If all goes well, this will be the last post on this incarnation of my blog. I've got a new version ready to roll out tomorrow - it won't appear too much different, but it's all revamped under the hood. And I'll finally be free of Blogger.

The new version will show up under this same URL, but the RSS feed will be different, so you aggregator-users will have to do whatever it is you do to update that, which is why I'm posting now to give you a heads-up.

Enjoy New Year's Eve! I'm going to a party with practically all of my college friends. Being in Cleveland for the whole holiday stretch can be a drag, but getting to catch up with everyone is definitely worth it.

# : 12:30 PM : :

I've finally uploaded a bunch of pictures going back to the summer. A few previews follow - they look grainy because I just set the sizes smaller to make them fit on the page; if you click on them you'll be taken to the nice versions.

Here's my sister-bonding trip to the beach. Something was wrong with my camera, so most of the pictures were really overexposed, but there are several photos of our surfing lessons. Unfortunately, the one photo of me actually riding a wave was on a film camera, so I don't have it.

Then there was our fall trip to Lake Hope. I got stung by a bee - notice that my right thumb is swollen up:



There was lots of hiking and goofing off:



And we spent some time at the shooting range:



Unfortunately I don't seem to have any still photos of me shooting my dad's new semiautomatic pistol (I was by far the most successful) but there is a pretty sweet video.

Finally, here I am (on the right) with my sisters, all dressed up for Christmas church.

# : 11:46 PM : :

I know plenty of curmudgeons like to complain about how everyone has a cell phone now, you can't ever get away from people who want you to talk to them, everyone is jabbering on the subway, and all of that. Many of these people complain that cell phone enable rudeness in people, and they may be right.

But I think more people still need cell phones. Specifically, the guy in the upstairs apartment next door, and all of his friends and family. He gets more visitors than anyone else in the neighborhood, and evidently not one of them has a cell phone. They park in the driveway behind the house (almost right under my bedroom window) and honk their horns until he comes down. Or they get out of their cars and yell. Or they come up and hammer on the back door (right next to my bedroom window) and yell.

If these people had cell phones, I'm sure they would be the rude ones talking through grocery store transactions, conducting personal business loudly on the subway, and driving erratically with phones plastered to their ears. But none of that would be as loud or grating as what they do without cell phones.

Rude people will always be rude. But at least cell phones remove any need to sit outside someone's house and lay on the horn.

# : 4:26 PM : :

I think I fixed the Firefox display problem by setting my blog to show 7 posts, not 7 days' worth of posts, on the front page. I'm not sure if the problem was that Firefox just couldn't handle that much data, or if there were too many links in the data, or something else.

My last final is tomorrow, so after that I might try to pin down the issue. If you were or are still experiencing the problem, I'd appreciate it if you'd comment and let me know what browser/version you're using. If I can figure out exactly what the problem is I can make sure my (still-theoretical) WordPress theme won't have it.

# : 4:27 PM : :

The other day in physiology, we were learning about cardiovascular system regulation, and we watched a video of tiny blood vessels getting injected with various blood-vessel-altering chemicals (epinephrine and the like). It was taken through a high-powered microscope, so you could see the little red blood cells floating around in the blood vessels:



So they injected the blood vessel with stuff that made it contract, and that pushed the red blood cell away. Then they did it again a little farther along, and that pushed the blood cell again. We were really getting into this. (No joke - videos of microscopic processes are ridiculously engaging. The best one ever was one of a bacterium getting chased down and eated by an immune cell whose name I forget.)

Then they injected right next to the cell, just far enough so the cell didn't move much, and while that bit of blood vessel was still constricting, they moved over and injected on the other side of the cell. First it was trapped, and then as the blood vessel continued to constrict, it was squashed!

My response? "Awwww!" I actually felt sorry for a single squashed cell. I'm way too much of a sap.

# : 7:44 PM : :

Apparently something is messed up with my blog again; in Firefox, sometimes only part of the text loads and the rest is gibberish (and occasionally it's all gibberish). I don't know what is going on; I had a similar problem once before and never figured it out. Eventually it went away - I think something in a particular post made Firefox thrash. Anyway, hitting refresh seems to fix it.

Eventually I really am going to move to WordPress and maybe then things will work better.

# : 12:24 PM : :

Catching up on my blog reading, I noted two posts about the effect of sports. Hugo posts on the dangerous anger of the fan:

What bothered me -- and always has at athletic events -- was the venom. My wife and I were sitting surrounded by USC fans, and with one or two exceptions, we were the youngest two folks in our section by a decade. Most of the folks around us were old enough to be grandparents, but that didn't stop virtually everyone of them from hurling extraordinary profanities towards UCLA, its players, its band, its cheerleaders, and everything else associated with the Bruins. A woman in her fifties, sitting behind me, shouted "Hurt him!" when a Trojan defender dropped the Bruin quarterback* for a sack. "Break his fuckin' leg", her husband yelled. They were drinking water and sodas; neither seemed intoxicated. When the husband dropped his camera case on my shoulder, he apologized profusely. He was perfectly polite to me while simultaenously rooting for a 21 year-old kid he'd never met to suffer a serious, painful injury. This couple wasn't alone -- everyone around us chanted "UCLA sucks" on more than one occasion. Three rows behind us, that cry seemed to span three generations -- I saw a Dad, his father, and his son all joining in the joyous obscenities together.

And Nikki comments on a study on moral reasoning in athlete populations.

a recent 17-year study claims that morality declines with prolonged involvement in sports, and that women have an equal share in this effect. what's more, team sports are much worse for moral development than individual ones.

I don't know about the validity of the study (its web page certainly doesn't elicit much respect) but the results aren't at all surprising to me.

Organized sports sometimes seem to bring out the worst in people - fans as well as players. I've noticed behavior similar to what Hugo describes, and could add more: riots following games (even by the winning team), calls for legislation evidently intended to punish officials who "caused" a favored team to lose, and rivalries that get people to insult each other for no other reason than following a different team.

I think sports can hook into an ancient part of the human psyche, left over from the days when physical contests meant life or death and strongly identifying with one's group was a survival mechanism - outsiders were dangerous. We don't need those responses anymore in civilized society, and competitive sports serve as just about the only societally acceptable outlet for them.

It's understandable, but it's something we should struggle against. Sports, of course, serve plenty of admirable purposes - exercise, teamwork, healthy competition, entertainment, the satisfaction of taking one's body to its limits. But while we're enjoying sports, it's important to be aware of our reactions to them. Hugo writes:

So today, I don't let myself go to that dark and enticing place of anger. I love sports with all my heart. I love watching sports, playing sports, reading about sports. But today, I care less and less about who wins and who loses. I care more and more about the way the game is played,and less and less about the result. Of course I want my teams to win, but I will only root for them to win -- never for their opponents to suffer injury or humiliation. It took me years and years (and a self-imposed ban on going to games) to figure out how to do that.

It sounds like he's succeeded admirably. Just as we work to remodel our brains to think more fairly of everyone we come in contact with (and certainly to act fairly, even if we can't quite rid ourselves of all prejudice) - even though being suspicious of people who look different is a natural response shaped by thousands of years of evolution - sports fans need to work to keep their competitive reactions from becoming venomous and uncharitable.

The University of Idaho researchers advocate character education for athletes; I don't know if their program would be effective, but it sounds like a step in the right direction. If only someone would get to work on the fans!

# : 11:26 AM : :

Raised as Catholic in Belgium, She Died as a Muslim Bomber

Muriel Degauque, believed to be the first European Muslim woman to stage a suicide attack, started out life as a good Roman Catholic girl in this coal mining corner of Belgium known as the black country. She ended it in a grisly blast deep inside Iraq last month.

# : 6:01 PM : :

Via Pharyngula, I found a post on Effect Measure about why right-handed people find it easier to drive screws. This was a topic of discussion in my anatomy class, but this post explains it much better than I could. It's worth a look - there are pictures and a simple self experiment. [In anatomy, we discussed the fact that for righties, it's possible to screw jar lids on too tightly to open them oneself - there are frictional and vacuum-related reasons for this as well, but if you read the post you should understand the anatomical part of the explanation.]

In the comments to that post, someone mentions chirality in sports. Evidently motorcyclists find it easier to turn left than right, and the same is true for figure skaters - my experience bears that one out. For every race I can think of (speed skating, horce racing, car racing, track) the tracks run counterclockwise so that you're always turning left. Is this cause or effect? That is, are people just used to turning left because all the tracks go that way, so it becomes more natural, or did the orientation come about because people found it easier?

I wouldn't be surprised if this were another consequence of right-dominance. Personally, I think I know why it's easier for my body to turn left when figure-skating or running (not that I run if I can avoid it): my hips and legs aren't symmetric in strength and flexibility. It's easier for me to extend and push with my right leg, and to bend my left leg. It seems reasonable that a preference for left turns would result.

Obviously, this is another chicken-and-egg issue, but I've never spent much time on tracks at all (when I took figure-skating lessons, we did both left and right turns, and as I said, I avoid running) so I doubt their counterclockwise orientation made a difference to me. My asymmetricism is most evident in my habit of sitting with my left leg tucked under my rear, which obviously is a self-reinforcing habit, as I realize every time I go to yoga and can only comfortably do pigeon pose in one direction since that's the way my joints and muscles are used to going.

I can't be sure, since at this point sitting in the opposite orientation is awkward, but I suspect that I developed the habit in the direction I did because it oriented my body in such a way that writing with my right hand was comfortable. In the right-leg-under position, it seems like I have a harder time controlling my right hand.

Obviously I can't claim that my own eccentricities cast much illumination, but it seems somewhat reasonable that we'd become comfortable facing left while we write and do other activities right-handed. Perhaps that is part of the explanation. I wonder if small children evidence a preference for turning direction?

# : 3:13 PM : :

Everyone's already talked about this Linda Hirshman article, which argues that the new glass ceiling is in the home.
I liked the article, unsurprisingly. I think it's something that needs to be said.

In the area of criticizing women for their choices, I think Hirshman kind of misses the boat. If someone believes that staying home is the best thing for her family and herself, I might not necessarily agree, but of course people should do what makes them happy. What I have a problem with is the societal and cultural programming that makes people - particularly women - think that home life is primarily the woman's responsibility, and makes it more likely for women than men to make life choices that are generally accorded less value. (To explain that last bit - there's nothing whatsoever wrong with being a car mechanic; it's exactly as honorable a career as being an accountant. But if all the minority kids are becoming mechanics and all the white ones are becoming accountants, we'd wonder what was going wrong even if everyone is happy with his or her choice. One of those jobs gets more respect than the other, and we'd think there's something wrong with the culture if the minority kids are being shunted into less-respected careers.)

As far as fighting those expectations, I'd say it's morally praiseworthy to make choices that contribute to societal change, but it's not blameworthy to just go with the flow and do what makes you happiest. I certainly would have a problem with, say, people teaching their kids that women should be caretakers and men should be breadwinners, but not so much with people choosing to order their lives that way because it works best for them.

What choices would contribute to change? Obviously there aren't complete answers. Hirshman makes a start (though I don't agree with her suggestion to have only one kid). Essentially, I think we have to start by being thoughtful about the issue, considering where our attitudes come from and whether they really make sense.

For example, I recently remembered that as a teenager I didn't want to have kids. part of that was because I didn't particularly like them, but I clearly recall explaining that I thought it would be unfair to the kids not to have their mother at home, and I wanted a career. I've since changed my mind, first realizing that there's no reason the mother has to be home - the father would be just as good, and I have just as much right to assume my spouse will take care of the kids as a man does. Then after reading quite a lot about the issue I came to the conclusion that while of course children need to spend time with their parents, there's no evidence to suggest that it has to be every hour; a reasonable amount of high-quality daycare doesn't harm kids in the slightest. So now I assume I'll have both a career and kids - men don't angst about it, so why should I? Of course , most of the angst comes from the societal expectations, which we still have to deal with, but I'm doing my part by rejecting them.

Another great example is housework. You always hear women complaining that their husbands are slobs, but hardly ever the reverse. One could easily think that women are naturally neater, but that's not in fact the case, as you can clearly see when you visit single people's homes. Slobs and neat freaks are pretty evenly distributed across gender lines. The difference is that women are socialized to think neatness matters.

As a slob myself I know how it goes! My house is not actually in particularly poor condition, but I'm embarrassed to have people see it. Guys don't have this problem. Add on that women are expected to take care of the home, so they're responsible for their own mess AND the family's, and you have what we observe. (Hugo and Amanda both describe this phenomenon.)

So really, I think the choice is between domestic drudgery and confronting the goofy idea that cleanliness is next to godliness (and, of course, that's women's job). I know what I choose. Of course there's a base level of cleanliness that has to exist - you can't let your house become covered in mold, and you can't leave food out to attract mice and bugs. Those are health issues. Socks on the floor? Aesthetic issue. So just as you have to work out which color to paint the foyer, you have to work out where clutter can go and how deep it can get - it's not the woman's job to set the standard or to maintain it unless she chooses to.

Majikthise put it well (my emphasis):

Personally, I'm a huge believer in what Hirschman calls "ignorance and dust"--not caring about tidiness and not cultivating any special skills to produce domestic order. One of the way society controls women is by setting unrealistic bourgeois aesthetic standards and foisting them on women. One way women can resist the patriarchy is by rejecting these standards as unreasonable.

If you don't let other people shame you for your sex life, don't let them shame you about ironing the sheets, either. Slob is the new slut.

Perhaps, in addition to deciding some things just don't have to get done, it would also be good to not do stuff that you do want done. A couple wants to have the same name for the whole family, or to have one parent stay home with the kids, but (rejecting stereotypes as much as possible) it's not clear who should give up their name or job? Add "fighting the patriarchy" to the balance sheet, and have the man do it.

Obviously the ideal is for gender not to come into the equation at all, but I think this is a case where a bit of grassroots affirmative action could be useful. Work-life balance issues will start being taken seriously when everyone - not just women - cares about them. And then everyone will have more choices.

# : 12:43 AM : :

I might be losing my mind.

On Sunday I went grocery shopping and bought ingredients for chili. I kept thinking "do I have everything I need? Ground beef, green pepper, tomatoes, tomato paste... onions, beer, and seasoning are at home... OK, guess I'm set." So finally I decided I had everything and went home.

Last night, I made the chili. While I was cooking it, I kept wondering why there seemed to be so little chili, considering it contained a pound and a half of meat. Then I wondered why it seemed like there was so much sauce, when I'd put in the same amount of tomatoes and beer as usual.

When I was eating it, I wondered why it looked so much like spaghetti sauce. But it tasted good, so I finally figured that the meat must've just cooked down.

This morning on the way to school, I realized that I'd forgotten to put in the pound or so of beans that I normally use. That explains so much.

***

At lunchtime (during which people laughed at my spaghetti-sauce chili) I discovered that I'd put my sweater on backwards (it's a turtleneck, so it wasn't obvious). After class, around 3:30, I went to student health to get required bloodwork. After I got there, I remembered that I was supposed to fast before the lipid profile, and come before 3pm for the immunity check.

I'm kind of disturbed about this; I wonder if I've forgotten anything else important. Maybe the front door is open and my cats are frolicking outside, or maybe I sent the credit card payment to the gas company. Who knows!

# : 4:50 PM : :