Caolionn O'Connell

3 Legs.

Notes:  I am normally keen on including pictures, but, well, that isn´t looking like it is going to happen (I think this computer is from the 80s).  I will post some pictures when I return, so we can relive my vacation TWICE! (Yeah, keep the nasty comments to yourself).  Also forgive the spelling mistakes, pretty please, my Spanish computer doesn´t do English spell-check, but I can make a "ñ" and "€" really easy.  You win some and you lose some.

Leg 1 (LAX to JFK):  On Monday, I was feeling brave when I woke up.  I thought to myself - if there was a day for not needing to self-medicate to make it through a flight, this was the day.  The flight was fine, I was fine and I was beginning to get smug, that was until we were over the great lakes; the turbulence was so bad, flight attendants were asked to sit.  I have decided the flights are so much better when you are only partially lucid.  From now on, regardless of my state of mind, I am taking the damn pills.

Leg 2 (JFK to MAD):  I took my pills and slept like a baby.  I was even more grateful that the toddler sitting behind me also slept like a baby (thank God for small miracles).  The best plane feature ever: The tail camera.  It shows the plane during takeoff and landing from the top of tail, looking down on the plane.  It was completely mesmerizing.  I am uncertain if it was the pills or the tail camera view, but I didn´t have a worry in the world on that flight.  Ehh ... it was probably the pills.

Leg 3 (MAD to SVQ):  Attempt one failed.  We missed our connection, so we spent some quality time in the Madrid airport, where apparently some women have no problem smoking while sitting in the loo.  How tough it must be for them to visit California where you can´t even smoke in bars.  We finally made it to Sevilla and, thankfully, the flight was uneventful.

I love Sevilla.  I haven´t even left yet and I already want to return.  The city smells like orange blossoms.  I wish I could figure out how to post pictures... sh*t!

Sporadic.

If this blog is your regular destination for wasting time at work, I will be sorry to disappoint, but I am going on vacation. Now this doesn't mean I will M.I.A. for the next two weeks, since I am assuming Morocco is like every other place in the world with internet cafes on every street corner. I promise to give a full account of my travels, but I doubt I will be making my daily quota. So while I have embraced not writing my thesis for two weeks (the laptop is staying at home), I wish all of you additional productivity having one less website to frequent while trying to avoid your responsibilities.

I'll be back on April 8th and I will return to my regular posting duties. Until then my running commentary will be a bit sporadic. Now I am just trying to determine the strain capacity of luggage zippers. Conclusions: Piss poor.

Mmm ... Sugar.

Peeps might well be considered the perfect food for those of us who love sugar. They are basically marshmallows dipped in colored sugar and come in various Easter shapes: bunny, chicks, etc.. In other words, they are sugar then coated in yet another level of sugar. How can anything be more perfect? I have happily sampled most of the Easter color and shape combinations over the last couple weeks. Why must all the good candy be associated with a holiday? (Mental note: Must make dentist appointment and probably sooner rather than later.)

Guilt.

(Scene) Last Night. Sam and I have duplicates of the same electronic equipment. We both have Apple laptops, I have the iPod mini and he now has my old iPod. I am packing and we are in the midst of figuring out who takes what cables.

Sam: Why are you taking the firewire cable and not the USB cable?
Me: I need the firewire cable which goes into the power brick so I can recharge my mini while I am gone.
Sam: Can't your computer do that with the USB cable?
Me: I'm not taking my computer.
Sam (incredulous): You're not taking your computer?
Me: No, I'm on vacation in Morocco. Why would I bring my computer with me?
Sam (flabbergasted): How are you going to work?
Me: Work? On vacation?
Sam (STILL confused): You're not going to work?! I thought you said you were going to work?
Me (guilt setting in): I maybe thought about working, but I never really said I was going to actually work. I never get work done on vacation.
Sam: Oh. If you say so.

Okay, now I am racked with guilt. Do I bring the computer with me?
Pros: Should I feel inspired to work, the computer will be there. I can download pictures off my camera regularly, so I don't have to worry about losing them in case my camera gets lost/stolen. I love my computer; it is like my child. Why would I deprive my child from seeing Morocco?
Cons: Why on earth would I bring my prized possession on vacation in Morocco?! What if it gets stolen? And really, let's be honest, am I actually going to do any work or am I just going to lug an extra 5 lbs. around the world?

Crap. This seemed like a very simple problem before we had this conversation. What happened?

Crackpot?

For those of you who are not a member, sometimes it hurts to be left out. Granted you might not miss being inundated with all sorts of material you couldn't care less about, but occasionally (maybe even rarely) you actually get something worth reading. Case in point: "The Crackpot Index" which was in the APS newsletter-thingy. The article was written by John Baez and, based on certain criteria, his index rates "potentially revolutionary contributions to physics". Being that I don't care a whit about these things called "permissions", I will include some pretty stellar lines:

* 5 points for using a thought experiment that contradicts the results of a widely accepted real experiment.
* 10 points for pointing out that you have gone to school, as if this were evidence for sanity.
* 10 points for arguing that a current well-established theory is "only a theory", as if this were somehow a point against it. (Caolionn says: Take that, creationists!)

Care to read more? Check out the whole list for yourself.

This is one of those days ...

... that totally suck. I got feedback on Chapter 4. If my advisor had corrected using a red pen, it would have looked like my paper bled to death. The chapter actually merited a "special meeting" to discuss his comments. My favorite comment came toward the end of the meeting, when he mentioned that he thought I should include some other data we took, which means more work. When I shot him an icy stare, he added that I shouldn't think about it until after I was done being pissed at him for all the other comments. Well, he gets kudos for lightening up the mood.

To be honest, Chapter 4 is the least critical item on my list of things to do. I leave Friday to spend Easter in Los Angeles with my family and Monday I leave for Spain and Morocco. Yeah, yeah, tough life - I assure you, you wouldn't be the first to comment. So I am presently preoccupied with doing laundry, finding my passport, finding my stash of Euros, getting my no fear of flying pills (totally succumbed to medicinal aid to counter-act my neurosis), etc. – none of which has been accomplished yet. I am running out of space on my hand trying to keep track of everything, since I have totally given up writing "to do" lists on paper. I am a firm believer that hand notes are much better reminders; it's a bit tough to ignore your hand, whereas paper can easily be stashed in pockets and backpacks and quickly forgotten. Now I just need to decode what I actually wrote and I'll be good to go.

'Tis the Season

You might have missed it, especially with all the rain we've had around these parts, but spring has sprung. Technically this event took place on Sunday. Spring combined with the fact that I am 27 means only one thing: wedding season is about to start. Not my own, I assure you, Sam and I are not really ready for that step. We are prepping for moving in together and that's enough stress, so a wedding is not on our radar screen.

Between now and the beginning of July, we have seven wedding celebrations to attend. That's right, seven. I bet you can't top that. If you can, you have my condolences. It's not that I am against marriage as an institution, it seems to work, well ... at least 40% of time, but I hate weddings. All the sermons on two becoming one, one thought, one soul, yada, yada, yada. This is usually accompanied by a sweeping gesture, where the minister/preacher/rabbi takes his two index fingers and brings them together in an arching motion. It is at this point in the ceremony I whisper to Sam that he has permission to shoot me when we start only have one thought and he responds by fake vomiting. Yes, there has been more than one occasion when we have been scowled at by little old ladies sitting in the pews around us. I mean, isn't marriage about having interesting company legally bound to stick around? How does that work when you only have one thought?

Between the smarmy sermons and watching grown women dive for wedding bouquets, I just don't have the stomach for these things. Alas, with seven in my immediate future, I better get over it and fast.

Ammunition on the Hill.

Granted it has what might be considered the cheesiest slogan ever ("Innovation is American's Economic Heartbeat. Don't Flat Line our Future!"), but the report produced by the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation is actually a really interesting read. The supporters of the task force is not a combination normally seen (Texas Instruments, National Assoc. of Manufacturers, American Physical Society, etc.), so the fact that they have come together to produce it says something.

The report basically highlights the economic consequences of this chronic under-funding I've been harping about. It looks at five benchmarks to assess America's "knowledge economy": education, workforce, knowledge creation, R&D investment and high-tech economy. Although it has a bit of a nationalist tone (American losing its competitive edge and the sort), it is a good read nonetheless. At the very least, it has excellent graphics.

To show I haven't been lying about that whole under-funding thing:

What's interesting (or grim) is its long-term effects, which can be seen in the surplus to deficit of the U.S. trade balance of hi-tech products from 1990 to 2002:

Okay, I am done with all my doomsday scenarios on the future of basic science research. It's out of my system, we will now return to our regularly scheduled programming of thesis-writing and plasma wake field acceleration.

Emergency Exit Flying.

I flew back yesterday on a 6:30 am flight and, in order to make my flight, I had to get up at 4:30 am. Simply stated: I am not a morning person, so the whole process was painful. Waking up that early, it makes sense that some others on the flight might be inclined to stay up all night and when I got on board, there were two guys who clearly chose that option. They managed to bring beer (Miller Light) with them and continued to drink throughout the flight. Provided you're not throwing punches or singing your national anthem, I don't really care if you get drunk en route to your destination, but in this case they were sitting in the emergency exit row and they were totally tanked. I thought for sure the flight attendant would encourage them to sober up, you know, "in case of emergency," but she didn't say a word.

I have always believed the emergency procedures in planes were a sham. If the plane is falling out of the sky, I really don't think the life vest is going to help you out. Not to be totally macabre, but a friend once joked that they probably only included the life vests such that the bodies would float to surface, so as to be recoverable. Now that it seems they don't care if you're sober enough to sit in the emergency exit row, I feel as though my fears have been confirmed.

As luck would have it, I got a seat in the emergency exit row for the second leg of my journey (let it be known that I was sober). I never request the emergency exit, so I was pure coincidence my seat assignment put me there. It's like first class space at a coach price. I even slept with my head resting on the fold-down table, which is something I haven't been able to do since I was 10. To be honest, having now enjoyed the luxuries of the exit row, I don't care if it is a scam: I want the frickin' leg room.

Selling Science.

Science is not a controversial topic. Generally, everybody likes science, some may fear it, but on the whole science is everybody's friend. Yeah, we do cool stuff. Yeah, we add to the technical know-how and knowledge base of society. Yeah, we produce a population of well-trained scientists and engineers. So with all the net positives, why do we have so much trouble getting money to fund these endeavors?

This week in D.C. has been filled with both positives and negatives. There are a lot of people in Washington who really believe in the importance of basic science research and I think their statements are genuine. In the past, they have signed their name to legislation that we, as a community, have supported, and we are grateful. Many symbolic legislative gestures have been made, but cash has not always shown up.

What are we doing wrong? Physicist have a reputation of being arrogant and projecting attitudes of entitlement, but we have worked very hard to curb those tendencies (at least, on Capitol Hill). We are trying to become more politically involved and trying to present a better face to the people with public relations campaigns. We started asking offices, who are known supporters of science, "What can we do better?" The most frequent response has been to have people in physics and those supportive of physics to talk to their local representative. So using my soap box and stealing another's slogan for my own purposes:

THINK GLOBALLY, ACT LOCALLY

If you are a supporter of science, write your representative tell them, you, as a constituent, feel basic research in the physical sciences is important and should be funded. If you can't remember his or her name check out Congress Merge and don't use gov't resources (e.g. SLAC email account) to send your letters or emails, that's a big no no. Better yet, make an appointment at the local office - remember: they work for you - and talk with the staff. To be honest, there won't be any increase in funding until people (including physicists, themselves) really speak up for it. Without people willing to spend the five minutes for an email or letter to their congressperson, we will most likely continue along this path of chronic under-funding.

Civilization

While walking to my next appointment, I got lost. So many hallways and so much marble, it is not very hard to do. In the process, I passed by Dennis Kucinich's office and the door was open. I took a picture of the view because I thought it was pretty funny.

By the way, I have no idea what the hell kielbasa is, but I liked the idea that it was one of three pillars of civilization. I also figured being coupled with polka and bowling, it's got to be good.

I promise to write more about the pro-science movement we are hoping to inspire here in Washington, but my feet are killing me and it's St. Patty's Day, so I am not really in a state of mind to speak eloquently on the subject.

Capra-esque

I am a sucker for any movie by Frank Capra. It Happened One Night, It's a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington -- all classics and all make me feel warm and fuzzy.

I am presently in D.C. having my own Mr. Smith goes to Washington moment. Granted I am not here to expose graft and corruption, I'm just here to pass the tin cup, as my uncle would say. A bunch of physicists from SLAC and Fermilab are here to meet members of the house and senate to talk about the importance of federal funding for basic scientific research. We are here as citizens of the physics community, who use these national facilities, hoping for more federal support of the laboratories in which we do our research. It is a tough time to ask for money for basic science, but funding has been flat for so long, if we don't start re-investing into the future of the physical sciences, especially high-energy physics, the ramifications to the future of the field and, eventually, to our society will be severe. I will refrain from such doomsday predictions when I have my meetings tomorrow, I promise. It's just that my whole graduate education has been supported by federal dollars and without that support I would not be a physicist nor would many of my peers. I sometimes wonder if the policy-makers are aware of that direct investment. Maybe by seeing my face, it will help remind them. Once again, I am young and enjoy being naive - leave me be.

Also I love being in D.C. I find it remarkable how you can look outside the taxi window and see the Washington Monument. Very, very cool.

Good Pandas gone Bad.

A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

This thesis thing has made me painfully aware of one very important thing; I really suck at writing. I can tell a good sentence from a bad one, but this has made my problem all the more difficult. Every time I edit a chapter, I am aware that a sentence or paragraph isn't good, however, I am incapable of making it better. Generating a good sentence is not within my reach, at least, not without 20 attempts at it. In my desperation, I am resorting to books on grammar, hoping they will be good enough to improve my character failings. It remains unclear if I am beyond help.

Done. Kinda.

Chapter 4 is done ... well, mostly. Three days late and not exactly in fine form, but at this point I am not really in a position to be picky. Since it seems I am only capable of progress with external sources of pressures, I have decided to try a new motivator: the white board. I am now chronicling my defense date countdown and thesis page count on my white board. Maybe by having a daily reminder for my sloth-like behavior, I will actually succeed in finishing my thesis on time. Only 86 more days to go, which sounded like a lot of time to me. Then I subtracted known vacation days and dwindled it down to 64 days, which now sounds really soon.

It's Wild Out There.

If you live in California, congratulations! You are about to witness one of the greatest seasons for wildflowers, the likes of which haven't been seen in decades. I am only really familiar with some of the flowers around northern California, but even those have been amazing; crops of flowers are blooming where there haven't been any for years. I tend to be pretty blind, so if I'm noticing them, they have to be pretty damn showy.

Since this type of season doesn't come around very often (once in a lifetime maybe?), I thought I would try and make a couple pilgrimages around California to really see the splendor. Should time allow, I am going to try and visit Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve and the Anza-Borrego Desert. If you live anywhere near these parks, go next weekend, you have no excuses. If I'm willing to put my thesis on hold, what possible reason could you have?

Here are a couple of my favorites that I have seen this season. The one on the left is a Shooting Star, the first to get me interested in wildflowers, so I will always have a soft spot for it. While the one on the right is a Purple Mouse Ears, a very difficult flower to find, let alone see. It didn't even make it into my wildflower guide. It is only the size of my pinkie nail, but for something so small it has an awful lot of character.

Knocking Knees

Apparently, public speaking is the number one fear of American adults. As a squeamish flier, I thought flight must be number one, but it seems my emotional baggage is not as common as I thought. I am beginning to feel like the odd-man out, since public speaking isn't really one of my hang-ups. I still get the butterflies, but I have gotten over the squeaky voice and shaky hands. As a physicist, you really have no choice but to learn how to speak in front of crowds. Whether it's in front of a classroom or a room of your peers, you better start talking and, at the very least, not suck. Now that I am toward the end of my graduate career, I have enough lectures, classes and tours under my belt, that public speaking just isn't something I worry about. In the interest of full disclosure, I haven't always been so comfortable. The first class I taught had an unseemly amount of cussing. I did not know this previously, but it seems whenever I am really nervous I tend to curse like a sailor. I am still working on fixing this. Then to make it through my first plenary talk, I downed a shot of tequila at 9 in the morning to calm my nerves. Scoff if you will, but it worked. Thankfully, tequila is now solely reserved for celebration rather than a calming elixir.

This all brings me to yesterday's activity: I attended the final speeches for a public speaking class. A good friend of mine from college is now at the Stanford Business School and she's taking a class on public speaking, which is given through Stanford's Engineering Dept., but it seems a wide variety students from around Stanford take the class. Everyone in the class is required to bring two guests to the final class to act as an audience and comment on each of the speeches and I was one of the guests. Let's just say, I am very grateful for my crash-course lesson on public-speaking. To sit through the final speeches - so many ums and ahs, awkward gestures and nervous stuttering - it was borderline painful. Although they weren't all lost causes, some were actually quite good. I am just very happy to have moved past that point in my public speaking, especially since I don't have the stomach anymore for tequila before noon.

Car Talk

So I was driving into work today and I saw this bumper sticker on the car in front of me. This is the second car this week I've seen that has claimed their border collie is smarter than my honor student. (FYI: A border collie is a type of dog, for those of you who don't keep up with these sorts of things.) I find it fascinating and slightly bizarre the dialogue that takes place between people's cars. First all the "My child is an honor student at [insert school name]" start showing up. Then slowly people start to advertise, "My kid can beat up your honor student" and now "My dog is smarter than your honor student." I am beginning to wonder what the next step will be -- if the Truth v. Darwin debate is any indicator, it won't be the last of the conversation.

The evolution of Truth v. Darwin "discussion" (pun intended, so sue me):

And Finally ...

Filler.

So I am valiantly trying to complete Chapter 4, consequently, writing something ain't really gonna happen. Instead: Pretty Pictures!! C'mon who doesn't like pretty pictures? My experiment takes place in the Final Focus Test Beam (FFTB) Facility, which is at the end of the 2-mile-long linear accelerator at SLAC.

Here is an overview picture of SLAC and all its beamlines:

And now, just 'cause it's cool, here are some shots of the beam line from above and from the side. The beamline is, in fact, linear, but the picture is several separate shots stitched together so it looks a little warped. Also the picture is taken on the northside of the beamline, so the beam enters from the right and exits out the left side of the picture.

Lofty Goals.

I'm putting it out there: I will complete Chapter 4 by the end of this week. I figure since self-motivation isn't really working, maybe shame will. So I am vowing publicly (this is about as public of a forum that I am going to get), I will finish a chapter this week come hell or high water. It might be crappy, but, damn it, it will be done.

And really, how many times can you say "Figure XX illustrates" or "Figure XX shows" without becoming painfully repetitive? I am hoping that it is a number greater than 15.

Designer Physics

I woke up at 6:30am this morning. Not by choice, I assure you and I can't even begin to understand how people with real jobs manage to do it daily. But I got up despite all inclination not to and I was quite pleased with myself. The reason for waking at such an ungodly hour was to attend a workshop at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, which is located about an hour northeast of SLAC. The commute can be even longer when traffic is working against you, which seems to be often in the bay area. The workshop was to discuss a FEL (free-electron laser), which is to be built at a laboratory in Trieste, Italy, called Fermi@Elettra.

It was a totally cool workshop. The photo above was me trying to be inconspicuous at the workshop by turning off the flash; you can't see crap but I thought it turned out okay, in a trippy sort of way. The workshop consisted of a group of about 30 people, who were told a few things: this is the land space we have, these are the accelerating structures we have and these are the wavelengths we want. We have the funding to build an FEL, so go design something that is reasonable. Determine the machine parameters, nail down the design, decide what diagnostics you want and where to put them and then we'll talk to the user community and make sure it works for them. All of this is to be done and ready for operation in something like 3.5 years. Crazy. It's really strange for me to witness this stage of a project. My exposure usually has been in the commissioning stage (it is already built but it needs to work in the laboratory) or, in the case of my experiment, a project that has past the commissioning stage into the lots-of-awesome-science stage. So it was a fun to hear arguing for one design or another or how to fit as many diagnostics as possible into tiny spaces (you can never have enough real estate in accelerator projects for what you want). Worth waking my sorry ass at 6:30 in the morning, but it also meant I came back home for a nap. Leave me alone, I'm still a student.

Atonement

To compensate for my lack of discipline, I have suffered. I actually consumed 4 boxes of Thin Mints in 1 week - I believe it might be enough calories to feed a small village, but no matter. I have paid for my gluttony by spending the weekend hiking and trail running. Now my body is pissed and everything hurts. I'm not sure if I have learned my lesson, but I am avoiding Girl Scouts until cookie season is over, just in case.

It was a bit muddy and I landed in a puddle:

It is never comforting to begin a solo hike with this warning sign. Being from the city even deer scare me, so you can imagine what the possibility of mountain lions means to me:

The weather on top of Windy Hill was amazing. Even the kites were out. I liked the fish against the blue sky, it looks like he's swimming:

Join the Club.

I am now an official member of APS (the American Physical Society). I avoided joining for years, but when I found out the first year of membership as a graduate student was free, I said what the hell. They also send you Physics Today as part of your membership package. So I am feeling pretty geeky, a bit like I'm a card-carrying member of the physics community. Also strangely enjoying it, as if now I have a card which assures people that I am, in fact, a physicist. But to be honest, I'm not sure if you actually have to be a physicist to join APS. Oh well, no one I show the card needs to know that detail. I am not totally understanding of why or what benefits come from joining these professional groups/guilds as physicists (other than subscriptions to Physics Today), but it seems to be the thing to do. So being the follower that I am, I joined. Why break with tradition? Admit it, you're jealous.

Motivated ... Not Really

Lately, I've been a little distracted. I'm just not feeling the inspiration to get my s**t together and finish the next chapter. I think I got lulled into some false sense of accomplishment earlier this week, which means there's been a lot quality web-surfing going on. Since I got my credit card bill this week and saw how bad it was means I am no longer allowed to do my usual "virtual" window-shopping (as it often results in actual shopping). So now I've been grazing greener pastures, which don't involve credit cards. In the process, I discovered a couple of really great columns. My present favorite is Slate's Ad Report Card - a must is the latest column on the Overstock.com ad. I know, I know ... it prompted me to then scan the overstock.com website, but for the first time in a long time, I actually exhibited restraint. The unfortunate clothing temptation aside, any column which deconstructs cheesy ads wins huge brownie points in my book. Also there is the recent discovery of all the Calvin and Hobbes cartoons online, although it seems to be of questionably legal origins. Disclaimer: Even glancing at the website will result in many hours lost. Yeah, I really need to pull myself together. June is really not that far away.

It's a Date

It is official I have a defense date. The big day: June 8th. Now, I just gotta finish up that thesis thing. Ehh.

Always the Critic

So we are working on a paper to show our latest experimental results. By we, I mean a designated primary author actually writes the paper, while the rest of just take credit for the results. When the primary author finishes a first draft, he sends it to the co-authors, who then comment and edit as they see fit. Mark, our first author, sent out a draft late last week and I added my comments this week and sent it back to him. After months of thesis writing, it is really nice to be on the other side of things. It is so much easier to write "awkward" or "word choice," without actually having to come up with a way to fix it - that's Mark's problem now. Hah!

I'll admit I've got a little schadenfreude going on with editing text, but I am totally gun-shy about commenting on figures. I have concluded in writing my thesis, about 25% of my effort is on the text whereas I devote 75% to the figures. I am an aesthetic militant for proper presentation of data and hold myself to high standards. But I am unsure if this 25/75 relationship reflects poorly on my ability to write, which is reasonable enough, or if this is a trend experienced by others. Either way, I realize I might be a little overzealous with my figures, so I feel bad commenting on other people's figures for fear that I might commit them to hours worth of extra work. I'm not that mean.

Not-So-Thin for you Mints.

It's that time of year again. Girl scout cookies are here. Now is your chance to run out and buy some tasty cookies and in the process help the Girl Scouts transform girls into accomplished young women. Whatever. Who are we kidding? Does anyone really buy Girl Scout cookies on principle? I am all for accomplished young women, but I don't eat Thin Mints for a cause. I buy them solely because I believe they are the ambrosia of the gods. The fact that they only come around once a year makes them that much more coveted. I am trying so hard to make my four boxes last longer than 2 weeks. It's looking grim. I got them on Friday and I am already two boxes down. I am disgusting and I better run many, many miles this weekend as penance.

Brhiju (aka Old People Activities)

Last night was bridge night. This morning is hung-over morning. Not feeling so bad, just very aware that I should have said no to the last cocktail. I have only been playing bridge for about 6 months, but I am a total convert to the game. I still haven't bothered to learn how to score, so I'm told by my partner, who does keep score, that we only did pretty well last night. The hard part about bridge (for me, at least) is that it really helps to properly count how many of each suit has been played and I absolutely suck at keeping track of such things. To compound my problem, whenever we play there is always copious amounts of alcohol, so truthfully by hour three I'm just winging it. But it seems to have worked out for us:

Thank you, Mr. Summers?

So yet again, there is another discussion of women in science in the New York Times (Trust me, I have at least been reading other newspapers lately even though I haven't been referencing them). The latest in the never-ending series of articles discussing women's scientific abilities is titled "Scientists Are Made, Not Born."

So after my initial criticism of Mr. Summers, I have something new to say. Thank you. For the first time in a decade, women in science has garnered national attention. For those of you unaware, in the mid-'90s, MIT came out with an internal report on some of the systematic discrimination experienced by their female professors. When the results were made public, it inspired a number of debates, very similar to what we are seeing now. Actually, I talked with one female scientist recently who wanted to send Mr. Summers a bouquet of roses, despite the fact she thought he was a horse's ass. So perhaps Summers's "provocative" comments have been more beneficial than detrimental? At the very least, the topic is being discussed (over and over and over again).