thusspakezuska | July 25, 2008Earlier this year I reviewed Douglas Tallamy's Bringing Nature Home, which inspired me to convert my garden to all or mostly native plants. I swore this year would be a much better gardening year than last. Visions of gardening glory danced in my head. Ah, early spring. Now we are baking in the heat of high summer and my garden sadly disappoints, even as passers-by comment on how much they enjoy looking at it. Yes, I think, if only you could see what it should look like! One-third of the natives I planted this spring, supposedly so well adapted to our climate and soil, have already…
thusspakezuska | July 24, 2008Blame it on Abel, who blogged his vasectomy, and Janet, who blogged her mammogram. Also blame Drugmonkey and Physioprof, who along with Abel, Janet, and others encouraged me to Blog My D&C. Yep. So here goes.
It all started innocently enough back in May with my annual exam. First appointment. My nurse practitioner was bothered by my history: no periods since September 2006, followed by the sudden surprise! of brief bleeding episodes in February and mid-May. Various doctors of mine have been debating as to whether I am in menopause, or I just have screwed up hormone levels that…
thusspakezuska | July 22, 2008Planning to be in/around/near New York City on August 9, 2008? There's a reader-Scienceblogger meet-up event in the works, being planned even as you read this, probably for around 3 pm. We'd like to know whether you think you'll be in the area and likely to attend. If so, please leave a comment here. Seed promises a fun afternoon event in an air-conditioned joint, with snacks and swag. I'll be there. So will a bunch of other fab bloggers. Whaddya say????
thusspakezuska | July 20, 2008I've been sorting through books lately, in an effort to cull and control my ever-burgeoning collection, and of course I have to browse through each book to decide if I want to keep it. It's a slow, but rewarding process. This evening I was wandering through Migraine: The Complete Guide, when I happened across this delightful anecdote from a fellow migraineur:
Many migraine patients feel that emergency departments treat them with disrespect and with disregard for the seriousness of their condition. Emergency-room personnel, they say, do not consider severe migraine a true emergency.…
thusspakezuska | July 20, 2008This weekend is the 160th anniversary of the first (US) women's rights convention at Seneca Falls, July 19 and 20, 1848. At Seneca Falls, Elizabeth Cady Stanton rewrote the Declaration of Independence as the Declaration of Women's Rights, beginning, of course, with "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal..." And the Declaration included the shocking call for women's right to vote. It took 72 years till the right to vote was accomplished.
The final resolution in the Declaration called "for the overthrowing of the monopoly of the pulpit, and for…
thusspakezuska | July 16, 2008Hello, dear readers...if there are any of you left...I've been away for a week taking care of mom, plus the usual migraine breaks...back home now, and hoping to get back in the blogging groove asap.
Meanwhile, Physioprof is off guest-blogging at Feministe for two weeks and you absolutely have to read his deconstruction of a really atrocious piece of reporting in the New York Times about Title IX and science, Teh Ladeez Jus Don Liek Teh Scienz. Warning: the quotes from the NYT will make your teeth hurt.
thusspakezuska | July 6, 2008Why would you celebrate Black Independence Day on July 3rd? It took the work of slaves to build America; the slaves came before the nation, so Black Independence Day would logically precede the traditional Independence Day, July 4th.
On July 3rd, I joined about 200 others in downtown Philadelphia, at 6th and Market Streets, to celebrate Black Independence Day and to honor in particular the 9 slaves transported to Philadelphia by George Washington (of the 316 slaves at his Mt. Vernon Plantation), and in general, all slaves whose labor helped build this nation. (See here for background…
thusspakezuska | July 5, 2008Mr. Z and I are celebrating America's Fourth of July holiday with that great new American tradition, the STAYCATION!
Later I'll blog about how I began my staycation on July 3rd. Yesterday, Mr. Z and I staycated in style, cleaning out a large and extraordinarily untidy closet. Triumphant but exhausted, we elected to go out to dinner rather than grill something. We are hoping that Homeland Security does not get wind of us having Chinese food on the 4th as opposed to A-merrycan grilled slabs of meat. We did hie ourselves unto the local fireworks display after dinner and despite the rain it…
thusspakezuska | July 5, 2008At my mother's assisted living home, the staff helped my mom and other residents put in a small garden in the spring. Onions, featured in the planting, are now being enjoyed by all. Mom says they are past that first delightful small green onion stage; the bulbs are getting bigger, and the tops thicker and stiffer. Which takes her back to childhood, and some creative onion engineering.
Image originally uploaded on 3/8/08 by Matter=Energy
Mom says when she was young, and the onions got to this point, they would cut off a top to use as a bubble blower. They would cut off the top end of…
thusspakezuska | June 30, 2008The comics rawked last week! Gracie signed off as the engineer on plans for the bike ramp she constructed for her brother Baldo and his friend. Gracie, you are awesome! Read the strips for June 24 and 25, too. I want more Gracie with my Baldo!
The Chronicle News Blog reports that India will now have quotas for faculty positions at its prestigious engineering universities, for members of the so-called lower castes and classes. You can tell we really are living in a global society; the same whiny rhetoric about how the entry of those unmeritorious Others will destroy all we hold sacred you…
thusspakezuska | June 30, 2008Kylie at Podblack asks, for the next Scientiae,
"A voice in the crowd" - are you heard? How are you heard? Are you one of a team that works as a choir or does discordance rule the roost?...who really has control of the megaphone?
Heh. How am I heard? Depends greatly upon the listener, and how far they've come in examining their own types of unearned privilege.
Cranky, irritable misogynistic Rethuglicans hear me as a shrill, whiny, petulant, hairy-legged, man-hating, castrating feminazi. Yes, Gerard Harbison, you can think of that as an homage to you! You are a cranky irritable…
thusspakezuska | June 27, 2008I was browsing the Women's Policy Inc. site, which is awesome, and ran across an item in the June 16, 2008 issue of The Source that just left me with my mouth hanging open. I can't find a permalink for this item; follow this link and scroll down to the fifth item, "House Approves Paid Parental Leave for Federal Employees". What's under discussion is a bill that
would allow federal employees to be paid for four of the twelve weeks of parental leave to which they are entitled under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) (P.L. 103-3). The legislation also would permit federal employees to…
thusspakezuska | June 24, 2008The latest issue of Smithsonian arrived today, in time for my dinner. There are few things more pleasing than reading and eating on a fine summer day, sitting on the back patio with a light breeze blowing and the perfect toasted cheese sandwich, not burned this time, sitting on my plate.
But even a perfect toasted cheese sandwich can have its charms diminished when you find your sex so blithely dismissed in the opening lines of an article that caught your eye:
Seventy-seven thousand years ago, a craftsman sat in a cave in a limestone cliff overlooking the rocky coast of what is now the…
thusspakezuska | June 23, 2008After my last post, Magetoo asks why do I blog? Poor Alison does not understand why I blog at all, being as I am so very bitter and angry, which I suppose we can classify under #8 in my newly numbered list of reasons why I shouldn't blog, with a dollop of #7 and #9.
Anyway, why not talk about why I do blog?
I will say first and foremost that I blame it all on my good friend Cindy, who nagged me incessantly until I finally agreed to begin blogging just about three years ago. (July 13 is the actual anniversary of the first "hello" post on the old site.) At the time, my friend had…
thusspakezuska | June 19, 2008A number of my Sciblings have taken up the challenge of the last "Ask A ScienceBlogger" question, "Why do you blog, and how does blogging help you with your research?" (See for example Alice and Janet and PhysioProf and Grrl and DrugMonkey.)
I am not currently involved in research, nor am I even employed, so the second half of the question is not very relevant for me. I thought I'd turn the first part around, though, and share with you all the reasons why I shouldn't be blogging, at least not about gender and science. These are culled from comments over the past I-can't-believe-it's-been-…
thusspakezuska | June 18, 2008I will admit that rap music has more than once caused me to mutter "These kids today! Their music is just noise! When I was young, our music had a melody!" Or something like that. You know, the stuff mom said when I was young. I won't even mention how the generous dose of misogyny that seems de rigeur in rap songs makes me feel.
And yet I confess to being delighted today when I was listening to NPR's Here and Now and heard this story about educational rap. (Scroll down for summary.) Rhythm Rhyme Results (their tag line is "the other three R's) brings together teachers, musicians,…
thusspakezuska | June 16, 2008Some time ago Penny called my attention to this post by Liz Henry regarding the erasure of women from the tech community via language. I loved it, not least because her most excellent rant includes one of my own pet peeves:
All of this just yanks my chain big time, like when people say in talks and demos, "It's so easy, my MOM can do it." (And then everyone in the audience laughs knowingly.) Like moms are the dumbest people ever. My pet peeve at technical conferences. I am a mom!
Preach it, sister.
If you've been wanting a guide to help you parse Christian right anti-gay rhetoric and what it…
thusspakezuska | June 16, 2008Some time ago I posted info about the Seed lab photo contest. The deadline is long since past, but in the comments on my post I offered to post lab photos that you submitted but that didn't get selected. Barn Owl took me up on my offer. Here's her lab photo followed by her comments. That photo really takes me back to my tissue culture days.
Mine is a standard workspace for microdissecting groups of neurons from mouse or chicken embryos, to establish cell cultures; I've got a Zeiss stereomicroscope, with fiber optics illumination from above or below the stage. Everything sits in a…
thusspakezuska | June 11, 2008Hey folks, over at the carnival I missed one entry that got caught in my spam filter.
JaneB at Now, What Was I Doing? muses on how traditional success criteria lead to uneven weight distributions:
The lesson I'm trying to learn this year and next is that when I try to 'play the game' using externally set values for the things I do and am, I will be off balance - the weights of the different parts of my life will be wrongly distributed. It is up to me to recognise the true weight of things, and to distribute them appropriately for efficient and enjoyable carrying.
This is a really excellent…