nanila | Entries tagged with social issues

You rise before your partner when you hear the baby begin stirring and begin the first morning's feed. When you're halfway through this process, you change her nappy. During the nappy change, you notice that her fingernails need to be cut and make a mental note of this. You return to the bed, where partner is stirring. Partner sleepily heads for the shower. As Partner prepares for work, you carry on feeding until baby is satisfied. Then you head downstairs to have breakfast with Partner and baby.

Once Partner has left for work, you spend another hour going through the feeding, winding and changing cycle until she falls asleep for her mid-morning nap. She has been too active all morning for you to dare trying to trim her fingernails, and she falls asleep so quickly that you don't risk waking her again. You make the bed, have a shower, dress yourself, put on a clothes wash, fold and put away yesterday's laundry, do the dishes, feed the cat, feed the birds, put out the rubbish, hoover the front room, read your e-mail and have just enough time to make a cup of tea that you won't be able to drink when the baby wakes up again.

Another hour and a half is spent feeding, changing and entertaining the baby. The last is the most challenging. You watch baby intently. What does she want? Does she want to be held? To be shown a picture book? To have a toy dangled in front of her? To be on her tummy? None of these seem to be working so you pop her in her carrier and go for a walk, which settles her temporarily. She makes happy "Mmm" noises as the cool air wafts past her face.

When you return from your walk, it's lunchtime, or possibly quite a bit past that. If baby is happy on her own that day, you get to make your sandwich, eat some soup and drink a fresh cup of tea. If baby is being clingy, you eat the components of your sandwich directly from their packets and forgo the rest, holding baby in your other arm. As you swallow the last mouthful, you contemplate trimming baby's fingernails when she suddenly falls asleep again.

Once again, you spring into action. You hang up the laundry and put another wash on, hoover a room or two, pay some bills, phone your GP and make an appointment, assemble the components of supper, make a grocery list and reply to the most critical e-mails. Baby awakens, hungry again.

This time you get half a feed into her and while she's having a break, she is content to lie back and gaze at you without moving much. You see your opportunity and pick up the nail clippers. Gently, delicately, you trim one tiny fingernail at a time, pausing between each for reassurance and cuddles so that baby stays relaxed enough for you to do the next one. You look at the clock and find that it's taken you half an hour to complete this task without tears or inadvertent bloodshed. Rejoicing, you finish the feed and carry baby downstairs so she can watch you prepare supper.

Your partner returns home as you're wiping your hands on a towel.

"Hello, darling," says Partner. "What did you do today?"

You briefly consider proudly recounting the successful fingernail trimming episode, but saying the words suddenly makes them seem ridiculously trivial. Instead, you smile and reply, "Oh, the usual," the accompanying sweep of your arm encompassing tidy house, drying laundry, washed dishes, simmering supper, purring cat and clean, contented, short-fingernailed baby. "How was your day?"

Partner launches into an account of the day's achievements and grievances while picking up a knife to assist with supper preparation. You reflect enviously that it was nice when you had a full-time job as your only benchmark for accomplishment.

And that, my friends, is how it takes all day to trim a baby's fingernails.

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On being a spacecraft engineer, using only the ten hundred most used English words:

I went to school for a long, long time. I tried a job doing exactly what I had studied but I didn't like it enough to keep doing it. So I moved far away and tried again.

Now I have job I enjoy. I work with a group of people who build things. Our things get sent into space. They tell us how much of something that we can't see, smell, touch or hear is present in space. It takes a long time to build a thing that can go into space and stay on for years. We have to make sure our things don't break easily and don't use too much power. I use a computer to make sure that the stuff our things tell us is right. This is so that we can learn about our world and other worlds. We want to know things like: how shifting lights in the sky form, how the hot stuff in the middle of worlds helps keep them safe from the stars and how to find worlds that could have life on them.

Right now I'm taking a break from my job because I had a baby. I take a lot of pictures of my baby, my boyfriend, my cat and my house. I also like to tell true stories to my friends and to paint. I live in a place that lets me spend time raising my baby without losing my job. This place also gave me free care during the time just before I had my baby. I'm happy because when I do my job, I help to pay for this care for myself and for other people who can't pay for it. This is very good and I wish it were true in more places, like the place where I used to live.

(Created using the Up-goer Five text editor http://splasho.com/upgoer5/, which challenges you to use only the ten hundred most common words to explain an idea.

Words I was unable to use: instrument, measure, device, engineer, planet, system, country, partner. Worst of all, the word “science” was forbidden. Argh!)

Unpaid work and universal childcare by

rmc28
Singlet oxygen by

holdthesky
Political canvassing by

miss_s_b
Working for a Fair Trade organisation by

ironed_orchid
Working as a clinical psychologist by

vi
Working in retail by

pbristow
Working in the hotel industry written begrudgingly by

gominokouhai
Virtualization and "the cloud" by

azurelunatic
Researching politics, gender and human rights by

ajnabieh
On being a physics teacher by

crystalpyramid
Space science & outreach by

rinkle
Teaching people about dinosaurs by

innerbrat

ETA: They accepted my submission to the Ten Hundred Words of Science tumblr: here.

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Last year, all of the nominees for UK Sports Personality of the Year were male. This year, there's a chance for the winner to be a woman, to be a minority, to be queer, to be disabled. But it'll probably be Bradley Wiggins. I'm trying hard not to resent this because he did win the Tour de France and he is the first Brit to do so, and he also won Olympic gold.

But. But. Next year won't have the Olympics and the Paralympics. Next year, it'll probably be back to the status quo: no women, no queer people, no disabled athletes. And that taints the whole exercise for me.

ETA: Yep, it was Wiggo, with Jess Ennis coming second. Depending on what happens with the nominees next year, this may be the first and last time I actually phone in to vote in this (for Jess, with love and bells on). At least there wasn't a blimin' footballer in sight.

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*WARNING: SWEARY.*

Maybe it's enhanced because I recently had my own child, but the shootings in Connecticut and the kibosh on gun control discussion imposed by the White House have made me so, so angry. Why does this keep happening? Because, as The Onion summarized neatly in its caption of a photo of a woman hugging a sobbing child, "Right To Own Handheld Device That Shoots Deadly Metal Pellets At High Speed Worth All Of This".

When are we going to sort this out, America? Civilians don't need to own handguns and assault rifles. They may want to, but they don't need them. If you need to hunt to survive (and very few people's survival depends on this any more), a shotgun and some decent target practice will suffice. You don't need an assault rifle.

Never have I been more pleased to have chosen to raise my child in a country where there is a ban on ownership of the types of weapons which are primarily used to kill other people rather than edible game. I'm not saying Britain doesn't have problems. Just that I'm glad my daughter will be able to go to fucking primary school largely without fearing she'll die in a massacre enabled because one of her teachers owns a goddamn assault rifle.

Kids in a primary school were massacred. Kids in a goddamn primary school were fucking massacred. This isn't bad enough for you, America? Really? REALLY? What the hell is, then?

This was written after the Aurora shooting. Which was in July of this year. The first bloody line of this piece is: "How many more tragedies need to happen before the United States joins the modern world in banning assault weapons?" How fucking short are our memories?

From the New Statesman. "In the US, the total of firearm homicides in 2011 was eleven thousand, one hundred and one, and this year is on track to be even higher. Look at it this way: if the Connecticut attack was the only shooting yesterday, then the day's death toll would actually be below the US average. More people die from firearm homicide every year than the total number of US military casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. More than twice as many people die from firearm homicide as in 11 September and Pearl Harbour combined. 31 people every day die on average from a firearm-related homicide. This doesn't count accidental deaths. Just murder." [emphasis mine]

The final word goes to The Onion.

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Did I mention that the week of geek chic wouldn't be contiguous? I guess that's fairly obvious now. I have time to do about one creative/fun thing per day while Humuhumu is sleeping, and taking a photo with my proper camera isn't always it. We have managed two more days, however, and the pictures are behind the cut.

( Om nom nom + There's a nap for that )

I've been meeting up with a few of the mums from my NCT course every Wednesday afternoon. We go to a cafe in a garden centre, which may seem like an odd choice until you know that:

It has big comfy sofas with space around them for prams and car seats.
There is a lovely girl at the counter who always encourages us to have cake. (I don't need encouragement to have cake.)
The cake is delicious and served in generous slices.
It's £1.40 for a pot of tea that yields at least three cups.
The toasted sandwiches are excellent if you've missed lunch.
Those of us who are breastfeeding can do so in comfort.*

I'm not an exceptionally social person, so this and one other visit are just about all I need during the week. When the bloke asks what we talked about, I often find it difficult to remember. At our last meeting, Humuhumu was being fussy. I couldn't get her to feed, she didn't want to be burped and she didn't need a nappy change. (It turned out she just wanted a cuddle.) Frustrated, I told her, "I don't understand you!" Another mum said, "Oh, it's so good to hear someone else say that." I think that sums up why it's helpful and why we're never there for less than two hours, even if the last bit of it is mostly sitting quietly or tending to our babies.

This same mum is the one who tries to get her baby and mine to interact. It would never have occurred to me to do that (See: not particularly social). I think putting Humuhumu into nursery for a day or two a week as soon as she is at least partially weaned will be the right thing to do, lest I raise a strange little hermit. She may turn out to be a strange little hermit anyway, but I'd like that to be her choice and not an imposition of my introversion.

* Interesting facts about our group: There were eight mums on my NCT course. Of those eight, three gave birth naturally. Only two are still exclusively breastfeeding, including me - and the other person who's breastfeeding also gave birth naturally. For various reasons, we're also the only ones who had immediate skin-to-skin contact with our babies post-birth.

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lapswood was kind enough to send me a few photos he took at Eastercon last month. I thought this one made a nice illustration of some points that were made about PoCs and the (lack of) diversity at science fiction conventions.

This is from the panel I was on. Myself, the gentleman next to me and the man on the opposite end from me are all working scientists. The other man is the moderator - I'm not sure whether or not he is a scientist.

When I look at this picture, the first thing that pops into my head is the Sesame Street song: "One of these things is not like the others/One of these things just doesn't belong."

Visually, the thing that doesn't belong is me. And that makes me sad. What does it make you think?

the weather today is melancholy

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When I do an outreach session, one question I'm almost invariably asked afterward is, "What got you into science?" I have a range of answers to this, all of which are partially true and all of which, singly, seem to be accepted by the qeustsions as The Answer. I find this frustrating, because as far as I can tell, for most people there is no Great Epiphanic Moment that lets you know what your vocation should be for the rest of your life. But for some reason, many of us have this anticipation ingrained into us so deeply that we end up wandering around expecting it in vain until we die, and I hate perpetuating it in this way. Although I'm quite happy with my job and the life I've built, I realise there are probably a half-dozen other ways in which I could have been equally happy doing something entirely different.

Here are the answers I give to this question.

Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" and/or David Attenborough's "The Living Planet", in which they express pure unabashed enthusiasm for science. These were among a handful of television programmes that I was allowed to watch as a child, aside from the news and "The Muppet Show". (I re-watched "Cosmos" recently and found it a little creepy. He never stops smiling.)
My grandfather. He was an artist, but he was also a craftsman with an abiding interest in science and engineering. He helped me make some wonderful models in primary school - a slice of clay painted to show the layers of the Earth's interior, dioramas of dinosaurs, a papier mache volcano.
My mother the librarian. She brought home stacks of books for me, gradually tailoring them to my growing interest in science as I aged.
The desire to do something "difficult". I found I could get good marks in most academic subjects without exercising the full capacity of my brain. Science, especially chemistry and physics, proved more challenging and hence more fun. We got to build things! Make dangerous compounds! Carry out controlled explosions! What wasn't to like?
The desire to know more about the way the universe works. There are so many questions. We still have so far to go before we can start exploring our solar system, let alone our galaxy, in person. I want us to survive long enough to be able to make all those wonderful science fiction fantasies we have come true. It won't happen in my lifetime, but I'm happy knowing that in my tiny way, i'm contributing to the process of inching toward that goal.
The knowledge that I'm doing something that gives people hope for something more than just surviving on this small dirty rock/beautiful blue marble.

Here are the answers I don't give, but are also true.

The desire to travel. Let's face it, you need money to travel. If you haven't been born to parents who are able and willing to help you do so, you'll have to earn enough to do it on your own. Science, engineering and IT, if you develop your technical skills well enough, allow you to either fund your own trips abroad or go to conferences.
The desire for creature comforts. I could survive in a tent with no hot water and access only to chemical toilets. I just don't want to, or at least not for longer than a week. Again, this comes down to money. I like my lifestyle. I wouldn't, at this point, be willing to live in a cramped flat trying to scrape a living off one of my less developed skills (writing, photography, painting), which is why they are hobbies.
It passes the time in a stimulating manner.

The truth, then, is a complicated mixture of selfishness and altruism, but does anyone really want to hear that?

Bonus weird anecdote: My first outreach event this week was at the ScienceAlive centre in Harlow, Essex. A man came up to me afterward urging me to vote Republican "so they won't cut NASA's budget". Given that NASA's budget was at a high of 4.4% during the Apollo mission and has been on the slide pretty much ever since, I don't think that logic works too well. (Also, no.) I won't be basing my decision exclusively on what happens to NASA's budget (Also, NO.) What gives you the right to tell me how to vote after I've given a talk on Cassini at Saturn - and after I've told you our team's funding doesn't come from NASA - anyway? (Did I mention, no?)

It transpired he'd been watching Fox News. May the heavens preserve the UK from the incursions of Fox News. The Daily Mail is quite enough, thankyouverymuch.

Bonus anecdote #2: My second outreach event was at a secondary school in Tottenham, London, to a bunch of Year 9 students (about 14 years old). The organisers neglected to tell me that I wasn't going to be speaking to the top set, but rather to an "aspirational" group. Read: kids with behavioural problems. I figured this out about halfway through my talk, but damn, that was unnecessarily exhausting without the forewarning. It's always harder talking to a disaffected audience. That doesn't mean I don't believe it's worth doing. But at least if I know this in advance, I'm mentally prepared for the two or three people who clearly don't want to be there and aren't afraid to show that they couldn't care less that I've given up my time to come and speak to them.

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As amusing as sentences like "What be this strange futurebox?" and "All of my colleagues have [e-readers] and most of my friends - people I previously thought of as human beings with hearts, souls and inner lives" are, I must vehemently disagree with Lucy Mangan's recent Stylist column decrying the use of e-readers.

For a start, I think it is rather obvious that Ms. Mangan does not have to make the 2-4 hour daily commute to/from her job that many Londoners must. If she did, she would be as immensely grateful as I am that I have not had to carry dead-tree editions of The Life of Samuel Johnson and Le Morte d'Arthur around with me on my journey. Excuse me, I have to go on a tangent now. Speaking of the latter, I feel like people, particularly my high school English teachers, have been keeping things from me. Why oh why did no one ever tell me that it is, in fact, hilarious? I realise this will have been obvious to people who majored in literature and humanities and the like, but for this scientist, discovering that Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail is actually not a parody but a faithful re-enactment of the stories contained in L M d'A was a revelation. If you were an Arthurian knight whose history was being retold centuries later, you really were in danger of encountering dwarves who would leap out from behind trees and whack your horse on the head. The dwarf would then force you to fight two other knights and when you defeated them, would suddenly and inexplicably experience a change of allegiance, reveal that he knew exactly where you were going and would help you on your quest. Castles populated entirely by women were a terrible peril for all good knights. Every sexual encounter seemed to beget new knights determined to kill their fathers. Also, every joust ended in a bonfire's worth of shattered shields and lances. It's a wonder there were any trees left in the forests in Arthurian England. And do not get me started on Merlin, who reveals everyone's fate in the first ninety pages, including his own, thereby completely spoiling the rest of the book. Within four pages, he manages to fall in love and gets himself sealed up in a tree by a witch, removing him from the remainder of the story just as the reader has decided his character is the most interesting one in it. This was a clever literary device in the fifteenth century? What? I mean, it's amusing, but no wonder modern storytellers are so obsessed with giving Merlin something other than a deus-ex-machina persona.

Anyway, my point is that without this wonderful Kindle invention, I would never have read a good many of the classics of English literature that have been the bulk of my intake over the past two years, mostly because (a) it would never have occurred to me to seek them out without the assistance of Project Gutenberg and (b) I would never have voluntarily carried such massive tomes around in my handbag.

Much as I love my dead-tree Folio (and paperback and hardcover) editions of my favourite books, they're not without flaws. In a country in which you pay a premium for space, owning paper copies of all your books is a luxury that many people can't afford, whether they're a single person crammed into a tiny studio apartment or a spouse in a two-bed flat with a partner and a couple of kids. If my eyes are tired, I can't resize the text to a larger font so that I can still read, or if I have a headache from looking at screens all day, I can't activate the Text-to-Speech function that will read to me. (Granted, the Kindle does this in the creepy voice of our future robot overlords, but it is an option.) Both of the aforementioned also demonstrate the increased accessibility to books that e-readers afford people with vision problems.

I admit that loaning and gifting electronic books isn't quite as fun as doing the same with paper editions - you can only unwrap an e-reader once - but owning one hasn't stopped me from giving and receiving paper copies of books with pleasure.

So while I'm happy to stay old-school at home because I happen to be one of the people who can indulge in the luxury of space for my dead-tree editions, I can't agree that e-books are "eroding our humanity". They've made it possible for me to spend more, not less, time reading and increased the scope of my choice of material. I think this means they're enforcing - possibly even improving - my humanity.

the weather today is on holiday!

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There are a few people I see regularly on my commute whom I consider my "train buddies". These aren't necessarily people I know terribly well, but I enjoy conversing with them because they're cheerful. I ran into two of them last week on my way home and we all sat together around one of those four-seat tables. We chatted for a short while and then one of them opened the Evening Standard she was holding and said, "Look at this. I don't understand this."

"What's that?" I said.

"This Chris Huhne, did you read about the woman he's dating now?"

I had, but I shook my head. "She's been married twice before, to women."

I blinked. "And?" I said, failing entirely to see what she was driving at, other than being slightly scornful.

"So, she's bisexual. Don't you think he's worried she might leave him for another woman?"

I blinked some more. "Um, probably not any more than he would be that she might leave him for another man?"

She stared at me. "I just don't understand that at all."

I shrugged despairingly, and changed the subject.

In another reality, a braver, bolder me made the following speech so compellingly and humourously that she would have understood. "Sexual orientation and faithfulness are not dependent characteristics. Being bisexual doesn't make a person more or less likely to be unfaithful in a monogamous relationship. I'd be willing to bet there is at least one heterosexual person on this train who is in a monogamous relationships who has cheated on their partner. I'd also be willing to bet there is a bisexual person who has never cheated on anyone at all, and a heterosexual polyamorous person who has two husbands, and an aromantic asexual person who has never slept with anyone (and, incidentally, is perfectly content), and a gay person who has only ever had one partner and has been with them for fifty years. I'd even be willing to bet there is a person on this train who enjoys sex the most while wearing a Batgirl costume and is impatiently waiting to get home to her - or his - Stormtrooper. That isn't me, by the way, so you can't win the bet by guessing that."

I'm not that braver, bolder me. But I would like to be.

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There are a lot of things that I find repugnant about the statements jeering at the public sector workers' strike happening in Britain today, but the one I find most baffling is the argument that "because private sector workers have terrible pensions, so should public sector workers". Do people really want their definition of equality to be "making things equally bad for everyone"? Don't we all want decent pensions? Shouldn't the aim be to let all people retire in a reasonable state of health and comfort, and not die in poverty?

Why bother to exist if the only thing we do with our existences is to sustain the crap conditions we were born into? Is there anyone left who wants a better future for all of humanity, rather than to just goggle at one another while we cling hopelessly with our fingertips to the tiny pittance we've been allotted? How did we all get so defeatist and so short-sighted in our aspirations? Why does it feel like it's now not only uncool to aspire to change the world, it's unacceptable?

I bet the wealthy and powerful just love watching us peons squabble over what little we've got. It certainly seems to keep us from doing anything to genuinely threaten their grip on our fortunes.

the weather today is confused and sad

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It takes all day to trim a baby's fingernails.

My Up-goer Five bio

UK Sports Personality of the Year 2012

No. No. Now IS the time not just to talk about gun control, but to do something about it.

Humuhumu's Week of Geek Chic Days 2 & 3

Eastercon and diversity

If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well. If it's not worth doing, give it to Rimmer.

Books and e-readers and that

Expecting everyone to conform to the same sexual mores: Still futile. In other news Pope is Catholic

This post is not (just) about today's public sector workers' strike.

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