This blog has moved to http://scientopia.org/blogs/thusspakezuska This announcement supersedes the announcement in the previous blog entry. Thanks for reading TSZ here at ScienceBlogs, and I hope you will continue to enjoy reading TSZ at the new digs over at Scientopia.org.
New blog address is:http://thusspakezuska.wordpress.com
...the party's over. They say that all good things must end. I've been mentally inching towards the coat closet myself for the past week (read Bora's post for the reference), but as you know, I've been off spending time with my mom. Now is as good a time as any to say goodbye to ScienceBlogs. My first blog post was on July 13, 2005 on a relatively obscure blogging platform. Only the friend who nagged me into blogging noticed. A year later, the wonderful and talented Katherine Sharpe had invited me to join ScienceBlogs, and I gladly did. What a crazy crazy party. It has been a…
"The Same and Not the Same" is the title of a fantastic book by Nobel Prize winning chemist Roald Hoffman. It's a great place to get a hearty dose of science + culture. Part Eight of the book is titled "Value, Harm, and Democracy" and has all sorts of interesting stuff in it on chemistry and industry, environmental concerns, chemistry, education & democracy. It does not have a section on what to do when you are running a media empire and your advertisers want you to censor your writers because they are still feeling a bit touchy over that whole messy Bhopal business, but you can't…
By now, perhaps, you are aware of the uproar about the ScienceBlogs corner of the bloggysphere. PepsiCo has bought started a blog here, called Food Frontiers. Many are unhappy, bloggers and commenters alike. Read PalMD's take, and commenters there, for one perspective. One of the potential disadvantages [of a blog network] is advertising and sponsorship. Here at Sb, we've been very fortunate in that our content is completely independent. We control anything in the center column. The top and right however belong to Sb, and they use this space to keep the place running. There have been…
BREAK THE CHAINS!!! UNLEASH THE FURY OF ZOMBIE WOMEN AS A MIGHTY FORCE FOR REVOLUTION!!!!! Zombie women of the world, I ask you: why are we content to shamble aimlessly along behind our brethren, following them willy-nilly, eating the leftover brains, and cleaning up after they senselessly destroy some village? Would it kill them to take a turn minding the zombikins for a change? No, it would not. Because they are undead. There I was just last week, shambling along after Nigel on Shakedown Street. Like he knew where he was going! "Would it fucking KILL you to stop and ask for directions…
Why should any woman get any degree in a STEM discipline? Especially if she has to wade through tons of bullshit courses to get there, and part of the learning, it appears, has to do with learning how to be someone you aren't? Some other gender, some other race - or some other social class? skeptifem challenges the female STEM universe thus: I am not working in some kind of grueling coursework, so I am not "most of us", I guess. What happened to me was that I never imagined I could be a college graduate or learn the sciences/maths (mostly because of being a woman in this culture), and I…
Jun. 28, 2010 10:45 PM ET SB COMMUNITY DEEMS PSEUDONYMOUS SOCKPUPPETERS ACCEPTABLE TARGETS FOR MOCKERY, DERISION Douchey McDoucherson, ScienceBlogs WritersANYWHERE (SB) Scientists have recently discovered that popular bloggers can taunt and gloat over the downfall of unpopular bloggers, and bask in the warm glow of widespread support - but only if proper precautions are taken while engaging in this dangerous enterprise. Most of the relevant research was published in a leading online linguistics journal. Noted meangirl, petulant whiner, and internet gadfly Zuskaids was quick to critcize the…
So Mr. Z and I went to that Phish show last Friday night. We bought our tix for that show from a ticket liquidator online. Had to call them to confirm and all because it was last minute. They were all set to walk us through the VERY COMPLICATED PROCESS of opening the email, downloading the emailed tix doc, and printing it. First thing the person on the phone said was, "Hey Phish fan, are you ready to have fun? Are you doing 'shrooms already?" (We were not, then or later.) Then he began talking very slowly and carefully to Mr. Z. "Do you have a computer? Do you know how to turn it on? Do you…
Every once in awhile I do manage to get out to a social sort of event. Recently I was at one such thing. And overhead the following: Female, mid-40s: When I was in high school, I wanted to be a veterinarian. And I had great SAT scores, high 1400's [out of a then total 1600]. But my high school guidance counselor strongly discouraged me, and told me "those are really more men's kind of jobs." So I gave up thinking about vet school, even though I had the ability. Male, same age: When I was in high school, I wanted to learn to type. Probably because I just wanted to take what I thought…
Female Science Professor has posted a checklist - "Kind of like Sexism Bingo, but in list form." - and asked for additions. I was going to offer a few additions, but I thought "all that crap happened a thousand years ago, when I was an undergrad/grad student. I'll just read this list of new stuff to see what teh wimminz are whining about these days." Because things are getting better all the time. Alyssa at 6/17/2010 10:03:00 AM said: Someone asks why you bothered getting a PhD if you're "just going to have children" and DRo at 6/17/2010 10:36:00 AM said: You are told that you won't…
Phish, you were fabulously jamtastic, and I dearly loved that sweet cover of Joni Mitchell's "Free Man In Paris", but I swear there were times when your light show made me feel like I was strapped in a chair next to Karl in Room 23. What can I say? I freely bought my own ticket. Also: I neglected to bring along a hardhat, which would have come in handy for the glow stick hailstorm during your version of the opening movement of Also Sprach Zarathustra. Everybody looked like they were having fun and the glow stick tossing was random and joyous, so it was all cool. Thanks for the show. Oh…
Jun. 17, 2010 3:34 AM ET SB COMMUNITY DEEMS FEMINISTS IRRELEVANT NOBODY MEAN GIRLS, OMNIPOTENT PRIVILEGED HELLIONS Douchey McDoucherson, ScienceBlogs WritersANYWHERE (SB) Just days after a remarkable dustup in the science blogosphere, ScienceBlogs community members gathered to render judgment on feminist science bloggers. Noted commenter, blogger, and cress fancier B-DOH! said "PZ and Orac take out the clueless fuckwits of the world with penetrating criticism, incisive wit and clever put downs. Feminists science bloggers, with their aggressive snark, set a tone." Newly disclosed…
While I was at work on this whole work-life balance stuff, a raging conversation sprung up on the WMST-L listserv about domestic workers and whether feminist women should or should not hire someone to clean their houses and help take care of their kids. (The discussion is still going on.) Some of the more interesting points have to do with questioning why this work has to be called women's work, and why it just can't be called work proper, and given some respect, and along with that some decent wages and benefits. Meryl Altman, a professor at DePauw, posted a link to a short video, "Women…
First post in this series can be found here. Second post in this series can be found here. In my second post in this series, I gave the men a cookie, and commenter rpf accused me of...gasp!...being too nice! I believe this is the first time this has ever happened. rpf quoted me and commented thus: "If I were a married man with children, I might well be leery of blogging about how I negotiate the home balance with my spouse on my science blog, even if I weren't concerned about privacy or protecting a pseud, because I'd be afraid of pissing off my spouse, and pissing off the feminist…
I know I'm supposed to be posting installment three in the work-life balance series - and it's coming tomorrow, I promise - but I was distracted by this post by Isis's new co-blogger. I think there's a relatively strong consensus that this invention is clearly a bit of Technology Gone Bad. In a really old Saturday Night Live sketch, Gilda Radnor and Dan Akroyd play a befuddled couple at home in the kitchen, arguing over Shimmer. It's a floor wax. No, a dessert topping. But wait! Spokesperson Chevy Chase pops in to tell them it's BOTH!!!!! What does this have to do with understanding…
First post in this series can be found here. The third and final post in this series can be found here. ScientistMother really wants DrugMonkey to step up to the plate already. She says that DM laid out his own responsibility to deal, on-blog, with work-life balance issues and to share the details of how it goes down at his own home. Find the full quote in the comments at her post or here in Doc Free-Ride's post. As is generally the case, I have a few things to say about this. For starters, I do not agree with ScientistMother's interpretation of that quote. I have no idea what…
Work-life balance: people have been talking about it. Wait, that's not right. Women have been talking about it. And have been talked at about it, by some people. Doc Free-Ride has a good round-up of a most recent skirmish of opinions on the topic in the sciencey blogosphere. If you have not been following this, please do give Doc Free-Ride's post a read. Where to begin? Science Careers says all you married ladies with kids should hire housekeepers. And get over it already, will you? Last year, when Carol Greider, a molecular biologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine,…
Just because I need a change of pace once in awhile. Once when I was home visiting mom, I took her to a church spaghetti supper where we met up with her sister, my beloved Aunt Betty. This was at a time when I still couldn't really eat anything with onion in it, without immediately getting a migraine. Of course, the spaghetti sauce for the church dinners was chock full of onion. No problem, I said, you ladies enjoy your dinners and I will get something to eat later. This was not acceptable to Aunt Betty. She went into the church kitchen and whipped up a spaghetti sauce just for me.…
Over at Boing Boing, Maggie Koerth-Baker says "I wanted to know what actual female scientists thought" about the boring blah blah John Tierney barfed up this week in the NYT. And then gives links to four different responses, included the fabulous Isis's awesome take on why she is bored to tears with this topic. Personally I would rather be forced to watch the second Transformers movie on constant repeat for the next 10 years than continue to have this discussion, but since the New York Time's John Tierney seems to have his head shoved so far up his own ass that his can lick his own tonsils,…