A Peaceful Thanksgiving

It was a quiet but nice thanksgiving here at Casa Fields.  A few months ago, my advisor said “you should at least write a paper draft before you graduate.”  Two weeks ago, we got the go-ahead to start writing the paper that will present the details of my thesis research to the rest of the world.  And two days ago, I sent the paper draft to my advisor.  It was a frenzied two weeks of non-stop writing, and I’m grateful that it is done, at least for the moment.  Here are some other things I am grateful for:

Update: For the people curious about the food above: cranberry sauce and gravy on the left, then stuffing, green beans and tofurkey.  I love, love, love tofurkey.  It is great for thanksgiving, and the tofurkey leftover sandwiches are even better.  The green beans are from a recipe that Howard and I both heard on NPR during our separate drives home from work last week: Molly Katzen’s “dramatically seared green beans”.  Basically they are cooked on very high heat for two minutes, then tossed with salt, garlic and chile, and they were very very yummy.  In fact, everything was very very yummy.

 

The Good and The Bad

The Good: Obama was elected — very very exciting and awesome.

The Bad: All the gay marriage bans that passed, and the gay adoption ban in Arkansas.  So disgusting.

And: Among Obama’s council of economic advisors and apparently a front-runner for treasury secretary is Lawrence Summers, the Harvard president who lost his job for suggesting that there are so few female scientists because we are genetically inferior.  Whoever digs us out of this mess is going to have to have more sense than that.  Please please please don’t pick him, Obama!

 

Nevermind

I did have respect for the John McCain of several years ago.  But I have changed my mind; I would cry if he were elected.  A LOT. I’m glad there aren’t any more debates, because they have been making me unreasonably angry.  I thought my head might explode tonight when he dismissed pay equity for women as a trial lawyer’s dream.  Jackass.

 

She Looks Like Everybody’s First Wife Standing Outside of Probate Court

I’m glad that Obama is the “presumptive democratic nominee”. In the past several elections, the Democratic party has chosen the safe and boring candidate, and then paid for it during the general election. Hillary Clinton seemed like the safe and boring choice here, so I voted for Obama. But I still like Clinton a lot, and am sad for her at the moment.

Since I don’t watch cable news much, I hadn’t realized how much idiotic sexism actually occurred on television during the campaign. As usual, the Daily Show has a really hillarious take on it. The montage at the end must be what inspired Howard Dean to say that “many of the most prominent people on TV behaved like middle schoolers” during the campaign. I don’t know who some of those assholes are, but they need to be fired.  And I congratulate that one asshole’s ex-wife for being rid of him.  I hope she took him for everything he had in probate court.

 

“We don’t think this is just going to be about some numerical metric”

That’s a quote from Geoff Garin, one of Hillary Clinton’s advisors,

Apparently, vote counts are now just a “numerical metric” to the Clinton campaign, and not even a numerical metric worthy of determining who wins the election.

 

Another Anti-feminist

I wasn’t aware of the existence of anti-feminists until Charlotte Allen wrote her bogus indictment of women in the Washington Post (that I got really upset about in another post). Recently a women in physics mailing list pointed me to an article in “The American” (whatever that is) by another apparent antifeminist, Christina Hoff Sommers. This time the target is not women in general, but women who are also physical scientists. It is pretty well written and contains a lot of interesting information, so it’s worth a read. And I agree somewhat with her thesis that we should be careful of attempts to “fix” the problem of the underrepresentation of women in science, but I take a lot of issue with how she makes her point.

Basically, she says that all research claiming that women in science face bias is flawed. She nitpicks some of these studies with a fine-tooth comb. I can’t help pointing out (though I know this is evidence of me being an arrogant physicist), that I was really amused by the fact that she sent some research done by physicists to some social scientists. This reminded me of a date I went on once with a social scientist who tried to impress me with his ability to fit data points to a line. That’s not impressive, and even if it was, who would try to impress a date with that? Needless to say, I didn’t go out with him again. Hopefully the social scientists mentioned in the article are more competent than that guy, but the best they could come up with is that the data should have been analyzed for multiple variables at once rather than one at a time. That is probably true, but Hoff doesn’t mention that the low statistics available to any study of women in science probably makes that difficult.

While nitpicking the articles she agrees with, she glowingly praises a single study she agrees with (that concludes that women are better “empathizers” while men are better “systematizers”). She doesn’t provide any of the details of how that data was analyzed, and more upsettingly, she uses this rather vaguely statement to leap to the conclusion that men are more suited to being scientists than women. She concludes the article with this:

American scientific excellence is a precious national resource. It is the foundation of our economy and of the nation’s health and safety. Norman Augustine, retired CEO of Lockheed Martin, and Burton Richter, Nobel laureate in physics, once pointed out that MIT alone—its faculty, alumni, and staff—started more than 5,000 companies in the past 50 years. Will an academic science that is quota-driven, gender-balanced, cooperative rather than competitive, and less time-consuming produce anything like these results?

Um, I think it would produce better results (and I’m not sure that Lockheed Martin should be considered a precious national resource). But Hoff’s objection to a lot of the research about women in science is that it is done by women in science, so I guess my actual experience as a female physicist is not relevant. Apparently women with degrees in philosophy are more suited to address the problems of female physical scientists.

I don’t understand the motivation of these anti-feminists. Are they just dreaming up the most unlikely position they can come up with so as to get their name in print. Or do they really believe this nonsense?

 

Morganic Dog Bones

I recently read “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver, about her family’s attempt to eat local food for a year. I am a fan of Kingsolver’s other works* and I thought this latest book was really awesome. She makes some very convincing arguments for why we should all be trying to buy our food locally (and preferably organic, sustainable and all that).

The problem with reading this book is that all food buying decisions have suddenly become more difficult. I already had enough trouble choosing between the 20+ brands of butter available. Now when I go to pick up a previously innocuous bottle of Canola oil, I know I’m probably supporting Monsanto and their evil attempts to control all North American canola crops.

So it recently occurred to me while buying a $8 imported-from-China dog bone from Petsmart that maybe there are better dog bone options. The Ithaca Farmer’s Market opened for the season last weekend, so I asked some of the meat vendors if they had anything suitable for dog bones. One guy was selling “Morganic” (organic only not certified by the government, according to the farmer, who seems quite trustworthy) dog bones for $2 a pound. That price makes them quite a steal compared to petsmart — about $1.50 for a big meaty bone.

There is one problem with these new bones: they are raw. Since our kitchen is vegetarian, my first thought was that maybe we could grill them. But some seaching on the internet told me that cooked bones can be dangerous to dogs, especially those cooked with dry heat. That left the options of boiling the bones (infecting our kitchen with meat and risking Oliver choking on splintered bone) or giving the bone to Oliver raw. Taking the path of least resistance, we decided to give him the raw bones.

According to our dog trainer, the bones at Petsmart have been “Jerkey-fied” — somehow sterilized but not cooked, avoiding dangers from parasites and bone splintering. So now I have yet another decision to make: is it better to buy my dog these jerkey-fied bones (that are laced with god knows what), give him raw bones (that have all of the usual dangers of raw meat) or give him cooked bones (which may splinter in his stomach). Maybe the answer is just not to give him bones at all. But he is the world’s happiest dog when he has a bone — I don’t want to deny him that pleasure. The modern world is full of these questions that just don’t seem to have a right answer.

* on a completely unrelated note, I once travelled in Europe with some foreigners I didn’t know well and was reading “The Poisonwood Bible,” which caused them all to think I was a crazy bible carrying American. Not quite!

 

A Sad Day For Women

The Washington Post published a vile awful sexist piece of trash yesterday that was written by a women. They now claim it was a joke. If it was a joke, which I doubt, it’s not a funny one. The gist of the piece is that women are stupid. Amongst her dubious evidence is the fact that some women have swooned in the presence of Barack Obama. She goes on to cite such logical gems such as:

“A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men’s 5.1, even though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year than women.”

I’m not linking to the article. If you want to read it, Google it, but I warn you, it will make your blood boil.

Also available in the Washington Post today: this article and this article, both about men. I have to say I am proud to be a member of the sex which does not rape people as they lay dying, even if we do occasionally fall for our favorite politicians. If Charlotte Allen and the Washington Post think this makes us the inferior sex, they have an extremely dubious definition of inferior.

 

Why I won’t Cry if McCain is Elected

Like many people, I was basically in mourning after the last two presidential elections. In neither case was I really excited by the Democrat, but having Bush as our Commander-In-Chief just felt like the end of the world. If Romney (or even worse, Huckabee) were to win this year, I think I’d feel the same way. While I’m certainly not going to vote for John McCain on account of his pro-war stance and general conservatism, I will not be as upset if he wins the presidency.

My first knowledge of John McCain came from an unlikely source: this surpisingly good book by the bow-tie wearing conservative pundit Tucker Carlson. He describes following McCain’s 2000 bid for the Republican nomination, and seems keen on McCain mainly because traveling with the campaign was a roaring good time. More impressively, he mentions that McCain kept his staff from talking about the years he endured torture as a POW in Vietnam, even in the face of rumors (that many people believe originated with Karl Rove and the Bush Campaign) that McCain had a secret black baby out of wedlock. I don’t personally care how many babies McCain has or hasn’t had, but that’s a pretty bad rumor to be circulating if you are running for the Republican presidential nomination in South Carolina.

Wikipedia doesn’t confirm that McCain didn’t want his staff talking about his time in Vietnam, but it does give some impressive details about that part of his life. While in POW prison, McCain was offered the opportunity to return home (on account of his having a famous father), but he declined the offer, saying that those who had been imprisoned longer than he had deserved to go home first. Choosing to stay in prison and be tortured for the sake of your friends requires more conviction than I expect from just about anyone, much less a politician.

Apparently he endured some pretty grueling stuff at the hands of the North Vietnamese. McCain wrote “I had learned what we all learned over there: Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine.” Presumably before that, when his captors attempted to coerce him into saying the names of people in his squadron, he listed the names of the offensive line of the Green Bay Packers. How awesome is that?

I don’t know much about his main opponent this year, Mitt Romney, except that he is a Mormon. I really can’t respect anyone who uses as the guiding principles of his life the teachings of Joseph Smith, a man who claimed to look into his hat and see the word of god and, when he grew tired of his wife, claimed god told him to screw a bunch of teenagers. Huckabee, the former baptist preacher who, among his many sins, covered up his son’s dog torture is no better than George W in my mind. Some people have pointed out that the Democrats have a better shot at the White House if Romney or Huckabee win the nomination. That may be true, but I’m still crossing my fingers that McCain wins the nomination. I’ll sleep better at night before November if he does.

UPDATE: Apparently Dan Savage agrees with me.

 

What’s Up With These Tax Rebates?

I don’t know what to think about the tax cuts that everyone in Washington is so keen on. But they seem very fishy. I’m definitely happy that the rebate is on the low end of the income spectrum, so oil tycoons and such won’t be raking it in any more than most people (at least I don’t think they will). But where is all this money coming from? Is racketing up the national debt even more really so good for our economy? If the federal government were a person, it would be the most horribly debt ridden person ever in the history of the world. If such a person person suddenly decided that he should give a portion of his check back to his employer, would that be a good idea?