I love the premise of NPR's new Guilty Pleasures series in part because I supoprt anything that may help to break down genre-guilt, but I found the recent piece by Brad Meltzer to be very problematic. Unnecessary gender-gauntlet-throwing aside, Metlzer proclaims his love for the Twilight series without actually saying why he does like the books. Fine: however, by doing so, he completely glosses over every reason to legitimatley dislike the books, which have absolutely nothing to do with their being young adult, or gothic fantasy, or any other reasons that often cause the Literati to defend their reading choices ("but it really transcends genre!"). 

Metlzer calls on women to give the Twilight books to their teenaged sons, nephews and husbands, to tell them the books are cool, that they'll like them. ( The thing is, I wouldn't even want my daughters (or nieces, or sisters) to read them, let alone the men... )

Sorry, Mr. Meltzer, but I won't be foisting Stephanie Meyer's anti-feminist, raceist pop-fluff on the guys in my life. Instead, I gave Ethan Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games, which features an empowered-but-refreshingly-unspunky heroine, realistic relationship dynamics, and multidimensional characters. I'm sure he'll still grow up to be a Real Man.

Reading:

 

Planning:

Lots of crocheting for my swap, seeing the Best Bad Movie Ever, working in the lab, and bringing the bike out of its hibernation cave. Oh, and hosting dimensionwitch for the weekend, as she is up visiting from the Field Museum - this means that good food is somewhere in the weekend equation.

Celebrating: Pi Day! And Einstein's Birthday! And the imminent arrival of spring (it's 49 degrees outside right now!). Oh, and Spring Break...though for me, that means "Good Time For Getting Work Done."

This Week's Revelation: I love heist films! Ocean's Eleven and etc., The Italian Job, The Thomas Crowne Affair...they're not quite action/adventure, not quite comedy, but usually involve elements of both. They're typically much more clever in a way that's really entertaining, in spite of their formulaic nature - the setup, the unexpected element, the twist ending. They also manage to support a large (typically excellent) cast without seeming crowded or confused.

In high school, and even as an undergraduate at my summer-camp-like little colleges, I always imagined university life (with a heaping spoonful of idealism) as an intellectual culture. To me, the epitome of this dedication were those iconic lectures given by aging and distinguished individuals: the modern Darwins and Marie Curies, Picassos and Sylvia Plaths, Jungs and Crowleys. I finally had my first such experience this week when I attended one of UW's Distinguished Lectures by Edward O. Wilson, a prominent ecologist, naturalist, and conservationist. Among other things, Dr. Wilson is credited with inventing the term "biodiversity" and bringing it into general use, discovering and describing the communication of ants using pheromones (for which he won a Pulitzer), and inventing the field of sociobiology. Dr. Wilson's work is anything if not controversial, and while I have significant issues with many of his assertions I believe his work to be very important; he is simply one of the most influential scientists alive today(especially of those who publish in the "pop-science" field like Stephen Jay Gould, Matt Ridley, Michio Kaku, and Jared Diamond). In all honesty, it was likely my last time to see him before he dies.

What frustrates me is that one of my strongest reactions to his lecture has nothing to do with its content, but rather with the audience. First, there were no less than four incidents when different people's cell phones went off, echoing through the large and sold-out hall. There is simply no excuse for this, particularly when some fool has gone through the trouble of reminding you to turn your phone off after theirs has rung half a dozen times before getting turned off.

My second and even more irritating moment came during the questioning; two microphones were efficiently brought out and placed in the aisles so that people could ask Dr. Wilson questions about his lecture (which, not surprisingly, was on biodiversity and the increasing dangers to it). While we had stood in line before entering the hall, several people had passed out yellow fliers to those in queue, and I had taken one thinking it was a program or some other relevant information. It was, in fact, a local enviromental group advertising a public hearing on various hunting-related issues. While I thought this was a bit rude of them, I shrugged my shoulders and used the empty back side to take notes. When time came for questioning, however, the first person on the mic was the woman who'd organized the flier. Did she ask a question? No - she stood at the microphone re-iterating the very words on her flier, including her e-mail address (which was printed on the sheet), and then, after several minutes and an increasingly angry crowd that was beginning to "boo" her tirade, she said, "And I have a question!" and proceeded to go on another rant about how we should all adopt a vegetarian diet as a tactic to save biodiversity. I'm almost certain none of her statements ended with the tell-tale upswing of tone and the grammatically-accompanying punctuation that are typically associated with questions.

Eventually someone managed to get her off the microphone, and the second person on proceeded to inform Dr. Wilson that what he really should be doing is talking about biodiversity to Washington, not to the people of Madison. Again- no question. Dr. Wilson brought up the very comment I had in response- he was doing his part as a researcher, and then sharing that with a broad public of voters. It's now our job to do the rest.

I was so frustrated and ashamed of this representation of the University community. To waste this man's time, when there was a limited amount of time for questioning, after we'd asked him to give a lecture...and to essentially berate someone who has given their lives to service in the form of education and research. I am still appalled, and am strongly considering writing a letter of apology to him to that effect.

As to the lecture itself, Dr. Wilson brought up a number of interesting points on the nature of biodiversity and the multitudes of life forms, particularly when you begin to look at insects and bacteria. What I found particularly striking, however was his assertion that he is a "secular humanist," but that he believes that the ecological crises cannot be solved unless there is a unity of science and religion, because religion can provide the moral force needed to energize the public behind ecological conservation. Conservation is inherently a moral discipline- it involves a group of people asserting the way conditions "ought" to be, and managing them to that end. I wonder about this faith in a dialogue between religion and science, though...espeially as, though this is never truly the case, science strives to be an objective force in the world, and relgion is nothing if not subjective. The last time religion and science were so integrated people were burned at the stake.

I have created a new community, thelunarsociety! The Lunar Society was founded in 1775 by Erasmus Darwin (Charles' grandpappy), and met once a month to discuss the scientific advancements of the times. Like its namesake, thelunarsociety is designed to be a forum where people can discuss and debate new advances in science & technology*, share their own pet theories, and challenge old paradigms. Share interesting articles, add your voice to debates on current events in the sciences, and discuss the societal, spiritual, cultural, or environmental impacts of technology.

Tell your friends!

*archaeology, botany, biology, zoology, microbiology, paleontology, climatology, astronomy, astrobiology, chemistry, physics, oceanography, ethnobotany, pharmacology, psychology, geology, anthropology, nanotechnology, biotechnology, genetics, anatomy, physiology, medicine, cryptozoology, biochemistry, geophysics, mathematics, statistics, geometry, conservation biology, ecology, environmental science, meterology, astrophysics, cosmology, geography, minerology, microbiology, urology, oncology, sociology, engineering, architecture....

"This ice is, in fact, old. So old, I believe, that it's been frozen for a great deal of time. Does it ever get warm down here? I should think not."

Quote by drunken_boatman

Home again, home again, jiggity-jig. Minneapolis is now officially on my List of Cities I Could Definitely Live Someday (along with Seattle, Boston, Montreal, and Burlington). I had decided this within five minutes of having arrived, even though I woke up the next morning with what has turned into a very bad head cold, morphed into a very bad chest cold. Jack (my advisor) and I took the Appleman Lake cores to the Civil Engineering building on the UMN campus, which is an eight-story building that is unremarkable except for the fact that only one of the floors is above ground. The Limnological Research Center is actually six stories underground, which means that on Saturday I spent a fifteen-hour workday deep below the city. They've got lots of very cool toys and gadgets, and when we split our cores (lengthwise) we found some very nifty things.

Jack's early guesstimate is that our basal date (for the bottom of the core, the oldest sediment) is 16,000 calendar years old. This puts us in the last ice age, folks, and lots of very interesting things were happening around that time. We're hoping we've caught the Younger Dryas, which is a period of rapid climatic cooling following (probably) the shut-down of the North Atlantic Deepwater current, the oceanic conveyor belt that brings warm tropical water up from the Equator and dumps it off our coast (and even more so in the UK, which is why it's so much warmer there even though they're farther north). Yes, some parts of The Day After Tomorrow were actually scientifically accurate. What does this mean to non-paleo-geeks? Essentially this: the NADW shut down because lots of warm, fresh water were being dumped into the ocean with the melting glaciers at the end of the last ice age (remember from chemistry that cold, salty things tend to sink, being denser?). This resulted in a temporary reversal regionally to colder, drier conditions on the order of ~15C (and that is actually a LOT), for lasting about 1000 years. The cooling itself happened over about a ten year period; in other words, something that could actually be experienced during a generation. So, as indreased CO2 emissions continue to increase global mean temperatures, there is a possibility that we could experience something similar to the Younger Dryas in our lifetime due to glacial meltwater shutting down the warm-water conveyor belt.

Scary stuff.

Part of the reason I'm so fascinated by the processes of the past is to better understand the present and future. It makes me insanely frustrated to hear people dismiss the work that paleoclimatologists do as "novel" or "itneresting but without application." It frustrates me to see how the media continue to portray climate change as though the scientific community were divided on it, fifty-fifty. The split is more like 95-5%, and keep in mind that to this day there are "scientists" who don't believe in plate techtonics or evolution, or a vegetational origin to fossil fuels. Sometimes I have to laugh at myself, the artsy theater-girl who seemed destined to become a humanities major of one kind or another (photojournalist, writer, historian, anthropologist, philosophy major).

So many art and literature people (my co-workers at Borders, for example) become immediately dismissive of me when they hear what I do, as though I couldn't possibly appreciate the world in a way that they do, as though I see things in a quantified way, lifeless and impossibly structured. Nothing could be further from the truth- to me, science IS art. I have never yet met a biologist, a physicist, a geologist, a chemist, who wasn't driven by love, inspired by beauty. Sometimes that passion drives people to do terrible things, like create weapons of such destructive force that they can rend and tear the very fabric of our genetic being, and split the tiniest particles of matter like melons. Yet I can somehow sympathize with these people, who, like Marie Curie, were driven to discovery, to knowledge, even when they felt the destructive forces of their passions changing and weakening their bodies. There is a music there, and composition, and form. Chaos, surrealism, memory. In the end, it's all motion, heat, energy. The writers, the painters, the sculpters, the poets, the potters, are all trying to catch it, to tame it. Just like Edison, Oppenheimer, Newton. Trying to know a thing and love it and never, ever let it settle.

I'm in the lab, kiddo's, which is fantabulous. I've got my own fume hood, full of wonderful ehrlenmeyer flasks, filters and stirring rods, and polypropylene graduated test tubes. I have a vibrating mixer, hot water bath, and centrifuge at my disposal. I've got potassium hydroxide, sulfuric acid, acetic anhydride, tertiary butyl alcohol, and silicone oil by the bottle-full. I've got seven meters of sediment dating back to the last ice age. i look hot in goggles, thankfully, though I need a nice pair of rubber gloves...I'm thinking blue?

What's a paleogoddess to do?

I figured out last night that Billie Holiday makes great pollen extraction music. The tempo is perfect, the tones an appropriate blend of musical order and chaos. Not to mention that she sure knows how to make a girl wanna fall in love.

Though that could just be the spring, not that you'd know if from the recent snow and brisk arctic breeze. Yes, I uttered the "s" word, sadly. Yesterday was a cold day full of crystalline precipitation. Today is a bipolar flux between picture-book sunny-blue-fluffy-cloud skies and cloudy, decrepit dampness. Either way, it's still chilly. I'm telling you, folks, the ice is coming back. The plants sure seem to think so - not a leaf-bud is stirring, and I'm pining for the green. After the two Summers That Weren't, I'm craving a little bare-skinned, night-swimming, outside-sleeping, pine-needles-in-my-undrpants fun.

They have pine trees in Wisconsin, right?.......................right?

I am a naughty geek-girl.

I am spending my New Year's uploading World of Warcraft, a MMORPG. If you don't know what that is, pray for my soul.

If you do know what that is, pray for my soul.