dumb as a wooden chicken

I have a cold and a new apartment. The apartment is swank and spacious. The cold is highly evolved. If colds were a good thing I would be proud of this one's quality; as it is, I can only say that about the apartment.

I found a webpage where the Chinese swearing in Firefly is translated, and it turns out to actually be swearing. This helps, because the actors' pronunciation is not very good - I wouldn't enjoy looking it up myself. This link is mostly so I can check back when I have time to learn swear words and other impolite things.

everything looks brighter when

Poking around this morning, I came across a review of a book of letters Richard Feynman wrote, collected by his daughter and published recently. It reminds me: I have a lot of books lined up to read. Now I've got to add this to it, as well:

You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their simple questions when they come into your office. You are not nameless to me. Do not remain nameless to yourself—it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of the naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher's ideals are.

Best of luck and happiness.

Sincerely,

Richard P. Feynman

I already had his Lectures on Physics on the list. These days I read the first thirds of books and then don't have time to finish them, and that's what happened the last time I tried to read those. Also on the list:

1. Gravity's Rainbow (also afflicted with First Third Disease)
2. Remembrance of Things Past
   
3. Ulysses (this one has First Few Pages Disease)
   
4. Analytical Mechanics, 4th ed. (this one is tangentially related to a project)
5. A book on optics whose name escapes me
6. The Feynman Lectures on Physics (this may have been the original carrier of First Third Disease - an especially virulent strain, since this has three volumes and I read the first third of each)
7. Norwegian Wood (I've been reading Murakami books off and on for a while now)
   

There are others, too, but clearly I've got my work cut out for me.

say it ain't so

My friend D. made some comments a few days ago that have been bouncing around in my head for a while now: "Why are you guys trying to add standing meditation, ground fighting, push hands, [. . .] to ksw when it doesn't actually contain those things? People who saw your demo and signed up knew what they wanted and were getting into. Why try to remake ksw when other things already exist that do what you want?"

Could it be true? Could our students really care more about looking cool than learning how to use their bodies effectively or developing practical fighting skills? Is that why the kind of person who joins the ksw club is not the same as me, T., B., or the kind of person who studies bjj or tj? Is that why we have so much trouble with bad attitudes among them?

I mean, I know what I want to learn. I've started to realize that studying ksw will probably not get me very far with that, so I've picked up other things. But I've been kind of assuming that the students want to learn those things too, so I've been passing on some of what I think helps. Maybe they don't want it, though.

I'm collaborating with this optics professor on an experiment right now while I simultaneously take a class on optics from him, and I'm starting to think I'd like to do more optics-related work. Maybe it's just because I get along with the guy, but there are also some really cool problems in the field.

I've been back here for a month, and I am still spending a lot of time reexamining whether I still want to do what I have been doing all along. Both parts of this post are related to that.

walking back to you is the hardest thing I could do (for you)

KSW has been crazy recently. That's what happens when you gut your old routine and re-make it in a different image. Some of the changes are good - we have this whole team-teaching thing going on, we're planning practices beforehand, and we worked in some practice time for ourselves. Awesome. Things run more smoothly and we get better. Some of the changes had unforeseen consequences, though. We got more relaxed about etiquette, and all of a sudden people were nagging us to promote them or teach them more stuff, getting defensive when we said they needed to work on something, dissing each other, and complaining when we made them drill something more than twice. Not Cool At All. We gotta get these kids some manners.

It makes me miss Boulder. I wasn't responsible for that kind of thing over there. I kept myself to myself, and my job was just to learn shit. Very simple. I did worry that F. and others would think I was uppity for wanting to speed up because I knew a little bit already, but I think everything worked out - I took the beginner class, and if I already knew it it was still something I could stand to drill. Then I went to open practice and people stopped thinking I was so much of a poseur when I said I knew a little. That's one big advantage to bjj. It keeps you honest. If you are not good at it, it will show when you lose to everybody. Of course, I lost to nearly everybody, but that's not so bad for a beginner. Losing is like resurrection - only in losing can you find eternal winning... or at least learn what they did to tap you out.

Oh, I found a bjj club here. Guess what I'm doing all the time now.

maps (my kind's your kind)

I'd been in Boulder for two months before I actually arrived here. Used to wishing I could get out of here, I've been tripped up: just about a week ago I realized there is something I'm going to miss. I even decided to try to come back. It's not for the job or the mountains - I will be sad to leave the jiujitsu school.

For me, and I think for a lot of other people who do a lot of martial arts, there's a specific kind of connection you make to some of the people you train with. To explain it I have to tell a story.

I've been here on this internship, and the way this happened is a little odd and unlikely; I didn't exactly apply in the usual sense. I was going about my grad-schooly business, and I gave a talk at a conference. A guy who works here remembered it, and that is how I got this job. It didn't make sense to me until I realized that seeing me do a talk will tell someone a lot more about me than meeting me at an interview. In 20 minutes they see what I work on, how well I communicate, how I respond to questions, and in general whether I've got a lick of sense or not.

A grappling match contains a lot of information about a person, similarly condensed. If they know a ton more than you, are they the kind to flaunt it and kick your ass in 15 seconds, or do they give you a chance to try some things, maybe point out where you go wrong, and then they win? Do they think it's better to lose a good match than to win a bad one? Are they careful, or are you afraid they'll break your arm? If you don't know a lot, are they too cool to roll with you, or will they take a minute to help you out? This stuff doesn't just tell you what kind of martial artist they are, it tells you a lot about what kind of person they are.

So I feel like I know a lot of great people from bjj here: nearly everyone is respectful, laid back, badass, approachable, and trustworthy. Some schools have a couple of really macho guys that ruin it for everybody else by confusing their training with their egos, but if those guys exist here they're outnumbered and outclassed.

For some reason it took me two months to get around to hanging out with anybody, though. I've been trying to cram all the fun into a single week, and I'm exhausted & flighty because of it. I lost my keys and got locked out of my house twice this week, but it was kind of fun. I'm pretty comfortable just looking somebody up and kickin' it until the roommates come home - what would I do in my apartment anyway?

The problem with all this is, I'm leaving today. Doing what you planned to do is sometimes the hardest thing.

This dj kills fascists

Far in the future, but in the works nonetheless: a Labor Party for Labor Day. What would such a party entail, do you think?

(a dj is not a machine, I know, but ok.)

T-R-A I-N-W R-E-C-K-Y

MCCLELLAN: I’m well aware, like you, of what was previously said. And I will be glad to talk about it at the appropriate time. The appropriate time is when the investigation…

QUESTION: (inaudible) when it’s appropriate and when it’s inappropriate?

MCCLELLAN: If you’ll let me finish.

QUESTION: No, you’re not finishing. You’re not saying anything.
You stood at that podium and said that Karl Rove was not involved. And now we find out that he spoke about Joseph Wilson’s wife. So don’t you owe the American public a fuller explanation. Was he involved or was he not? Because contrary to what you told the American people, he did indeed talk about his wife, didn’t he?

our skin gets thicker from living out in the snow

I'm homesick. I want to eat neighborhood food, hear my house's noises, walk under all my old trees.

that right ain't shit

The problem with the supreme court is that it stays however you put it pretty much until somebody dies.

In other news, ICSG may not actually leave town after all, and work is intellectually cool and progressing satisfactorily. I still kind of want to go home; things there are cheaper (and for the most part just as good), I have more friends, I don't have to drive so much, etc etc. I am also looking forward to the drive home, during which I insist upon stopping at Saleem's. Matt visited this weekend and that kind of made it worse - it is like how being hungry gets worse if you have a snack, or maybe (though I don't know this firsthand) how keeping a vow of silence is harder if you accidentally say "Oh shit."

what our knowledge amounts to

The story of ICSG continues: we went on a hike, then met her girlfriend and my neighbor for beers in one of Boulder's tiny brewery-things. They will probably leave town for good by the end of the week. It's unlikely that I'll ever see ICSG again, and I only really hung out with her for a total of maybe 4 hours. I'm still kind of down about it, though.

Today I got a ride to & from work with one of the other interns (car in the shop). It was a lonely time; on the way there, the Angry White Boy Nu-Metal station he listens to was talking about "My girlfriend's parents took a 7-year-old kid to the water park on Gay Pride Day. Oops! What a time for young eyes! Not that there's anything wrong with that." On the way home, it was "The Supreme Court says police don't have to enforce restraining orders. This guy who called in says women really just do that when they don't like their boyfriends anymore, anyway. No big deal."

Remember a long time ago, that MIT study about somen in science? Where they found that discrimination isn't "I just don't like women having that kind of jobs" so much as a more passive trend of not taking people seriously as people in one way or another?

Speaking of, a while ago my roommates were watching this show, "Crossing Jordan," maybe? It's about some sort of crime investigating lady. Anyway, the show was unremarkable, except that in nearly every scene some man would grab the leading lady by one or both arms and steer her to one side - usually up against a wall - and give her forceful, unwelcome advice (at best). Maybe with some finger-wagging. Even at her job this happens! I'd never stand for that. Weird how on UPN or whatever men can still literally push women around, even if they do allow them to have exciting crime-investigating jobs.

Also, I had a dream the night before last that N., one of my original martial arts big brothers, was back in CU for some practicing. I actually went back to sleep in order to finish a grappling match.

I used to think about you all the time; now I think about you all the time

I've been in Boulder for three weeks now. It has its ups and downs. Here in the apartment there's a strangely asymmetrical situation where I try to stay out of G.'s way and she is always annoyed with me for being in her way, or having been there in the past, or for letting her notice that I have attempted to get out of it, etc etc. I mostly just go to brazilian jiujitsu - because what is more out of the way than out of the house? Those guys are cool and not weird about girls the way some other martial arts guys are.

I've met a few people here that are nice. One guy from bjj asked me what kind of music I like and his eyes didn't glaze over when I answered - if he is at practice again later I will try to find out what his name is again because I forgot; one girl I met tonight at the ice cream store is leaving Boulder next week but I'm going hiking with her tomorrow night (if she calls me); one guy I work with is unconscionably hot (and also very friendly, but mostly hot).

Ice Cream Store Girl moved to Boulder with her girlfriend, but they don't like it here so they're moving back to parts further east, I guess. ICSG was sitting around by herself while my downstairs neighbors and I talked about the daily show, and I felt silly excluding someone who was so clearly interested. The four of us sat there outside the store until it closed, and then we felt weird hanging around outside a closed ice cream store so we went home to watch the daily show, which is apparently not on again at midnight on fridays, even though it is on every other night. ICSG lives nearby but did not come with us for the daily show. I hope she calls me, though.

I heard from my downstairs neighbors that my roommates say I fight with G. a lot. I am not even going to address the kind of dynamic that that implies. I don't think I do - I feel uncomfortable around her, sure, but I go out of my way to avoid fighting with G. I think this situation is so weird because she clearly doesn't care to go out of her way to avoid fighting with me. Like I said, asymmetrical.

Downstairs Guys are Taiwanese and [from Shanghai-I don't know if there is a special word for that, but we can go with Chinese which is simultaneously true], and they are all right. They say they will practice Chinese with me, but I am very shy and kind of afraid I'll suck. I suppose they expect it though. I'm going to need a dictionary.

So, Boulder: good and bad, but in general better if I am not at home.

pls update yr blog thx

I'm in Boulder now. My roommates are pretty much as I preemptively described them before. They're okay, if quirky. It is likely that they also think I'm quirky.

I drove past the jiujitsu place today. It's gratifyingly close to my house. So are ASIAN DELI, whole foods, and world market. This is one of those weird states where grocery stores don't sell wine - I hope world market still does.

Also, the sun is very very hot all the time, even when the air isn't. I'm going to need some sunscreen.

the infinite connectivity of the center of the sun

Matt and I are in Phoenix now. It's nice, though I have been pretty much constantly thirsty ever since we entered New Mexico. I haven't seen much of Phoenix yet, really, but there have been some other cool things.

1. Nebraksa's katamari is really huge. Actually just Nebraska. We drove all the way across it on I-80, and it took the better part of two days of driving. Also there is oil in Nebraska. I had no idea.
   
2. My new apartment is nice, if a little plain. I hope I can say the same for my roommates (the nice part, not the plain part).
3. Mountains make my ears hurt, and one of them took a while to get back to normal, but I think it's improving now. It will help that we are staying someplace flat for the next few days.
4. There is nothing to do in Albuquerque at 6:30 on a Tuesday. Also, it is hard to find any Mexican food, which was surprising. What we did find sucked.
5. Apparently some hotels set up their TVs so that you can't connect your gamecube or other external AV device to them. Stupid!
   
6. I saw the Very Large Array in New Mexico (this is at National Radio Astronomy Observatory). The VLA is very cool in its own right, but it's also where they filmed "Contact," so I guess non-engineers like it too. It's got a stupid name, though.
   
7. We drove through Pie Town, NM, but we did not stop for pie. I regret that immensely.
8. We finally found some awesome mexican food in Show Low. Ask Matt what he ate sometime when you have an hour to spare. It totally beats Albuquerque in that regard.
9. Because of the VLA, we took US 60 across to Phoenix instead of taking I-40. 60 is one of those two-lane roads that is Main street in all the towns it goes through. In many towns it was the only street.
   
10. Driving through mountains is pretty fun if you have a lot of time on your hands. If you're actually trying to get somewhere it gets old, though. Thankfully, Phoenix and its suburbs are flat.

I'd post pictures, but Matt isn't awake to host them.

a new goddamn era

The first pictures I took were a series of "how to tie your belt" instruction photos for my brother.

the west is dead and it's burning

For the past two weeks, I've had a personal soundtrack entirely composed of songs by the Books. I hope it keeps up; it's nice having songs in my head that I never get tired of listening to.

Our road trip is going to begin in three days. I don't know what to do with myself. Pack, I suppose, since the trip is on the way to my internship, and I'll be pretty unhappy if I don't pack with foresight and judiciousness.

At work I'm also getting ready to leave, but in a strange way. I think my advisor thinks that leaving on Friday will make me superhuman. She wants a first version of this journal paper before I go, and I have stupidly committed myself to completely rewriting the whole analysis section (formerly three chapters) so that it addresses the three cases in parallel rather than one at a time. There's a good reason to do it this way, but right now I'm regretting what I got myself into.

This week marks a lucky confluence of many events: I had enough money to buy the digital camera I've been wanting right before we leave to go on the road trip. So it's just in time. Then I went to get a memory card for it, and there was a strange technology-price inversion where the really huge one was actually cheaper than either of the two capacities of cards I had originally thought it would be reasonable to buy. Finally, at work they are upgrading the network, so I'm working from home on the very same morning that my camera is supposed to arrive by UPS, and I don't even have to feel bad about it. Matt says he'll let me host pictures in his space, so I'll post some when it arrives. Clearly I can't take pictures of the camera itself, but I'll take example pictures or something.

Oh, and just now my biggest little brother B. told me he was standing around wearing his brand new tae kwon do uniform, which fills me with family pride and brotherhood and shit. I taught him how to tie his belt over IM. Aww.

Arch-ery

On Thursday I turned in my thesis, and it was a kind of strange feeling. I'd been editing it & making revisions for a couple of weeks off and on, and then I wandered up to the graduate college, they checked whether my figures were on the pages the list of figures said they were on, and took it. Excepting waiting, the whole thing took ten minutes. (The waiting was more like a half hour or more. That's part of why the in & out bit of it seemed so weird to me.)

Despite the anti-climasticity (when you have a master's degree they let you make up words) of that whole thing, it is lucky that I turned it in when I did. See, the deadline was Friday and not Thursday, but I had to drive to St. Louis on Friday for a kuk sool tournament. Matt & R. & I ate at IHOP in the morning, drove to St. Louis, R and I tested for black belt (1), and we didn't get time for dinner until about 11 at night. We went to this fantastic Lebanese place whose kitchen was about to close. Make sure you eat at Saleem's, y'all. I mean, even if we hadn't been imploding from hunger this would have been awesome food (2).

The next day there was a kuk sool tournament, which is what everyone except me was in town for (I didn't compete, I just tested). They had split up the tournament into kids' and adults' sections, with the kids competing in the morning and the adults in the afternoon. This was awesome, except they put the promotion ceremony/masters' demo in the middle of the day. They promoted me, and when they were ready to start the afternoon competition they were short on judges. They asked all the black belts who weren't actually competing to come down & be a judge. I didn't volunteer at first, because I didn't really think I counted in my hour-old black belt. But then they started threatening to come up in the bleachers and get us, so I figured I had better go. That whole thing was kind of uncomfortable.

(1) There were so many people in such a small room, working out for such a long time, that the floor-to ceiling mirrors and windows all fogged up. I hardly remember the test, I just remember the food.

(2) Matt ordered this great thing, which then was accidentally put in front of me. By the time we figured that out, I had already eaten half of it and I wasn't giving it back. I think it might have been called "mouzat" but the description I've found of that doesn't quite match what I was eating. Whatever, it had an M and a Z and some lamb in it. With rice.

in a second

I think that for the duration of the camping trip I miraculously turned into a badass. I'm not normally as awesome as all that, and now that I'm back the effect has worn off. I'm not a martial arts master, and lack of sleep catches up with me just like any other person. But man, this weekend was different. I kicked ass and took names.

And why is it that all I want to eat this week is rice?

every single molecule is right

That camping trip that I've been setting up all week starts today. This is a relief, as is the end of any period where you have to plan a 48-hour thing for 13 people. Yesterday I pre-chopped all the vegetables and bought a very impressive cooler, and now all that's left is to take some things out of the dryer and hope the teaching goes as well as the camping will.

Another thing that is nearing completion is my thesis. I gave that to the publication department - those people who check for grammar and formatting - yesterday afternoon. Within two weeks I fully expect to turn it in. Holy shit.

I've been trying to understand why I get so worked up about women-politics in particular. It's not like general politics affect me any less. But they don't get me into the kind of towering rage that things like anti-abortion wackos do. I mean, corruption? Gerrymandering? Dismantling social security and nominating assholes? Those things are pretty bad. But mention pharmacists and I fly off the handle.

tomorrow's lunch today

I have noticed that if I eat out less I get skinnier. This is nice, except it means I have to pack a lunch. It used to mean that, anyway. These days I can go to the food co-op (which is a block away from work) and buy cheese, bread, vegetables, whatever. I don't have a knife, though, so I have to eat them all separately, in torn-off chunks. I don't mind.

I am going to finish this edit of my thesis this week, I say. That gives me 2 weeks for formatting-type revisions and everything.

mighty, fallen, etc etc

The Riviera was a lot more impressive in the old version of Ocean's Eleven - where it really was the most sophisticated thing on the street - than it is up close & in person in the present day. Maybe I'm just not all that into the flashing-lights and things-made-of-gold scene. Other hotels have cool gimmicks - they are pyramid-shaped or New York-shaped, or they have Cirque du Soleil shows or rollercoasters. This one has a casino, a bunch of dancing-girl boob shows (3 or 4 simultaneously!), and a pool which is closed because it's not warm enough. It's got all these pamphlets that bill it as "the grown-up option." Yeah right. More like the "everyone who does government technological research is a man" option.

p.s. the time stamp is in Las Vegas time!

he might replace the earth with the moon

(if I had written it that's what it would be.)

Matt's had 154 in the car for the past few days, and up until now I didn't realize what a difference the CD makes. I've heard a lot of these songs before, but they were on tapes or mp3 or a few years ago, and they are different now. I drove a block: "Self, is this Wire?"

I've been meeting with T. and B. a lot to talk about a camp we're setting up for kuk sool - it was originally just a camping trip, but we have all these ideas, and it's turned into an all-day seminar. Exciting. They're talking about how we're going to try to change how ksw practices are run after I promote, and I'm happy about that too. Our old teacher rarely even had a lesson plan, and I don't understand how he could just wing it all the time. We're talking about meeting weekly, having goals for the class... refreshing! I wish we could expect people to at least work out a little on their own, though. I'd love to spend class time on making people better at kuk sool instead of just making them feel less guilty for eating.

Have I mentioned that before? I feel like a lot of people use practices as a time to make up for any pie they had over winter break. I have more than one problem with this:

1. Making up for pie in that fashion points to them having some weird attitudes about themselves, food, and fitness that I don't want to be part of.
   
2. If they were paying attention, martial arts would teach them not to eat too much pie in the first place.
3. They are in kuk sool to get badass, not to get skinny.
4. Workouts take away from practice time, and the curriculum moves way too fast as it is.

That last point is a result of a larger problem - at least, I view it as a problem: people want to have black belts before they graduate. Now, it is possible to get to that level in that amount of time. But people come in as white belts and they specifically want a particular color at a particular time. If they think they can't do that, a lot of them will quit because they "won't have gotten anywhere." So the class has to go at a particular speed because ksw introduced some artificial milestones. I want to make testing more optional - we should discuss students' progress with them and let them know before testing comes around whether they should bother with it or not. Then we can stop promoting people prematurely without so many hard feelings.

I'm going to visit my parents tomorrow. It's too bad they're not into roast leg of lamb, because that would make a great Easter dinner. I'm not so much into the eggs & chocolate event anymore, but I will take any excuse to make an impressive dinner.

np: Matt's mix that has "You Can Make Me Feel Bad" and "As You Do" on it

Iron Chef Urbana

Recently I've been consumed by a fit of cooking (and eating), brought on by my memory of the Clarkston Union's macaroni and cheese and fueled by my recent viewing of Steven Chow's God of Cookery. My weekly half-day of baking hasn't been enough, and I've been having adventures.

First, I dressed up my best chicken recipe for dinner with my brother when he was visiting. I served it with clever artichokes (we had two - there were four people - artichokes look awesome cut in half the long way - clever) and some squishy co-op cheese, and everyone was impressed.

Later on, after a couple of weeks of careful consideration, I determined that the secret ingredient in the aforementioned macaroni (besides the overt but delicious breadcrumb topping and ham chunks) must be parmesan cheese. The sauce was just mysteriously tangy. I was proved right with the aid of a little extra pepper.

Friday I watched God of Cookery with B., P., K., and Matt. Awesome.

Then I went to a wedding, which had good food, and a party that also had good food. But yesterday was the best adventure yet - I made a deliciously seasonal stuffed leg of lamb with all kinds of planty-tasting herbs and vegetables in it. I've never been so impressed by fennel. C. came over and had some, and we gave him some to take home to M. - I hope she liked it.

The combination of my culinary adventures and having seen that movie led B. to suggest a God of Cookery - themed party/potluck, in which everone is flamboyant and chefy. We'd offer a prize or something for Best Dish. But not everyone has seen this movie, and not everyone wants to cook like that. If they hadn't seen it, how would they know what to bring? We couldn't even accomplish that by showing it at the party, because then when would they have time to cook something suitable? But if we could work something out, it'd be the best meal most of us have ever had.

qualified

Is it Tuesday?

I think it is beer Tuesday.

Judgment

Today's the day. I'll let you know.

I am a great fan of triangles

My brother is visiting the university this weekend, since the college of engineering is having an open house. It's kind of like a science fair, and he's staying with me. I'm not sure what to do with him.

See, K. seems content to stay home most of the time. I asked him what he'd do if he lived here, and he told me "Oh, study, do homework, play D&D." Maybe I am out of touch with what he likes. But if he's going to move out of a Detroit suburb (even he admits there is nothing to do there) to a town that reguarly has concerts, plays, events, cool workshops, and all that, I think he ought to take advantage of it. I want him to realize the opportunity he has in going away to school - to try everything out and not just do engineering and sit in the basement. How do I get that across? I want him to treat engineering like his day job, and make sure that he tries out everything he can in his off-time.

One of my friends works at a jewelry counter these days, and I got something for my mom there (making sure I get mother's day under control). But I might go back and get this other thing that I saw, for myself. I'm very impulsive, but only around tax-refund time.

CELEBRATOR DOPPELBOCK

I took the qualifying exam Saturday, and I might have passed it. There were some problems I thought were really bad, but it seemed like everyone else who did those problems agreed. I figure I'm okay, then, because they can't just fail all the electromagnetics students.

Several of my friends (and Matt) went out with me to my local afterward, and I had some very nice new kinds of beer. Particularly noteworthy were Great Divide Wild Raspberry Ale and Celebrator Doppelbock. Also I've been buying indulgent things on ebay.

I can play video games again, and I've got Pikmin (1 followed by 2), Prince of Persia, and Sly 2 for that purpose. Those will probably help me hold on while I pray for the game types to hurry up with Final Fantasy 12 or the new Zelda or something.

"in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude"

I've been following that Larry Summers thing the way other people watch a train wreck. So today I was idly following links, and I found out that in the mid-90s MIT realized it didn't have very many women faculty either. Heavens! What to do? Since doing studies is one of their strengths, they did a study.

Interestingly, it turns out that women don't begin their careers disillusioned, but they slowly become that way:

The Committee discovered that junior women faculty feel well supported within their departments and most do not believe that gender bias will impact their careers. Junior women faculty believe, however, that family-work conflicts may impact their careers differently from those of their male colleagues. In contrast to junior women, many tenured women faculty feel marginalized and excluded from a significant role in their departments. Marginalization increases as women progress through their careers at MIT.

One compelling piece of data was this graph of the percentage of MIT's faculty who were women from 1985-1994:

I saw that and I was speechless for about five minutes.

Apparently, women tended to begin their careers thinking the problem of discrimination had already been solved, and then mistrust the conclusions they drew from their own experiences.


An important finding to emerge from the interviews was that the difference in the perception of junior and senior women faculty about the impact of gender on their careers is a difference that repeats itself over generations. Each generation of young women, including those who are currently senior faculty, began by believing that gender discrimination was "solved" in the previous generation and would not touch them. Gradually however, their eyes were opened to the realization that the playing field is not level after all, and that they had paid a high price both personally and professionally as a result.

From the letter written by the women Science faculty members that started the study:

We believe that discriminatory attitudes operate at the time of hiring junior faculty and influence the experiences of the women who are hired. Most discrimination at MIT, whether practiced by men or women, is largely unconscious. Often it is difficult to establish discrimination as a factor because any one case, no matter how disturbing or aberrant, can usually be ascribed to its special circumstances... Thus, we need to develop safeguards to prevent, detect, and promptly correct the experiences that together constitute gender discrimination...

The article also had some powerful insights about what constitutes discrimination in our times, which they called the "post-Civil-Rights era."


How else might we explain what happened to the senior women faculty in Science? While the reasons for discrimination are complex, a critical part of the explanation lies in our collective ignorance. We must accept that what happened to the tenured women faculty in the School of Science is what discrimination is. It defines discrimination in the period from the 1970s up till today. But we, including for a long time the women faculty themselves, were slow to recognize and understand this for several reasons. First, it did not look like what we thought discrimination looked like. Most of us thought that the Civil Rights laws and Affirmative Action had solved gender "discrimination". But gender discrimination turns out to take many forms and many of these are not simple to recognize. Women faculty who lived the experience came to see the pattern of difference in how their male and female colleagues were treated and gradually they realized that this was discrimination. But when they spoke up, no one heard them, believing that each problem could be explained alternatively by its "special circumstances". Only when the women came together and shared their knowledge, only when the data were looked at through this knowledge and across departments, were the patterns irrefutable.

The tenured women faculty, acting as a group through the Committee, together with the Dean, made a discovery. They identified the forms that gender "discrimination" takes in this post-Civil-Rights era. They found that discrimination consists of a pattern of powerful but unrecognized assumptions and attitudes that work systematically against women faculty even in the light of obvious good will.

I'm impressed that they did the study, and doubly impressed that they took its results seriously and made policy changes in response. And the changes have made a difference - in 1999 the School of Science's faculty was more than 10% women for the first time ever. But even that is depressing: 10% is an improvement? We're starting from so far behind.

This is an important initiative since, even with continued effort of this magnitude, the inclusion of substantial numbers of women on the Science and Engineering faculties of MIT will probably not occur during the professional lives of our current undergraduate students.

Damn. Probably not during the professional lives of current undergrads. Damn.

radio urbana free library

Urbana had a primary yesterday, including one for (democrat) mayor. I voted in it! Urbana's crappy current mayor lost, and a way more progressive person will probably take his place (Urbana isn't going to elect a republican mayor - I don't even know if one will run). Also it'll be our first-ever female mayor. Bonus!

And so at 10:30 yesterday morning I was just walking out of the voting building when my phone rang. I figured it was Matt or my mom or something, but when I answered it turned out to be a phone interview in disguise! Okay, not in disguise. But I didn't know it was coming.

1. See, they emailed me the Wednesday before last, said they'd be doing interviews "shortly," and asked for some times that would be all right to call me. Not sure how long shortly is, I said "Friday or Tuesday during the day, or Wednesday before 3 pm." I assumed they would tell me when they planned to do it.
   
2. Not so! I didn't hear anything from them for a week. Still assuming they'd tell me before they called (so I wasn't, y'know, busy voting or getting a haircut) , I just did whatever I felt like yesterday morning.
3. What to do? I was in the middle of the street trying to get an internship from an antenna engineer. At a loss, I turned around and went back in the voting building. I was sitting in this auxiliary-church-building cafeteria, the place empty except for me and the janitor, talking about phased arrays and how I really liked my radio circuits class.
   

It sounds like a cool job. I don't have a lot of hands-on experience - all my serious work so far has been pretty analytical, and I hope they don't mind that. But I think other than my lack of experience in that regard the interview went all right.

Then I walked the rest of the way to campus and got a haircut, which was basically the best ever. The stylist was this awesome girl who pretty clearly likes bands, and she knew what I meant to describe, haircut-wise, and did all my favorite razory things. It helped that I brought a picture. Everyone should definitely bring a picture when they get a new haircut. And she talks a lot, which is awesome.

I finally put slsk on my computer - I hadn't before because it's a laptop so a lot of the time it's not on or plugged in. But I figured that leaving my computer on at night is a small price to pay for all that awesome. So what should I listen to now?

I'm not so afraid of the qualifying exam anymore. First I wasn't, then I wasted a lot of study-time by studying the same thing for too long. Then I was worried I didn't have enough time left to get ready. But in the past few days I've managed to sufficiently study acoustics in not very much time. So maybe I can pull it off for other things (remote sensing, lasers, semiconductors, DSP) too, in the two weeks I have left.

secretly, between the shadow and the soul

I've recently taken up baking, for the food co-op. I hang out there with one of the taiji guys on Monday mornings, just cooking. And yesterday was a Monday, so I was there (a little late because I missed the usual bus). But it was also Valentine's Day, so we made some of the loaves heart-shaped. At least, we thought we did.

I couldn't stay until the bread came out of the oven - I never can - because I have classes in the afternoon and I feel like I ought to make an appearance at work, at least. So when I came back around 7 to get some bread for myself, imagine my surprise. The hearts had big cracks down the middle. Maybe it was because I'd poked a couple of them to give better definition to the lobes of the heart-shapes. Something happened, anyway, and S. had renamed it "oh go ahead and break my heart" bread.

Apparently the broken hearts sold pretty well - by the time I got there only one was left, and it kind of looked like a butt. I took that one, because my heart isn't broken but everyone likes butts.

np: Arthur Russell - "You Can Make Me Feel Bad"

best use of the same lyric for more than 1 continuous minute

Ted Leo & the Pharmacists : "Little Dawn"