ladies

Do you have days when you want to be an ass-kicking over-educated Nature-paper-publishing scientist (or other "non-traditional" field) beast, and others when you just want to bake cupcakes and squeeze babies and shop at anthropologie?  Here is some reading material and food for thought for the ladies:

Why I can't stop reading Mormon housewife blogs - a feminist atheist with a guilty pleasure I can relate to.

I Choose My Choice! by Sandra Tsing Loh.  An awesome article about the fruits of the feminist revolution.  (She's my girl and fellow Caltech alumna with a diploma made entirely of partial credit.)

move over Alan Hills 84001

I have a new favorite meteorite: the Orgueil Meteorite.


I learned about this meteorite in Echoes of Life, a book about the history of organic geochemistry (what I'm studying in grad school). The Orgueil meteorite landed in France in the 1860s, and was sealed in a jar until the 1960s, when scientists had developed the instruments (GC-MS) that could analyze it for signs of life (organic molecules). They soon realized that someone had glued bits of pollen to it, and disguised the glue with coal dust. " Whilst the perpetrator is unknown, it is thought that the hoax was aimed at influencing 19th century debate on spontaneous generation by demonstrating the transformation of inorganic to biological matter."

super science

Today is my last day as Super Science Teacher (how awesome is that job title?) at Tobin. We are going to make, and launch, rockets.

Here is my prototype. The nose is crumpled because it hit my ceiling when I tested it out. :-)

Here is the pattern that I used, from the exploratorium.

Edit: The rockets were super awesome! The kids had a great time coloring them, cutting out the fins (Caellum added eight fins in total), and especially launching them out by the playground. They flew a lot higher than I thought they would; two rockets in the kindergarten class got stuck on the roof! And the older kids had fun seeing whose could go the furthest. I think it was Vincent who said this was the best science class ever, haha. From him, that means a lot.

indexed

Before our last Super Science class, I asked the older kids (first through third graders) to reflect on what we've learned over the past few weeks [the moon, the earth's axis / seasons, the solar system, solar energy / ovens, the atmosphere], and write down any questions, about anything scientific, they still wanted answers to.

How many feet long is the Earth? How many feet away from the sun to Pluto?

how many moons das ererth has? how many moons dos plotow has? war is plotow? war is mars? war are astaroits?
[To be fair, Cajetan is not a native English speaker.]

Why do we need to put seeds on my project.
[A reference to our atmosphere project, where different lentils and seeds represented different gasses.]

how long is the erath? Why is the earth is tiltied? How many planits are there? How many feet is the earth?
[We talked about scientists discovering planets beyond pluto, and extra solar planets, which may have caused some confusion here.]

How many planet are there? What is out the soler sistim? How do thay plant there food on the Moon? How do you use a soler oven?

How do lunges [lungs] work? Can we make pirotic [periodic] tables?
[A backwards K? Can these kids be more adorable?]

What coler is all of the planets?

How meeny feet is the Earth? How do you make magnits?
[Our very first class, in January, was spent making electromagnets.]

These kids were so cute! I am really going to miss them. I hope that they learned a little bit, or at least think science is fun. Next week is rockets, because I want them to remember me as the coolest teacher ever.

groan if you love science jokes

My adviser gave me a textbook to read when he discovered that I am mass-spectra illiterate. I began by reading the Preface, where I discovered this groan-worthy passage:

"Again, I am indebted to Dr. Willi Richter for a quote from Mao Tse-Tung that provides the raison d'etre for the third edition: 'We are obliged to organize the masses.' "

a nerd's life

I think yesterday was such a great culmination of beautiful weather, a great city (where else can you think of that has a week long science festival?), friendlies, yummy food, and hardly a responsibility to distract me from how much fun I'm having.

Mr. P and I rode along the Charles River bike path for 5.5 miles to the Museum of Science, which had a cute little telescope pointed at the sun.

yes, a telescope can be adorable

Then we strolled through the museum for a few minutes (they were doing a demonstration with a sheep's lungs! this is a serious museum, folks), and then rode to the Science Festival Carnival, where we met up with Russell.

Newton's cradle made out of tetherballs, and a girl with a sweet backpack learning physics

a maker bot, which prints things (like the figurines on the right) in 3D

Best part of the carnival: looking at jello under the cross polarized filters! Thank you, mineralogy. We then walked to the Miracle of Science, a bar in Central Square which, according to P, has the best burger around (my veggie burger was also delish!). Eric joined us for lunch, then we all walked to the MIT Museum, which has crazy awesome holograms, but my favorite were the kinetic sculptures. Ice cream at Toscanini's, then we all played kubb (remember my first encounter with the game?) at P's house. After Russell and Eric headed home and we retrieved our bikes, we noticed a flyer advertising free poutine at the Queen's Head. Yes please! At this point, I was wearing pajama pants under my skirt to keep warm for the bike ride home, but a free Canadian delicacy is worth the major fashion blunder.