west of the moon

Monday, already.

UC Berkeley.
Originally uploaded by Susan Groppi.

Oh lovely weekend!  Daylight Savings has -finally- left us, and not a moment too soon.  (Several weeks too late for my taste, actually, given how grim the mornings have been.)  And it's gotten chilly, which makes it actually feel like autumn.  (We've even had the first fog of the season!  It serves the same symbolic role as first snow, but is less cold and more transient.) 

Posting's been slow because work's been busy.  Good busy, though--in my lecture course, we've just completed the section on science in classical and medieval India, and we start with Islamic science on Wednesday.  From here to the end of the semester, it's a more direct acceleration to modern science, which should be interesting.  We're also at a transition point in the seminar; up to this point, we've been reading historical texts, books that analyze different applications and interpretations of evolutionary theory in a historical context.  For the next few weeks, the course readings are all contemporary applications or interpretations of evolutionary theory, and the students are the ones doing the historical analysis.  I started us off with a book that I personally find extremely frustrating (Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson's Demonic Males), and based on the reading response papers, it looks like we're going to have a great discussion.

Twenty Epics on Escape Pod.

The newest installment of Escape Pod features Stephen Eley's story The Dinner Game, from Twenty Epics.  ( Lulu | Amazon | BN )  (Also currently available at Borderlands Books in San Francisco and the Barnes and Noble in downtown Berkeley, in limited quantity.)   It's read by Maia Whittaker, who has a beautiful voice, and Stephen does a nice intro to the anthology at the beginning of the episode.   

(Some reviews have been starting to come in, including a very thoughtful one by Rose Fox at Strange Horizons, and a great review by Rich Horton in Locus.  If you haven't bought your copy yet, it's never too late.  And don't forget, fiction anthologies with interesting stories and beautiful covers are _always_ appropriate Christmas presents for your friends and family!)

bits and pieces.

Partway through composing a couple of longer and more substantive posts, but in the meantime, I've been accumulating odds and ends, things I meant to draw some attention to.  On with the eclecticism!  (And hello, people coming from the History News Network!  Nice to have you visiting.) 

Last year, when A. was in town, we spent an afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art.  The real highlight of the trip was the upstairs gallery, which had two completely remarkable exhibits.  One was a hypnotic and gorgeous animation piece by a South African artist whose name I've since forgotten, and the other was an installation by Wangechi Mutu.  The installation (which I think had some paintings accompanying it) was eerie and disturbing and really beautiful.  (Similar in some ways to the third-from-the-left link on that page, with dripping bottles and stains on the walls, but there was more to it.)

Tom Burnett, a graduate student in history of science here at Berkeley, is spending most of this semester in Nicaragua working with a non-profit educational group.  He's started a blog about his experiences in Nicaragua. 

Everyone knows about the Astronomy Picture of the Day, right?  Just checking.

Yeah, sure, it's part of a viral marketing campaign for Dove.  That doesn't make this video about the transformation of a model during a photo shoot any less freakish.

Speaking of freakish: how cute is this?  Too cute!

I've been thinking a lot about this post from White Bear on teaching and observation, and performance and connecting with students, especially as the semester progresses. 

The semester does progress, as semesters are wont to do.  My students continue to be wonderful and delightful.  In the survey course, we've finished the history of science in China--on Friday, we covered natural philosophy; on Monday it was medicine and alchemy, which led us into yesterday's discussion of the four major technological innovations from dynastic China (paper, printing, gunpowder, and the compass), since the discovery of gunpowder initially came out of work in alchemy.  China's done, though, and we're moving on to India.  Looking at my reference texts for Indian science, I can't help but notice that most of them have yellow bindings.  It's probably a coincidence, but it's a nice cheerful visual effect.

Pictures of plants.

Autumn in Berkeley.
Originally uploaded by Susan Groppi.

Sometime in college, probably freshman year, my friend Dan asked me to take a walk with him.  We'd just had a heavy snowfall, and Dan wanted to go down by the river to take some photographs.  As we picked our way over the icy sidewalks, Dan explained that he thought the ice in the river might make for interesting pictures, but that he wasn't going to take any shots of ice-covered branches.  Ice-covered tree branches were one of the categories of things he'd sworn never to photograph.  I forget exactly what the other categories were (puppies, maybe?) but they all had something in common: Dan didn't want to waste time and energy taking pictures of over-photographed faux-artsy things.  Ice-covered branches were too easy.

It's not that I disagree with this philosophy, it's just that I can't help myself.  I appear to have a compulsive need to take pictures of plants, trees, and flowers.

the miscellany.

Collected points of (possible) interest:

• It's fund drive month at Strange Horizons!  We haven't been publicizing this as much as we ought to, and I have a large share of the blame for that, but still, fund drive month!  Your donations allow Strange Horizons to continue providing high-quality speculative fiction (and nonfiction! and poetry! and art!) on a weekly basis. Your donations also can bring you attractive bonus gifts.  Go to the site, click on the big rocketship in the sidebar, help us stay in business.
• We really do live in a world of wonders, and I have photographic evidence.  Or, rather, the photograph is the evidence: a satellite image of one of the Mars Rovers.  Not only do we have small robots on the surface of Mars, collecting data and sending it back to us, but we have the ability to take pictures of our small robot friends.  I love living in the future.
• Synergy of points one and two: Strange Horizons has a few new columnists in the lineup, and one of them debuted last week.  Dr. Marshall Perrin, Berkeley astronomer, will be writing about space and science for us.  His first column is all about Mars.
• It continues to be very dark and very cold in the mornings, which may partially explain why I'm so very taken with Maggie Hogarth's coffee doodles.  Some of these mornings, on my way in to campus, I wouldn't be surprised to find a thought-bubble over my own head reading "magic coffee plz." 
• Interesting article from the Guardian about a sociologist of science who is so immersed in a community of physicists that the way he talks about their work is virtually indistinguishable from the way they talk about it, opening up some interesting questions about what it actually means to be knowledgable about a subject. 

There is a season.

My lecture course this semester, the one on the history of premodern science, is divided into six major units.  Each unit deals with a major geographical region, and the first lecture of each unit is a walkthrough of the geography, political history, and agricultural development of that region.  There are a number of reasons for this, but they can all be loosely summed up by saying that I consider those factors to be important in understanding the early development of science.  For one thing, an agricultural society creates a need for calendars (to determine annual seasons and cycles), which leads directly to astronomical observation.  Not only that, but agricultural development is itself a kind of scientific process, it's just not a very flashy one.  (Our working definition for "science" in this class is something on the lines of "systematic and organized attempts to understand and explain the natural world."  In that sense, agriculture is definitely part of our work.)

Today we started the unit on science in China, which meant that lecture today concluded with a discussion of major developments in Chinese agriculture.  It's an interesting thing, pedagogically, making students understand the importance of the ox-drawn seed drill, showing them stylized silkworm ornaments from Shang-era bronzes, explaining that a comprehensive manual for farmers actually can be considered part of the larger story of the history of science.  I find that I'm starting to develop protective feelings towards agriculture, this most un-glamorous foundation for both science and society. 

Go Bears!

Oregon fans.
Originally uploaded by Susan Groppi.

Usually, when I come to campus on weekends to work, everything is very quiet.  This Saturday, it was a zoo.  It was homecoming weekend, so the campus was crowded with alumni, and Sproul Plaza was packed full with a student-run carnival.  (Complete with food!  I went for a mid-afternoon walk and was pleasantly surprised to be able to get a snack as well.)  For additional craziness, it was a home-game football weekend, and the game in question (Cal/Oregon) was being nationally televised. 

I think that the homecoming carnival (hayrides and dunk-tank and ring-tosses and all) created a particularly infectious school spirit.  Or, at least, that's what I'm going to blame it on, because when I walked past a huge group of Oregon fans having a pre-game barbecue, I very nearly started shouting "Go Bears!  Beat the Ducks!"  If you don't know me, you'll have to trust me when I say that this is really out of character.

midterms!

You can tell that it's midterm time.  There are the obvious indicators--more students waiting in the hallways to speak to professors, library study rooms all booked up.  There are other indicators as well.  Walking through campus, I'm seeing a lot more jeans and sweatshirts, not as many stylish (and styled) outfits.  At the start of the semester, everyone's putting a lot of work into their appearance, but once midterms get started?  Not so much. 

On the bus the other day, I overheard two students talking about their semesters.  "My friends back home just think I'm having this great time," the one said.  "Like college is a big party.  And I just say yeah, it's great, say what they want to hear, you know?  One of my best friends, she's a senior, she's applying to schools right now.  I don't want to let her know how awful it is."  The other girl nodded, murmured something I couldn't hear, and the first said "No, I mean, it's not that bad.  I just didn't realize I was going to be working this hard, all the time." 

When I first came to Berkeley for graduate school, lo these many years ago, someone told me that my moods would start to fluctuate around the exam schedule even if I wasn't taking any classes, wasn't involved in teaching.  They told me that you could feel it in the air, in the atmosphere on campus, that things would change around midterms and around finals.  It was true when I was a graduate student, and it's even more true now that I'm a lecturer.  It's not just the study rooms and the sweatshirts.  It's something in the air.