Stuff worth reading
What to tell a partner who wants you to remove your pubic hair Shared for the spectacular snub line: “he should be so lucky to pick one of your pubic hairs out of his teeth.” Also for the good advice
Saturday poem
If you forget me
Pablo Neruda, trans. Ochoa Pérez Isaac
I want you to know one thing.
You know what it is like: if I look
at the crystal moon, the red branch
of the quiet autumn through my window,
if I touch you
by the fire
the impalpable ashes or the shriveled firewood,
everything draws me to you,
as if everything that exists:
aromas, light, metals
were small ships
sailing to those isles of yours awaiting me.
However,
if little by little you stop loving me
I will stop loving you little by little.
If suddenly
you forget me
don’t look for me
because I’ll have forgotten you.
If you regard long and hard
the waiving flags
passing through my life
and you decide
leaving me at your shores’ heart
where I put down roots,
think,
on that day
at that time
I will raise my arms
and I’ll uproot to look for another land.
But
if everyday,
every hour,
you feel you are meant to me
with implacable sweetness,
if everyday
a flower climbs your lips to look for me
Oh! My ladylove, oh mine!
in me that burning is renewed,
nothing is put out or forgotten in me,
your love feeds mine, loved,
as long as you live it will be surrounded by your arms
without leaving mine.
While you’re waiting for the bus March 26, 2013
Stuff worth reading
Red, Bike & Green wants to shift the color balance in bicycling The cycling community would do well to acknowledge that poor folks have been using bikes and their own two feet as their primary form of transportation since long before all their spandex and activism and bike lanes and $3000 bikes became the stereotype of cycling.
Lockheed Martin finds way to slash the amount of energy needed to remove salt from seawater Very cool
What Empathy Is Why is it easier for most people to feel empathy for the rapist than for the victim?
Nixon sabotaged Vietnam peace talks
Using compressed air as green energy storage
Crime & Punishment Getting over it
The Brains of the Animal Kingdom Lines get blurry
Spring vegetables, winter fats How to eat meat
Interdisciplinary computer science at Mills College Very cool things people who can program did
Years ago, you ate what you liked, stopped when you were satisfied, and didn’t get fat. Bullshit. Years ago you ate what you could get and if you were lucky got enough nutrition to not die and reproduce.
Music for trying 5000 paths up the PhD mountain
The Do – On my shoulders from The Dø on Vimeo.
Would NSF have funded Galileo?
Still, says Clette, it is fascinating to ‘work’ with colleagues from hundreds of years ago. For instance, he says that even though Galileo’s coverage of the Sun was spotty because Galileo was “busy with planets and other things”, the drawings are detailed enough to reveal information about the magnetic structure of the sunspot groups and the size and tilt of the star’s dipole. “You can extract from those drawings exactly the same information as from a drawing made today,” he says.
More than that, however, he is taken with his forebears’ foresight. They faithfully recorded what they saw, thinking that it could be useful later on, he says. “It’s a fundamental aspect of science,” he says, “not worrying what will be the final result.” [emphasis mine]
From a wonderful article in Nature on long term research.
Tuesday Shoesday
les lolitas – ballerina
How to make the world worse when communicating your research
Laughing by Flickr user chimothy27
At a workshop on media relations for scientists, we read the first page of a paper from a totally foreign field and wrote a headline and first paragraph for a news story on the study. It was pretty challenging, but fun, to think of attention-getting but accurate ways to convey research. Then the presenter, someone who actually writes this sort of thing for a living, showed us how he’d translated the research into a few snappy sentences for a lay audience. One of his examples relied on gender stereotypes to generate humor and attention. The atmosphere was informal enough, and I was shocked enough, that I called him out on it. The presenter kind of shrugged it off, and one of the men in the class defended the headline. During a break, another woman in the workshop thanked me for saying something, which I really appreciated – I’d been second guessing myself about speaking up.
A later section of the workshop mentioned that at our university, the people who make the press releases show and discuss them with the paper authors. This put a a whole new spin on the situation for me. The media relations person made up the sexist headline, but the researchers approved it.
If you think a little joke about choosy females here and there isn’t a big deal, consider Moss-Racusin et al.’s paper in PNAS last year that measured discrimination against women in science and then have a look at some of Ford’s work on humor. Those innocuous gender based jokes aren’t so innocuous – they help create and sustain bias in the scientific community.
I think as scientists we have an ethical obligation to try to keep our work from being used to further marginalize and oppress groups that already experience discrimination. We have to scrutinize our communication – with each other and the public – to be sure we aren’t part of the problem. Even if it’s just one headline that hardly seems sexist at all.