nonsequitur girl

Focus is not our strong suit at the moment, at least when it comes to blogging. The Spousal Unit and I spent last weekend visiting family in Seattle -- chaos reigns, in a good way, when the whole loud rambunctious clan meets up for the annual family BBQ -- and now I'm furiously playing catch-up. Jen-Luc Piquant is on a Diet-Coke bender after finding out just how much of her favorite caffeinated beverage she can drink without croaking. Answer: a lot. Blame Tom at Swans on Tea for drawing Jen-Luc's attention to a handy little online calculator: just plug in your weight and caffeinated beverage of choice! (A few more details on just how fast you'd have to drink those beverages to reach the deadly levels can be found here.)

So, uh, yeah -- we're not focusing well, and it's turning me into Nonsequitur Girl, darting from topic to topic with no readily apparent pattern to my thought process. But there are a couple of things in the blogosphere on which we've been pondering, plus the Spousal Unit reminded me this morning that I totally suck at self-promotion, namely, providing an occasional update on my blog posts at Twisted Physics. (And did I mention I've written books? Um, yeah. I've written books. See sidebar.) Perhaps I place too much faith in my readers, but I just assume y'all would be reading it on your own, if interested. Such an assumption doesn't take into account the huge amounts of information floating around out there in the Internet firehose, however, so it probably doesn't hurt to list the latest posts here. Just skip this part if it's old news:

Gravity Wave Blues. The latest results from LIGO are null. (I'd meant to have a more coherent wrap-up paragraph about why null results aren't necessarily bad things, even if they're disappointing. But that lack of focus intervened, so it kinda ends with a vague whimper.)

We the Particles. Subatomic particles should have rights, too, in the form of their very own Bill of Rights.

Always Chasing Dust Devils. Some scientists have all the luck, getting to chase down dust devils in the desert in hopes of learning more about how they might behave on Mars.

Ghost Story. Hanny's Voorwerp, a.k.a., the "Green Goblin," is a nifty new kind of celestial object.

Rockets Red Glare. A bit of rocketry history illustrated by painter Lia Halloran.

Monumental Quirks. A bizarre monument to nuclear decay in the Netherlands, and an object lesson in why bloggers shouldn't try to dash off tricky science explanations at the last minute.

A Clockwork Antikythera. The latest news on the Antikythera Mechanism -- way better than your average ancient sundial.

A Mighty Wind. Revisiting the day the solar wind disappeared. Really. One day it just vanished.

(Anti)Material World. A bizarre new film being co-produced by NASA spurs some ruminations why antimatter isn't intrinsically evil.

Gravity's Telescopes. Why Hans Lippershey wishes he'd known about gravitational lensing back in the 1590s.

And then there's today's post, Paging Professor Frodo, all about a physics professor in Connecticut who uses the works of Tolkien to teach her students astronomy. Good times!

Moving on, here's some of the random stuff I've been pondering over the last few days, in no particular order. (If I were a normal blogger, I'd make them all separate posts. But instead, I dare to be different!)

In Which I Expound on Minor Points Concerning that Whole Science = Sexy Debate. There's been some excellent discussions going on over the whole Nerd Girls debate, both here at the cocktail party and elsewhere, including Bioephemera and Sciencegeekgirl's place. I've found the whole exchange tremendously thought-provoking. I just wanted to comment briefly on a couple of points. First, Sciencegeekgirl rightly points out that perhaps the real issue here is that female-ness simply isn't valued in our culture; "women's" books, magazines, TV shows and the like are considered silly and trivial, even when they tackle serious social issues. As Matt points out in a recent comment, nobody derides the male obsession with sports teams and the like with anywhere near the same level of ridicule. I direct interested readers to Carol Tavris' excellent book, The Mismeasure of Woman, which is the most even-handed (eg, she doesn't go in for simplistic man-bashing) exploration of this phenomenon I've read to date.

I also want to take a moment to address this notion of how we give our kids positive feedback, via telling them they are pretty or smart (preferably both). As I mentioned in my original post, this alone does not guarantee healthy self-esteem. I think it's just as important to teach kids how to fail -- because sooner or later, no matter how lovely or gifted they are, they are going to fail. We have a horrible attitude towards failure in our culture, but the truth is, failure is how we learn -- provided we pick ourselves up and plug along until we do succeed. That's probably the most important life lesson I gained from the martial arts.

And this leads into one last observation. Jongleur provocatively asks, what if someone is ugly and dumb? I made a somewhat joke-y response about how they should work on their personality, but in truth, the question itself is somewhat misguided. "Ugly" and "dumb" are in the eyes of the beholder. Maybe a person isn't conventionally "smart" -- as defined by being intellectually oriented and/or doing well in school -- but that doesn't automatically mean they are stupid. (They might be anti-intellectual and willfully ignorant, which is a different matter entirely.)

It's all about perspective; standards of beauty, for example, change with every age. There is always someone smarter or better-looking, and everyone is smart and beautiful in somebody's eyes. At least I hope so. And while my "work on the personality" comment was flippant, I'm a big proponent of fostering "inner beauty" -- those qualities that have nothing to do with being either smart or beautiful, but invariably add to a person's overall likability and attractiveness. Someone can be drop-dead gorgeous, or breathtakingly brilliant, and still be utterly intolerable as a person. Really. I've met them.

In Which I Question Whether a Scientific Study is Good Use of Technological Resources. Those wacky German scientists are at it again, per a recent item on the Improbable Research blog. Scientists at Munich University have tackled the nefarious problem of how to tell whether some prankster has replaced the jam or custard in your German Mardi Gras donut with something nasty, like mustard. Apparently this is a common prank during the German Mardi Gras celebration. Clearly, one needs a way to figure out what the filling is before one bites into the donut. And the best way to analyze donut innards involves CT scans and MRIs. The Munich scientists took CTs and MRIs of donuts filled with jam, custard and mustard, respectively, and then "diagnostically evaluated" them.

It's a fun, whimsical item, and in general, I'm in favor of doing things like this; it makes those big intimidating science machines a little more familiar to the general public. I love the images taken through optical microscopes of burgers and fries, beer (organized by country of origin) and cocktails over at Molecular Expressions, for example. But those are -- for the most part -- common scientific instruments they're using, not pricey diagnostic techniques.

I've known a couple of women over the past year who've been diagnosed with breast cancer, as has 36-year-old actress Christina Applegate. In all cases, the cancer was caught very early because their doctors recommended MRI screening in addition to a conventional mammography -- and (more importantly) all three had insurance coverage for the pricey procedure. But what about the tens of thousands (if not millions) of women who can't afford that additional screening? Not to be curmudgeonly or anything, but given the choice between finding out if a donut filling is jam or mustard, or whether or not I have breast cancer, I'll take the latter, thanks very much. I might feel differently if everyone had access to MRIs. Until then -- I will find this vaguely troubling.

In Which the Hotel Industry Falls Far Short of a Blogger's Minimal Expectations. Finally, Bora channels every traveling blogger's pet peeve in this post about how slow the hotel industry has been to catch up to the 21st century when it comes to high-speed Internet and wireless technology. This is one of my pet peeves, and I suspect many others feel the same. No more poky Internet connections and crappy wireless that fades in and out! No more exorbitant daily fees for sub-par Internet services! Bora is leading the revolution, and I say, Speak it, brother!

UPDATE: I almost forgot to give a shout-out to Tim Lambert at Deltoid for igniting a new meme of LOLDenialists. He very generously gives me partial credit for the idea because of an offhand comment I made on his blog, but really, I lacked the focus to take it to the next level. Tim's the one who came up with this gem:

Comments

[Lab Lemming]

"I might feel differently if everyone had access to MRIs."

In Germany, everyone does.

[Simplicio]

Mighty Wind link is broken