Amateur Photographer Suz!

For my birthday, I got a new camera. It's not a super-fancy SLR, but it is a high-quality digital manual with a great lens and lots of options. This purchase was just in time for my one-week March vacation, and I took the camera on a road trip to try it out.

I still have lots to learn about taking pictures with my camera-- especially how to deal with different kinds of light and make the colors in my pictures come out true. Nevertheless, my photographic dabbling greatly enhanced my enjoyment of my trip. Here are a few of the shots I am most proud of.

Cholla Ghost, Joshua Tree National Park

Spring Training at Tucson Electric Park

The Pitch.

Tucson Bike Path.

Sarah's Break

Laguna Beach

Pure Beach Joy

The rest of my vacation photos:
http://picasaweb.google.com/suzski/MarchVacation2007?authkey=mujQDUgCqt0

The Sparsity of Women in Science

Stop the abstract theorizing. Halt the heated debates in academic institutions everywhere. I've solved the great mystery of why scientific fields (in particular mathematics and physics) have such a hard time retaining women:

Because it sure can suck sometimes to be a woman in science.

Let me flesh that idea out just a bit. First, a young woman who dreams of being a scientist must sit through four years of being the only woman (or one of few) in her undergraduate classes. Let's be honest here: 9 times out of 10, being in the minority is just inherently uncomfortable in any situation. People tend to choose to spend their time and energy in environments where they feel they can be part of a community and a culture. Merely being a different gender than everyone around you makes it more difficult to feel you are part of the culture of science.

Then you get to grad school, where (and I don't care how smart you are) you are bound to run up against some serious academic challenges sooner or later. The kind that makes you wonder if you can hack it. Suddenly, you realize that you've got a choice between plowing through some of the shit on your desk, or keeping in touch with old friends/spending time showing your boyfriend you care/calling your family members once in a while. Not to mention taking care of yourself. Meanwhile, by this time, you're in your mid-twenties and starting to think about when in your life if ever you are going to be able to start a family, especially if you're living on a graduate student salary and time budget until well into your thirties. I don't think that I'm going too far out on a limb when I say that in general, interpersonal relationships probably weigh more heavily in importance for most women than for most men.

I don't know from personal experience how the story continues post-graduate school, but the statistics certainly seem to indicate that it's not "happily ever after."

At some point, no matter how much you love science and mathematics, there comes a time when the grueling uphill climb to establish a career in these fields makes you wonder whether it's worth the sacrifice. In my experience, this is true of both men and women. But with a much steeper gradient ahead of them, women seem to question it far earlier.

Anyway... time for vacation. (Deep breath.)

A Tucson Dive

On my birthday a couple nights ago, I went to check out a local Tucson dive bar called The Buffet. This bar sits under its flickering neon sign in the middle of a decrepit block next to only tumbleweeds, with no other businesses in sight. The windowless walls of the joint are covered with graffiti, and filled to the brim with the skeeziest low-lifes of the Old Pueblo. Thursday night, that included me and 15 or 20 friends. The Buffet features Happy Minute (11:00-11:01), free birthday shots and a birthday yard-of-beer, and surly bottle-blonde bartendresses with throaty, nicotene-glazed voices that wish you "a happy birthday, sweetheart."

The Buffet also has table shuffleboard, a game I have never played before. According to Wikipedia, the origins of this game remain mysterious. My brother tells me its trendy in NYC bars, though. The white dust covering the table looks like salt, but is actually a sea of tiny plastic beads that make the surface close to frictionless for sliding pucks across. (Ask my friend Brandon; as birthday queen I ordered him to lick it just to make sure.) The object is basically to slide your puck as close to the opposite side of the table as possible without having it slide right off the end. You get more points the closer you get. You take turns with an opponent who stands on the same side of the table as you, and you can slide your puck into theirs to whack it off the table, too.

If only I had known about this fabulous game when I taught conservation of linear momentum to my high school physics students last year. I have no idea whether I won or lost the game I played (mustuv been that free tequila shot), but I sure as hell had a great time.