Azure Jane Lunatic (azurelunatic) wrote,
Azure Jane Lunatic
azurelunatic

Sometimes Twitter is the proof that I haven't suddenly vanished entirely.

http://qdb.dreamwidth.net/dw/306

12:55 AM 6/8/2010
I like the magic triangle. The bulk of my waking hours yesterday were spent on code tour. My sleep schedule is fucked again. Frantically trying to adjust it back to diurnal. Since I live in a diurnal world, I sort of have to be diurnal in order to function in it, and I like having plans with friends and family.

3:39 AM 6/8/2010
Hmm. Perhaps that eyeliner was a bit old, eh? *fling* (It was dead in any case, and while I was cheerfully drawing on myself with it, the applicator broke. Woops.)

1:11 PM 6/9/2010
Smacked my sleep schedule with a big mallet last night. Let's hope it had the desired effect.

9:24 AM 6/10/2010
So. There's more stuff going around about the female aptitude for science being less than the male, blah blah blah offensivecakes.
1) like everyone else is saying, nice job disregarding all the subtle discouragements that girls get from scientific pursuits as soon as they're old enough to tell pink from blue.
2) after we've eliminated *actual* gender bias from scientific fields, let's put the primary focus about differences in training. After we've eliminated differences in training (especially early training, when we're no longer discouraging preschool, kindergarten, and elementary school girls from playing with toy heavy machinery and chemistry sets and computers, let's then and only then put the primary focus on about differences in aptitude, because that's the only way you're actually going to isolate it.
3) Averages schmaverages. It looks from a cursory glance like the stuff you're fretting about is tiny average differences in focus on the tail end of the fucking curve, which is, er, going to, what? If it holds true in real life, going to make tiny differences on the average spread of particular career paths taken by women vs. men, to go with their strengths.
4) Averages schmaverages. This is the sort of thing that makes next to no difference in the individual training of a student: if a student is part of two mostly-overlapping bell curves, focus on finding that individual student's place in the curve of all students, and teach to that actual student's actual aptitudes. Little differences in focus is for high-level program design to make sure that this as well as that is covered in lesson plans, and to make sure that given X hundred students, that it's likely that this many will want to go for N vs M.
5) Aptitude schmaptitude. Not everyone actually wants a Feynman left loose and unsupervised in their lab. I pick Feynman because he's appropriately famous, and I was raised on his autobiographies, and I've also been a supervisor (albeit not in a lab environment) and good *gods* but I would not want to be in charge of a lab where he was working as a young man, genius aside. There is *room* in a scientific field for people who are trained to do a job even if they do not have the spark. Sometimes the best person for the job is actually the one who will follow directions and do good, steady, solid work, has the social skills to fit into the environment, and has the sense to do the freshman experiments in the freshman lab (not mine).

10:50 AM 6/12/2010
Oh dear, that was not fun. Thursday, I went to the farmers' market with my aunt, having felt a bit uncertain for the past few days. By the time she was done, I was miserable. Instead of the walk we'd planned, she dropped me at home; TMI ensued. I was feeling OK enough to head out that evening, albeit with a bottle of ginger ale tucked into my bag. Friday was more funtimes in disrupted sleep schedule, and then random chatter with MissKat once I woke up and my phone stopped protesting being left on my bedside table. Speakerphone calls with [personal profile] stonebridge (dear typo fingers, not stonebride) are unexpectedly hilarious.

This evening will feature seanan_mcguire and assorted literary adventures.

This morning appears to feature housecleaning.

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