rho

Today is Thanksgiving, just one of many in an endless stream of holidays celebrated the world over that I either don't notice or notice but don't observe, since they're not my holiday.

This year, though, I feel that I can't let the occasion pass without marking it with at least a few words, even if there's no actual celebration.

This year, today, I'm feeling happier and more inclined to the giving of thanks than I have done in a long while. This is because, for the first time in a long while, I'm working towards a goal that is something that I genuinely deep-down want. I want to go study at Smith. I want to go live in Northampton. I want these things because I believe that they will allow me to be who I want to be, unashamedly, unabashedly, and unapologetically. This is the American Dream. Sure, it's not it's traditional manifestation, but there it is.

So forgive me this once if I get a little caught up in the moment and observe a holiday that isn't my own. I feel justified. And maybe, just maybe, this time next year, I'll be able to say that it is my holiday and will be celebrating it from the opposite side of the Atlantic.

Of course, maybe I won't. Maybe the whole thing will fall through. Maybe I won't get accepted, or I won't be able to sort out financing, or I won't get a visa, or I'll have a huge relapse of depression and not be able to get out of bed for 6 months. If these things happen then these things happen. But for now, I'm happy and I'm hopeful, and I'm thankful for that.

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Assertion: I am currently eating a bacon and cheese baguette.
Supposition: You are not currently eating a bacon and cheese baguette.
Conclusion: My life is awesome and your life is impoverished.

That is all.

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As of today (later than everyone else, but a whole lot faster than I got a gmail account) I now have google wave, where I am lowercaserho. Of course, now that I have it I have absolutely nothing to do with it because I have precisely two contacts there. Please add me, or wave at me, or whatever it is that you're meant to do with it.

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In IRC, I commented that 8 times 12 was part of the time tables, and someone else was surprised by this, having only learned up to the 9s (and then sort of tacked on the 10s and 11s since they were simple). This is weird for me, since I see the 12s as pretty vital. We have a special word for twelve of something ("a dozen") and even a special word twelve twelves ("a gross"). There are 12 inches in a foot. Lots of things come in 12s. 12 is a useful number since it's divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6. It's also an even fraction of 60 (seconds in a minute) and 360 (degrees in a circle), so being able to work with 12s helps you work with those things too. In short, familiarity with the twelve times table is important for a lot of mental arithmetic, and it surprised me to find someone who didn't learn it with the rest of the times tables.

I'm curious whether the school of the person in question was anomalous, or whether it's an America/Britain thing, or whether it's due to the age difference. Hence why I'm asking.

(As an aside, if you've ever wondered why there are 60 seconds in a minute or 360 degrees in a circle, I'm now going to tell you. In fact, I'm going to tell you even if you've never wondered. The ancient Sumerians and Babylonians used to use a base 60 number system (as opposed to the base 10 system we use today). One of the big advantages of base 60 was how it made a lot of arithmetic easier. 60 divides evenly by 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, so with a base 60 system, you'd wind up with a lot of calculations that were trivial (sort of like how multiplication by 5 is in a base 10 system). Naturally, they chose to use 60 when they created units of time, and we've been using their system ever since.

360 degrees is similar, except the explanation there also comes from astronomy. The Babylonian astronomers were pretty smart cookies, and they noticed how things move about in the sky over the year. They also knew that a year was 365 days, so that if they made their circle be divided up into 360 degrees (six sixties), not only would this give them nice, simple arithmetic to do but it would also mean that movement across the sky happened by very close to 1 degree every day. Handy!)

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Three nights ago, I woke up halfway through my sleep with a stonking great headache.

Two nights ago, I woke up halfway through my sleep with a toothache.

Last night, I woke up halfway through my sleep with an ache all around the general area of my ribs.

I am not impressed by this. If it was one pain that decided to go on for three days, I could deal with that, but having my body decide to come up with new and interesting ways to screw me over every day strikes me as somewhat unfair.

Grump.

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Before I forget, I want to keep you all up to date with the ongoing story of me and the natural history museum. On the 11th (which was the same day I was at Smith for the open house), I received this email from them:

Dear Ms Walmsley

Thank you for your recent email to the Museum and for taking the time to
point out the error in the cladogram in Our Place in Evolution. I'm glad
you enjoyed your visit to the Museum, and wanted to let you know the
outcome of your query.

I have spoken with our anthropology experts and you are quite right that
the latest research shows chimps to be more closely related to humans
than they are to gorillas. The cladogram panel was produced before this
find was made, which is why it shows chimps and gorillas on the same
evolutionary branch. Unfortunately, we are not always able to keep all
our panels immediately up to date with changes to taxonomy, but I will
put this amend on our list of gallery updates to be made, to avoid
confusion for visitors in the future.

Thank you once again for raising this issue with us and we hope to
welcome you back to the Museum soon.

Best wishes

[name]
Copy Editor
Natural History Museum

I'm feeling quite ridiculously proud of myself for this.

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It's been a while since I've properly updated here. I fear I may be turning into one of those people who spends more time actually doing stuff than they spend talking about it on the Internet. Now there's a turn-up for the books.

First of all, there was the interview that I had at Smith, which went well. Naturally, I didn't have any remotely formal clothes that were suitable for interviews, so sarianna took me clothes shopping a couple of days before the interview. She hates clothes shopping about as much as I do, so she really ought to be commended for valour and heroism for doing this for me. We did, however, have an entirely successful shop, taking two or three hours to find me a dress, a jacket, a slip, a pair of tights, a pair of shoes, a bag, and a watch, for something like $160 or $170, if memory serves. I have no clue how we managed to be both quick (relatively) and cheap (relatively) since I can normally only manage one of them at best, but I'm really not complaining.

It was then also decreed that in addition to dressing smartly for the first time in almost a decade that I really ought to be smartened up in general. With this in mind, thenowhere attacked my hair with coconut oil (to remove frizz) and scissors (to remove split ends) and my eyebrows with tweezers (to remove large portions of my eyebrows) the night before the interview, and then styled my hair for me on the morning of the interview.

Pictures of me were taken at this point, so that photographic evidence that I do look vaguely presentable when cleaned up can be provided. I have yet to get my hands on these photographs, though, but I'll make sure I share them with you all once I have.

Then came the interview itself. Naturally, after going to all this trouble, it turned out to be a fairly informal affair so I needn't really have bothered with any of the above. I figure that it's much better to end up presenting too formally for something informal than it is to present too informally for something formal, so I think I made the right choice even so. It's also not going to hurt for me to actually have interview type clothes now that I can use in the future should I ever happen to need them.

The interview went broadly speaking as I'd expect it to. We talked about things like my personal history and how I'd reached the point where I am today, what it was that had attracted me to Smith, what I was wanting to study, and things like that. There weren't any questions that caught me unaware and it was all things that I'd thought about beforehand and researched where necessary. I think that I managed to talk passionately about my interests and goals, and was generally engaging. Certainly, the woman who was interviewing me nodded at the parts where she was meant to nod and laughed at the parts where she was meant to laugh. At one point, when I said that Smith came across to me as a place where people grow into themselves, she said that that was an excellent way of putting it and that she might use that herself. So overall, I'm very happy with the way things went, and am reasonably confident.

One interesting thing at the interview was that, when I was talking about my history of depression, my interviewer said that she found it difficult to imagine someone as lively, outgoing, and vivacious as I was (or words to that effect) ever being as depressed as I was saying I was. Those of you who actually know me should feel free to snort and giggle at this point. sarianna also commented at one point while I was there that I was being far more positive and confident then I usually am. This is the difference between me when I'm in the Pioneer Valley and me when I'm not. It's hard for me to put my finger on precisely what it is that makes such a difference in my psyche, but that right there is why I want to move out there.

After the interview (on the 9th) there was then only another couple of days until the open house (what in England would be referred to as an open day), on the 11th. This was specifically for prospective Ada Comstock scholars, which is Smith's program for non-traditional (in England: mature) students, so there weren't any 17 and 18 year olds there who were just glad to be getting a day off school. It also meant that everything was focussed on how things work in the Ada Comstock program, which kept everything nice and relevant.

I'm very glad that I did decide to go, despite the journey and the air fare and the jetlag and the run in with immigration and all that. Probably the biggest thing that I got from the day was a confirmation that yes, this is definitely where I want to go. I was massively impressed by them from start to finish. Reading things on a website or getting word of mouth recommendations from friends are not the same as seeing something in person.

It was also a useful day from an information-gathering perspective. I learned things I didn't know about financing, about housing, and so on. I also learned just how seriously they take the whole Ada Comstock program and how committed they are to it, which was very good to know. Apparently, about 8% of their total student base is non-traditional students, and they provide excellent financial packages to all of them; they judge each individual's circumstances, then put together a package of grants, loans and on-campus work placements such that they hope that nobody accepted for a place on the Ada Comstock scheme will have to decline on financial grounds. Which is pretty damn awesome, really. I also picked up a whole bunch of contact details for both faculty members and current students, such that if I have any questions at all from this point forward I have plenty of people who I can contact.

Other noteworthy elements from the day were the mock-lecture that we were given, on the subject of perfectionism and anxiety (they clearly know their target audience), and getting to meet with other prospective applicants. The thing that really came across strongly to me from the latter was that everyone there had their own story of how it was that they hadn't gone the traditional route through the education system, and that there was no single typical story. This was hugely reassuring. I also exchanged email addresses with one woman I met there who I spent a great deal of time chatting with. This was all good.

After that was the flight home, which I've already written about, so I'll not go into detail here. Suffice is to say that having a door-to-door travel time of over 24 hours was not happy fun time.

I'm still feeling jetlagged though I do feel as if I'm starting to recover. My sleep patterns are completely shot to hell, though, which is hardly surprising. I've spent most of my waking hours since getting home playing video games (Sword of the Stars, Fort Zombie, Dragon Age: Origins, and Torchlight) and generally lounging about doing other things that don't require a functional brain.

One thing I have managed to do though is phone the secretary of Phil Thomas (surgeon in Brighton) to arrange for an initial consultation, which I'll be having on the 5th of January. I'm a little twitchy about the wait for this, since I'm running on a deadline (provided I get into Smith, which I'm hopeful of but far from sure about) and time is precious. I don't think that this is going to be a catastrophic delay, but it would be nicer to have been able to have it sooner so the ball was rolling.

( cut for the squeamish, though it's really not bad )

Other things that are on my agenda as things I want to do in the relatively near future:

• Get my Smith application sorted. It's not due until February, but I want to get it done sooner rather than later.
• Visit my sister and get to see her new baby, Ella.
• Get the specs for the new Dreamwidth FAQ system fully sorted and pass them off to mark
• Finish writing the entry for geek feminism that I started the other day.
• Reply to email from Tarisa (the woman I met at the Smith open house).
• Pick up the parcel which was unsuccessfully delivered while I was away
• Write the story I got assigned for Yuletide.

Phew.

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I'm now safely back at my parents'. The flight from London up to Manchester was delayed several hours, so my overall door to door travel time wound up being a little over 24 hours. I did manage to get quite a lot of sleep on the flights, though. None of it was particularly good quality sleep, but it was enough that I'm still conscious rather than falling over. I'm sad to have left, glad to be home, and very glad not to be stuck in airport purgatory any longer.

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Nothing is ever easy.

I'm in Bradley International Airport. I was going to be flying from here to Philadelphia, and then from Philadelphia to Manchester, arriving at 08.45 GMT tomorrow morning.

I am now not doing this.

Instead, I am flying from here to Washington Dulles, from there to London Heathrow, and then from there to Manchester, arriving at 16.40 tomorrow evening.

FML.

What's even more fun is that the only phones this airport seems to have are the sort that require feeding with coins, rather than the sort that require feeding with plastic. Although I do have some coins left, they're approximately enough to cover three seconds of international conversation so I can't actually let my dad know not to come and pick me up until later.

Fortunately, the airport does have free wireless, so I was able to get online and since fae is awesome, she phoned my parents for me. Unfortunately, they aren't home at the moment and my dad doesn't have his mobile on/with him. She's going to keep on trying though so hopefully he'll learn about my change in schedule by some means other than my not walking off the flight he's expecting me to walk off. Hopefully.

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I have an interview at Smith on Monday. With this in mind, I suppose I need to start thinking about how I'm going to present myself to them. Of course, I'm just going to go with the general principle that I am awesome and that any sensible university would be delighted to have me as a student, so I'm mostly going to be presenting myself as myself. Even so, a little thought as to what aspects to present most strongly probably wouldn't hurt.

I'm planning to talk about how much I loved Northampton last time I visited, and how looking at Smith it seems to stand for the same things that made me love the area in the first place. I'll talk about diversity and how it's important to me and how it makes me feel more at ease, and say how their attitude towards diversity really comes off as genuine rather than just as words. I'll mention how throughout my teenage years I always wanted to go into academia, and how I went to Oxford, but then having to struggle through university while I was dealing with all my mental health stuff meant that I lost my passion for learning. Then I'll say how with Smith I'm actually genuinely excited about learning again; I'll say that I'm excited to have a chance to continue with my physics and also to have a chance to study a wide curriculum that I wouldn't have at an English university. I'm also going to try to explain how, yes, I've kinda made a mess of my adult life to date, but how I'm really trying to get things right for me, and how I see this as a huge opportunity for myself.

The idea through all of this is that I'll be presenting myself as:

a. Someone who really wants to be at Smith rather than just a generic desire to be at a university.
b. Someone who is very intelligent and has a great deal of academic potential.
c. Someone who really has a drive and a passion for this.
d. Someone who shares the same values that they do and will add to their overall diversity.

Thoughts? Advice? Smoked herring?

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People occasionally comment to me that I write well and ask if I've ever considered attempting to make a living writing columns or articles. My answer generally tends to involve pointing out that other people have said the same thing to me before and explaining that while I have considered it, not only would I not know where to start selling my work but I also wouldn't know what I'd want to write about.

While I do enjoy writing and I at least like to think that I have something of a way with words, most of what I write tends to be scattered broadly around a wide variety of topics. I'm not a writer about this or a writer about that; I'm just a writer about whatever happens to wander through my head at the time.

One thing I've been wanting to do for a while is to set up a "proper" "blog", by which I mean that I want a blog where I write consistently about a given topic in a way that would be potentially interesting to people who have never met me. What I wonder, though, is what I would write about. There are a few topics that I have a fairly broad knowledge of: science, video gaming, gender theory/transgender issues, etc. but for each of them I always feel that there are other people out there already blogging who are so much better at it and so much more knowledgeable than I am.

I'm starting to think that this way of looking at things isn't gong to do me any favours at all though, and that what I really need to do is just pick a topic, start a blog, and write. After all, knowing something isn't the same as being able to communicate it or having interesting ideas about it. And after all, the only way to get better at something is to do it.

And so, dear readers, I ask you this: what topic do you think I should blog about?

(This journal will, of course, remain as my catch all everything-else-under-the-sun repository for whatever I happen to have on my mind.)

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I got a reply from the Natural History Museum today:

Thank you for your feedback and recent visit to the Natural History
Museum.
I was glad you greatly enjoyed your visit.

I have passed your comments to the Interpretation and Design Department
for their attention.
Your feedback has been recorded on our database for future reference.

If I can be of any further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact
me.

[salutations and sign offs cut]

Very generic sort of reply, but at least a reply that indicates that they actually read what I had to say and took some notice of it, so I'm happy enough with that.

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I've long maintained that I'm not really involved with or interested in fandom. I mean, sure, I spent years hanging out in Pratchett fandom, and sure, I've been known to have in depths discussions about the characterisation and motivations of characters in fan-fiction, but these are the exceptions, not the rule, and I'm Definitely Not A Fandom Person.

Not that I have anything against fandom, of course, it's just not for me. The interests of fandom at large just don't really mesh with the fannish activities that I'd be interested in participating in.

Today, though, I signed up (for the first time) for yuletide* and am rather looking forward to it.

I guess it's time for me to just admit it already.

My name is rho, and I'm a fan.

* For those who aren't in fandom, this is a secret santa style fan-fiction exchange program for small and obscure fandoms that gets run every year. I think.

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Several people have been posting about what happened yesterday in Maine, but I haven't actually seen anyone saying what it was that happened yet. For those who haven't heard yet, there was a vote yesterday in Maine on the subject of same-sex marriage, with the result coming out against it by a margin of about 53-47.

Of course, this is something of a bummer and I'm sad that it happened, but thinking about it further, there's definitely a silver lining to this cloud. Majority vote has never been a very good way of protecting the rights of minorities. It's hardly surprising when people turn around and say "actually, I'm quite happy being in my privileged position".

And yet, even in spite of this obvious block in the road, the vote very almost came down in favour of same-sex marriage. Think about that for a second. If we allow for the oft-quoted but probably wrong estimate that 10% of people are gay or bisexual and assume that they were all backing same-sex marriage, that means that over 40% of straight people were backing it as well.

Of course, this is a long way removed from the 100% that I'd ideally like to see, but even so, I think it is somewhat significant that over 40% of Maine's straight voters were willing to vote to remove a small slice of their privilege in favour of doing the right thing. Small mercies, yes, but it's true that we ought to be thankful for them.

So to those people of Maine who supported same-sex marriage, thank you. And to those of you who were opposed to it, fuck you, asshole.

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It has been brought to my attention (aka, sarianna just wrote me a DW private message telling me despite the fact that I was sitting two feet away from her) that I haven't posted anything here in a while. This is because I have made like a Beegee and gone back to Massachusetts.

The flight here involved my hand luggage being searched twice, my case being searched once, and my me being searched once. It still managed to be better than last time, though.

Time spent since I have arrived here has been spent:

Playing Rock Band (I like hitting things (aka, drums))
Playing Fort Zombie
Snuggling
Dorking out enormously
Recovering from jetlag

sarianna is in the shower now, and when she gets out we're heading out into the big blue room in search of food. I don't know what we're going to find, but since I'm starving, I'm going to suggest some variety of eating out, since this will probably get food inside of me quicker.

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Since the consensus of opinion in the comments of my previous entry was that I ought to contact the museum, I have just sent them the following email:

Dear Sir or Madam,

I visited the museum last week and greatly enjoyed it. However, there was one small error in one of the displays in the human evolution section which I'd like to point out.

The display was explaining how all hominids are more closely related to each other than to any other great apes, and did so by means of a cladogram showing branching within the hominid lineage with an outgroup labelled "chimpanzees and gorillas".

While I appreciate that science must frequently be simplified for presentation to the lay public, I fear that this representation could mislead people into considering chimps to be more closely related to gorillas than to us, and would respectfully suggest that the confusion could be avoided by simply labelling the outgroup as "chimpanzees".

I am aware, of course, that making such a change is not a simple matter and that you likely have many more pressing issues to attend to, but I felt compelled to point this out in case you weren't already aware of it.

Once again, I'd like to stress that this minor issue did not detract from my enjoyment of my visit to the museum. Keep up the good work.

Regards,
Rachel Walmsley

Whee.

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On Friday, I went to the Natural History museum in London.

It was, by and large, excellent, but there was a display that had a scientific inaccuracy that I noticed. It was talking about the evolution of humans, and mentioning how Australopithecines were more closely related to modern humans than they were to modern chimpanzees and gorillas. So far so good. However, there was an accompanying cladogram which looked something like this.

     |-- Homo Sapiens
  |--|
  |  |-- Australopithecines
--|
  |----- Chimpanzees and gorillas

I think that there may have been another branch within the hominids, but the basic principle was the same. Hominids were presented as a group, with chimpanzees and gorillas as an out group. The correct cladogram for these groups would be:

        |-- Homo Sapiens
     |--|
     |  |-- Australopithecines
  |--|
  |  |----- Chimpanzees 
--|
  |-------- Gorillas

Chimpanzees and humans are more closely related to each other than either one is to gorillas.

The obvious solution would be just to leave off mention of gorillas entirely. That way you still get the desired message across while also maintaining scientific accuracy.

I'm feeling tempted to contact the museum to mention my displeasure at this display. If I were to do so, just how a. churlish and b. dorky would I be being?

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I have a theory.

You know how burning fossil fuels and cutting down trees are bad because they take carbon which was previously trapped and release it into the atmosphere?

I believe that with the closing of geocities, all the bad netpseak, horrible design and broken images that had previously been trapped in ancient ten year old pages will suddenly be released into our ecosystem, fouling up the blogosphere and causing an average increase in flame war temperature of 1.2 degrees. Today's XKCD is only the first sign!

IT COULD HAPPEN

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I didn't get to see Nick Griffin on Question Time on Thursday, since I was at the theatre watching Avenue Q at the time. In memory of this occasion, I present to you a filk, to the tune of Avenue Q's It Sucks to be Me and featuring several notable British political figures, including Mr. Griffin.

GORDON BROWN
When I was little
I thought I would be...

DAVID CAMERON
What?

GORDON BROWN
An elder statesman
Loved nationally

DAVID CAMERON
Oh.

GORDON BROWN
Now I'm prime minister
And as you can see
I'm not

DAVID CAMERON
Nope!

GORDON BROWN
Oh well,
It sucks to be me.

( Full song under the cut )

I was just speaking on the phone with my dad, when their cat comes to say hello to him.

"Do you want to speak with Rachel?" my dad asks of the cat.

The cat, clearly distraught by her lack of opposable thumbs and resultant inability to hold a telephone responds with, "Me? 'Ow?"

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