Category Archives: Life

Women in science: the network effect

Before I lose track, a passing thought raised by the Guardian article on “Women and the Maths Problem” about women’s under representation in STEM professions.

I haven’t so far seen anyone mention the network effect, how having friends who share your enthusiasms reinforces them and helps you learn to communicate about them, and how gender might influence finding those friends.

I have, clear as a snapshot, the memory of standing beside my best friend, staring rapt at the luminous white of a cocoon in the early dusk of a rainy Saturday. We were six, both nature enthusiasts, and she was incubating it in her family’s greenhouse.

Her family emigrated, and shortly after, so did mine. After that came one mediocre school with bullies. One highly academic but arts-orientated all-girls school, where my best friend’s passion was Latin and Greek, and we could if nothing else support each other’s enthusiasm for the odd. And finally one high school where a few girls might take physics and chemistry but didn’t buck the social order by being keen. Girls sat at the back, kept quiet, and didn’t stick around after class to talk science. Boys didn’t talk science with girls, an attitude reinforced by the physics teacher who was most invested in the science students and hosted an informal science club [i].

In such a setting, if girls are in the minority, and some girls aren’t really interested in the subject or don’t want to show their interest, and others aren’t congenial, the pickings get pretty thin. Lack of peers to talk science to didn’t kill the passion in me; probably nothing would have; but it got me in the habit of assuming no one shared my interests, and not showing how much I knew or how much I cared, a habit I had to unlearn. I also didn’t get practice at putting my ideas into words, especially speech, which I needed, since to this day my processing can be stickily nonverbal.

[i] I now wonder if he saw himself as (to use John Wyndham’s phrase from The Trouble with Lichen) waging jungle warfare on behalf of his male students against an environment that wasn’t particularly nourishing of bright young men either. As an illustration, this school, which prided itself as one of the most academic in the city, with, as I recall, four or five of the six top scorers in the provincial scholarship exam, had at its prize-giving 20 minutes of academic awards versus 1.5 hours of sports and citizenship prizes. I got one prize, for creative writing. So he wanted them out and off to University, and a girl was a distraction and a threat – a competitor if she were able, a potential marriage shackle, if not. Not much fun being the girl, though.

Mes noveaux vélos

Cross-posted from The Bicycle Diaries.

I promised the gang a report from Montréal on the subject of Bixi, the new public bicycle system, which I joined just in time for Anticipation, the 2009 World SF Convention, and here it is. No pictures – keep forgetting to go out and snap some bikes at their stands. But my effort may be redundant.

I signed up and paid my initial subscription on-line while still in Victoria – $28 for a month, which covers any number of 30 minute trips (as long as they’re at least 5 minutes apart) during the month. Any number, not one per day. When I arrived back from Victoria, helmet in holdall, my package was waiting, including a shiny red plastic key with an identifying number and embedded chip-that-tells-all, and a small foldout map indicating stations and coverage and bicycle routes. The only complaint I have about the latter is it doesn’t show the direction of these bicycle routes. I had to log in to the website to activate the key, and on Wednesday August 5, I was ready for my maiden voyage, down to the Convention Centre to help set up.

So, out to the stand nearest where I lived, put the key into the slot by the bicycle. Yes! Green light. Tug at bike. Nothing happens. Tug a little harder at bike. Nothing happens. Try another bike. Oops, red light. Back to original bike, insert key, get green light. Tug firmly, bike releases. Magnetized holder.

OK, I haz bike. It’s a solid, sit-up-and-beg design, dull silver finish, broad black plastic handlebars. Cradle with a bungee cord in front to function as a carrier. Helmet on, adjust seat, hop on, wobble into bike lane. Haven’t done this for a while. After a couple of blocks I discover initially a second and then a third gear, accessed by twisting a ring medial to the right handlebar. By then the wobble has evened out considerably, and I’m picking up speed in the bike lane heading down St Urbain, dodging the cracks, the manhole covers and the potholes.

That first run was straight down St Urbain to the Convention Centre, the only hazard some construction that narrowed the street down uncomfortably. I missed having a handlebar mirror – my neck ain’t made of rubber no more. It took 13 minutes, according to my trip record on Bixi Space. There was a stand with vacant spaces just outside the Convention Centre, so I cruised to a stop, lifted the bike into place, pushed, green light went on, all done.

Getting home proved to be more of a challenge, since by the time I left the Convention Centre, my straight route through the centre was blocked off due to a street festival. I worked my way east and west and eventually found myself going up Saint-Laurent with all the diverted night traffic, jousting with a bus and dodging parallel-parkers. Trip home, 29 minutes, one shy of the 30 minute free limit. Based on that experience, the next home trip I did, I caught the metro past the centre of town, and then picked up a bike.

The longest trip I’ve done so far was a 33 minute run to the limits of the service at Jean-Talon. For that I will have incurred a $1.50 fare. That was the first bike I reported as having problems, having discovered after I started out that not only was one of the brake levers broken in half, but the gears were slipping – I suspect a previous rider had tried to force 10 gears out of 3. Every time I hit a bump, it would spontaneously drop a gear. Mind you, that was to be preferred to the Millennium Sparrow’s (my 1980 Nishiki, aka the Spuggie) trick of gearing up in cold weather, particularly on hills. Reporting in consisted simply of pushing a button on the station. The only other problem I’ve encountered is a bike that refused to check in at the first 2 stands I tried, but I requested an extension on my time, went round the block and it checked in fine. It would be an advantage to have a cellphone for such occasions, and it would be best to make allowances in timing for not getting the bike into the first station.

The one-way deal is wonderful. It frees me up to, for instance, bike in daylight and take the Metro back late at night (the bike is, however, equipped with reflectors and a flashing head-light), or bike to the market with empty bags and take the Metro back with 5 lbs of tomatoes and 3 lbs each of apples and pears (I go a little crazy in the market). I get the impression the bikes are well used: I see quite a number of them during commuting hours along the main cycling thoroughfares, pedalled by people in business suits, and I see them by ones and twos in the side streets off hours, pedalled by tourists. The same rack, completely full in the morning, will be completely empty in the early evening. There are iPhone apps for tracking availability.

Bixi announced recently that it will be moving into London and to Boston, and I see they are doing a trial run in Ottawa-Gatineau. Hmm, I wonder if my key would work …?

Thank you, says the voice from the hole

This is the first month’s anniversary of Darkborn’s publication, and last night I did my first Google search on the title and noted that a number of people have already reviewed it. I’d like to thank you all. Even if you didn’t care for it, I still very much appreciate the time and attention you put into reading it, thinking about it, and writing about it. And of course, if you did like it … well, I’m human (when not being something else for literary impersonation purposes), susceptible, and even more appreciative. 

I’m afraid I’ve been rather un-interactive; in fact, I more or less jumped in a hole and pulled it in after me. The first three novels I published were not only in the early days of the internet but stand-alones. By the time Legacies was published, I was deep in Blueheart. By the time Blueheart was published, I was trying to subdue Cavalcade. When I received reader and reviewer feedback, it was on a story that was completed in my mind and characters that had safely arrived, deservedly or undeservedly, at their destinies. Not on a story that was still working itself out and characters that were still developing. I had one critical comment pre-publication, quite offhand and definitely not intended to have the effect it did, that made me realize how easily my nerve could fail me in taking the trilogy where I want it to go. (I usually know where I want my characters to end up early in the writing, but the getting there is rather like the famous cartoon of the mathematical proof on the blackboard that has, in the middle, “And then a miracle occurs”.) So I’ve been – and continue to be – a bit skittish. Particularly since, instead of establishing the trajectory for Shadowborn over the summer, I’m in the midst of what has turned out to be a complex and substantial rewrite of Lightborn.

But it’s time to bunt myself out of the hole. Start Twittering again (I’m alixsinc – note the c – on Twitter and alixsin on identi.ca). Turn comments back on. Post photographs. Tidy up the blog. Finish posts and book-notes that are cluttering up my hard drive. Get over to tor.com and chip in my 2-bits-worth on some of their fascinating articles. Get the website upgrade done, which involves making a final decision on Dreamweaver (if it will condescend to accept my license key), Dokuwiki, or WordPress as the publication engine. So many more options since I first learned basic HTML. Can’t promise much over the next month, alas. Aside from Lightborn, I’ve summer courses in pharmacoepidemiology and Bayesian statistics. And I mean to get myself into a kayak at least once a week, before the water freezes once more. And since I’m in Montréal, I have a natural deadline to climb out of my hole: Worldcon 2009, Anticipation. Going to be fun!

Might as well admit it

Blogging has slipped even further down my list of priorities than ever. So I shall hereby note the fact, to relieve myself of blogger’s guilt, put on the record that I do not know when I shall next update, or in what form, and return to trying to resist the seduction of our late-arriving summer to wrangle the middle part of a second book. Among other things.

Taxes (squared)

I delivered some batteries to the recycling recently, say a couple of dozen AAAs and some odd Cs, weighing approximately 1 lb. For shipping to the recycling plant, I paid $2.50. Plus tax of $0.17. So, taxed when I earn the money to buy the batteries, taxed on the purchase of the batteries, and taxed on the money spent recycling the batteries (and, of course, on the money earned to pay for the recycling of the batteries – which causes the equation to start to look distributive, if not out-right quadratic), which works out to about $10 in taxes on my couple of dozen batteries … And then there’s a recent short-hop cross-border airline trip, on which the tax mark-up was 60% from EIGHT different sets of fees and taxes …