Rampant fangirlism

Sunday before last I was woken up by a phone call from my second sis Flowermoonfish. Somehow we ended up chatting about Terry Pratchett and I told her about the copy of Good Omens EK gave me for Christmas. She said that "six of my friends went to fangirl ["fangirl" as a verb] him every day, and they said he told them that he and Pratchett were thinking about another collaboration."

Then last Tuesday, my copy of Wired magazine arrived. There happened to be a story about how the growth of his fanbase is driven by 13 to 25-year-old females (The Gamines Love Gaiman, Wired 14.04), and as soon as I hit this line, I cracked up:

"But I do know that when I got to Singapore to do a reading, there were 600 teenage girls waiting."

Couldn't resist sending Wired an email with the story. See if they print it.

Wired really is my favourite techy magazine now. I liked Popular Science as a kid, but it's a bit too middle-aged hobbyist - too many ads for pheromones, sex enhancers, and model rockets - and also has a flavour of right-wing militant. (They like things that go boom to the point where it's scary. I have nothing against things that go boom as long as they're in the hands of, say, university people and not the world's biggest military.)

The Deadly Ethnic Riot

A few weeks ago I bought Donald L. Horowitz's The Deadly Ethnic Riot on Amazon. It still hasn't been reviewed yet, and I'm determined to read a reasonable chunk in enough time to write a seat-of-the-pants review just so I can be the first. It was some magazine review that tipped me off to this book, but unfortunately I can't remember which mag it was or I'd post a link.

Humour trivium: Horowitz's homepage mentions "hot Malaysian curries" as an interest. Oh, and he's a visiting prof at UKM.

I'm not usually inclined to read this sort of big heavy sociological tome, but two things caught my attention - first, the subject is something that I'm interested in as a citizen of a multicultural developing country who's trying to figure out how it's going to go forward. Second, the review mentioned the May 1969 riots as a particular case. So I had it on my Amazon wishlist for a while and then just felt antsy and bought it.

It's a hefty 588 pages, which I didn't notice before buying, and the writing definitely has a textbooky flavour, which means that reading is going to go slowly (Horowitz is a prof at Duke University). Have also discovered that unlike novels, I can't read this kind of thing while eating, which means that it's going to go slowly (since starting to earn a real salary, I've been giving in to the munchies a lot and am amazed that my jeans have actually gotten looser. It must be the 3.7-mile bike commute).

On bipolar patterns of political competition (that's bipolar as in two parties, not manic-depressive, and that's the phrase he used, so stop laughing)):

In many societies, this competition takes the form of aggregating group and subgroups felt to have the requisite affinities to form a majority vis-a-vis other aggregates, with contrasting attributes, that attempt to form a majority of their own. This development is recognizable as an ascriptive variant of the effort to produce a minimum winning coalition, one in which a bit more than half the state can claim much more than half of the rewards that political victory provides.

How come this sounds familiar ah...oh yeah! BN!

Next paragraph:

But even where electoral politics does not prevail,if ethnicity is salient, there is a struggle to produce aggregates of sufficient strength to take control of the state by nonelectoral means.

Translation: we all should be glad UMNO and PAS are so busy fighting each other that a) UMNO needs the support of the ethnic minority parties and b) they don't realize how similar they really are and form a government that's [totally] composed of power-mad Islamists.

An out-of-this-world ride

All ye bike enthusiasts and anime fans, bow in wonder. In the seventh month, there will be a velocipede of great awesomeness: the EVA 01 bike.

• Gizmodo post
• FAQ from the official site, for those who can read Japanese
• Babelfished FAQ - gramatically weird but quite comprehensible.

Too bad they're not releasing it in the US...yet.

False alarms

The most annoying time of the month for me is the few days preceding a menstrual period, especially if it's late. This is because every time I feel something wet, I drop everything and run to the toilet, only to discover it's a false alarm.

Yes, this is very much TMI for guys - but I'd like to hear from any female readers who agree.

Oh yeah, and while we're on the subject, two plugs*:

• Museum of Menstruation: tons of menstruation trivia, history, and reams of period jokes, including a couple I contributed.
• The Divacup: bought one of these in a fit of environmental sensibility a couple years ago, choosing it over the Keeper because I thought the Keeper website looked too hippy and didn't want something made of latex rubber in me. Also, the Divacup was a few bucks cheaper, the really critical point.

*pun intended!

Bananana

I got this bizarre email from my dad (who trained as a chemist before becoming a pastor, but that was a long time ago):

something I've wanting to get someone to check out.

You notice that bananas somehow 'heal' themselves when the skin is broken and then they don't rot like other fruits.

has anyone done a study on this and see if it can be applied to our human skin?

Well...going by the "thought experiment" route, I think the difference is that banana skin is spongy whereas human skin is elastic. Therefore, when you cut something spongy, the adjacent bubbles/cells swell to fill the gap, and I would imagine that the sticky banana sap helps to seal the edges. Whereas when you cut something elastic, the edges pull apart, which is why large wounds need to be stitched.

However, there's something nice for the skin cracks you get in winter...3M's Skin Crack Care (click here for MSDS). I use that stuff a lot, especially being a lab worker. It's basically a brush-on plastic coating, has tea tree oil in it so it smells of that instead of organic solvents. Unfortunately, like nail polish, it has a tendency to dry up and get very viscous by the time you reach the last couple mL.

By the way, the best thinner for old nail polish (tinkered a bit since I don't paint my nails often, and then more as a strategy to reduce biting) is not acetone, which tends to make it cloudy, and definitely NOT alcohol. I found that ethyl acetate was often mentioned as a main ingredient, so one time sophomore year when we were using it in organic lab (the only one time it was used, if I recall correctly) I stole a few mL of it. Worked beautifully.

---

Oh yeah, and the difference between muesli and granola is that muesli isn't toasted. Finally got around to looking up that question after 6.5 years in the US. Going to make some granola soon...oatmeal is boring me.

But they don't sell spellcheck software

Transparency=100%

I hate days when there's nothing to do in lab. It makes me feel more like a high-tech coolie than a budding scientist. We had first aid and CPR training in the afternoons today and yesterday. The AED training is strongly reminiscent of the Mr. Bean episode where he defibrillates someone with jumper cables.

EK made me show him my blog. I regret I wrote last Thursday because it was unfair criticism. The caveat at the end of that post that "It's 2:31 am and posting this will probably be a cause for regret when I'm more awake," has obviously turned out correct.

This doesn't mean I'm going to stop posting funny stories about him, or any of my other friends who've discovered it, for that matter. ARE YOU GUYS READING THIS??? I'm really good at embarrassing myself in writing. Maybe if I keep banging my head against the wall long enough, calluses will develop.

Of course, what my frequent blunders and confrontations of this kind really teach me is that I should never speak or write of anything that has substantial emotional weight and go back to hiding behind a shell of polished inhumanity punctuated with spurts of forced humour...

Update on AQ scores:

• Hez 17 (spot on for social science people)
• SD 11 (wayyyy low for mathematicians)
Between those two flers, maybe it's a good thing I like some normal guys =PPPPP
• BA (AT's roommate, who's triple majoring in physics, maths, and com.sci - and is a girl) 36.

I really like the Twister soundtrack, by the way. It was one of those chance finds at the Half-Price Books shop last week when the Koids and Tar were visiting.

Installation blues

I'm trying to install FreeBSD on an ancient (used to run Win 95) laptop my aunty gave me a long time ago. Got stuck early in the process at a command prompt. Engineer friend told me to type "man ls" ("man" being short for "manual", which brings up help documentation or some sort like that.). So...

OK man ls
man not found

Awesome. A way to make a computer sound like a female college freshman.

Yetta Nother

Yet another reason to not stay in America long-term: whatever hypothetical children I may have in the future will be weird enough by virtue of being mine. I don't want to screw them up even more by having them be the maladjusted, artificially assimilated, privately-schooled, hothouse-flower first-generation American offspring of an immigrant intellectual.

Compounding the problem would be my tendency to be attracted to guys with whom I should not mix genes because our offspring would probably be autistic (i.e., if you have a shot at getting a date with me, you would likely score 32 or higher on this test). Damnit.

First-generation ABCs are just freaking weird. They are the only ethnic group for whom I will confess overtly racist feelings. Sorry.

The Ultimate Man Bites Dog story

This was on The Star today. Maybe I'm just geeking out again, but the guy's symptoms sound awfully like botulism. Who knows...stray dogs eat all kinds of nasty stuff.

Solo

Long and rather emotional ramble follows - breaking my rule of thumb for keeping this blog for matters unrelated to my mental state.

I'm like a bird
I only fly away
I don't know where my soul is
I don't know where my home is
- Nelly Furtado, I'm Like A Bird

We watched Keeping the Faith tonight - it's a movie with Ben Stiller as a rabbi and Ed Norton as a priest (yay!) and they're both in love with Jenna Elfman, who I think has the best-known example of what Michael Ooi calls "phoenix-sharp eyes". It's a great movie - romantic comedy and buddy movie in one, and excellent at both - but it reminded me uncomfortably of something I've been thinking about off and on lately. That is, the question of finding a mate.

I thought I'd had, once, but SD realized before I did that the different directions we were aiming ourselves in weren't compatible and took it upon himself to break up. With EK, there's always been an explicit acknowledgement that neither of us will be in Madison for long from the beginning (okay, the beginning being when we ended up making out in my bed the fourth time we went out).

Aside from that, there's the issue of him being an American, and also an atheist - that one standing out in big blinky neon letters to my more conservative friends. Aside from that...I've been doing a lot of empathizing and quietly embracing and being a comforting presence, and let me tell you that comforting a depressed boyfriend when you're feeling "miang" sucks - okay, that's tangential. The issue is that I've never had any reciprocal compassion or empathy from him, not even when I fell off my damn bike and kissed the pavement a couple of weeks ago (some years back after I got hit by a car while riding, SD freaked out when I told him why my knees were scraped). I like EK in many ways, but trust is not one of them.

Things have worked out unexpectedly well between us. I wanted to see if it was possible to date someone 'for fun' and not 'for serious', the "poke it and see if it moves" scientist's ethic (obviously not a Joshua Harris fangirl). Funny. He's had sex with girls, but says I'm the first time he's had "anything approaching a girlfriend." Ah, the decadent American culture. It was alarming some time ago when he said he loved me, because I would use those words for a psychological state of a totally different order of magnitude, and as above I'm somewhat doubtful that they represent that state in him.

Maybe I'm scaring myself, because when I make the commitment to start grad school later this year, it really will put me on the road to becoming a career biologist. The character Piya in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide embodies the idea of the female biologist that I'm worried about turning into - someone very capable of being attractive but is too caught up in world-saving activities to have the time to even make a home for herself, let alone finding one with another person. I mean, that's clearly not true for people who've settled down as uni faculty or in some other institution, but for people whose work involves a lot of international travel, it probably is, and that's going to be me.

I listened to Ghosh's book on audio, and the 15th CD is a bonus interview of him by the reader, Firdous Bamji. Ghosh talks about how he met one of these young wildlife biologists (somewhere in ex-French Indochina; forgot which country) and talks about how much he was impressed by her dedication, but also says how she was living alone with "only a little dog" as a companion.

Jodi said something while we were in the Philippines (it's amazing how much about your professors' personal lives you can learn by going to a small college): "No, you should marry early. Don't be like me."

Someone asked me recently, "But what if Mr. Right is here and you're missing out because you're dating this guy for fun?" Answer: He can't be. No relationship is going to become "serious" until I figure out where my life is going. People talk about singles having a lot of free time, and of marriage as "getting hitched", like a horse hitched to a wagon. On the other hand, unless you're some sort of complete hippy, being single doesn't mean you have no commitments, merely that you're committed to other things - ambition, career, living or wanting to live in specific locations, groups of friends, etc. Maybe being with someone for the long term would provide a different kind of freedom, in that one could work out one's life with a mate and let the other aspects of life work themselves out.

Look at life in terms of desire: what do you want most, and what are you willing to trade off, and are you sure that trading one or a number of things for one other thing will, eventually, give you something you would have wanted more?

You can characterize love in many ways. I think - not sure, certainly - that for me, the defining characteristic of being deeply in love with someone would be that I'd be willing to change my life for him, and I would want him so much more than the train tracks of my freedom that it almost wouldn't hurt.

---

Yeah...very personal. It's 2:31 am and posting this will probably be a cause for regret when I'm more awake.

Wordplay

Tar, Amy and Audrey, and their friend Fei in town this week, visiting. At Art's friend's house:

Tar: Hey, Switchfoot!
Grete: Yeah, the new album. A friend lent it to me.
Tar: It's not as good as the other one, though.
Grete: This one's not so...beautiful.
Tar: It's just a letdown.

---

Last night we watched The Curse of the Were-Rabbit at Vesi's (Amy's friend's) place. Afterwards...

EK: Wallace is just oblivious to what's happening around him. Like, he doesn't realize Gromit doesn't like him, and in that scene in the greenhouse where Lady Tottington holds up two melons, you notice he's really lusting after the melons.
me: Are you saying that if he wasn't a fictional character, Wallace might have Asperger's? *
EK: Yeah, you beat me to it.
me: Well, with you around, that isn't a hard connection to make.
EK: [whack whack whack]
me: Ow!
EK: It's funny how Gromit just doesn't like him.
me: I don't think Gromit doesn't like him. Gromit's kinda fed up, but he has affection for him, and it's like "This guy's hopeless, I can't leave him to take care of himself." [pause] Why are you looking at me like that?
EK: [geram]
me: I wasn't insinuating anything! Ow!

*It's under "syndrome" on the Dorlands page. Dorlands is a good reference, but rather eccentrically organized (i.e. all syndromes are listed under "syndrome", all inhibitors are listed under "inhibitor") and navigation sucks.

Symbols of a dream

Engagement card for my friend Karen - she's a chemistry prof in her mid-thirties, going to marry a math professor at another college she met last year (jeez. there's something freaky in the air. my cousin Jien recently announced his engagement, also to be married later this year.). I think professors hooking up is an encouraging thing because it means THERE IS YET HOPE FOR THE GEEKY WOMEN!!!

Am kicking myself for making the heart-net red, though. Stupid and ugly. It really should have been from the same blue paper as the background and the vapour wisp so that it would look like a "colourless" thing, far more subtle. Also, the red screws up my colour scheme...ah well, with construction paper one has a limited palette.

Nets are awfully tedious to do in papercuts...I wonder why I find the rete motif so attractive, though.

The webpage behind the card is Michael Ooi's "a cup of coffee", the text of which I copied inside the card.

Ah, yes, in case you're wondering how I took this picture: I GOT A DIGICAM!!! Office Depot had the Olympus FE-110 on sale for $84.01, which is awfully cheap for five megapixels. Clearance of last year's stock konon.

The Last Race

A friend at The Star asked me to write something about the experience of studying abroad for R.Age a couple of weeks ago. I forgot to give her something last weekend, and then this week procrastinated until last night when I looked at the clock and realized 11pm Thursday on CST is 1pm Friday Malaysian time. Yeek. Cooked this up in half an hour. Also discovered, while looking for old notes, that I wrote a lot of memoirs on the last crew road trip on the way back from Dad Vail freshman year.

---

“Drop,” calls Lindsay. Eight oar blades smack the river’s surface. Behind me, Jill cries.

We could have been good. The start was much too slow, we weren’t pushing it, but we picked up the pace and were around third place – we might have made it to semifinals. That is, until Jill’s seat popped off around the thousand-metre mark. I am racked with guilt because I stopped rowing in confusion for several seconds after it happened. This boat has gremlins in it. We’ve had equipment problems all season.

Even after that disaster, we almost caught up with the rest of our race. We could have been so good.

Jill cries. I reach back and pat her arm awkwardly, not knowing what to do.

That was our last boat race during my freshman year, and possibly my last boat race ever, since I didn’t rejoin crew the following fall. After recovering from our misery, we wandered up and down the riverside park, watching the rest of the regatta and cheering for our seniors. It was the kind of bright spring day that makes me feel the North American climate can be bearable.

The year ended with a defeat, but we still felt that it had been a good year. In six or seven months we had gone from being eight freshman girls who couldn’t set up a boat straight to having raced in several regattas and won bronzes once.

Shortly after starting college at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, I committed myself to crew like a lamb to the slaughter. At first it was mostly curiosity, and an ill-though-out curiosity. The feeling I had on first seeing a racing shell is best described as techno-lust, like seeing a fighter jet, or an F1 car, in the flesh – a mobile monument to human ingenuity, sharp as a knife and icy smooth.

The problem was that I was in terrible shape and could hardly run a mile without wilting: fifty-one kilograms of wimp. Rowing is a demanding activity, since you’re pushing a large flat object perpendicularly through water. In racing shells, unlike ordinary boats, the seats slide back and forth so that most of the thrust comes from the rowers’ legs – you hold on to the oar handle and push off with your legs. And all this has to be done in exact coordination with the other rowers and the coxswain’s commands. An analogy for the physical and mental concentration this takes would be like lifting weights and drill marching at the same time.

And yet, when your boat achieves that, there’s the thrill of rushing through the water at incredible speeds, everyone catching and pulling in a perfect rhythm. You see the river in all its phases – still, wind-ruffled, choppy, cloudy, clear. Air and water. It’s an elemental sport.

(Obviously, in any activity that involves uni students, there are also abundant dirty jokes – like my “10 Reasons Why Rowing Is Better Than Sex” T-shirt purchased at a regatta.)

I look back and think I must have been crazy that year. Aside from crew and a full course load, I was also working part-time, sometimes up to twenty hours per week, and dealing with some of the social drama that comes with being a college student. It may have been pride that made me stay, and a reluctance to let down friends by leaving an empty seat in the middle of the season. There was, however, another side. For the first time in my life, I’d been forced past what I thought were my limits and discovered that they in fact weren’t. For the first time, I felt my muscles ache and harden. For the first time, I was participating in a sport by choice, not in P.J. or a compulsory co-curricular activity. For the first time, I was strong.

Sensationalising science...indeed.

Sometimes I wonder if the people in charge of doing layout on news website actually pay attention to which headlines they're putting next to each other. Like on the BBC site yesterday, on the Science/Nature page they had an article titled Media 'sensationalising science' along with Family may provide evolution clue. (Although that wasn't as bad as another website which wrote about the Turkish family whose kids had ataxia as “Backward evolution” spawns ape-like people.)

Labeling this as "backward evolution" has got to be one of the stupidest things I've heard recently. It's one family - when 2 normal people have a kid with, say, achondroplasia, nobody calls it humans evolving into a race of hobbits^*, even though it's a new mutation that will be passed on to the child's offspring. Sure, it would be super cool if it did turn out that the mutation this family has is a reversion to something that existed before in the human genetic timeline.

But it would also be as simple to assume for now that it's something that's screwed up in a novel way, and that the kids who can't walk simply figured out that this would be an easier way to get around than struggling with crutches. Especially since they're in a rural area where they don't have to deal with mocking strangers and broken glass on the pavements.

There seems to be a lot of inconsistency between reports - the "World Science" site makes them out to be total basket cases, whereas the BBC says that the women can do crochet and embroidery, which is pretty damn impressive since lots of bipedal people can't do needlework to save their lives. MRI scans of some of the family members showed that they have "a form of" cerebellar ataxia (FYI for non-bio people, the cerebellum is the part of the brain that coordinates movement). Anyway, given that that they apparently live out in the country, mental retardation may not be the disaster for their parents that it would be for, say, a rich urban couple. Because if the kids are still capable of earning their keep by helping in the house and on the farm, they can be functional members of the community - it's not an environment where conformity requires getting into an Ivy League school. (See Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down for why medical anthropology is important when bringing Western medicine into a Third World setting.)

Alamak, oi. I feel sorry for this family because the hype surrounding them reminds me of spectators watching 19th-century sideshow freaks. One gets the impression that some big-talking American "philanthropist" is about to swoop down on their little village and transport them to the New World in cages to be poked and prodded. Give them a break lah, you idiots with the cameras.

Someone from the BBC team who filmed them said that the family had "tremendous warmth and humanity". Yah and you're taking enormous advantage of their warmth and humanity by calling them pithecanthropi. Nice job, people.

* Although the discovery of Homo floresiensis did make a lot of LOTR fans happy last year...

The fine art of scandalizing people

You know, if I ever had a built-in halo as a pastor's kid, it's GONE.

[20:51] Terra: i need to start pretending you're the daughter of a stripper. it's seriously damn weird talking to pastor's daughter about this.

[21:09] Steve: i should stop chewing on this squishy toy thingy. Especially in the CAE office.
[21:09] me: rotfLOL
what on earth ar eyou chewing on?
[21:10] Steve: ahh...earth? Do you know those palm sized squishy balls that you are supposed to squish to relieve stress? This one is shaped like Earth, with hands and feet sticking out of it (and eyes in the pacific ocean).
[21:11] Steve: it's one of those little trinkets a company will hand out when trying to hire on campus. It's for a chemical compnay, National Starch and Chemical
[21:12] me: why are you chewing it?
[21:12] Steve: which is probably even more reason why i should not put it in my mouth like a little child
[21:12] Steve: i have no idea
[21:12] me: mm...starch and chemicals.
[21:12] me: go find some bubble gum, you poor sod.
[21:12] Steve: i was holding it in my hand, and then i started typing. I kinda wondered where the squishy ball thing with feet went, and then i noticed something squishy in my mouth
[21:13] Steve: no, i think i put it in my mouth to keep my hands free. Or i just love mastication.
[21:13] me: *holds breath and restrains self from making very obvious pun*
[21:13] Steve: i knew you would think that.
[21:14] Steve: i was daring you.

Which file extension are you?

Which File Extension are You?

Thanks >_<

boycott Erik's Bike Shop

Just a btw to anyone reading this who happens to be in Madison: do NOT go to Erik's Bike Shop if you need basic supplies. I paid $12 for a brake cable and 4ft of housing (the housing was sold separately for $1.99 per foot).

I'm not an expert on bicycle repair (obviously, from my last post), but last time I had to replace a brake cable back in Appleton, a cable + housing packaged together only cost about four bucks. Sheesh.

On the less negative side, while I was there on Tuesday evening, a guy was purchasing this freaky bike. It's only got one side of the fork. Somehow that looks both unsafe and incredibly cool at the same time.