They never do this!

And, it didn’t last very long — Duncan jumped off about 5 minutes after I took this picture.

Wedding Napkins and Favors

The personalized napkins and ribbon we ordered came in last week. I was worried that they wouldn’t turn out, but they look great:

I used the ribbon to start tying up the favors in little tulle circles….that’s going to take forever! Though I was able to do about 30 tonight in just under 2 hours. I have about 50 more to do for the VA reception, but then 125 or so for the MN reception (plus, I still need to make more soaps for the MN reception).

Three Lounging Kittens

Two in one room:
   

And the third in another:

Artemis and Felicia

I bought a new outfit for Felicia on Friday, so she wanted to try it on and work on her thesis in my office. But not a few minutes later, I found her catching a few winks with Artemis:

Biking to the movies

We biked up to Reston Town Center today to see the latest Harry Potter movie. It was only 4 miles from where the W&OD trail crosses Hunter Mill (where we parked and unloaded the bikes), so it wasn’t as much of a workout as our past two bike trips. Next time, I think we’ll start from downtown Vienna, which will add a couple miles to each leg of the trip.

Total miles: 8.0

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

4/5 stars

This is perhaps the best of the Harry Potter films yet. As Andrew pointed out, there is a lack of the look-at-how-magical-Hogwarts-is scenes, and just a good solid story. I haven’t read the book, yet, so I’m not sure how closely the film followed it. However, there were a few things that felt like they needed more explaination, and so I suspect they ended up on the cutting room floor.

Grad Life: Women can be our own worst enemy

This is an entry into my Grad Life journal that I’ve been avoiding. I was so excited to start classes my first fall. I had spent the summer fairly isolated from students my age, working on porting a oscilloscope’s control program from DOS to Unix. It was nice to get into the “real world”, but frankly, I had not done much programming, and felt completely out of my element. I actually missed the classroom, which was where I knew I could shine.

That was before I knew she would be there.

She was a professor who had gone through CalTech in the 60s, back when women didn’t make it through CalTech. She still showed the scars. She‘s a well-respected member of the astronomy community, and her hard work has really paid off for her career. However, at least to us students, she came across as a bitter woman with a mission to make grad school as hard for us as it was for her.

I do have to give her some credit. She took over the class at the last minute, becuase the professor scheduled to teach it passed-away just a month before the class was to start. In addition, her knees were giving her a lot of trouble, and she was developing cataracts. (Reports from a year later, after she‘d had surgery on both her knees and eyes were that she was much easier to get along with.)

Many of my bad memories of that class have faded in the last 6 years. However, there are two incidents that epitomize what she thought of us students in the class:

• One day, we were supposed to use what we were studying to come up with possible quiz or test questions. A fellow student brought the question, “How is the interstellar medium like a high band-pass filter?” (I think — that’s at least the gist of it). Her response was, “And how is a grad student like a low band-pass filter?”
• Another time, she turned back some homework to the class. As she was handing it back, she said, “Some of you girls might notice that I’ve put some harsher comments on your papers. That’s becasue I think you need some toughening up.”

Can you even imagine if a male professor had said that to the class? But since it was her, it was okay.

Even before these incidents occured, I felt uncomfortable and unhappy in that class. In fact, labor day weekend, which was just after the first two days of class, I went to visit my aunt in Altanta, and complained to her that I was already unhappy.

I looked for jobs in November of my first semester. The only reason I didn’t keep persuing that avenue is because my aunt offered to take me swimming with dolphins the following summer if I just stuck it out my first year.

Oh, and I found out something else about her last week. An acquaintance had another story about her. She wrote one of the qualifying exam questions asking students to find the distance to some object given a bunch of parameters, including H_0 = 50 km s^-1 kpc^-1. This acquaintance, while doing the problem generally correctly, had gottn 10/100 on the question with the comment, “H_0 is not 50”.

I’d like to say that things are changing, and I really do think they are. The next generation of female astronomers seem to have lost the bitterness present in a segment of the first generation. Now we just need to push the first generation out of positions where they interact or influence the upcoming generation, and we can at least bring better experiences to those just entering into astronomy.

Home Again

Flew home from Denver today. Yay! The best part of any trip (especially a business trip) is getting home. The flight was fairly uneventful, though I’ve had more than my fill of children today. Fortunately, the toddler across the aisle from me was very well-behaved on the flight…I might have had to have been tied down otherwise (tired and cranky does not deal well with noisy, cranky, ill-behaved children).

When I got home, Artemis didn’t seem to recognize me from afar. She ran downstairs when she saw me coming. She later came to see me, though, so I think I’ve been forgiven. (The boys didn’t seem to care that I was gone, though Ares did immediately take up residence on my suitcase.)

Denver AAS – Day 4

This is the first day that I actually went to talks.

The first talk was by a sociologist, Elaine Seymour, entitled Hidden Losses. Her group is looking at factors that influence whether or not a woman entering the sciences actually makes it to a tenure-track position. One of her main points was that the women who make it to a tenure-track position are those who maintained a straight trajectory. Those who don’t make it have been derailed for one reason or another (starting a family, family illness or death, lack of sufficient support, etc.) I fall into the latter group — I was derailed because I couldn’t handle the lack of financial support (at least that was the biggest factor). I look forward to seeing the final paper that comes from her group’s research.

The other session I went to was a panel discussion on the status of women in astronomy.

I find that I feel more depressed about the state of women in astronomy the more I go to talks. In my day-to-day life, I see plenty of women working in astronomy. However, I found out that even my advisor is fairly sure that the only reason she got her current position is because the center was required to hire a womam. This makes me happier that I’ve chosen to get out. There is a part of me that feels guilty for “letting down” future generations of women by not persuing the tenure-track. However, I know that I wouldn’t be happy forcing myself down that track. Plus, the direction that I would like to move my carreer is important and there are few people willing to do it.

The conference wrapped up at 4PM, and we started pulling down the booths. It was nice of the Colorado Conference Center to turn down the lights to a “twilight level” before they had even delivered our boxes to pack up the big monitor and stand. Yeah. That will make us get it done faster — in the dark.

Walked around 16th street and grabbed dinner afterwards, then called Andrew and packed in the evening.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

by Mary Roach

Roach takes what could be a morbid topic and turns it into an always fascinating, sometimes light-hearted but never irreverent book. Her style was easy with a pinch of humor (presumably out of necessity).

The book covers topics from the mundane (cadavers used for gross anatomy classes) to the gross (the “body farm” behind the University of Tennessee Medical Center used to study how bodies decay to improve foresic science) to the bizarre (experiments transplanting living puppies’ heads onto an adult dog as a pathway to eventually transplant a human head onto another body).

She covers things that I had never dreamed of, though should have been obvious. For example, the need to use cadavers to design crash-test dummies that are able to simulate how a real human body reacts to the trauma of a car wreck. She also covers the ethics of using cadavers to design better weapons (not acceptable) and to design test dummies to test bullet-proof jackets (less clear, though there is an unwritten code against firing bullets into a human cadaver, even to improve live-saving devices like bullet-proof jackets). There is a chapter on how bodies recovered from a plane crash can help reveal the cause of the malfunction when the black box is not found and not enough of the plane wreckage can be retrieved from the site.

The weirdest thing in the book, in my humble opinion, is the Swedish scientist who is developing a technique to turn human bodies into composte. The idea is to dispose of the body in a more environmentally-friendly way, without wasting valuable space. The compost can be used to plant a memorial tree with the organic material as fertilizer. While weird, I really like the idea, and hope that it catches on.

Excellent book; highly recommended.