west of the moon

friday housecleaning.

Closing tabs, as they say.

• I've seen a lot of people linking to this article from National Defense Weekly, about SIGMA, a group of science fiction writers who are offering their services to the US government in an advisory capacity.  News of this group has been around for a while--the idea being, presumably, that people who spend their whole professional lives thinking about the future might actually have ideas about it--but this is the first report I've seen of the group in action.  Most of the discussion of this article has focused on Larry Niven's ideas about how hospitals can cut costs (spread rumors that will scare Latinos away from using them, on the theory that they're all illegal immigrants who don't pay their bills), but you've all missed the best part.  Namely:

"The 45-minute panel discussion quickly deteriorated as federal, local and state homeland security officials, and at least one congressional aid, attempted to ask questions, which were largely ignored.   Instead the writers used their time to pontificate on a variety of tangentially related topics, including their past roles advising the government, predictions in their stories that have come to pass, the demise of the paperback book market, and low-cost launch into space."

No offense to either SIGMA or DHS, but seriously, this was the least surprising outcome EVER. 

• Another take on the singularity.
• Elle describes a few steps on the path that led her to become a historian.
• Incredible trainwreck of a First Person column.  I believe in being kind to First Person columnists, for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that being on the job market will drive a lot of people crazy.  (For a less calm but highly realistic depiction of what happens inside the brains of some academics on the job market, there's also the Philosophy Job Market Blog.)  And in this case, it does look like the writer has at least some self-awareness about what a trainwreck she is.  But still.  This woman's story is right at the intersection where weak graduate advising meets unrealistic expectations meets a baffling lack of common sense.
• Hugo nominations have been announced!  It looks like a good list, in that it has a lot of fiction that I read and loved.  Hooray Ted!  Hooray David!  Hooray Mary (for the not-a-Hugo, sure, but hooray nonetheless)!

playing the numbers.

Within the community of people who make their living paying attention to science--science writers, historians of science, science ethics and policy experts, among others--there are a few recurring concerns.  One is the lack of scientific literacy in the general public, which is usually seen as being related to a "soundbite culture".  Popular media sources need to distill everything down to small, simple, quotable summaries, but the work of science rarely produces small, simple results.

For most people, the most familiar examples of this come from health and medicine reporting, which often makes health science look contradictory and arbitrary: being overweight increases your chance of getting health problems, except when it makes you more likely to survive certain diseases, and losing weight is good for your health, unless you gain in back, because yo-yo-ing is bad for your health, and losing weight is futile because weight is genetically determined, except that people tend to lose weight when their friends do.  You should always wear sunscreen, because even small amounts of sun exposure increase your risk for cancer, but not getting enough sun exposure means you're short on Vitamin D, which boosts your immune system.  Red wine reduces your chance of heart disease, but drinking alcohol increases it.  In all of these cases, the apparent contradictions come from the fact that the basic statements are huge oversimplifications of the research in question, sometimes to the point where the statement no longer accurately reflects even a part of what the research was about.

Part of basic scientific literacy is learning to unpack these statements, learning which questions to ask in order to put everything in the right context.  When you're looking at a medical diagnosis, for instance, and someone says, "patients with this condition have a forty percent survival rate."  What does that mean?  What's the timeline?  "Forty percent survival rate" means that forty percent of patients are still alive at some set time after diagnosis--three years, or five years, or ten years.  If the timeframe is large enough, then the percentage may not take into account recent changes in treatment options.  It can also be hard to tease out information about how early (or late) patients were diagnosed.  Generally speaking, medical treatments are more effective in the early stages of an illness, but do the survival rate numbers take that into account? 

If you spend a lot of your time dealing with science and medicine, either from the inside or the outside, this kind of thinking becomes second nature.  But it can fly away just when you need it most.  A few years ago, someone very close to me was diagnosed with cancer.  When I first found out, I spent hours researching online, trying to get a handle on the situation.  I found websites that explained treatments and prognosis in detail, that avoided all of the sound-bite pitfalls I described above, and I didn't want them.  I was reading things like "patients diagnosed while in Stage 2, who enter treatment X immediately, have an eighty-five percent likelihood of still being alive seven years later, and the advent of medication Y has decreased the chance of remission after two years," and I didn't care--the voice in my head was saying, just tell me if it's going to be okay.  I kept thinking, I don't want all of this information, I just want the answer.  Within a day or two, I was able to appreciate and process all of the detailed information, but right in that moment I finally understood the appeal of the scientific soundbite.

All of this has been on my mind again this week, watching some of my closest friends manage a medical crisis with their infant son.  They're lucky enough to have doctors who will explain everything to them, patiently and thoroughly and in detail, and they're being flooded with information, and they're doing a great job of processing all of it.  From where I'm standing, half a step back, I'm comforted by having access to so much information, most of the time.  Every once in a while, though, all the statistics and probabilities fade into white noise, and the sound of all those numbers turns into that same small voice: just tell me if he's going to be okay.   

bibliophile.

I have just been informed that the Bay Area is either having or about to have a Massive Winter Rainstorm of Epic Proportions.  (I can hear it raining outside, so we may already be in the midst of it, but it doesn't sound like it's raining all that hard yet?  I don't know.)  I don't mean to diminish the importance of the Massive Winter Rainstorm, if only because I live in a part of the country where people build their houses on the sides of steep hills, and bad rainstorms can wash those houses right off.  In my life, though, the rain mostly only means that the mail in my mailbox gets wet and I have to juggle my umbrella and my coffee when I walk to my campus office. 

I know that we're a few days into 2008, but I have one last 2007 wrap-up to do, and that's a book list.  2007 was, among other things, the year that I started reading again.  I've always been a compulsive reader, but I got so worn down at the end of the dissertation process that I wasn't able to process anything more complicated than trashy romance novels and well-worn half-memorized favorites.  I stopped reading new books entirely, it seemed like, and that felt wrong.  About a year and a half ago, I emailed a lot of my friends and asked them for reading suggestions, old books, new books, fiction, nonfiction, genre, literary, whatever.  Tell me the names of some books you like, and I'll try to read them, I said. 

And that's what I've been doing.  I've been reading a lot of books that I hadn't read before, and it's such a good thing for me.  I haven't liked all of them, but I've liked most of them, and I've loved a few.  I tried to reconstruct the list of books I've read in the last year or so, and it's hard, because I don't really keep lists or records.  The list that follows is a reconstruction based on a few sketchy documentary sources and a quick scan of the bookshelves.  (I've gotten most of these from either BookMooch or the library, so it's been a pretty cost-effective reading surge.)  Almost every book on this list I've meant to blog about, even just a brief reaction, and kept not getting around to.  I may still try and do that, at least brief reactions, but for now I'm just going to list them.  If anyone's particularly curious about what I thought of any of these, though, let me know, and I'll try to get to those first.

• Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai.
• Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next books. (I may not have read all of them, but I think I got most of them.)
• David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas.
• David Mitchell, Black Swan Green.
• Robertson Davies, Rebel Angels and What's Bred in the Bone.  (still trying to track down a copy of The Lyre of Orpheus, the third book in the trilogy.)
• John McPhee, Annals of the Former World.  I don't think I've actually finished this yet, though.  It's just so hard to carry around.
• John McPhee Coming Into the Country. 
• Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild.  Particularly interesting read as a set with Coming Into the Country.
• Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.
• Julie Phillips's Tiptree biography.
• Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep.
• Kate Chopin, "Pale Horse Pale Rider" and "The Awakening"
• Mary McCarthy, The Group.
• Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
• Mary Stewart, The Crystal Cave and a few of the sequels
• Joan Vinge, Snow Queen (and World's End, and Summer Queen, which I haven't finished yet)
• Naomi Novik's Temeraire books.
• All of Kate Wilhelm's Barbara Holloway books (except I think the most recent one, which I haven't found a copy of yet)
• Michael Chabon, Summerland.
• Walter Mosely, Devil in a Blue Dress
• Bill Buford, Heat
• Janet Kagan, Uhura's Song
• Pat Frank, Alas, Babylon
• Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors and Dry, A Memoir
• James Halperin, The First Immortal
• Stephen Carter, The Emperor of Ocean Park
• Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
• David Halberstam, The Teammates
• Ben Mezrich, Bringing Down the House
• Leon Lederman, The God Particle
• Allegra Goodman, Intuition
• Jane Smiley, Duplicate Keys
• Alexandra Ripley, On Leaving Charleston
• Barbara Taylor Bradford, A Woman of Substance
• Willo Davis Roberts, The Girl with the Silver Eyes
• Caleb Carr, The Alienist
• Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist
• Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
• Garth Nix's Abhorsen trilogy
• Kate Wilhelm, Juniper Time
• Charles Stross, The Clan Corporate
• David Halberstam, The Summer of '49
• J.D.Robb, Innocent in Death
• Tess Gerristen, Bloodstream
• Nora Roberts, Angel's Fall
• John Scalzi, Old Man's War
• John Scalzi, The Ghost Brigades
• Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy

I may have forgotten a couple, but I did resist the urge to not list the books that I think will make me look less smart.  There's no shame in reading mass-market thrillers and romance novels.  Also, some of these are books I've read  before, but long enough ago that I didn't really remember them that well.

And that's 2007 in books.

Scene from a family holiday.

The scene: it's Thanksgiving, I'm in New Jersey with my family, and it's exactly what I wanted the day to be.  Including all the strange interludes. 

Mid-afternoon, we're still a couple of hours away from turkey, but the appetizer courses are in full swing.  The uncles are watching television in the living room, and a few of my cousins are in the basement playing video games.  I'm in the kitchen with the aunts and the rest of the cousins, eating shrimp cocktail and clam dip and our other traditional pre-dinner snacking foods.  Cousin Lo is trying to figure out which of the family's traditional appetizers she can make for a potluck with her friends from work.  I wonder if this is some kind of retro thing--I love eating this stuff, but I've never been able to convince myself that my friends will also want to eat clam dip or asparagus rolls or what-have-you.  Lo seems to think it'll be a hit, though, with her fashion-industry friends. 

Talking through the family recipes, and the inevitable vows of secrecy that accompany the sharing of family recipes, we somehow end up, as we always do, in family stories.  The collective chain of thought starts with the clam dip but ends up with my mother, age four, the oldest of the siblings, being sent off to kindergarten and having to ride the public bus.  The township schools had school buses, but didn't take four-year-olds; the Catholic school took four-year-olds, but had no buses. 

"I couldn't even reach the cord!  You know, to ask for a stop."  We've heard this before, a hundred times, but we all like to hear the stories again, and everyone's already laughing, knowing where this goes.  "I had to stand on the seat to reach the string!  And my legs were too short to even get on the bus without help, the bus driver, every day he had to stand up and hold my hand and pull me up, and he was a big man!  It was hard for him to stand up, even, but he helped me.  But I still had to stand on that seat to pull that string, and sometimes I couldn't do it.  I would miss my stop, and then I had to walk all the way back up that hill to the school."  She's laughing too, but also looks outraged at the memory of her four-year-old self on the public bus. 

Cousin Noelle looks a little outraged too.  "Why did Grandma let you do that?"  When my friends and I were in elementary school, our parents worried about our safety enough that we weren't ever supposed to be alone, and had to ride our bikes or walk to school in groups.  Noelle is ten years younger than I am, and parental nervousness ramped up even more in those ten years, to the point where they never walked or rode their bikes at all, but got driven everywhere by their parents.

Her mother explains to her that things were different when they were growing up, people didn't worry like they do now.  "It wasn't like it is now," she says.

"It was always like that," my mother says.  "We just didn't know." 

maybe just a little bit crazy.

I've been feeling a little mopey the last week or so.  At first I thought it was just garden-variety mid-semester tired, and then I thought it had to do with fighting off another cold.  (There seem to be a few different types of sick going around in the department--all up and down the hallway, office doors are sprouting "office hours cancelled" signs.)  As Matt and I geared up the planning for our Thanksgiving dinner, though, I started to think it might be something else.

I think I've mentioned this before, that I come from a large and close-knit family.  Family holidays in particular are major undertakings, long rambling days with a house full of people and more food than you can really keep track of.  One of the hardest things about living in California is being three thousand miles away from the big family holidays--I've made it back for Christmas once or twice, but haven't had Thanksgiving with the family since I moved out here.  We used to do an expat grad-student Thanksgiving here, a big group of us, but over the last few years everyone's started to move away, and the last few years Matt and I have been on our own.  It's fun, actually--we cook something fancy, make an all-day production out of it, or else we go out somewhere nice.  That was the plan for this year, too, and I was enjoying all the menu-planning and food shopping, but, dunno.  I've also been a little melancholy, wishing we could have a busy, noisy, bustling day. 

And now it looks like we will.

It's been kind of a crazy confluence of circumstances.  I'm not teaching on Wednesday--it's not technically a university holiday, but only three students came to lecture the day before Thanksgiving last year.  I decided months ago to not hold class that day.  Then, at more or less the last minute, Matt's work schedule got rearranged, giving him three days off right around the holiday.  The first time one of us suggested going back east for Thanksgiving, it was half-joking, but then it sounded more serious, and by the time we started checking airfares, we were just thinking that it would demonstrate to us how ridiculous the idea was.  Instead, we found flights at a good price and a good schedule--I'm still not sure how that happened.  I didn't think it was possible to buy airplane tickets one day in advance and not have to mortgage your house to afford it.  What it all comes down to, though, is that tomorrow morning I'll be on a plane heading east, and the day after I'll be in the middle of my first family Thanksgiving since 1999. 

housekeeping.

The semester has started well, if busily.  More posting in the next few days, maybe, but in the meantime, some links I want to get out there before my computer loses all of these lovely open browser windows I've mentally tagged "of possible use in weblog".  Mostly academic-related, although not entirely.

• New Kid on the Hallway has had a series of great and thought-provoking posts recently, but the ones I'd specifically tagged for notice is this one, about the  "intro to history" class and what should be included in it, and this one, on envy and houses. 
• Similarly, Sterling Fluhart's been on a roll lately, of the kind that can be very depressing to history graduate students (or recent history doctorates).  There's a round-up of the disheartening statistics in this post, but he's also been posting some intelligent analysis of actual job of the history professor and the changing nature of graduate research topics, and that's just in the last week or so.
• The most recent History Carnival, packed full of great material, which I haven't really had time to read yet.
• Free downloads of Zork. 
• Over at Body Impolitic, Debbie posted something months ago that I've been running through in my head ever since.  The context was the apparent paradox of women at WisCon, a feminist event, having so much fun getting super-girly dressed up.  (At the dessert salon, when I commented that I hadn't worn high heels since the previous year's dessert salon, there was a little chorus of "me too!" from all around me.)  Debbie's take on the situation was that in that explicitly feminist space, we all feel safe in the knowledge that the highly gendered behavior of super-girly dress-up is a performative act.   My point in bringing it up now is that I was reminded of it again, with her recent description of some weddings she'd attended, and her analysis of the performative (and gender) aspects of weddings as social rituals.

I think that's it for now.

long time gone.

How does it end up being so long between postings?  I don't mean it to be.  Actually, in this case I have a few very good reasons.  One big reason is that I've been working a lot--I've been making great productive use of my unscheduled no-teaching-required time this summer.   All of the work I've been doing is based around the computer, though, so when I have some downtime, I haven't been particularly motivated to spend it blogging.  I've been spending time with friends, both local and visiting from out of town, and I've been reading a lot, and working on some minor projects around the house, and trying to spend some time outdoors whenever possible.  There may even have been a few baseball games in there.  I have every good intention to make this a more active site (goodness knows I have enough to say, particularly as I ramp up for my second year of teaching) but I'm not sure I can, in good conscience, bump it any higher up the priorities list.

I'll admit, also, that part of the posting drought has been caused by the Strange Horizons fund drive.  I keep meaning to publicize it, and to encourage everyone to go look at our lovely gifts and prizes, and to give us money.  Especially since I've been relentlessly "encouraging" (read: badgering) our staff, contributors, and miscellaneous friends to help us promote the drive, I really should have been doing it myself.   But the fund drive hasn't been going all that well.  I know, I know, it's a sad and vicious circle--if I want people to donate money, I should be stepping up to do promotional work, but as day after day went by with only this tiny trickle of incoming donations, it's been increasingly difficult to work up the energy and enthusiasm to do publicity.  In just the last two days, though, something's happened, and the money's been coming in at quite a good clip.  (I don't have the itemized breakdown at hand, but I'd estimate that we received more donations in the last 48 hours than we did in the entire week previous.)  Things are looking up at last.

In the next few days, I promise to post on the following topics: the Strange Horizons fund drive, my reaction to the most recent Digital Campus podcast, and something about at least one of the courses I'm teaching next year.  (Not necessarily in that order.)

tiny roundup.

Oh, the horror of the link-dump post, but here, a few things I've been meaning to point y'all towards:

• The Accidental Scientist.  A weblog affiliated with the Exploratorium (sometimes known as "the world's best science museum"), featuring smart and thoughtful science writing.  Not updated often, but always interesting.
• One of those anonymous academic weblogs: Female Science Professor.   I keep wanting to link to individual horror stories she tells about her experiences (recent examples include the time she found out someone had installed webcam surveillance in her laboratory and the time someone insisted that her work had all been done by a man), but there's more here than the horror stories.  The weblog also gives you a peek inside the world of the academic research scientist, if you find that kind of thing interesting.
• Kendra Binney's spooky and gorgeous dark-fairy-tale art is available, at affordable prices, on Etsy.  Lovely, lovely stuff. 
• This one is from all the way back in April, but still, the picture from Stephen Hawking's excursion into weightlessness makes me really happy.
• Two podcasts that I'm particularly enjoying these days:  Science Talk from Scientific American (plus its little sibling, 60-Second Science) for smart talk about current scientific developments, and Digital Campus for discussions about how technology is affecting teaching.  (I feel like a lot of the discussion of technology and teaching just circles around a few basic themes: PowerPoint is the devil, Wikipedia is the devil, everyone should have course websites.  This podcast is one of the only places where I've seen the conversation really being moved forward in a meaningful or useful way.)
• If you're not listening to RadioLab, you really should be.   I think it might be one of the best radio shows ever.

I think that's it for now.

meramec caverns.

For all that I praised the lovely countryside on my drive from St. Louis to Rolla, that wasn't actually what triggered the memory of having been through that way before.  That honor belongs to Meramec Caverns, heavily advertised all along the interstate for miles in each direction.   The first time I drove past all of these signs, four or five years ago, I ended up with the first of a few pages of notes towards a possible research project on roadside attractions and their role in science education.  (Timothy Burke wrote something last year about using a draft syllabus as a way of working through a complicated issue--I do a lot of that, but I also channel a lot of that energy into these notes towards future projects.)  The idea isn't that roadside attractions are viewing (or marketing) themselves as venues for science education, but rather that there might be something interesting in the ways in which they implicitly teach about science.  I don't know that there -is- anything interesting there, I just think that there -might- be.

So that was one of the motivations for my trip to Meramec Caverns last week.  (I'm not even sure it was a primary motivation--I found myself with the better part of a day free, in central Missouri, and while I could have spent it sequestered in my hotel room, that seemed like a waste.  Why not go touristing?) 

The whole cave complex at Meramec runs to about twenty-three miles, but the tour, which lasts an hour and a half, only covers about a mile and a half.  It's a fairly stage-managed experience; they've wired the caves for electricity (how?  I meant to ask, and never had a chance) and some of the major stops on the tour have particularly dramatic lighting.  The tour concludes at a massive drapery formation, upon which is projected a flashing multi-colored light show to patriotic musical accompaniment.  The music is, we're told, historical as well as patriotic; one of the songs is a recording of Kate Smith singing "God Bless America", and according to our tour guide, she performed that song right in that very room, with the Stage Curtain limestone as a backdrop and the Missouri State Legislature as her audience.  There's also a little production moment at an anvil-shaped formation called Loot Rock, where (the story goes) artifacts belonging to the James Gang were found, lending support to the idea that Jesse and Frank James used Meramec Caverns as a hideout for many years.

Someone I talked to later in the trip, a Rolla local, told me that he'd heard that other caves in the area were actually more impressive, in terms of limestone formations and stuff.  Onondaga Cavern was the name that came up a lot.  I can easily imagine that a less tourist-friendly and less theatrically-produced cave experience might be more impressive, but it's not as though Meramec was -all- flashing lights and music shows.  Enough of the tour is in near-darkness and low-hanging caves that you can almost feel like you're in a more wild environment.  All in all, though, Meramec Caverns is a tourist experience, not a hiking or spelunking experience.  (Which is, it should be noted, exactly what I was looking for.) 

My tourist experience at Meramec Caverns was entirely satisfying--some local legend, some really cool cave formations, a nice way to spend the afternoon.  (Excellent peppermint ice cream in the snack bar, too.)  The science-studies angle was useful as well, although only in small ways.  The thing I was most curious about, at this location, was how they presented the question of the age of the earth.  The young-earth/old-earth controversy is (and has been from the beginning) at the heart of debates about evolution, and it's recently surfaced as a major factor in other disputes, such as the one over global climate change.  As a result, your beliefs about the age of the earth act as a signal for your position on other debates.  I wanted to know where Meramec Caverns, a major tourist attraction in the nation's heartland, came down.  As it turns out, my tour guide didn't pull any punches on this--he told us that the drapery formation (home of the patriotic light show) was estimated to be 75 million years old, that the largest stalagmite in the cave has been growing for 33 million years, and that geologists believe the cave complex as a whole to be about 400 million years old.  So that's one datapoint down.  (I do wonder if the other tour guides say the same thing--I mean, I have trouble understanding how one would describe the history of a cavern complex like this one without relying on old-earth numbers, but it's a strange world out there.)

jumble.

The problem is not, really, that I don't have anything to say.  It's more that I have too much to say.  I've got so many things that I want to write about that they're all getting jumbled up with each other when I try to actually sit down and post. 

Such as: the expected "what I've been up to" update.  It's been surprisingly interesting, this "what I've been up to".

Teaching is going extremely well--the students in my research seminar have all picked interesting topics, and they're all making good progress.  They have rough drafts due at the end of next week, and I'm looking forward to seeing what they've come up with.  We've been having regular meetings, and they've had some preliminary assignments due (annotated bibliographies, progress reports, detailed outlines), but the rough draft is another creature entirely.  I expect I'll be spending most of next weekend editing and writing up comments, and then they'll be doing some group workshopping of the drafts.  I've never done that in these seminars before, the peer critique, but I'm told that it can be very useful, and it seemed worth a try.  The lecture course is also going well, as far as I can tell, but the end of the semester seems to be rushing towards us. 

Non-teaching things are going well, too.  Matt and I have done a surprising amount of travel in the last few months, given our relatively restricted budgets.  Las Vegas for a few days in January, Los Angeles for a few days earlier this month, Sonoma for the first half of my spring break.  We went to see the NCAA Sweet Sixteen games in San Jose, which was a lot of fun.  I've been going to the gym again, I've been reading a lot of really great books (and a few "eh" books), and I have tentatively located a replacement for my much-beloved hairstylist (who moved to Florida, leaving me bereft).  Strange Horizons has stories on both the Hugo and Nebula ballots (Ben Rosenbaum's "The House Beyond Your Sky" and Dora Goss's "Pip and the Fairies", respectively), both SH and Twenty Epics have stories being reprinted in most of the major reprint anthologies, and the brand-new Strange Horizons podcast seems to be moderately popular, judging by the number of people who commented on its recent technical difficulties.   

That explains part of the lack of posting, I suppose--the amount of stuff going on, both professional and personal.  It also comes back to the idea of having too many things I want to post about, all the ideas jumbling around and blocking each other from coming out.  Just writing this little update has queued up a lot of them: the role of major sports teams in the college environment, the purpose of the survey course in undergraduate education, the conflicting and competing expectations for undergraduate education in the first place, more detailed accounts of some of the recent travels, thoughts about teaching strategies and student involvement, and discussions of at least four or five of the books I've read recently.  A lot of it is teaching-centered; teaching takes up the bulk of my time and energy these days, by far, and it's most of what's on my mind.  That may also go some part of the way towards explaining the lack of posting, though--for where I am in my career, and what I'm doing with my days, I think it's only natural to be a little hesitant about engaging publicly in rough-edged speculation about the educational process.  But there's so much I want to talk about, to have a conversation about.  All I can do is keep trying.