Some really small things

From The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, nominated for the Hugo Award for best novel:

“What’s particle physics?” asked Bod.

Scarlett shrugged. “Well,” she said. “There’s atoms, which is things that is too small to see, that’s what we’re all made of. And there’s things that’s smaller than atoms, and that’s particle physics.”

Bod nodded and decided that Scarlett’s father was prob-
ably interested in imaginary things.

That reminded me about this old, but still good, post about the physics of imaginary things.

And in other news, I now have a baby boy. And I'm considering to revive this blog, maybe. I'll not make any promises, but just see if I find time and inspiration to write here.

Hibernating

Yes, it is spring. Robins and grackles and starlings everywhere, and the geese going north above our heads. And the snow drops and crocus and even dandelions by the south facing walls. Now is the time you are supposed to come out of hibernation.

It's funny though, how it works. You grow a little heavier, a little clumsier day by day. The sprout is active during the night and keeps you awake. And the days pass faster and faster, leaving little time for everything you wanted to do except the daily grind and the necessary tasks. And then a new family member, and the life changes forever.

Less than two months to go now. The daughter will be a big sister, and we will be parents of two. I don't know how anything is going to be, but I realize that this blog is already a very low priority and it's better to officially pronounce it sleeping until... later. Maybe I'll be back in summer, after mid-June or so.

What is a "real woman"?

I hate it when I'm expected to conform to a stereotype rather than treated as an individual. I really hate it when people say "women are like this" and then expect every single woman to be more or less like that.

Ge me right here: I know that we are all prejudiced -- that we all have a tendency to have expectations based on previous experience. I also know that when it comes to problems in inequality between groups, it makes sense to discuss those differences. The problem is when people are unaware of their assumptions and think that their experience of how things are on average is a prescription for how things should be. That's when they (mostly without knowing it) put pressure on others to conform, rather than to try and meet them as the individuals they are.

Oh yes, this is a pet peeve. And very personal.

Let me give some examples.

I (call me A) once talked to a female colleague (let me call her B) about a woman we both were acquainted with (C). I was a little bit pleased with myself for having deduced that C was practicing some martial art from her relaxed stance when we had to stand and wait for a long time. I know that in that way you can stand forever without getting tired, and you are balanced and prepared to go. To explain what I meant I imitated it (probably not very well) to B. Her reaction: "That's not a very feminine way to stand".

You might see this as a very innocent comment, but what it tells me is that B judges (including C) people from her stereotypes, and the most important thing about how a woman behaves is whether it's feminine. By repeating comments like this she tells me (and everyone around her) that even if she doesn't say it, she thinks I should also first and formost be feminine as much as I can help it, before I can have any other characteristics.

This makes me a bit angry, but I'm too polite to always thake a fight. I hate those little innocent comments, because they are ultimately opressive. They tell people: stay in your place, behave as you are expected.

I know that there are many differences between men-on-average and women-on-average, but I also know that those differences are smaller than the variations between individuals. I think it should be expected of everyone in a polite society to at least have the ideal to allow others to be different from the stereotypes. I think that it's difficult to get to know people as fascinating persons if you always see them through your normative ideas. And sometimes I think it's worse for men, because they often have even more pressure on them to be male.


When I hear the men in the coffee room talk about their wives as "the boss", and exchange cliche phrases of how women are of course incomprehensible to men, I almost feel sick. What does that mean for how they see me as a professional? I might be oversensitive, but on the other hand this actually might have consequences for how people treat each other. If they expect communication failure, I would not exactly be surprised if they will have communication failure. And they spread this expectation, giving it on to others.

By the way: I mentioned exactly this coffee lounge incident to some students over lunch one day. The reaction from the male student: "What, are you a feminist?"

"I'm a woman, isn't that enough?" was my answer.

I don't want to be a "real woman". I want to be me. And I don't want the first reaction when I speak about something I find interesting to be "isn't it very unusual for a woman to be interested in that?" (Maybe more about this another day.)

Role models

When I think about role models, it takes a while before anything shows up in my head. What is a role model? Someone I have looked up to and wanted to be like, I guess.

The funny thing is that the first role models that show up in my head are all fictive people. It's Modesty Blaise (because she had such varied experience, first hand knowledge of extremely different environments and the wonderful skill to get along with people of all kinds -- presidents and kings as well as street kids and poor fishermen), it's Kip from Have Space Suit, Will Travel (because he got somewhere by being smart and knowing things), it's ... from A Very Long Way From Anywhere Else (because he was intellectual and did not really fit in with his peers, but found a way to be himself), and others. It was fictional characters I looked to when I shaped my ideas of who I wanted to be: smart, reasonable, open to new things, and so on. I might not live up to all of my ideals, but they are still there.

As for real people, I tend to admire everyone who is enthusiastic and really involved in things. People who make things happen.

There are also all of those people who have surprised me, and showed me new ways and attitudes. Like two of my fellow PhD students in Uppsala, who one day told me that it happens that they feel really tired and frustrated over their research -- that it sometimes seems hopeless -- and that they would then just lock the door to their office and cry for a while. Just the idea that there were others who sometimes felt like that was a revelation for me -- and the idea that you could actually talk about it was nothing short of revolutionary. I had always felt that if you could not be enthusiastic about your research all the time, you were somehow not worthy. Being frustrated and bored to the point of crying was to me a shameful secret. Maybe, just maybe, this was something that happened to others too? Even smart, successful students!

And then you go on, and another day you will be enthusiastic again, and make things happen.

Ashes

I say no more.

Merry Christmas!

I think most people have better things to do right now than to read blogs, but anyway. Happy holidays, and all that! I'm hoping to get time to write a bit the next few days, and to read, and to sleep.

Links on parade

Coilhouse Magazine: "A love letter to alternative culture, written in a culture where alt culture no longer exists". They have a mission statement quoting William Gibson. Looks interesting!

Astronomy Cast: a podcast about astronomy, and some relevant physics to go with it. There are transcripts for some of them. The little I have seen and heard so far makes me want to recommend it to anyone interested in these things. Beginner friendly, and with science fiction relevance: there is for example a three part series about the colonization of Mars.

The PJ Råsmark Blog: a friend of mine from high school, promising "opinions and thoughts concerning as diverse topics as science, magic, religion, critical thinking, pseudoscience, life, the universe, and everything".

LHC will get first beam on September 10. No comments needed.

Circling around the minefield, finding Dracula

Mostly I try to ignore the science vs religion debate in the blogosphere, because it really brings out the worst in people. Now the story about PZ and the communion wafers makes me deeply uneasy (actually really sad). The short version: there is this guy PZ Myers, a scientist with the interesting hobby to make a lot of noise about anything stupid that people say or do in the name of religion (well, actually I think he claims that it is religion itself that is stupid or makes people stupid). Now he reacted to some story involving bread from the communion by asking people to send him samples of the stuff so that he can desecrate it and post videos of it. I might have some detail wrong, but I'm not going to the sources to look into it because I think it would make me upset and destroy my day.

I agree that some people act a little bit strange, maybe even stupid, when it comes to threats to things that they hold holy. Also, sending PZ death threats is a very un-Christian thing to do (other humans should also be seen as sacred, and then there is this whole thing about loving the enemies...). This in itself makes me very sad, but his whole idea of deliberately demonstrating such utter disdain for other's ways of handling and thinking about the sacred is not only distasteful but deeply in-humanistic. I could also call it mean and childish.

About the meaning that communion can have for people I really recommend Take This Bread by Sarah Miles (thank you Elliot, for bringing this book to my attention!), a story that is perfectly readable also for people with no personal connection with any church.

This said, I have to comment on Dracula, the classic by Bram Stoker. In this book the heroes bring communion bread in enormous quantities, and they bury pieces in soil to make it unusable for vampires. I always wondered about that. Getting hold of some wafers is no problem, but not all wafers carry the vampire-smothering power: they need to be consecrated. This means that a priest has to perform a little ritual, involving the reading of the story of the first communion. The wafers that are left over after the ritual, those that are not eaten immediately, are usually locked in a little cabinet (the tabernacle in the church building, or otherwise in some other place, not accessible to the public). I have heard about people stealing consecrated bread for use in witchcraft, but as I understand it they did it by going to communion and then hiding the bread under the tongue until they left the church. How do you get hold of large quantities?

There might be some anglican priests who would do mass-consecration for use in vampire-hunts, but this is not mentionend in Dracula and I have never heard about it from anywhere. I picture a hidden chapel, with mass-production and a small staff of people packing the wafers for shipping together with vials of holy water (the water is usually much easier to find, but why pass on a good package deal?) and crucifixes. Buy the small vampire-package for home use, or the club pack to share with your friends when you travel to Transsylvania! And then little unconspicious ads in newspapers, sharing the space with mail-order companies selling hygienic underwear or pictures of ladies in costume.

Hmm. This is where blogging protocol requires me to write "I digress" and promise to stay on topic in the future. And actually, I really should bring my daughter to daycare now, and get to work.

Talk like a physicist day!

Today is pi day (3.14), Albert Einstein's birthday, and talk like a physicist day. I'm a physicist, so I guess I talk like one all the time, but anyway.

Because I have friends who understand what I mean, I have the habit of asking people for their boundary conditions when I want to make plans together with them. And when i didn't know the English word "slide" at the playground, I asked what to call the thing that is like an inclined plane. Some think that's funny.

Remember the WMAP conspiracy!

Yesterday the result of the analysis of five years of WMAP data were released (earlier results were based on three years of data). WMAP is the satellite detector that is mapping the cosmic microwave background radiation. From the pattern of tiny fluctuations in the temperature of this radiation we can learn a lot about the universe and how it evolved.

One piece of folklore among physicists is the initials of Stephen Hawking that can be found by the ever pattern finding human eye slightly to the left of the center of the picture. (Actually it looks more like S'H, or S'K, but anyway.) This is a good starting point for conspiracy theories. Especially over a couple of beers.

Ten things I've done that you probably haven't

Wow. How many strange things people have done! (Funny that Sweden is mentioned five times in the comment section, given that it's a country with a population of 9 millions I think it gets lots of attention.) I rarely care about memes, but I want to try this too. Given enough time everyone will experience some weirdness, and so have I. (But I sure know people who have experienced way weirder things than i have!)

So, here are ten things I have done that you probably haven't:

1) Visited the geographical South Pole.

2) Been filmed in a ruin, wearing a cape and mask, for a death metal music video. (Hmm. Well. It was fun, actually.)

3) Collected people to a cuddling pile on a street corner. Or whatever you might want to call it. I'm talking about a lot of people laying and leaning more or less on top of eachother, just to talk and relax. This was during the Falun Folkmusik Festival in 1993 or 1994.

4) Now that I think of it, most people have not done this: defended a PhD thesis in particle physics.

5) Worked in a cleanroom 2000 meters underground.

6) Arranged a science fiction convention nearly alone (70 members, 2 guests, one conrunner on the brink of total insanity). At least I had gophers, and people helping out with some of the practical aspects.

7) Tried to teach math to 30 13-year-olds who instead climbed out on the roof of the school.

8) Visited several student bars wearing a baby on my chest. (No, of course I didn't drink!)

9) Made a catalogue of a collection of thousands of fanzines (which was later donated to a library).

10) Looked very scientific, filling and shaking test tubes dressed in cleanroom gear, as a backdrop to some special founding announcement.

The last item was added today. Our local lab has a cleanroom with transparent walls at the back, and we were asked to go in there and work and show what science looks like (hmm, well, or something...). It could almost have been fun if I had not felt like a fish in a bowl, or a monkey at the zoo. I helped our radiochemist with preparation of some samples, I haven't done anything like that since I was still in school (that is, before I went to university). Very scientific! But all the time people were pointing cameras at us, and talking importantly in front of us. (And when I tried to ignore it I forgot that it was a show going on and talked too loud so that the listeners outside the cleanroom walls could hear it, which gave me a very angry look from one of the organizers.)

Happy New Year!

As a celebration of the new year 2008 I post what is probably one of the best music videos from 2007, and I'm not biased ;-) Elias and the Wizzkids, with a song about coming out of depression:



It's even science fiction: there are rockets, and it ends in the future.

Home devotional unit

From Paleo-Future:



I started to analyze the function of this device. The labels on the coin slots probably changes with the setting of the faith selector -- it would not make sense to have wine, wafers and incense if you turn it to islam. On the other hand, why is there a Hare Krishna button if the device is set to catholicism? At this point my husband told me that the picture probably wasn't made with so much thought behind it that it makes sense to question it like this. Well. He's probably right. Anyway, it's fun.

I rediscover music

I'm really, really tired today. The combination of being responsible for detector operation for the first time (meaning that I monitor the detectors online and sometimes have to intervene and adjust things), having a social life and being a parent has resulted in a lack of sleep this week.

This is why I decided to try to get some noise in my office, to keep me awake. The post-doc I'm sharing the room with is gone for the week, and so I don't risk disturbing her. I have no music on my work computer, and the first thing to come into my head to look for was The No-Shows from the novel I'm reading at the moment: Keeping It Real by Justina Robson.

Interesting! As strange as it might seem, I had actually forgotten how energized I can be by music. I suddenly felt twice as alive, and actually managed to do something instead of just blankly staring at the computer screen. Why have I been so uninterested in music for so long? I cannot remember when I lost the habit.

The next step was to explore what other things I could find to listen to. That's the dangerous part, where lots of time can be lost. Today I think I gained more than I lost, but I'll have to watch myself there.

A long time ago I had a boss who told me that it's impossible to work while listening to music. My mentor in that work place was listening to AC/DC in his office, but my boss respected him too much to say anything about it. I can understand that music can be distracting, but whether it's good or bad for productivity must depend a lot on what you are doing and what music you are listening to. I'll probably listen to a lot more music at work in the future than I have done for the last few years.

When I'm talking about music I might as well mention that my brother has a new record out with his band.

God wrote the rocks

The first time I encountered young earth creationists (and in fact any kind of creationism) was when the "school evangelists" in my high school (gymnasium) distributed booklets with the title "Are there any signs that God might exist?". It contained the things I now know all too well: flood geology, arguments about the lack of intermediate stages in evolution of species, stories about dinosaurs living together with humans... you have probably heard of it. I was shocked, and slightly offended. Did they really think they could convert anyone with this stupid stuff? It had nothing to do with the question of the existence of God as I understood it. And it was a silly way of reading the bible.

A few years ago I made a serious attempt at understanding how creationists think, why they think it's so important to stick to this idea. It was difficult to ask the right questions, but the impression I got whas that they (those I talked to on the internet, they were all Swedish) didn't really think that it was a very important question at all, but they found the idea of direct creation more attractive than the idea of indirect creation and evolution. It's probably just the internal culture in their churches, how they are used to talk about things.

I find this annoying, since to me it seems that they just decide not to think about how we learn and understand things about nature and therefore they sort of miss the point. I don't think they are any less rational than any of us, only much less empirically inclined. Reason seems to be important to them, but investigating and evaluating the physical world is not. (Remember, this is my interpretation of the creationists I've been talking to, I'm sure there are all kinds of them.) You can do all sorts of reasoning and be extremely cerebral without going out to see the evidence, and then you also end up with all sorts of conclusions which are not necessarily related to what the world really is like.

As you might have noticed, the discussions about the credibility of evolution now ended up to be about the role of science in society -- as we can also see from the incredibly infected (and stupid) debate in the US. I can not come to any other conclusion that this whole thing hurts both sides, research and religion, by focussing the attention on the wrong things. I recently noted that some churches have initiated an "evolution weekend" next year. This is probably a good thing.

In the end, the best answer I've found to creationists is still the filk song Word of God by Catherine Faber (follow the link for the complete lyrics):

Odd, long-vanished creatures and their tracks & shells are found;
Where truth has left its sketches on the slate below the ground.
The patient stone can speak, if we but listen when it talks.
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the rocks.

It can be downloaded from The Virtual Filksing, performed by Kathy Mar. (I have the CD. There is also a beautiful neopagan song about fire, water and smoke -- this always makes me smile and think about the candles, holy water and incense generously used in a church (Lutheran!) I know in Uppsala.)

By the way, if you are interested it might be worth taking a look at what Dr. James F. McGrath has to say on the topic of creationism. Or about intelligent design:
An Immoral Godless Pseudoscience.

World day against the death penalty

Today is the World Day Against the Death Penalty. You can act by signing the petition.

Do you know the Bible?

When we are on the subject of Bible knowledge (see the comment to the previous post) I have to mention The Harlot by the Side of the Road. My husband just finished this book, and it seems very interesting: it's about the stories in the Bible which are rarely mentioned, the censored parts if you will, the ones that are never told in Sunday school. I want to read it too, at some point, but my husband returned it to the library so I will have to remember to get it.

And I also want to take the opportunity to link to the thematically related Elliot's Adult Bible Quiz (the post starts with another quiz). Here are the answers.

OK, I confess that this is not my best subject. I'm beginning to think that it would be fun to polish up my Bible knowledge a bit!

Nerd test

OK, I have taken the nerd test:





I don't know much about tv series, hence the low score on sci-fi/comics.

Do men hate women?

Via Making Light I find that Joss Whedon posted a sad and angry text about "honour killing" and about how men sometimes tend to think about women. He also speculates a bit in why:

I try to think how we got here. The theory I developed in college (shared by many I’m sure) is one I have yet to beat: Womb Envy. Biology: women are generally smaller and weaker than men. But they’re also much tougher. Put simply, men are strong enough to overpower a woman and propagate. Women are tough enough to have and nurture children, with or without the aid of a man. Oh, and they’ve also got the equipment to do that, to be part of the life cycle, to create and bond in a way no man ever really will. Somewhere a long time ago a bunch of men got together and said, “If all we do is hunt and gather, let’s make hunting and gathering the awesomest achievement, and let’s make childbirth kinda weak and shameful.” It’s a rather silly simplification, but I believe on a mass, unconscious level, it’s entirely true.

I'll tell you what I think. I think "womb envy" is close to the truth, but I think the whole thing has much simpler roots. Economy. Men want to know that their children are their own, especially in cultures that give great importance to lineage. This is why the idea of "ownership" of women so easily develops, and spreads.

Also, I don't think that men generally hate women, but I do think that people have an ugly tendency to group together and develop an internal culture that is more or less hostile to other groups. This is an instinct we have, and that we will have to learn to deal with. Everyone of us.

That said, I have to add that in my experience men and women can often be friends and work well together. We shouldn't forget that. In Sweden we also generally stress the importance of fathers, and I think a father can attach to a child just as well as a mother can if he's only allowed to (and allows himself). I like men, and like to think well of people.