thusspakezuska | May 5, 2009Over at Uncertain Principles, Chad frets about committing physics heresy via a reading of Goldilocks and the Three Bears to his young offspring.
The story may convey a useful moral message, but it's way off base on the physics.
After all, the Papa Bear, being the biggest, presumably has the largest bowl of porridge. Here, the story fits what we know about thermodynamics, as the largest bowl should take the longest time to cool, and thus should be the hottest at any time before the porridge bowls reach thermal equilibrium with their environment.
The description provided of the other two bowls…
thusspakezuska | April 30, 2009What's a good citizen to do if he or she thinks that cough and sneeze is swine flu? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends:
Stay home if you get sick. CDC recommends that you stay home from work or school and limit contact with others to keep from infecting them.
This afternoon I've been reading Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich - which is ever so more relevant now, if that were possible, than when it was originally released. Near the end she notes:
It is common, among the nonpoor, to think of poverty as a sustainable condition -…
thusspakezuska | April 29, 2009McDonald's is everywhere, of course. But it's not completely cookie cutter; only about 99.9% so. For example, the McDonald's at the Heidelberg train station I used to frequent when I felt unbearably homesick in Germany had beer on tap - something you don't see in the U.S! Most McDonald's I've ever been in, though, feature incredibly dispiriting physical environments. You aren't really encouraged to linger and enjoy yourself. It's fast food, after all. It's not like it's your quaint neighborhood Starbucks.
But as we knew all along, the very rich are different from you and I, and so is…
thusspakezuska | April 29, 2009A week ago Friday I spent the morning traipsing about the Morris Arboretum. The magnolias were in full bloom and Patrick Dougherty had just finished his newest sculputure, The Summer Palace. The twig and sapling sculpture will remain in place until it decays away. I can't describe to you the feeling one has walking around inside it. If you have the chance to be in Philadelphia over this summer I urge you to visit the arboretum and see this sculpture.
if you can't make it here....try to make do with my meager photos. I hope you will also enjoy the magnolia shots that follow. I make no…
thusspakezuska | April 28, 2009Fab reader Penny Richards has a Handmade Geekery site on Etsy with this stunning Rock Diva purse that can be YOURS! Do not click unless you are prepared to drool and desire said purse. Penny says that thanks to the Smithosonian's Flickr Commons project, there will be plenty more of these delicious goodies coming. Mayhap you could request your fav????
thusspakezuska | April 27, 2009Sooooo....it appears some of you take your comics quite seriously. At least, should one be so foolish as to point out painfully obvious, boringly everyday occurrences of sexism.
Danimal asks of Comrade Physioprof: "So you are saying the comic reflects real life?"
What Physioprof said is this: "Every single one of the Foxtrots themselves represents absolute conformity to patriarchal gender norms. And the characters who are not part of the family who appear to violate those norms serve the patriarchal narrative purely as foils."
Inasmuch as patriarchal gender norms represent Real LifeTM,…
thusspakezuska | April 21, 2009I love the comic pages in the newspaper. Some of them are just mildly amusing, but some are bitingly funny and offer real social satire (Pearls Before Swine comes to mind here, as does Non Sequitur). But I was definitely not amused this past weekend when I read the April 19 strip of Foxtrot.
In case you aren't able to view the strip: the first panel shows a string of numbers, below which is a key. Each letter of the alphabet is represented by a semi-complex mathematical formulation, which must be solved to yield the number, which in turn allows one to substitute letters for numbers in the…
thusspakezuska | April 8, 2009Sunday was absolutely gorgeous, sunny and warm, and the Morris Arboretum was teeming with people out to enjoy the spring blossoms. Still, Mr. Z and I had this cherry tree and the blue sky above all to ourselves for a little while.
I know it's not a native tree but it's simply stunning, isn't it?
The folks from Yellow Springs Farm are coming today to consult on my yard and develop a landscape plan for me. Yay! Native landscape at home, manicured arboretum next town over...so much gardening joy. I love spring!
UPDATE: they were here! and a full-fledged plan is in the works!
thusspakezuska | April 8, 2009Oh, linky blogosphere, how I love thee!
I was just starting to browse through Atoms Arranged Meaningwise by Rachel McKinney - which I found via Scientiae's blogroll - when her most recent post sent me shooting off to Threadbared. Rachel notes:
And I know we're supposed to be good little serious philosophers and clothes aren't supposed to be the sort of thing worth thinking too hard about, but that's just the kind of fucked-up masculinist logic that got us into this mess in the first place, right?
I suspect Isis would agree!
Then the pitch for Threadbared:
Threadbared is a blog by two…
thusspakezuska | April 7, 2009Darn it, another Scientiae missed by me. But you don't have to miss reading it! Head on over to Candid Engineer and check it out! Topic is We Rise Up: Overcoming Challenges. Jane's contribution is heartrending at the same time it is inspiring.
And if you want to volunteer to host May's carnival, let them know with an email to scientiaecarnival [a] gmail [dt] com.
thusspakezuska | April 7, 2009Yesterday I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR and caught this very intriguing segment, Shakespeare Had Roses All Wrong. Would you describe a bridge as fragile, elegant, beautiful, peaceful, slender, pretty? Or as strong, dangerous, long, sturdy, big, towering? Lera Boroditsky, an assistant psychology professor at Stanford University, found that it depends - for native German and Spanish speakers, on whether your native tongue assigns a feminine or masculine gender to the noun bridge.
Boroditsky proposes that because the word for "bridge" in German -- die brucke -- is a feminine noun…
thusspakezuska | April 7, 2009Say hello to newest Scibling Ethan Siegel at his blog Starts With A Bang, which I think is interesting and nifty, and not just because he has a post about tinfoil hats with a music clip of bluegrass artist Colby Maddox singing Shady Grove. Sadly, he does not list TSZ as one of his favorite ScienceBlogs, though I will resist puking on his shoes, because his intro video is so darn much fun.
thusspakezuska | April 3, 2009Scads of stuff I don't have time to blog adequately...
Johns Hopkins Provost Kristina Johnson was nominated by President Obama to be under secretary of the Department of Energy in mid-March. From the email press release:
She is a distinguished researcher, best known for pioneering work -- with widespread scientific and commercial application -- in the field of "smart pixel arrays." Last year, she was awarded the John Fritz Medal, widely considered the highest award in engineering and previously given to Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, George Westinghouse and Orville Wright. She is an…
thusspakezuska | April 3, 2009Well, that was fun, wasn't it? Many thanks to Isis for making it possible by lending me her shoes...also thanks for playing along!
Now we return you to our regularly scheduled shoe-pukin' blog....
thusspakezuska | April 1, 2009I've been thinking a lot lately, and it seems to me that I spend way too much time puking on other peoples' shoes and not nearly enough time prancing about in my own fancy high heels. So this past weekend I did some shopping. Here's one result:
Let me tell you, Mr. Zuska is happy about this turn of events! I also got these:
Of course, after an evening in those, I couldn't walk at all the next day due to my arthritic toes but it was all worth it, because I knew I had finally consumed my way into modern womanhood. I know this because I was reading Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines…
thusspakezuska | March 30, 2009A few days ago I wrote about The Problem of the Problem of Motherhood in Science, a post inspired by Meg Urry's book review of Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory by Emily Monosson. A vigorous discussion ensued in the comments - thank you all for participating! It turns out the author of the book was paying attention, and she contacted me by email. Emily Monosson told me she feels her book was misrepresented in Meg Urry's review. I agreed to post here the contents of her email to me.
Here's the email:
I am writing, as editor of Motherhood the Elephant in the Laboratory, in…
thusspakezuska | March 26, 2009
It's here! The second edition of the Diversity in Science Carnival! But it wouldn't be here today without the help of Dr. Free-ride and Dr. Isis. With all the time I have had to devote to my mother and her issues the past two weeks, there is no way I could have gotten the carnival up today without their help. Indeed they really get full credit. I haven't even managed to finish a special post I wanted to do for the carnival - so check back later. I'll update when I have it done and add it in here.
But enough of my travails! Let's get on to the really good stuff submitted to this…
thusspakezuska | March 23, 2009Yeah, I should be asleep, restoring strength for spending another day with mom. But I'm catching up on email and blogs and preparing for the upcoming Diversity in Science Carnival WHICH YOU SHOULD TOTALLY BE WRITING SOMETHING FOR - GET BUSY, NOW!
And in the course of all that I read this post by Stephanie Z which led me to Sheril Kirshenbaum's post (Goodbye, Sheril, we will totally miss you here at Scienceblogs) Where Are The Women With BIG Ideas?
I'd like to point readers to a recent piece from The Guardian asking 'Where are the books by women with big ideas?'
Books like Freakonomics,…
thusspakezuska | March 22, 2009Text and title shamelessly stolen from Sciencewomen, I have no time to write, am at mom's again.
Dr. Isis has decided to donate the funds from her blog traffic to fund a scholarship for undergraduate research, and has gotten the American Physiological Society to match her donation up to $500. And all you have to do is click on her site - no $$ donations required. So cool!
Go visit her announcement, and her site through teh browser not the RSS feed reader for this month. :-)
thusspakezuska | March 21, 2009Over at Fairer Science, at the end of an excellent rant about the uselessness of one-shot workshops, Pat Campbell writes:
One other thing, if I see one more article about why there aren't more women in science that concludes "it's the children" I am going to run amuck. This one says "Women don't choose careers in math-intensive fields, such as computer science, physics, technology, engineering, chemistry, and higher mathematics, because they want the flexibility to raise children..."
Say what? Good to know that it's only the math intensive fields; so friends if you want a science career and a…