campaign on the Scienceblogs site from Honeywell Interactive. It includes short video podcasts of scientists discussing their work and ideas. See an example here, down on the navigation bar at right.
Here is a quote from the Honeywell folks supplied to me by my Scienceblogs guru Katherine Sharpe:
Designed to inspire the next generation of engineers and scientists, The Honeywell  Nobel Initiative establishes a forum for students worldwide to learn directly from Nobel Laureates in Chemistry and Physics through a combination of live on-campus events, interactive…