Scientists and Gender

Close your eyes. Think Scientist. What image do you see? Ok, maybe read the instructions first, then close your eyes...

Geek Feminist has a post regarding how children's perceptions of scientists changed before and after visiting a lab. I'd write a long rant but I'm at a conference preparing for the first of 2 talks. So far it's been a bit underwhelming despite an amazing keynote on the concepts of borders and "trans" - nation, gender, and sexuality. But I'm really happy to be back in my hometown and had forgotten how much I love it here. Too bad there aren't any/many job prospects - I sort of forgot how beautiful my little beach town is. Something else I forgot and had re-awakened: I freakin' love driving. I love flying down the 5, and I even had fun in the super aggressive LA traffic - it's like a survival of the fittest life sized version of frogger. Between the speeds I was able to rock on the 5, caffeine, and the adrenaline shooting from the traffic, I felt amazing when I arrived in one piece and on  time. Seriously though, it's nice to be back in a big(er) city. So much different stuff to look at.

Confessions of a Carnivore

I like meat. I like the taste, texture, and the way it pairs with a great red wine. I wish I could say I was a sustainable meat eater, but the truth is that as a grad student i get the best quality I can afford and sometimes that grass-fed sustainable and other times it's what I find on sale. I know meat comes from cute cuddly animals and I sort of don't care. I'm not even in the Ted Nugent category of "if you can kill it you can eat it". I couldn't kill what I eat and I realize that's total hypocrisy but oh well.

Realistically, however, I don't eat that much meat. Lunch and Breakfast are always vegetarian, and I'd say only 2 meals a week contain meat proteins. And when I say meat proteins, meat ends up being a part of a dish (like a 2-3 sausage links in a batch of pasta sauce that lasts us 3-4 meals) rather than the center pieces (like a roast), except on special occasions. So it's pretty rare I eat red meat more than once or twice a month, and poultry maybe once or twice a week, but on the whole we eat mostly dairy and plant proteins. I know, what has happened to my pro-meat agenda? Well, the wallet is part of it, and the diet is another part (meat dishes tend to have higher calories, not as much fiber, blah blah, lentils are great, and so on and so on ). This weekend I found a third, unexpected, component: getting old.

I'm putting this in the category of my relationship to caffeine/coffee. Until about 3 years ago, I could have a full cup of coffee after dinner and get to be w/ no problems. I can still do that with espresso, but real coffee or green tea after 6pm and i'm never falling asleep. This weekend we went camping in SLO and took a beautiful drive down the 101. Not thinking about it I had pastrami on Friday, a roast beef sandwich for lunch on Sat, lamb and salami with dinner on Sat, and i think something else (I know, you can hear my arteries slam shut - this is why I run). By the time I got home on Sunday I felt awful. My stomach was pretty bloated and I just felt gross. I'm getting too old to be a militant omnivore!

This has less to do with my actual missing meat - I still plan on eating like I normally do, which means meat occasionally - but more to do with noticing another change in my body as I get older, and finally understanding why most of the food blogs I follow switch heavily to pescatarian or vegetarian w/ only the occasional meat eating entry after the blogger hits her early to mid-thirties. Christ, I can't even count the number of women I know with IBS (mild or otherwise) who have found that meat was a large part of the problem. And this makes me sad - because little lambs and cows are so tasty!

In other news, evals are in grades are done, and now I turn to diss work and 2 conference papers. Also, blogger has a new layout tool that I intent to peruse more extensively in the future, so there may be some changes in the way this blog looks. Yeah, I know I change it pretty frequently, but I'm sort of like that  with everything in my life. Change is good.

Tools of the Trade

Coffee, answer key, blue books... it's that time of the quarter again. I try to make/bring something for my students if they have an in-class final exam and I figured what was more apropos for an Italian history class than biscotti? I've made biscotti once before and used these two recipies: A fantastic Gluten Free Sugar Free recipe (more like macaroons than biscotti, but if you bake the second bake until the crisp up they'd be closer to the original), and a traditional biscotti recipe. The second recipe was also excellent, but traditional in the sense that it used no additional fats other than that found in the eggs. For my students I wanted something that wouldn't require coffee - although why woudl you go to a final w/o coffee? - which meant a cookie with added fats and a slightly more americanized taste.

I decided to make 2 recipes rather than double one. The first came from the partner of a colleague: The Pixel Diaries Guilt Free Biscotti.  I made mine with almonds and apricots. This recipe was very easy to make and came out fantastic. I used 1/2c olive oil this time, but will try the applesauce substitutions next time. Oh yes, and the dough was a bit sticky so I added and extra 1/4c. of flour and chilled the dough for 30 min before handling. "Handling" was more like blobbing bits onto the cookie sheet with a spoon - so don't be concerned if you can't really kneed or handle the dough.

The second recipe was from one of my favorite all-time blogs: Foodiefarmgirl's Chocolate Biscotti. so, easy, so chocolatey, so good.

If you've never made biscotti and want to give it a try, I highly recommend both recipes.

Now I just have to stop being lazy and take pics with something other than my laptop camera. I sort of can't believe myself in that I can't be bothered to take proper pictures. It's sad that the extra steps of downloading the photos from the camera, futzing with them, and then uploading them is too much.  Maybe that's why I need the new iPhone! Awesome camera and instant blogging ability! (in my wildest dreams of totally unnecessary gadgetry that I can in no way afford or justify....)

Want to know where the extra 32% in tuition money and 10% furlough pay went?

If you guessed "Top UC Executives" you win a prize!

I have no words other than this is just disgusting. And I gotta say, I appreciate and respect the nurses, but when someone can bring in over $97,000 in one year in over time pay, there's something really fucked up going on. 1) how many hours is that? When did they sleep? 2) for that amount of OT, uh, hire someone else to work full time. Heck you can probably afford 1.5 positions.

Baking and other things

Time for a non-work/school/discipline post.

This past week I ended up making 2 new-to-me brownie recipes. Now I like my brownies rich and fudgy, so that's what I was looking for.

I first tried ATK brownie recipe which were described as low-fat brownies. I figured: well, adding yogurt to a brownie mix works really well, why not to a made-from scratch recipe? My brownies turned out quite different from those pictured, and despite using good 72% chocolate, were totally tasteless. In terms of texture they squeaked when I cut into them and they were so rubbery that had I dropped one on the floor I'm sure it would have bounced around the kitchen like Flubber.

The next recipe I made was the polar opposite of the first: Triple Chocolate Brownies. These were amazing- sort of like a cross between not-too sweet fudge and a flourless chocolate cake or fondant. They definitely need to sit in the fridge for a few hours, but I'll definitely make them again.

Finally, I'm still working on 3 on-going knitting projects but am also trying to design my first sweater. I was inspired by a friends skinny grey and white striped maternity t-shirt and am thinking that a I need a grey and white striped sweater. Maybe something in lace-weight alpaca and silk. Maybe boatneck, but more likely scoop... For now, just ideas floating around in my head but it's nice to be at the point where I can actually conceptualize design elements that I might actually be able to produce.

Methinks you do not understand the term... musings on teaching

Quite frequently I notice that professors make references in lecture to concepts or people that the majority of the students either don't understand or have never heard of. In European history classes it tends to revolve around terms from Marxism that are never explained or contextualized, Cold War history in general, and a whole slew of 19th and 20th century Intellectual history. They are all elements that were either part of the professor's personal experiences (Cold War), or an integral part of the way they were trained as grads and undergrads before the social/cultural turn- when history was still the realm of great men thinking and doing great things.

In this class it means I get research papers like this one "D'Annuzio and Mussolini: the search for the Superman". In which the author at one point concludes: "After a long life of adventures and being the ubermensch that he was, he died on March 1st 1938 by a heart attack, quite a non-Superman way to die I might add. This does in fact show he is human."

Hmmm perhaps kryptonite would have been more appropriate? All 12 glorious pages of this paper are based on comments that the professor made in lecture: that D'Annunzio was a classic example of the Nietzschean superman. If you know who Nietzsche was and what he meant by the superman the comparison is apt, but the professor failed explanation as to why the comparison was important or even appropriate- which is why I have a research paper that states ad nauseum that D'Annunzio was a perfect example of the Superman but Mussolini wasn't (b/c his Superman image was purely propagandistic). Again, not incorrect, but it's clear from the writing that the student couldn't tell me what Nietzsche meant by the Superman if pushed even slightly. (I'm half waiting to read that D'Annunzio could leap tall buildings in a single bound...)

Of course, the student should have taken the 10 min on Wikipedia to look up what Nietzsche's conception of the Superman was, but this is also a lesson for me regarding the necessity to fully explain and contextualize the terms I chose to use, and not to make assumptions regarding what my students know. 

ok, enough procrastinating, back to grading.