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It’s been a little while since I’ve updated here. I’ve been posting regularly at the OpenHatch blog, and on my MetaScience tumblr, and I’ve been busy with a pack of things. Probably the most useful to mention is the Boston Civic Expo, which I’m co-organizing. It’s on Friday, May 31st. If you’re interested in government transparency and in using technology to improve government and communities, you should come.

& Recommendations

A friend asked me the other day for my top science fiction recommendations, and I realized I’d never posted them here. Let’s rectify that.

1.

photo by Daniel Wabyick, courtesy Wikimedia Commons, cc-by-2.0

Contact, by Carl Sagan, is probably my favorite science fiction novel, and one of my favorite books period. Many authors get so caught up describing future tech or alien civilization that they forget to write compelling main characters, but Contact’s Ellie Arroway is the heart of the story: brilliant, stubborn, kind, self-righteous, lonely, and deeply curious. She elevates the plot – a well-told, innovative take on first contact – into something unforgettable.

2.

photo by Christopher Michel, courtesy Wikimedia Commons, cc-by-2.0

Hyperion, and its sequels Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and Rise of Endymion, by Dan Simmons, are gorgeous, ambitious novels. The first book, which is my favorite, tells six intertwined short stories – the tales of six pilgrims on their way to the Time Tombs, on the planet Hyperion. The Time Tombs are guarded by the Shrike, an enigmatic, half-mechanical being, and legend says that it kills all pilgrims save one, to whom it will grant a single wish. If that premise doesn’t hook you, I’m not sure what will. Simmons is endlessly inventive, and a beautiful craftsman of worlds, characters, and sentences.

3.

a picture of the book cover, courtesy of the New Yorker

On any given day I will list a different story of Ursula le Guin’s as her best. Sometimes it’s the more fantastical Lathe of Heaven, or the more political The Dispossessed, and one can make strong arguments for many of her short story collections. (I’ve written about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas on this blog before.) But today, I’m going with The Left Hand of Darkness, a book told by an envoy to a world without seasons or genders. It’s an exploration of a culture without duality, and the title comes from a poem/proverb of that culture: “Light is the left hand of darkness / and darkness the right hand of light.”

Honorable mentions: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick; Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott; The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood; and Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman.

Filed under: open government, recommendations by Shauna on 10:18 pm, May 19, 2013
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My new favorite thing on the internet is math gifs.

It started with this beauty:

It makes the link between sine waves, the interior angles of triangles, and the unit circle so intuitive it’s hypnotic.

My favorite source for these is the tumblr of a physics undergraduate named Lucas who frequently uploads his creations to wikipedia:

A visualization of how Eigenvectors are transformed, yet keep their direction.

A visualization of Reimann integration, showing progressively better estimations of area under the curve.

(Also delightful, but not a math gif, is his series of videos visualizing pitch class in classical music as a spiral.)

From elsewhere:

Outtakes from the game of life.

A visualization of the tautochrone problem.

And finally, the gif a friend posted to facebook, which reminded me how much I love these:

If you know of others, please share!

Filed under: math by Shauna on 9:36 pm, April 28, 2013
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It turns out the soil in our back yard is fairly toxic. My housemate Molly, rather than give up gardening, decided to invite a bunch of people over to help make raised beds in which to grow edible plants. I helped in the best way I knew how: by making a themed cake.

More low quality cell phone pictures below the fold.

(more…)

Filed under: food, making things by Shauna on 7:18 pm, April 21, 2013
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I ran into Adelaida on the train yesterday morning, on my way out to Amherst for an OpenHatch event. We struck up a conversation which eventually turned to the book she was reading, Unlocking the Clubhouse. This made me think of Top Secret Rosies, a documentary about women computers during WWII which I bought on a whim recently and which I’m hoping to show soon at BoCoup Loft.

We were talking about the documentary when a man sitting next to Adelaida interrupted us. Sorry for eavesdropping, he said, but he was curious – his son had recently gotten accepted into MIT, but he couldn’t get his daughter interested in computer science. How could he encourage her?

The only response that seemed reasonable was: well, maybe your daughter’s just not into computing.

He then asked a much more answerable question. He ran a software startup, and he’d just hired his second female engineer. How could he make his company more welcoming to women?

Afterwards, Adelaida complimented my response. She asked if she could use it when asked similar questions, to which I said, of course.

So. In case anyone else finds it useful, here is how I answer the “Women In Tech” question – Three Minutes Before The Next Stop Edition.

Are you familiar with the concept of the leaky pipeline?

The answer is almost always no, so I explain:

The leaky pipeline is a way of viewing the path that people take to success in their field. The idea is that women experience many ‘leaks’ along the way, and each leak decreases the amount of women who ultimately succeed. These leaks happen everywhere, and so there’s no one solution – instead, there’s a lot of individual patches to be made.

What I like about the leaky pipeline metaphor is that it allows me to pick and choose a few things to talk about without suggesting that I’m providing a comprehensive answer. Also, I think it’s pretty accurate, for a metaphor.

Because this man was the head of a startup, I focused on the leaks he could most directly impact.

Here are some things you can think about.

Also, make sure you respect all of your employees’ work/life balance. Because women on average spend twice as much time doing housework and twice as much time doing childcare as men, women have less ability to sacrifice their weekends and evenings for your company. Creating a company culture with constant pressure to work hurts everyone – but especially women.

Obviously I wasn’t able to cite individual studies – my ability to speak on the fly isn’t that good! – but that’s the gist of it.

Filed under: feminism, programming by Shauna on 1:17 am, April 15, 2013
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I’m afraid of flying.

I wouldn’t say I have a phobia of flying, because a phobia is supposed to impair your functioning, and while some people might say that taking a twelve hour greyhound bus down the eastern seaboard when you can afford to fly is dysfunctional, I prefer to think of it as character building. And when there’s no way to avoid flying, I do it. Like this past month, when I flew to California and then to Florida. I took four flights – six, if you count connecting flights.

To calm my anxiety, I do two things. I eat outrageous amounts of gummy bears, which are my favorite comfort food. And I read novels. I try to find the most engrossing, pulpy novels I can. I read five novels over my four flights, but unfortunately, none were as compelling as I hoped.

Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand was a beautiful book – full of deep world building and casual lyricism – but the wrong kind of book to read in flight. Delaney, the author, does some very interesting things with gender and sexuality, as well as with family structures. But the central narrative is rambling, detached, and not particularly moving. It’s a good book, but not a good story, if that makes sense.

The Forever War I found unremarkable. The writing is tight, the scene-setting is well done though not especially original, and the main character is sympathetic even as he does some pretty unsympathetic things. But I think that in the end, this is more of a war novel with a science fiction aesthetic than the reverse. And I’m not a huge fan of war novels. Though I’m a pretty voracious reader of non-fiction accounts of war – I prefer my stories of horrific violence to be as non-narrative and non-romanticized as possible. So this book didn’t work for me, but for a different kind of reader I imagine it very much would.

At this point, I switched out of the sci-fi genre and into contemporary fiction, in the hope that it would be more satisfying.

Saturday takes place over the course of a single day – a Saturday, of course. Almost necessarily, the book is full of digressions – memories and self-reflections and daydreams of the main character. It was an interesting way to approach a story, and it resonated very well with the events of the book, during which the main character’s intellectualism and remoteness is a source of conflict. But it was hard to get into. There are only a few moments throughout the day in which anything is at stake, and even those moments are dragged down by the continual focus on the main character’s interior world.

Summerland is less experimental/speculative than the other novels, and I picked it off the shelves of an airport news stand precisely for this reason. The story revolves around a set of three families dealing with the aftermath of a car accident in which one child was killed and another permanently injured. While it’s easy to sympathize with the characters’ pain, I don’t think the author builds very interesting characters. The only two which stuck out for me – the teenage Demeter, who helped cause the accident, and depressed Ava, the mother of the boyfriend of the deceased character – were treated pretty poorly by the narrative. It didn’t help that Demeter, the only fat character, was portrayed as unpopular, self-loathing, and constantly eating. And the ending of the novel was a bit trite. This was probably my least favorite of the books I read.

Finally, The Shadow of the Wind, a book which I’ve heard good things about but which ultimately fell flat for me. I enjoy a murder mystery as much as anyone else, but there’s something self-consciously literary about this book that kept me constantly aware that I was reading a piece of fiction. It seemed, in its content and ambitions and historical setting, like an inferior version of The Name of the Rose (which I thought was incredible. See, I do like books!)

So, there you have it. Four half-recommendations and a non-recommendation. I think next time I fly, I’ll make sure to do my research and bring some better books with me.

Filed under: reviews by Shauna on 1:19 pm, April 7, 2013
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