thoughts inspired browsing on amazon

the most wished for item on amazon's wish lists in the health and personal care section is the "Philips HeartStart Home Automated External Defibrillator (AED)." that makes me sad.

but, just to show how fickle i am, i'll also tell you about something that makes me happy. it's the reach access flosser. i've tried other flossing gadgets before, with no luck. i just have to floss the manual way, basically sticking both my hands in my mouth to floss. i have a hard enough time trying to get my mouth to open far enough to eat. but in any case, this thing is fantastic! i read about it on kevin kelly's cool tools list, which subsequently listed a link to a free sample which is still available. i can't recommend this highly enough. basically, it's as firm as a toothbrush, which makes it easy to poke the floss between your teeth. i have a couple of teeth that have crashed together like icebergs, and i can even get in those if i use my upper jaw to push down a tad on the flosser. so add it to your shopping list or fill out the online form for a free one, but do it, especially if you don't floss every day. this will make it easier, without getting spit all over your hands (or is that only me?).

The drawbacks of Club Caltech

Getting into a class can be difficult. Not because there are too many people in it. Not because there are stupid rules about which classes you have to take first. No, people are perfectly confident that you have the capability not to fall on your ass. No, the problem is Finding Where The Class Meets.

The schedule for winter classes listed the Graduate Seminar in Molecular Neuroscience as meeting in 101 Kerkoff at 7pm on Wednesdays. I went to the class meeting. I was a couple (no more) minutes late. There was no one there. The door was locked. Let me also mention that it was in a locked building. No one had left a door open or anything, I just happened to know the the key to my building also opened the back door to Kerkoff.

I went home and sent the professor, who I have met with in the past, an email.

hello david -

i was hoping to attend the first meeting of your grad seminar tonight, but i didn't find anyone at 101 kerkoff. i was a few minutes late; did the class relocate? if it's still possible for me to take the class, could you send me a syllabus?

thank you,
holly

The response, from his assistant:

Holly,

The class is on THursdays at 7 in 151 Braun, there was a mistake on the calendar, you should show up to tonight.

Gina Mancuso

Roberta's thoughts on the matter:

What ever happened to "i'm sorry?"

"you should show up tonight?"

how about "you should get some social skills, imbecile."

Thank you Roberta for representing my id in this story.

Last night I went to the class meeting. The professor knew nothing of the problem; he had been out of town until that morning. He was very apologetic and immediately started thinking about how to reach other people who may have been put off as well. Few people showed up (surprise), so I'm presenting next Thursday. I don't mind that, and I'm looking forward to the quarter.

Thank goodness for the options that come with class privilege

Darlene Jespersen was a highly praised bartender at Harrah's in Reno for almost twenty years, until Harrah's instituted a policy that all women had to wear foundation, concealer, or powder, blush, mascara, and lip color at all times. Darlene demurred, was fired and is now working in retail while the case wends its way through the courts. I'm glad I've got more employment options than that. It makes me furious. The requirement is a legal way to fire butch lesbians. Sure, some straight women choose not to wear makeup too, but they get called lesbians for their trouble. Likewise, a non butch lesbian may also not wear makeup, and get called butch for her trouble. We all might as well come around to support the rights of butch lesbians.

...wearing makeup made her feel sick, degraded, exposed, and violated. Jespersen felt that wearing makeup “forced her to be feminine” and to become “dolled up” like a sexual object, and that wearing makeup actually interfered with her ability to be an effective bartender (which sometimes required her to deal with unruly, intoxicated guests) because it “took away [her] credibility as an individual and as a person.

The legal challenge to the policy is that it places undo burden on women, since maintaining their appearance for work takes more time and money than it does for men. I'm curious what the other people who work at the casino look like. I doubt they are all young "movie-quality" hotties. Does Harrah's think that there are no gay people in the area? Guess what the closest major city is? Gay ground zero, San Francisco.

club caltech

my asthma, which is worse in cold weather, was terrible when i was east. i was using my albuterol inhaler there. it helped, but i noticed that it had expired in 2003. on my dog walk this morning, i walked over to the student health center. leaving mac on his long leash outside the doorway, i walked in far enough to let the coordinator know what i wanted and asked if i could wait outside. she said yes. shortly, mac and i were visited by a nurse who handed me an inhaler, made sure i knew how to use it, and admired the loveliness of bad dog. i am sad that i will be leaving the shelter of student health centers when i graduate from caltech and cross the PhD threshold. i suppose this level of service is a type of concierge medicine. being able to bring the dog and incorporate health care into a dog walk is the mark of a high standard of care for me.

500 year tsunami

I am horrified by the consequences of the tsunamis in the Indian Ocean. The New York Times is reporting 50,000 deaths so far. It seems that some of the smaller islands moved as a result of the event. Another new horror is the unearthing of land mines:

A new danger emerged today: UNICEF said uprooted land mines in Sri Lanka threatened to kill or maim aid workers and survivors. "Mines were ... washed out of known mine fields, so now we don't know where they are," said Ted Chaiban, the Sri Lanka chief of UNICEF.

I'm afraid that we'll be seeing many more unexpected consequences of this disaster.

Yet another reason not to read the LA Times

Recently I've been willing to sound like a member of the so-called "liberal elite" and decry the newspapers published out West. I followed a link to the following article in spite of my reservations because the article mentioned a geographic change resulting from the tsunami in the Indian Ocean. In the second paragraph I found the following hideous sentence. And really, what does "recorded by scientists" mean? In my book, anyone who can record the magnitude of an earthquake is a scientist. Yeesh.

The quake was the largest since a magnitude 9.2 temblor struck Prince William Sound, Alaska, in 1964 and was one of the biggest ever recorded by scientists.

Dolly-cious

Thursday night HC and I went to see Dolly Parton in Orange County. We got dressed up in my finest clothes, like kids playing dress-up.

Dolly was in great form. Apparently she hasn't done this kind of tour in a while. It was all kinds of stuff, old, new, popular, more obscure. I've been reading reviews from around the country about it, and it sounds like she makes changes based on region. In Georgia, she is reported to have said, after singing (John Lennon's) "Imagine", "I don't want to imagine no religion." After playing some enormous number of instruments on "Thank god I'm a country girl," in Orange County she said "Take that, Dixie Chicks." She is reported elsewhere to have continued, "How do you think they liked the election?" It's funny because I think of her as being very plain spoken and straightforward, so I'm a little surprised that she modifies her patter based on her audience. Naive of me, I guess.

The other dissappointment was the pre-recorded singing. I noticed it in the first couple songs, and not much after that. It's so commonplace now that I can't really hold it against her. She's certainly got the pipes; it's not like she's Madonna or something. She's 58. Still, I'd rather hear her sing imperfectly than hear recorded vocals.

Disappointments aside, she was fantastic, and I'm so glad I got to go see her.


dolly

better living through psychopharmacology

i was at ross to buy some clothes for my trip east. when i saw a man trailing a woman through the through the store while watching football on a mini portable tv, i knew it was time to head home and watch the game. i'm watching the broncos-chargers game.

saturday i played scrabble with one old person and 6 young people. the visit was part of a caltech program where students visit the nearby retirement home. it was a lot of fun, but seems a little pointless with so few old folks. but i liked the folk we had; she was fun and interesting. i also got to be the embarrassingly obsessive player, the one who knew that fo isn't a word but xi is. i was playing as a team with my roommate anne, so i managed to keep my competitiveness in check.

in the past week, i've come to the conclusion that my series of down moods have been part of a trend. it's such a hard thing to assess: is it just situational, etc. i've been really unmotivated for a while. i had a hard summer, but i attributed it to the house-buying pressure and taking time away from research to teach. other times i've attributed my foul moods to hormones. i think it's time to take an aggressive pharmacological approach to making some improvements.

Lazyweb request: wristwatch phone ringer/buzzer

I wish I had a device that I could wear as a wristwatch that would have a silent buzzer to alert me when my phone rings. There are buzzing watches for deaf and hard of hearing people. It would solve a couple of problems: 1) even if you put your phone on vibrate, it has to be on the right kind of surface to be silent. Even in my backpack it sometimes makes a racket. 2) If i silence my phone for a particular event, I usually forget to return it to its alerting settings. 3) At every group event, someone has forgets to turn off their cell phone. We all do it. With this device, it wouldn't be necessary to ever have the ringer on. With a wrist buzzing device, i could be alerted silently, without anyone else knowing; i could shut it off easily (if a repeated notification was even necessary); and it could be part of my daily outfit. In my perfect world, I imagine it as a kind of patch that I can attach to the back of any watch.

Philip Morris conducted and hid 800 studies on second hand smoke

this makes me mad too. i must be in a cranky mood.

The Philip Morris tobacco company quietly conducted extensive animal research in the 1980s that documented the toxicity of secondhand smoke while arguing publicly that it was safe, according to an analysis, published online last week by The Lancet, of thousands of industry and court documents. In a related move, the University of Geneva (UG) has raised doubts about more than 3 decades of tobacco-smoke studies authored by a retired UG environmental-medicine professor who coordinated research for Philip Morris. His failure to disclose that he was a "secret employee of the tobacco industry," according to a UG faculty commission, tainted his research...

[The] authors...reported finding more than 800 unpublished studies on secondhand smoke completed between 1981 and 1989 at a Philip Morris facility called the Institut für Industrielle und Biologische Forschung (INBIFO) in Cologne, Germany. In one key 1982 study in rats, INBIFO researchers showed that sidestream smoke, which drifts from lit cigarettes, caused severe damage to the nasal epithelium and abnormal cellular alterations called metaplasia sometimes associated with cancer and was up to four times more toxic than the direct smoke sucked from a cigarette. The data were not published.

The Lancet authors maintain that Philip Morris created INBIFO from the start to learn about the effects of tobacco smoke but concealed the work to reduce liability. For example, the authors say, the company situated the lab in Germany instead of the United States, funded it through a Swiss subsidiary, and told few employees about the tobacco-smoke research. The company contracted with Rylander [the UG prof] to serve as an intermediary between INBIFO and Thomas Osdene, a Philip Morris executive responsible for research and development.

citation:
Dan Ferber. TOBACCO WARS: Research on Secondhand Smoke Questioned. Science, Vol 306, Issue 5700, 1274 , 19 November 2004

sad/angry/annoyed: shooting hunters

I just read about the 5 hunters who were killed and the three who were injured Sunday in Michigan. Whatever the shooter's motivations were, I can't see how anyone could justify the end of the assault weapons ban. Still, the gun the shooter used, an SKS, would not be covered by the assault weapons ban; it was legally available even when the ban was in effect. It has a fixed 10 bullet magazine, and the speed and force of the trajectory can penetrate the soft armor most police wear (cite, pdf). If hunting is a sport, why does one need a gun with a large clip (that can shoot many bullets without manual reloading)? If one needs a large clip, why not also hand grenades?

Bridge over the Middle fork Snoqualmie

Wow do I love bridges. I saw this picture on flickr. I'm thinking about getting a higher resolution camera. Maybe I should learn to take better pictures first. Any reading suggestions?


Bridge over the Middle fork Snoqualmie
Originally uploaded by Abu.

My dreams don't mess around with subtlety

I had a dream last night that some friends and I had pulled off a mountain road through a national forest. I had pulled the horse trailer in a small track that looped back to the road so I wouldn't have to turn the trailer around. We were walking around enjoying the cold and the nature. A bunch of Forest Service trucks started pulling up. There were many of them, and they blocked the road so we couldn't get out, so we hung around to see what they were up to. There was a huge electrical power line running nearby, with massive steel power line poles. The Forest Service guys (all men) were erecting a monument to the success the Forest Service had running electricity. The monument was a concrete power line pole, shaped just like the nearby real ones, but made out of concrete and so generally bulkier.

yeah, i'm last minute like that

i worked on my fellowship application until the deadline today. i've been working steadily on it since friday; before that i already had rough drafts of the essays. the rest of the application was a reasonable amount of online forms to fill out. filling them out was a useful form of procrastination when i was too worn out to work on essays any more. the topics of the essays: proposed research plan, previous research experience, personal statement, and societal benefit. the personal statement was to let them know how you ended up being a scientist, and probably also a way for them to screen applicants who they might be especially excited about, like underrepresented people of color, and in certain fields, women. biology is not a field they feel they need to increase the presence of women in. sorry about these miserable sentences, but i'm not going back to try to clean them up because it feels like torture to do that.

in any case, i started this entry to share part of the receipt they emailed me to confirm my application submission.
Application Received On: Wed Nov 17 20:00:29 EST 2004
for those of you playing along at home, that means my application was 29 seconds late. i'm not remotely worried that it will be a problem. i'm even a little proud.

this is a phenomenally nice fellowship. for three years, they pay your fees plus a $30k annual stipend, and it's a great resume item. last year i was an honorable mention, so i think i'm a strong applicant. there are a few parts of the application i can think of improving, but not many. basically, i think at this point it's a matter of luck. writing the application was very helpful for clarifying my thought process though, and mary gave me a lot of feedback on the essay and my planned dissertation project, so it certainly wasn't time wasted. holly put in a heroic effort to help me. it was really helpful.

ok, now i'm going to do some laundry. clean the house. pay bills. you know the scene.

More from the fair

After being overwhelmed with hick-fabulous schwag, we decided that we had to see some actual animals. Here was our first victim.


From there, Holly and I joined the crowd that was filling the bleachers in front of the upcoming milking machine demonstration. A group of kids in front of us apparently decided it wasn't worth staying and started to file out. One of them, about twelve years old, was resistant and said "I want to watch the frigging cow being milked." He ended up leaving with his friends. It was a kind of urban wholesomeness. This dairy display was near the milking machine demonstration.


On our way out we found out what day it was.

Unfortunately, there were no donkeys in sight. Maybe on donkey day, the donkeys get the day off.

4 more years

inspired by sarah's trip to pennsylvania to rouse voters, i sponsored an event on election day at which people brought cell phones and we all made calls to likely democratic voters. i'm disappointed by the outcome of the election. partly i'm swayed by people's exhortations to work harder for a better outcome, partly i want to move new zealand.

holly's been reminding me to post some pictures of our trip to the LA county fair. that was fun! here are some pix.

Corn good

Corn very good

Did you notice that he's barefoot?

Special hat