women
thusspakezuska | April 6, 2010I was catching up on reading at Female Science Professor's place and came across her post: Women Girls.
FSP, as far as I can tell, seems to be saying that the young ones these days are all hip with the term "girl" for women even into their 30's because...I don't know why, it's a peer thing, and we old biddies wouldn't understand. We must accept that the times they are a-changing. Girls just wanna have fun?
Perusing the comments, I gather that "woman" is stodgy, or P.C. (!), and too mature and "girls" these days are putting off adulthood, and can't think of themselves as women.
To this…
grrlscientist | April 5, 2010tags: satire, humor, funny, weird, behavior, stereotypes, women, men, Untucked Films, Harvard Sailing Team, streaming video
This video is a satire of how women behave when they get together. However, this is highly stereotyped since I've never acted like this, not have any women whom I know. Who are these mythological women? Do you know them? Or are they sitcom women only?
And of course, what's good for the goose is good for the gander (or is it the other way around?);
Website: Harvard Sailing Team, Produced by Untucked Films, directed by Jonathan Emmerling, director of photography Pat…
sastyk | March 15, 2010Reaching the hellacious end-of-book period where I do nothing but merge endlessly with my computer. Thus, low on new content. So you can read this stuff instead.
First, check out "Little House in the Ghetto" which will be going on my blogroll just as soon as I figure out how to change my blogroll.
Waking up from this entrancement and becoming aware that options exist has given me opportunity and motivation in my own life. As hobo poet Vachel Lindsay remarked, "I am further from slavery than most men." This has been an unexpected gift from downshifting (dropping out) from mainstream…
sastyk | March 14, 2010First of all, may I ask which New York Times editor was responsible for permitting the coinage "femivore" to pass into language. Talk about illiterate (linguistically a "femivore" would be someone who ate women) and uneuphonious - yes, yes, I get that you want to get a Michael Pollan reference in there somehow, but come on... any writer worth her salt could do better than that.
Now to the meat of the thing - the essay, which profiles Shannon Hayes's book _Radical Homemakers_ attempts to argue that focusing on food has given women a new set of choices.
Hayes pointed out that the original "…
sastyk | February 19, 2010Many of us in the Global North probably have a mental image attached to the word "farmer." Here's a pretty good approximation of most of our impressions of what constitutes "the average farmer."
Most of us probably don't realize that the "average farmer" on a world scale looks rather different. Here's an approximate of what the average farmer looks like:
Or maybe she looks more like this:
Women feed the world, and I mean that quite literally. Worldwide, according to the UN FAO, more than 50% of all the food grown worldwide is produced by women, who constitute close to 60% of the world'…
sastyk | January 31, 2010In 2005, my first widely republished article was entitled "Peak Oil is a Women's Issue" and detailed the ways that material realities for women were likely to change in an energy depleted world. I got more than a 100 emails after I wrote that piece, mostly falling into two camps - either "Wow, I never thought of that, but of course it is" and "Oh, I've been worrying about these issues for a long time and no one ever writes about them." I was not the first significant woman writer in the peak oil movement, nor was I even the first to ever write about these issues, but somehow this article…
jstemwedel | January 27, 2010It's true that I recently returned from a fairly geeky conference, but I just found out about one happening practically in my backyard. And, given that I don't yet have any papers to grade, I figured I should check it out.
(Today is the last day to register without paying the late registration fee, in case that helps you make up your mind.)
From the web page:
She's Geeky's 5th unconference, the third in the Bay Area, is coming up the last weekend in January at the Computer History Museum [Map] in Mountain View. Register now to receive regular pricing.
Who is invited?
Are you a woman? Are…
sastyk | January 14, 2010John Michael Greer has a superb piece up about our reluctance to seriously consider real community and organizational strategies. I think it is well worth reading for anyone interested in this question of community - because we have to ask ourselves, if this is the tool we've got, why do so few of us want to do the work? Why are so few of us able to do the work?
It's interesting to speculate about why that took place. I suspect many of my readers have encountered Robert Putnam's widely discussed book Bowling Alone (2000), which traced the collapse of social networks and institutions…
edyong | January 12, 2010For something intangible, a glance can be a powerful thing. It can carry the weight of culture and history, it can cause psychological harm, and it can act as a muzzle. Consider the relatively simple act of a man staring at a woman's body. This is such a common part of modern society that most of us rarely stop to think of its consequences, much less investigate it with a scientific lens.
Tamar Saguy is different. Leading a team of Israeli and US psychologists, she has shown that women become more silent if they think that men are focusing on their bodies. They showed that women who were…
grrlscientist | December 13, 2009tags: religion, christianity, fundamentalism, wingnuttery, comedy, humor, satire, fucking hilarious, streaming video
The Bible states clearly in Genesis 3:16 that the man rules over the woman.
Did anyone follow this guy's "logic"? If so, please do explain to the rest of us who are still mortally confused. A flowchart might be helpful.
sastyk | December 8, 2009I was about to post the Chocolate-Banana Bread Pudding recipe that I left out of my food waste post, when I found myself worrying a little bit about whether posting recipes is appropriate for my new forum. You see, I tend to think of Scienceblogs with the first syllable pronounced just like Thomas Dolby in "She Blinded Me With Science" yelling "SCIENCE!" (which I have included a link to for no apparent reason, simply because it pleases me http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V83JR2IoI8k.) Is this warm, fuzzy, chocolatey goodness appropriate to a hard-edged SCIENCEblog? Does PZ Myers post…
razib | August 3, 2009The author of the paper, Physical attractiveness and reproductive success in humans: evidence from the late 20th century United States, speaks:
Having your study publicized by the media is nice. Having your study misrepresented and misinterpreted in the process is not. The media coverage of my paper on physical attractiveness and having children had a bad start and even worse follow-up. The origin of the problem: Times Online news article sexing up the finding a bit too much (I wasn't interviewed for this article at all and heard about it only after it had been published). Then things got…
edyong | June 23, 2009Think of a scientist - not anyone in particular, just a random individual working in the field. Got one? Did you picture a man or a woman? If it's the former, you're probably not alone. There have been a few times when I've only ever known a scientist through their surname on a citation and automatically assumed that they were a man, only to learn, to my chagrin, that they're actually a woman. It's always a galling reminder of how pervasive the stereotype of science as a male endeavour can be, even at an unconscious level.
Now, Brian Nosek from the University of Virgina, together with…
edyong | June 1, 2009History has had no shortage of outstanding female mathematicians, from Hypatia of Alexandria to Ada Lovelace, and yet no woman has ever won the Fields medal - the Nobel prize of the maths world. The fact that men outnumber women in the highest echelons of mathematics (as in science, technology and engineering) has always been controversial, particularly for the persistent notion that this disparity is down to an innate biological advantage.
Now, two professors from the University of Wisconsin - Janet Hyde and Janet Mertz - have reviewed the strong evidence that at least in maths, the gender…
bioephemera | June 1, 2009
A sexual violence victim recovers in Goma, Congo
photo by Endre Vestvik
A few weeks ago, the NYT published a horrifying account by Nicholas Kristof of the pervasive sexual violence left over from Liberia's civil war. A major survey in Liberia found that 75% of Liberian women had been raped - most gang-raped. And many of the victims are children:
Of course, children are raped everywhere, but what is happening in Liberia is different. The war seems to have shattered norms and trained some men to think that when they want sex, they need simply to overpower a girl. Or at school, girls sometimes…
thusspakezuska | April 7, 2009Yesterday I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR and caught this very intriguing segment, Shakespeare Had Roses All Wrong. Would you describe a bridge as fragile, elegant, beautiful, peaceful, slender, pretty? Or as strong, dangerous, long, sturdy, big, towering? Lera Boroditsky, an assistant psychology professor at Stanford University, found that it depends - for native German and Spanish speakers, on whether your native tongue assigns a feminine or masculine gender to the noun bridge.
Boroditsky proposes that because the word for "bridge" in German -- die brucke -- is a feminine noun…
thusspakezuska | April 1, 2009I've been thinking a lot lately, and it seems to me that I spend way too much time puking on other peoples' shoes and not nearly enough time prancing about in my own fancy high heels. So this past weekend I did some shopping. Here's one result:
Let me tell you, Mr. Zuska is happy about this turn of events! I also got these:
Of course, after an evening in those, I couldn't walk at all the next day due to my arthritic toes but it was all worth it, because I knew I had finally consumed my way into modern womanhood. I know this because I was reading Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines…
bioephemera | March 24, 2009
It's Ada Lovelace Day!
Ada Lovelace (1815 - 1852) is often referred to as the world's first computer programmer. The daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron, and the admired intellect, Annabella Milbanke, Ada Lovelace represented the meeting of two alternative worlds: the romanticism and art of her father versus the rationality and science of her mother. In her attempt to draw together these polar opposites and create a 'poetical science' during the Victorian age, Ada collaborated with the renowned mathematician and inventor, Charles Babbage. (source)
I'm betting famous names like Marie Curie…
sheril | March 18, 2009A couple weeks back, I composed a post entitled 'Science Reveals How To Lose Weight And Keep It Off'. The results weren't surprising... research out of Harvard found that calories are the most significant part of the equation. However, what really resonated with a number of readers turned out to be a different topic related to this point:
Weightwise, my take is that we humans have an interesting habit of coming in all shapes and sizes and the most beautiful tend not to fit a particular mold. That said, being healthy--inside and out--is everything.
I received several emails in agreement, and…
sheril | March 9, 2009I'm off to the city for a panel in recognition of International Women's Day. Given the theme, I'd like to point readers to a recent piece from The Guardian asking 'Where are the books by women with big ideas?'
Books like Freakonomics, defining significant cultural or economic trends with a punchy title, never seem to be produced by women. But why?
As you can imagine, I have much to say on the topic coming soon, but am first interested in your reaction to the article. Here's an excerpt to get us started:
Julia Cheiffetz, blogging at publishing website HarperStudio, dubs the genre "big think…