Losing this web space?:

It appears that other people who graduated with me have gotten emails claiming that their email addresses (and I assume web space) are disappearing. I have gotten no such email, to any of my email addresses, but I have to assume that mine will too. So tomorrow, I will be moving this website over to the following site: http://home.comcast.net/~kathleen.moriarty. Please update any links. If this site doesn't die tomorrow, I may continue to update here. We'll see.

Amusing things heard last night:

Someone's entry for the Style Invitational, category 'Bad Sales Slogans': 'Trojans: the condoms your father used.'

On a New Zealand cricket channel, after some cricketer scored a record number of wickets: 'He just achieved temporary immortality.'

President's Day goodness:

Hey, does anyone want to go to NYC for President's Day weekend? I'd love to go and maybe sleep on Naomi's floor. Or maybe Boston (and sleep on Sudeep's floor?)

On women in science:

I do believe that there is anti-female bias in many science departments across the country. I'm not sure that there's more than anecdotal evidence for it, but I think the anecdotal evidence is pretty strong. In my experience as an undergrad in physics courses (in which most of the students were physics majors), there were times that it was pretty damn uncomfortable to be a woman. My first year physics lab partner and I were the only women in our lab, and on one occasion, the male lab supervisor walked past several pairs of men with their backpacks up on the lab bench to tell M-- and me that we couldn't keep our bags on the bench either. He then walked back, passing the same boys whom he said nothing too and left the room. That was the most overt example, but there were sometimes jokes about women's abilities or professors who seemed to think I couldn't do something for no obvious reason. And the fact is that being the only woman in a group of men can be uncomfortable. I could see this environment making some women unhappy enough to consider another career (and in fact, I stopped being a physics major, though bias had little to do with that decision). But for me, this was more an annoyance than a situation that would have stopped me from doing something I loved, though I believe that it was worse for many other women.

Honestly, though, I don't really think that the problem is in college primarily. I knew too many women who came into college convinced that they were hopeless in math despite any evidence to the contrary. I TAed Calculus in various forms for three years, and my least self-confident students were always women. Many of them were perfectly competent too, just scared of math and convinced that they had no chance ever at being any good at it.

When I was about to get hired as a mathematician, one question I asked my only female interviewer was how the place was about dealing fairly with pregnant women. I had heard some horror stories from friends in grad school. She told me that her experience had been great, and that was something I took into consideration. I didn't have to worry about losing my career if I chose to have a child.

I think it's possible that there are more male mathematical geniuses, or even that men on average are better than women at math. But I'm not sure the point of saying it, when women still face serious challenges in scientific careers. Once we fix these problems, if women are still underrepresented, then we can talk about biological causes for the underrepresentation. Until then, we should concentrate on fixing the societal problems and not make excuses.

More on Dell tech support:

So, it turns out that the problem with Sims 2 is not a problem with the video card, but instead the fact that my processor with a clock speed of 1.3 gigs is running at 600 megs. I discovered this and called Dell again. After they managed to slow it down to 100 megs (and like what is that, Pentium I? I remember when Pentium I was top-of-the-line, but it's no longer 1993, so that's not going to cut it), we established that the problem was not that I didn't have the right specs for the game, but instead that my computer was messed up. It took me at least 20 minutes to convince the guy of that, though.

It was an hour and a half total on the phone, during which time we established that the dell support website is messed up (can't download a BIOS update), that the computer is running fine in the BIOS, so the problem is shockingly enough related to Windows, Dell's hold music is non-existent once you actually talked to a person, and that I might have to talk to software support (and pay money) to get my problem fixed, which is crap because, you know, 3-year warranty. Oh, and if you hang up on Dell since you've been on hold for the last 15 minutes so the guy can figure out when the website will be fixed, they'll call you back. I'm not up to dealing with it right now, though, so I didn't answer. Oh and the problem is not the fricking POWER OPTIONS, Dell guy.

So the problem is not fixed. And frankly, the Dell tech support guy doesn't know much about computers. Not that that's shocking.

Flu:

I've never had the flu before, except for a mild attack of West Nile last summer. So this kind of sucks. I can't get warm, I have a fever and headache, my back hurts, and I'm dizzy. I felt fine this morning and went into work. When I sat down at my desk, I knew I'd made a mistake. I thought I was going to pass out.

Things that are hard to explain to the Dell customer service person:

"So, every time I try to get my Sims to make out, the Sims 2 crashes. Do you think it's a problem with my video card?"

"No, I can't get them to the 'Make a Baby' stage. They can't even make out." Thinking, "Jesus, don't you understand how this works. Making out always comes before sex."

Long weekend!:

This whole paid vacation thing is still a little bit weird to me. Basically, Monday I will get paid to go to Trader Joe's? And in May, I will get paid to go to Hungary and Romania?

I'm not really taking advantage of my long weekend this time. I have to get caught up on sleep and clean my apartment. And go to Trader Joe's. We have another holiday in a month, so I'm hoping to make it somewhere then.

To the woman who got on the Metro at U Street tonight:

It is never good when your jeans are low enough and tight enough to cause the four-boob phenomenon with your butt. It is particularly bad when your shirt is high enough that two of the four lumps of flesh are visible to the poor people stuck on the Metro with you.

Seriously, though, when did we decide that plumber's ass crack was attractive?

Hobbies:

So my current hobbies are mah jongg (played on Wednesday nights) and horseback riding (currently Mondays, maybe changed to Thursdays). I'm trying to find a broomball team, but so far no luck. It's better than drinking, as hobbies go. I think that two nights a week is about right, what with the drinking on Fridays and the fact that I've been working 7 (yes, that 7 am) to 4 this week.

Sleep is also our friend.

On God and disasters:

Two different articles on reactions to the tsunami today.

Heather MacDonald on Slate calls for a boycott of God. While I understand and sympathise with her point, I think she's being a bit disingenuous. There is a fundamental difference between human action and natural disaster. That is, I think that people who claim that God is responsible for the response of people but not fo the tsunami are not necessarily being intellectually dishonest. I like a universe where even God is governed by his own rules, since I'm not particuarly bothered by a God who is not all powerful. My understanding of quantum mechanics is that it precludes an omnipotent God anyway.

Willliam Safire writes on the book of Job for the NYT. I found this article really interesting, though perhaps it does let God off the hook a bit. So God is so busy restoring light to the Universe that he can't save 150,000 lives?

Yes, I'm slow:

Sorry about the lack of updating. This week at work has been ... interesting. And somehow after staring at a computer screen for 10 hours, I can't come home and look at another screen. Especially since due to my crappy glasses prescription (my right eye is overcorrected by 1.25 diopters!) all the close reading gives me migraines. But I should have a new lens by Tuesday.

As for the rest of it, next week should be a bit better. As for the week after that, well, we'll see.

I'm about to go to a happy hour with some friends from work, but I came home first. I'm looking forward to some alcohol.

So, for those of you to whom I owe email, I'm really sorry. I'm planning on getting caught up this weekend.

But a quick LoTR question, probably for Ed: (this contains some spoilers for RoTK Extended Edition, but I don't think they would affect your enjoyment of the new material).

So Aragorn seems shocked to see Arwen at the coronation. But why? Elrond told him (before he went on the paths of the dead) that she had chosen to stay with him rather than sail to the West. The added scene of Aragorn looking into the Palantir made me think that he thought her dead. But the coronation is a while after the end of the war, right? Wouldn't he have sent a messenger to Elrond to find out whether she was safe. Wouldn't Elrond have been like, "oh, by the way, Sauron lied. Your girlfriend's not dead." It seems unbelievable that he wouldn't have known that she was alive and chose him, so wouldn't he expect her at the coronation, especially since he saw Erond there?

I know there are many things that should bother me more about the RoTK (the disappearing horses, how did Aragorn manage to be riding Brego up to the Gate anyway, the hobbit clothes in Mordor, Aragorn making out with the horse, and so on). But I chose this moment to be disturbed by. Is there a simple explanation that I'm missing in my sleep-deprived headache-y, lacking in booze state?

Blood sucking:

I've been trying to figure out whether anyone will take my blood, tainted by my three plus months in the UK despite my almost nil beef consumption during this time. I had read that the guidelines had changed.

It appears that the FDA does not (less than 3 months from 1980-1996 and less than 5 years since 1996). However, Red Cross and DoD donor deferral rules still defer me indefinitely (more than 6 months cumulative in Europe since 1980). Since everywhere I know uses Red Cross or DoD rules, I guess that no one will get the benefit of my O-negative blood.

I can't write about the tsunami. I can't even read the New York Times or watch BBC World News (on PBS here at 7 pm, go Maryland) without crying so I can't compose anything remotely coherent about it.

I can, however, write about the media coverage of the tsunami. I've basically been watching CNN or BBC World News and reading the NYT or the Washington Post (I'm a good little liberal) so everything that follows applies only to those sources.

Overall, the coverage has been pretty good, I think. CNN has been the worst of all these, but CNN also has had by an order of magnitude the most coverage, so I'm willing to forgive a bit. I recognise the need to show some hopeful moments and I think that nobody has had these moments overtake the vast scale of the tragedy, even if they seem to be stratching sometimes (ie, this little girl has been lying in the hallway of the hospital for a week but a doctor could finally look at her is not a particularly hopeful moment). I winced when Anderson Cooper (who I usually like) asked a British woman who had recently moved to a Sri Lankan town "Did you fear the worst? Did you fear that your [new] house had been destroyed?" after she described where she, her husband, and her son were at the time of the tsunami. The woman handled it with a fair amount of grace, saying that she didn't even think about her house since she was worried about her neighbors and friends.

My real complaint is the focus on Western tourists. There's nothing wrong with showing an American family that came home or even the SI model's story, but they shouldn't overtake the coverage of the people who actually live in Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. However, the media focus on the tourists ignores the billions of dollars that will be needed to allow the "locals" to live in their cities again. Tourists can leave and go back to their intact homes and their intact jobs in countries with infrastructures not affected by the tsunami. The cost of thousands of lives is still terrible, but the rebuilding is at least manageable. But the Maldives have rebuilding costs of twice their GDP and may very well not be inhabitable again in the long term (like Tuvalu). Aceh lost 100,000 people out of a population of around 4 million and around 2 million people have lost their homes there. The number of injured is overwhelming the available hospitals. And this is not something faced by the Swede vacationing in Phuket. The focus on these relatively few affected Westerners trivialises the amount of reconstruction that will be necessary.