ISE6 goodness!

Oh! Looky what came in the mail today!!




Look at this awesome scarf my pal made for me!! It's super soft merino and a gorgeous offwhite color (compared to my offwhite duvet cover...). Plus she sent that cute little bag of stitch markers (which she made herself!) which have very spring-like, good-karma messages on them, a funny book about cats, and a nice long letter introducing herself! I adore the scarf--squishy heaven!! Yay!!! This package totally made my day, which I needed after having another thesis-induced meltdown yesterday (more on that later). Thank you sooo much, dogyarnfun!!




I cast on for a sideways-knit-vest using the Evilla artyarn that arrived last week--those will be vertical stripes. I forgot to take pictures of the skeins and handwound the balls so it's hard to see much of the color variation. I'm very excited about it!

hidden footprint

Recently a friend and I were having a conversation about our carbon footprint (calculate here or here) or more broadly, just our ecological* footprint (calculate here) and discussing things we could do in our day-to-day lives that we thought would make a Big Difference. I found the conversation kind of frustrating, because I could come up with some ideas but in the end I was left with this nagging feeling that they were just a drop in the bucket. Yes, it's easy enough to buy compact flourescent bulbs (and cut my lighting-energy use by 90%!), but if CF bulbs were enough to save the world, we'd all have bought them and there'd be no more reporting about the climate crisis. And anyhow, if you live in an area with carbon-neutral energy (hydro or solar or wind or even nuclear, to some extent) your lightbulbs don't matter. And if it was as easy as just buying carbon offsets (which for me are about US$100 per year) then we all would just go do that and the crisis would be, again, over.

This nagging feeling is strengthened when I do carbon footprint calculations, and I still come up with 9 tons of CO2 (or 1.6 earths or 6 kilowatts per year or 50,000 kWh per year), which is about half the amount an average American uses, about equal the amount an average European uses, but is still more than I "should" get for keeping a lid on disastrous warming (2 ton CO2, or the 2 kW society).

This study, which looks at carbon footprints of a variety of lifestyles in the US, helps me put a finger on what's going on. They determine that there is an apparent minimum carbon footprint for a person living in the US--even a homeless person or a monk living in the woods half the time still has a pretty big impact, due in part to institutional factors such as using roads or libraries or police services. I also suspect there is a lot of hidden energy use in the manufacture of goods that must add up to a significant amount in the end.


I guess I'm bothered as well by the idea that if I, who am pretty committed to "the cause", struggle and ultimately fail at living a sustainable lifestyle, where does that leave someone with less, shall we say, enthusiasm?


*I find it a bit of a quagmire to understand my footprint. I think it's because there are two axes that I tend to confound. One is carbon, as in global warming, which has some obvious solutions (use less fossil fuel and more renewable energy). The other is a general ecological harm or lack of sustainability, which can be much harder to address. Things get tricky when you look at CF bulbs (less energy! good! more mercury! bad!) or solar panels (free energy! good! heinous toxic chemicals in manufacturing and disposal! bad!)

Creepy ads

I've been seeing these ads around town for a few days, and I find the bird one incredibly creepy, so I'm submitting them to Sociological Images: Seeing Is Believing.

I'm not entirely sure why they bother me so much. I guess partly it's the sexualization of animals, but I think it's also because I can tell instantly that the bird is supposed to be female and the chipmunk is male by their poses. (I have no idea what that flower is.)

The statement at the bottom says: "TerraSuisse guarantees natural Swiss agriculture." I don't know what natural is supposed to mean. It seems to be a new line of "happy animal and plants" foods at one of the grocery store chains that implies more sustainable use of resources. It's separate from the official organic certification.






I dropped the ball last year on snapping pictures of the racist anti-immigration ads during an election campaign. Examples can be found elsewhere (one, two and the Wikipedia entry).

Scarf midpoint

Whoever it was that said that knitting a scarf is all about endurance was right. Lordy these things get boring. I'm glad I never tried knitting one when I was first learning to knit--I surely would have given up the craft entirely.

But I am plugging away on my ISE6 scarf. I swore I was picking a lacey stitch and then after I knit a while I noticed it was all squishy and 3D, but by then I'd knit more than I could bear to rip out. I think I'm about half done--it's around 2.5 feet. The pattern is the cloverleaf eyelet cable (rib) from Barbara Walker's first treasury:




ETA: I forgot to say--I bound off a secret project this week that was very enjoyable. It's a gift, so I can't write about it, but if you are on Ravelry it's in my notebook, waiting to be blocked (of course).

Tromso

Finally got my pictures of Tromso up. We took a little road trip into Finland.


We saw reindeer:



And some alpenglow:



And some fjord ice:



And some cool rocks:


Stunning mountains:



Stunning Tromso itself:






And troll burger gummy candy:

Moving target

When I was five, I announced that I was going to be an airplane pilot when I grew up, and that I would fly a pink jet. This amused my parents to no end. Aside from the pink fixation, I was not a girly girl, playing exclusively with my Legos, Tinker Toys, and this horrible old electric train set that filled the whole basement with smoke.


In high school, I wanted to be an auto mechanic. I went to a votech school for grades 9-11 and took tons of shop my freshman and sophomore years (including the woodworking class where I clocked my teacher in the head with a 2x4 that was over my shoulder. Oops!). When I had to choose a "major" my junior year, though, I wound up picking drafting. If I'd taken automotive, I wouldn't have been able to take any more math or science.


My senior year in high school, I switched to a regular school and buried myself in another world. I took western civ, latin, and as many writerly-type things as I could find. Now I wanted to be a writer.


This dream took me through the first year of college at The Evergreen State College. Evergreen is an "alternative" school where you mostly take one (massively interdisciplinary) "class" for an entire year. My first year I took "Great Books". We read a book a week--yeah, a book being Homer's Illiad or Plato or Aristotle--and attended a lot of seminars and wrote an essay about the book. I don't remember any of it. One of the core professors was a physicist and I developed a huge crush on took a real liking to him, so I decided to take whatever "class" he was teaching the next year.


That turned out to be "Energy Systems", which covered the math and science and technology behind how we create and use energy in the world, from coal fired power plants to internal combustion engines to solar panels. We also looked at the social implications of technology. That year was about the best year of my life. I absolutely loved the class and loved being back in science. Suddenly, every question had a right and a wrong answer, and if I worked hard enough, I could usually find it. Even if I couldn't figure them out myself, just knowing the correct answer existed seemed comforting to me. I also had a sweet internship at the Thurston County Solid Waste Department writing a report about cloth versus disposable diapers, instigating my lifelong secret obsession with solid waste. I'm fascinated by garbage and all things municipal.


But Evergreen doesn't really let you "major" in anything, so after that year I left and moved to San Francisco, to study physics at SF State. I loved that department, and more good times were had. I worked as a research assistant in the Underwater Acoustics Group, and I even had a fun internship in the theoretical physics department at Ford Motor Co. (No, I didn't know there was such a thing, before the job offer.) I decided I would eventually work in research and development in industrial physics, or possibly at a government lab. This meant I needed a PhD in Physics (or something close).


But first, I wanted to take a few years off and work. I found a great job as a development engineer at QualiTau, right in the heart of Silicon Valley. There I designed some new electronic instrumentation and wrote some software. And got thoroughly sick of the semiconductor industry which is a crazy, manic, cutthroat kind of industry.


Then I started a PhD in materials science at the Univ. of Minnesota. I'd promised myself I wouldn't work in semiconductors anymore .... and wound up in a semiconductor research group. I flailed away at a flawed idea for a couple of years, but my heart wasn't in it.


I needed an adventure.


So I signed up for a gig at the south pole. I was a research technician, caring for and feeding 6 mostly automated research projects over the winter. Yep, I loves me some adventure. Here I learned the lesson be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.


I was beamed back to earth, dazed (to put it mildly), and with a newfound love of weather. I went to work as a weather observer on Mount Washington, home of the world's worst weather. The world record wind speed (231 mph) was measured there in 1934. Damn that place is windy! My "personal best" was 140 mph. Then I moved into a staff scientist position in the valley research office and digitized 70 years worth of weather observations.


Then I saw an ad for a PhD position digitizing old weather observations in the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science at ETH (sort of the the MIT of Europe) in Zurich Switzerland. And here I am, getting some more instruction in be careful what you wish for (one, two, three, four)... But this life of typing quietly to myself is a bit hard on my back and my eyes and my soul, so as we know I've decided to become a public school science teacher.


I've had a paying job of one type or another since I was 14. I have never not worked. Sometimes I fantasize about it would be like to be unemployed or retired. I've worked as a warehouse order-filler, a daycare attendant, a library clerk, at a movie theater, at a video store. I've done temp work in offices and department store returns. I worked as a secretary and a customer service rep for an industrial magazine publisher. Can you tell that I have a short attention span? And that perhaps I misinterpreted the encouragement "You can do anything you want in life" as "You should try everything in life"?


As to the careers I've considered pursuing? A, perhaps, unknowably large number.


My favorite job, bar none, was at the video store. I loved that store. I liked the coworkers, I adored and respected my boss, I liked (most of) the regular customers. I loved that I was getting paid to stand around talking about movies, watching movies (free tape!), repairing broken tapes, and, best of all, just interacting with people all day. I've always seen myself as an introvert and reliably test that way on personality "tests", so it was a bit puzzling that I always loved my retail and customer service jobs. I've recently seen that paradox from a new perspective: in work, I am an extrovert. I like to interact with people. In my private life, I'm in introvert. I find socializing kind of tiring, especially if I don't know you. I feel uncomfortable with unstructured interactions with strangers, but when I know my role, what's expected of me, I excel in dealing with people. And I love people. We are all such fascinating creatures, each of us living out the same storyline (be born, live, die) and wanting the same things (food, shelter, love) but none of us with the same details or tactics or outcomes.


I am excited to embrace this new side of me, and to let myself flower and use all of my natural skills and talent. I am looking forward to the next chapter in this story.


For the May, 2008 Scientiae.
Tag: scientiae-carnival

My lucky day!

So I've been pondering another sweater project, even though in my head I swear off sweaters every time I finish one, and I definitely swear off designing them myself.

So I've been pondering designing another sweater (ha). I want to knit something really lightweight that I could actually wear indoors. I tend to live in my Icebreaker shirts all winter, so I should be able to get away with something really thin. Here's what I'd been thinking about:

• thin, preferably wool--something to hold it's shape
  
• something lacy to keep it lighter
  
• ooh, lacy--how about a nice scalloped edge on the bottom? That would be pretty
  
• Something that would flatter my shape.
  
• I'm determined to break out of my red rut. I loves me some red! Some days I wear 4 different red garments at once! I'm sure my officemate thinks I'm colorblind. Oh, ha ha, especially since I've developed a special colorblind-friendly color palette that I use in all my data plots at work, and I'm always harping about it being colorblind friendly. Heh.
  
  Anyhow, I have blue eyes (nice ones, so I'm told) and when I wear certain shades of blue certain friends start exclaiming about the garment and my eyes, so I thought I'd go for a nice blue.
  

That's about as far as I'd gotten. I ordered a bit of yarn (here and here--couldn't resist a bit of red for the swatching! Click on an item and then on the picture in the item page for a bigger view) to play around with--just to work on some stitches and fabric weights (what is this drape of which you speak?). And of course, to indulge in some nice Evilla colorways (pdf)!

Then a totally unrelated Ravelry conversation tipped me on to Merike Saarniit, where I discovered this sweater called Rosemary (go here and scroll down a bit).

flurryflurry Ravelry flurry

I am now the proud owner (eagerly awaiting shipping) of a kit (the last one in stock!), in that exact shade of blue to make this thin, lacy, scalloped-edged, flattering to all types, sweater! How cool is that!

---

And here's this week's sciencey awww, a face only a mother could love

How we learn

Jonah at The Frontal Cortex just published a great post about how much college has changed in the past decade. When I went to school, we sat around with pencils and notebooks taking notes. Some of us were eager beavers [raises hand] and brought a tin of colored pencils to keep up with the profs who lectured with colored chalk. Nowadays the vast majority of lectures are powerpoint with a copy of the slides being distributed and students take notes (or not) in the margins. This whole topic kind of makes me see red. I feel really strongly that there are going to be some surprise consequences of this. I know change is inevitable and colleges are hardly about to revert to chalkboards, but I still feel pretty freaked out about it. It also was very eye opening for me, especially in light of becoming a teacher. I have a lot to learn about how other people learn!

Here is my comment to his article (also posted on his site):

I am a "senior" grad student (35 year old PhD candidate) and recently made the same (horrific) discovery about how much Things Have Changed. I attended a summer school last year that was 11 days of 9-5 powerpoint lectures (each an hour long) and it became clear that this was the preferred mode of giving a university course. I was horrified. There is no other word for it. I was also exhausted in a way I never have been (in my entire life!) from "learning". I felt like I'd been steam-rolled, and that far, far more material had presented than I could ever hope to assimilate in the time alotted.

I ranted and raved about it for several weeks. This actually turned out to be productive because it was pointed out to me (as is said above) that some people learn best by listening, so for them this is a great improvement--no more need to pretend to take notes, feel bad about not taking notes, or try to take notes and find it hindering. I had never thought much about the variety of learning styles before then.

My concern is that for those of us who learn by the written word (more on this below), we are left with no real options. A lecture given by powerpoint by definition moves at a faster pace than a person can keep up with, meaning there is no way for me to "learn" in class. Just scribbling occasional notes in the margins of a printed slide doesn't do it for me. In college, when I was "in training", I could write nearly verbatim the professors' words using a kind of shorthand I developed over the years. The lectures went at the speed of the explanation. What concerns me is that a lot of students probably don't realize they are learn-by-taking-notes types, and might not discover this when notes are handed out.

A further note about learning by writing--in my case, this is very specific to writing, not typing. Typing is too abstract for me and somehow my brain doesn't process the information. When I've tried to take notes by typing, I come away with nothing (except irritation at how loud my keyboard is). And yes, I still write first drafts of everything on actual paper with an actual pen.

To summarize: People who learn by listening can listen in on old school lectures and new school lectures. People who learn by writing and taking notes are now left with a reduced set of options.

This issue is a huge pet peeve of mine. I've actually been trying to figure out some kind of little study to do on this, because I think the impact on people with different learning styles is pretty profound. I'm concerned about the usage of powerpoint in grade schools. I don't mean to be a luddite, but I do think the questions need to be asked.

ISE 6

I started some swatches for my ISE 6 pal.



The bottom one is the actual color! I picked up some Lang MerinoSeta (70% merino, 30% silk). It's dreamy soft to the touch. The store I was shopping at let me use my loyalty points to pay, so I splurged and bought 6 balls (150m, 50g each) so I wouldn't have to freak out about running out!

It also meant I had enough to swatch like mad--usually I get a little worried that I'm overswatching and wearing out the yarn if it's a strandy-splitty one like this is. Yes, that is possibly the worst excuse you've ever heard for why someone doesn't swatch enough. Heh.

I haven't decided which pattern to use--I love the squishy berries (a) but I feel like a spring scarf should go more for lace and less for squishy? I love the waves that form in (b). I did (c) mostly because Barbara Walker claimed the back side looked like elephants!! I kind of see that. I'm not so excited about the parentheses look on the front side, though!

I will read, even with my bad eyes

I've been reading a lot lately, although I have to stick with books with reasonably sized print! I've been on more of a fiction jag, as a "treat" during the stress of writing up my thesis. (I normally read mostly fiction, but it is so expensive here--$25 to $30 for a paperback--that I don't indulge as much because I read them too quickly. Non fiction I can manage to make last a few weeks, so the investment seems "worth it".) Here's a quick overview of books I've finished off in the past couple of months:

• Touchstone by Laurie R. King---divine as always. LRK is absolutely my favorite author. I'd been saving this as a treat for a couple of months.




• Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron---I was excited about this because I have this romantic obsession with the silk road, but this book turned out a bit too British for me, meaning I found myself reading every sentence three times because I kept feeling like I was missing words and couldn't quite put things together.
  




• American Gods by Neil Gaiman---I couldn't put this one down. Low key current-day scifi with an air that reminded me a bit of Neal Stephenson, who runs a close second behind LRK in my list. I'm pleased to see Gaiman is quite prolific!
  




• In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan---Fabulous, as Pollan always is. His books make me laugh out loud on the tram, garnering all manner of stares! His manifesto: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Food as in actual food, not processed foodlike items. Not too much, as in, within a healthy context of meals enjoyed with others rather than by the bagful in front of the TV/steering wheel. Mostly plants--well, that's clear enough.
  




• The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova---A reworking of the dracula story. This had suspense like mad right up to the end when it sort of ran off a cliff into thin air. The suspense didn't build UP to anything. It was an enjoyable read, though.
  




• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood---forgot I'd already read this, but Atwood is such a fabulous storyteller!
  




• The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney---nicely done and I loved the atmosphere of frontier Canada. Lots of snow!
  




• The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld---I was a bit leery of this as I'm not the biggest fan of Freudian psychoanalysis, but this was an enteraining read.
  




• Sepulchre by Kate Mosse---I enjoyed her first book, so I figured I'd give this a read. Yikes. Formulaic, boring, and a short story stretched out to the length of a novel. I kept wondering why I was still reading--I seem to have finished it out of grim determination or something.
  




• Deja Dead, Death du Jour, and Deadly Decisions by Kathy Reichs---The first one started out pretty stiff and formulaic but she seems to have warmed up to things and I'll probably finish out the series once I'm within range of a used bookstore.
  




• Lifting a Ton of Feathers by Paula Caplan, which I already discussed.
  

current reading:

• Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie---post colonial Africa. Interesting but so dense it's a bit slow going for me. It's so completely another world that I have to stop and think every few paragraphs.
  




• Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser---I'm enjoying this a lot. Biography can be so hit or miss, especially with famous people who wind up with a "cast of thousands" that I can't keep track of. This one is nicely handled.
  




• Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood by Bill Hayes---just started this, but it's entertaining so far.
  




• Broken Open by Elizabeth Lesser---about life changing events. I don't know if I could have handled this in the aftermath of my own humpty-dumpty post-south-pole experience, but it's very interesting reading now that I have a little perspective on the whole saga. The book I was able to read and relate to right in the dark of the dungeon was Through the Narrow Gate by Karen Armstrong (and it's sequel, The Spiral Staircase) about her 7 years as a catholic nun.
  

Right now I am also a little bit obsessed with Rory Stewart. He's written a pair of amazing books about Afghanistan and Iraq. I'm not sure why I find him so fascinating--I think partly it's the the way he represents people he has encountered--he seems to have this deep empathy and a completely non-judgemental view, which (I find) is very hard to achieve in a foreign culture. He also seems totally fearless, and does things I wish I could do but know I never will, like walking across Asia, or being able to live in a totally foreign culture. (When I moved to Switzerland I thought I was so tough for moving abroad, and then one of the master's students in our group moved to China and then sort of wandered off to Tibet for a year.)

I always feel like I should put links in for books, but I hate linking to Amazon because I feel quite strongly about supporting local bookstores. Thoughts?

Lessons learned

I finished the unspun sweater for my friend in Tromso. Let's just say I learned a lot from this project. But first, some pictures:







Lessons learned:

• The sweater was too big. Gauge is crucial. The bigger the project, the more it matters. I know this, intellectually and mathematically, but I just can't seem to respect it. I actually knit gauge swatches, but I have two problems:




• I always knit these tiny little swatches and then pretend that is representative. Then I wonder why I never get the drape I was expecting in addition to getting the wrong size.... Solution: knit bigger swatches.


• My gauge goes all over the place between the time I knit the swatch and the project, or even if I put the project down for more than a few days. Solution: ???




• Unspun is tricky to knit with. It kept sticking to itself, to the sweater, to my couch, to my pants. Solution: knit inside a plastic bag (ick!) Also, because I was really using combed top, which I had to split myself, I couldn't keep the diameter so even, adding to my gauge woes. Commercial unspun or pencil roving would have a definite advantage there. Solution: think twice before executing your next untested unvention in an adult sweater.


• Somewhat loosely knit unspun is streeeeeeetchy like taffy. Every time I picked up the sweater I was terrified it was going to stretch apart. I guess it has a lot of drape? I don't really know what "drape" means except it always seems to be used by other people when discussing my knitting problems. Solution: knit on smaller needles/tighter gauge. This gauge theme is getting old.


• That boat neck? I don't know where that came from. I used 40% of the body stitches, per the EPS. I know the sweater's a bit big for my friend, but even lying on the ground the neck is out of proportion. Solution: ???


• I hate drop shoulders. I hadn't put that together until now. I just don't like how they bunch up at the underarms, and I never quite know how short to make the sleeves since the body width will count for part of the arm length. Solution: Use another sleeve. I see some more raglans in my future.

I think my friend wouldn't actually care if I posted his face all over my blog, but I put the black bars in because they amused me. I'm not sure I believe they really work--is our ability to recognize faces really so dependent on seeing the person's eyes? If so, that's pretty amazing! Anyone have any real info on that?

A ton of feathers

I just returned Lifting a ton of feathers by Paula Caplan to the library. I have library issues. I love libraries. I love the idea of them, and I love being in them. I worked in 2 college libraries for a total of about 3 years and I loved it. But, I'm not a very good patron. I always check out more books than I can read by the due date, and I have some bizarre chore-avoidance issue that flares up and I can never, ever remember to get my books back on time. My late fees pile up so high it's cheaper for me to just buy books. Bad, Andrea!

I got this book with the intention of joining in a virtual book club about it over at ScienceWomen. March was a wee bit busy for me, though, and I didn't get very far in the book. In fact, I'm so far behind on blogreading after my trip to Tromso that I haven't even read the other posts about it!

I had trouble finishing the book for a couple other reasons. One is I'm having trouble reading small typefaces still (just started my eye PT last Friday), but the other is I found the content so depressing I just couldn't bear to pick it up. The book is about women in academia, and it's meant to be supportive in the sense that "knowledge is power" and it does have a ton of great advice. But I just couldn't get past the whole bigger problem of it. The fact that we need this book to begin with, and the vast extent of the problems addressed in it. It's overwhelming.

I guess I'm also a bit bitter about the whole issue right now. For many years I kept being told that if we just get more women into science, we'll reach a critical mass, and the whole culture will start to change. Reading Virginia Valian's book Why so Slow opened my eyes to that being a lie. There is a deeper problem that both men and women value women's input less, and respect us less, etc, that underlies everything. It's no longer enough to just keep packing women into the pipeline, letting each one of us flounder about wondering why we, individually, seemed to like it less than many of our male colleagues. I know so many women who have left science, but almost no men. Yes, that is totally anecdotal, but the statistics back that up.

Just today at our group meeting a colleague gave a practice talk, and I found myself silent. Normally I'm the first one to pipe up with comments and suggestions, but I just couldn't bear it today. The stares, the silence, and knowing that my suggestions are never implemented. I don't expect all my ideas to be used all the time, but when I see, month after month, that my ideas are always the ones to be glossed over, it gets tiring. It could just be coincidence that I'm the only female in the group, but Valian's book convinced me otherwise.

I also wasn't so motivated to read it because I'm pretty burned out on academia in general and have already decided to leave it after I graduate. I've totally lost perspective on the "pros" of academia and see mostly the "cons", so a whole book of cons and how to fight them was just too much.

For example, a new study came out recently about sexism in peer review. The Women in Science blog have a nice writeup about it. Normal peer review in science is single blind--the authors don't know who the reviewers are, but the reviewers see the authors' names. There was one ecology journal that changed its review process to be double blind and after several years Amber Budden looked at how many women were published--it had increased dramatically. No other ecology journal showed an increase over the same time period. It's incredibly depressing.

I think I might have avoided late fees, though, so it's not all bad!

And I've made a decision about what I want to do next. I've really been struggling with that for a long time, but the spiritual exercises I did in February and March really helped clarify things for me. I've decided I want to teach high school science, in particular to under-served kids. I know I'd be an awesome teacher, and it's also really important to me to feel like I'm contributing something. That the world is a better place, in however small a measure, because I was in it. I also feel like it will start to integrate the different parts of my life. Teaching feels like a calling to me, and is in harmony with my values and religious beliefs. It also promotes social and environmental justice, both of which are extremely important to me. Van Jones (here and here and here) is one of my big heroes right now. Ok, this might be the most stilted paragraph about something that I'm actually incredibly excited about. I should post the mind map I drew about teaching. The "so exciting it actually paralyzes me with looking-forward-ness" part totally grew and grew and overtook the "bad" or "fear" parts.