It seems that next week is Copyright Awareness Week. I don’t really have anything to say about that, except it seems a bit ironic that a web site promoting copyright and IP would have such crappy web design. Shouldn’t they have, like, artists and technically talented people available?
This video, about a kitten and rooster that become friends, is quite amusing. It also comes highly recommended by Tess, who watched the entire video with her nose an inch from the screen. I’m not sure whether she was interested in the kitten (friend!), the rooster (food!), or the charming Chinese narration (fascinating even if totally unintelligible).
(HT: Cute Overload)
It’s been awhile since I’ve posted much of an update on what’s going on with me. Since currently things are going very well, I thought this would be a good time.
School continues to be fun. I think I’ve mentioned before that I haven’t been able to evaluate whether the career switch was definitely the right life choice yet, but it definitely appears to have been a good choice in the short term - on a day-to-day basis, I’m far happier than I was at my last job. This may be primarily due to the much smaller requirement for working with others, but I’ll take it for now.
I’m still not studying nearly as much as I thought I’d have to, nor even as much as I should (the latter being considerably less than the former), but I’m learning a lot, and classes are very interesting. Immunology is really neat, I always like physiology, and genetics is quite interesting. Microbiology, somehow not as much, but a lot of it is clearly useful.
Since coming to the conclusions that (1) I have more than sufficient free time and (2) I don’t have sufficient money, I started working again. I’m back teaching MCAT test prep, and tutoring physics as well. I work once or twice a week, which is great. Having a more structured schedule seems to help me stay on top of things, I like the variety, and I’m able to earn enough to significantly increase my spare cash.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever posted about my migraines - I’ve dealt with them since grade school and had gotten used to spending several evenings per month unable to do anything involving light, sound, smells, or being vertical. A few years ago I discovered that there are actually drugs that work, and that helped a lot - I still got the headaches, but I could almost always make them go away. Then last fall, the Student Health doctor told me that having 5-6 migraines per month was really too much, and I should consider a daily prophylactic. I decided it was worth a try, and it’s seriously amazing. I’ve started keeping a headache diary, mostly for the thrill of looking at a whole month and only seeing two headaches. In December I didn’t have any. And I haven’t had to miss any social events in months.
I take a yoga class once a week and try to work out a couple times as well; it feels good. The gym at school is very convenient; I can take advantage of it during unexpected free time between lectures, and I can keep my workout clothes in my study carrel.
School extra-curriculars have not been quite what I was hoping for; most of the groups seem to concentrate on bringing in lunchtime lecturers, which is great (though often they don’t convey as much information as I’d like) but I was hoping for a little more interaction with my classmates. Nevertheless, I’ve gotten involved in a couple of things: there’s a group that teaches science to middle- and high-schoolers; we’re starting a physics teaching team, and that’s fun. Several other groups do teaching as well (reproductive health, prenatal health, AIDS, etc) and I’ve participated in some of those. And there are a bunch of other things that come up sporadically. (Tonight I’m making truffles for tomorrow’s talent show.)
Currently I’m working on lining up a summer research position. I don’t have very much to say about that yet, except that I’m looking forward to it. (Except the part where I’ll have to sometimes go outside in the St. Louis summer humidity.)
Last weekend my mom came to visit and we had a good time, checking out several good restaurants, the Soulard farmer’s market, and the Missouri history museum. She also cleaned my apartment while I was at work (particularly amusing given my recent posting topics) and helped me rearrange and decorate my bedroom. It looks very nice, and now I only have one box left to unpack.
I like my apartment a lot (especially now that my noisy neighbor has left) and so I expect to stay here for at least another year; I’ll probably only move if I feel like I need to be closer to the hospital for third year. Putting down roots is really nice; I’ve started hanging things on the walls, and it’s amazing how much homier the place feels.
I’m appalled by Richard Cohen’s column arguing that algebra is worthless. (And I’m not the only one.)
You will never need to know algebra. I have never once used it and never once even rued that I could not use it.
I don’t think that Cohen knows what algebra is. He certainly doesn’t appear to know what math is:
Most of math can now be done by a computer or a calculator.
Calculators - at least the ones someone who couldn’t pass algebra is likely to be familiar with - do arithmetic. As anyone who’s ever asked a math major to calculate the tip knows, arithmetic isn’t math. (OK, it is, but math is so much more than that.)
And if you don’t know algebra, you can’t set up the problem to punch it into your calculator. Do you need to know the quadratic formula? Probably not. Do you need to know that ax=b is the same relationship as x=b/a? You sure as hell do. Quick: the grocery store is selling loaves of bread 5 for $10. How much for one loaf? Congratulations, you just did algebra.
Writing is the highest form of reasoning. This is a fact. Algebra is not.
This is self-evidently false (writing isn’t any form of reasoning, unless you define “reasoning” as something like “brain activity”), and Cohen goes on to demonstrate, in the rest of the paragraph, that logical reasoning does indeed escape him.
The proof of this, Gabriela, is all the people in my high school who were whizzes at math but did not know a thing about history and could not write a readable English sentence.
I’ve met a few people who were whizzes at math and couldn’t write a readable English sentence. Every last one of them was a recent immigrant from an Asian country. I have never once met a math whiz who couldn’t write a readable sentence in his/her native language, and I don’t believe that Cohen has, either. Perhaps “math whiz” means “someone who passed math while I failed.”
I can cite Shelly, whose last name will not be mentioned, who aced algebra but when called to the board in geography class, located the Sahara Desert right where the Gobi usually is. She was off by a whole continent.
Oh, I get it. “Reasoning” is defined as “memorizing facts.” And if you want to talk about things you can go through life without knowing? The various locations of the world’s deserts would probably fall into that category.
So check it out. Cohen claims that writing is the highest form of reasoning, then goes on to “prove” that by making two anecdotal claims: one is, if not completely false, greatly exaggerated, and the other isn’t relevant to the argument. See what happens when you don’t learn math?
OK, so what does Cohen think is useful to learn in school? He mentions history and English, but:
I let others go on to intermediate algebra and trigonometry while I busied myself learning how to type. In due course, this came to be the way I made my living. Typing: Best class I ever took.
Well, no wonder he doesn’t like the idea of algebra class. His idea of a great class is one that teaches a menial skill any third-grader can pick up on her own.
I’m so glad that someone who’s proud of his failure in ninth-grade math is using his nationally-read column to encourage young people to give up just like he did.
In the comments to my last post, Tim in Columbus asked me if my messiness causes problems in my life. The answer, as I said in the comments, is both yes and no, and I think the way I’ve come to look at the issue is worth sharing.
These days, I see housekeeping as analogous to personal care. There’s a whole ladder of standards: the bare minimum for hygiene (preventing garbage from building up; staying clean enough so you don’t smell and wearing sufficient clothing), a reasonable standard (washing dishes before every single one you own is dirty; combing your hair and wearing presentable, appropriate clothing), and an ideal level (no clutter and washing dishes as soon as they’re used; wearing stylish clothes and waxing your eyebrows).
Do I prefer the ideal level? Sure, in both cases. It’s certainly nice to be in a spotless house, and I really like knowing that I look my best. Do I live up to that ideal all the time? Definitely not. It’s just not worth the effort.
I always wear clean, matching clothes to school, but fairly frequently those are jeans, a sweater, and Docs. I love to wear really stylish clothes with heels and have my hair done, and it would be awesome if I could do that every day with no additional effort, but the fact is that the effort necessary to live up to that level on a regular basis is fairly significant, and it’s simply not worth it to me. I don’t really want my life to revolve around my external appearance, anyway. So I dress up for special occasions, or sometimes when I just feel like it, and the specialness makes it even more fun.
Same thing with the house. I make the effort to keep it at a reasonable level of cleanliness, but in order to consistently keep it free of clutter, wash the dishes every time I use some, dust the furniture regularly, and all of that, would be more than I’m willing to put in. Instead, I clean up on occasion - when someone’s visiting, or when I feel particularly motivated - and I enjoy the results while they last.
Over time, my base standards in both areas have increased - I’ve gotten used to staying on top of my wardrobe so essentially all of my options are at least presentable, and I’ve developed an aversion to going out in public in sneakers. Similarly, I’ve gotten better about shelving my books rather than leaving them in piles, and I sweep the floors a lot more often than I used to.
On the other hand, I’ve gotten more comfortable with adhering to my own standards rather than others’. I try not to feel inadequate when I don’t look as cute as other women I see, and while I enjoy reading fashion magazines, I don’t take their advice personally all the time - I’m not going to wear makeup every day or cut my hair every month, thanks.
Becoming comfortable with my less-than-white-glove housekeeping has been more difficult, and actually coming up with this analogy made a big difference. Just as I actively avoid the temptation to always feel as if there’s a high fashion bar I can’t quite reach, I’ve tried to accept that it’s fine to set my day-to-day housekeeping goal at a reasonable level, with occasional excursions to greater cleanliness. The surprising result has been that it’s actually easier to keep up. Now I think, “oh, I should wash some dishes” instead of “my entire kitchen is so dirty - I need to wash all those dishes, clean the top of the stove, mop the floor, clean the oven, scrub the sink, dust the windowsill, and clean out the fridge - I can never get all that done!” Just washing a sinkful of dishes is a much more manageable task, and as such, it’s far more likely to get done. And I don’t have a constant low-level feeling of guilt that I’m a failure as a housekeeper.
All over America there are mothers telling their daughters that they don’t have to live up to what they see in Seventeen. I’m not aware of a big movement to free women from the expectation that they’ll keep their homes immaculate at all times, and I think one needs to start.
There’s a petition asking Chipotle to offer half-size burritos.
Sadly, I live in the land of Qdoba, but last time I was at Chipotle, they had knives for free. You can, in fact, get TWO half-burritos for the price of one!
Following the housework debate at Matthew Yglesias’s blog, the Angry Blog, and elsewhere, I keep finding myself wondering, why is housework such a touchy subject in so many relationships?
It seems to me that if two parties approach division of labor in good faith, it’s not that big a deal. Either you are happy with a spontaneous order, or when one or both parties becomes unhappy, they sit down, make a list of what needs to be done, and divvy it up fairly according to preferences.
Obviously, this isn’t what happens. Overall, women do more housework, and a lot of women are unhappy with that. Why? I think there are two contributing factors, and each stems mostly from the larger culture.
First, clearly, there’s a cultural norm that women do more housework. Presumably this stems from the times when women were expected to take care of the home rather than working outside the home, and the norms haven’t quite caught up with today’s broader options. This comes into play directly - I’m aware of (mostly older) couples in which the man says something like “I need a shirt to wear to work tomorrow” and the woman washes and irons one. There’s also an indirect effect as described by Tim: prevailing norms have an effect on negotiations made by individual couples by making the “normal” solutions seem likelier.
The second problem is that, on average, women tend to want the house to be cleaner than men do. But in and of itself, that doesn’t explain the rancor. For example, Tim and I often eat together. He is perfectly able to feed himself and me, but I prefer fancier meals than he does (though he’s certainly willing to eat whatever I cook). The solution ends up being that I cook more often, and he splits his contribution between takeout, spaghetti, and occasional fancier meals at my request. There are no hard feelings; we’ve successfully split the “procuring food” chore to satisfy both of our preferences.
Why doesn’t this work with housework in most situations? The problem is the introduction of a (bogus) moral dimension. Very few people see anything wrong with limiting one’s food contribution to plain meals and takeout (assuming that’s financially feasible). But a lot of people see something wrong with limiting one’s housework contribution to the minimum needed to avoid visits by rodents, insects, and CPS.
While I think most people can agree on a desired cleanliness level somewhat above that needed for the most basic hygiene, I see no reason why one partner should dictate a level significantly above that. If one partner wants to wash the dishes every other day, allow stacks of paper but no food to build up on the dining room table, let the kids wear jeans all week or until muddy before washing them, and clean the refrigerator once moldy food is noticed, and the other partner wants to wash dishes immediately upon dirtying them, keep all surfaces free of clutter, wash all clothes after one wearing, and perform weekly refrigerator audits, obviously they have a difference to work out, but it’s not at all clear to me that the more-clean partner should prevail.
But since society considers cleanliness a virtue, the prevailing norm is that of the neatnik. Unless the clean freak is really extreme (say, spraying all surfaces with Lysol daily), s/he’s considered the reasonable one, and the partner who sees nothing wrong with a bit of clutter is considered a slob.
This, unsurprisingly, tends to make slobs a bit defensive. They (OK, we) often see requests to clean up beyond our natural preferencs as indictments of our moral character, and not without reason! Nagging (or what can be experienced as nagging) sometimes makes people revert to childish behaviors like refusing to do any of the work at all.
I’m not blaming the neatnik women, though. They didn’t choose to have irrationally high cleanliness standards - those were trained into them along with all sorts of other cultural norms. Women, far more than men, experience a societal expectation to have immaculate living quarters. Despite being a natural slob and believing intellectually that there’s no moral dimension to cleanliness, I still frequently feel guilty about the state of my house (and it’s not even that bad, nor does anyone else live here). Women are bothered by dirt because they were raised to believe that they need to be clean.
It is very difficult to work full-time, cook nutritious meals, have a life, and keep your home to a white-glove standard of cleanliness (and with kids, it’s a whole other story). You can’t do it by yourself, but convincing someone who doesn’t share your standards to help is difficult. Obviously, the rational solution is to simply stop doing the things that don’t really need to be done, like daily vacuuming and weekly dusting - but rejecting societal expectations is easier said than done.
Nonetheless, that’s what needs to happen. Once cleanliness beyond the basic hygienic level is seen as a preference without any particular moral weight, the whole issue becomes much less fraught. Women can work on letting go of their guilt about never washing the ceilings like their mothers did, and men can work on seeing housework requests as things they can do to make their spouses happy.
“Sweetie, I know I’m silly about this, but I really like the way the kitchen looks when there are no dishes in the sink” is going to be a lot more effective than “Why haven’t you washed those dishes yet? Were you raised by wolves?”
Adrienne has a fun post on debunked myths, one of which is that saying every college student knows, “beer before liquor, never been sicker; liquor before beer, you’re in the clear.” Of course that’s not really true; alcohol is alcohol and what matters is how much of that you consume.
However, as one of my friends used to explain, there is some truth to the rhyme. Steve used to draw the following set of graphs on the whiteboard (usually during parties):
The slopes of the drunkenness vs. time graph are significantly different for beer and liquor*. When you have liquor first, you get drunk quickly, but then switching to beer slows down the process, and you have plenty of warning to stop before hitting that red line.
On the other hand, starting with beer gets you just drunk enough to think shots are a good idea, and then since you’re already somewhat intoxicated, you can quickly overshoot your desired drunkenness level.
*Of course this is just because of how quickly people tend to drink; if you carefully timed things so that you consumed the same amount of alcohol per unit time the slopes would be the same. But most people will consume hard liquor more quickly than beer with an equivalent amount of alcohol.
We have one lecturer in GI physio who rocks for several reasons. One of them is that he always brings us snacks, but more importantly, he uses old-fashioned overheads instead of PowerPoint.
Obviously both overheads and Powerpoint presentations can be abused, but the barrier to abuse is so much higher with overheads. Primarily, it’s much more difficult to give the kind of crappy presentation where you just read what it says on your slides, because if you have overheads you have to physically write what’s going to be on them. Writing is way harder than typing (or copy-pasting!), so you have to actually think about what really needs to be on the slides, instead of just including everything you can think of.
Then you end up with overheads that have a few key words or phrases, maybe some important diagrams, perhaps a brief paragraph of text if it’s really necessary. And while you’re displaying the overheads you’re narrating and adding value to what’s on the slides, rather than pointing to every word on the slide with your laser pointer while you read them aloud, like one of those Disney singalong tapes with the bouncing Mickey Mouse head on the lyrics.
(Hmm, I wonder if we could encourage lecturers to stop this by reading along with them. It would be really unprofessional but it might work.)
While there are situations in which Powerpoint facilitates giving a great lecture, I think a large number of the lectures we get would be significantly improved if they were given using overheads instead.
Two exciting discoveries in the news recently:
Eureka: Lost manuscript found in cupboard
A long-lost 17th century manuscript charting the birth of modern science has been found gathering dust in a cupboard in a Hampshire home. Filled with crabby italics and acerbic asides, the 520 or so yellowing and stained pages are the handwritten minutes of the Royal Society as recorded by the brilliant scientist Robert Hooke, one of the society’s original fellows and curator of experiments.The notes describe in detail some of the most astounding and outlandish scientific thinking from meetings of the society between 1661 to 1682. There is the very earliest work with microscopes, confirming the first sightings of sperm and micro-organisms. There is correspondence with Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Christopher Wren over the nature of gravity, with the latter’s proposal to fire bullets into the air to see where they might drop. And there is a page that lays to rest the bitter controversy over who designed the watch that would eventually lead to the first measurements of longitude
A Lost World in Indonesia Yields Riches for Scientists
A team of scientists has discovered a lost world of rare plants, giant flowers and bizarre animals — including a new species of honeyeater bird, a tree kangaroo and an egg-laying mammal — on a mist-shrouded mountaintop in a remote province of Indonesia on New Guinea island. …“Naturalists love to go to places that haven’t been visited before,” he explained. “And this was one of the last, perhaps the very last.”
These are just thrilling to read about. I can’t imagine how exciting it would have been to be one of the discoverers.