Notes From A Queer Engineer: Badass Princess Engineers and Gaming Manifestos

Header by Rory Midhani

Have you all seen Black Panther yet? I went yesterday and would just like to report back: the hype is real, your expectations are not too high, this movie is SO FREAKING GOOD. So many amazing roles for women, the best written “villain” I’ve seen in years, and oh yeah, a badass princess engineer whose tech is going to save the world.

Here’s actress Letitia Wright on her character, Shuri, and repping Guyana wherever she goes:

Lady Scientists

Cynthia Malone wrote an excellent piece for Vice called “The Future of Science is Black“:

Scientists in authority positions have told me that social justice does not belong in science. I have been accused of “reverse racism” for speaking out against actual racism at an international science conference, where I organized a handful of workshops and presentations on inclusion. While being called on to do “diversity” work for free and in hostile environments, I am tokenized and my status as a scientist questioned—despite years of education, global fieldwork, and management experience in ecology and conservation science. I did not struggle through the academy as a Black girl from a marginalized socio-economic background just to teach white people that Black peoples are human. I did it because I am passionate about monkeys and apes and the science of understanding their worlds, despite whatever myths racist natural historians perpetuate about our relationship to them.

PODCAST: Margaret Mitchell on Machine Learning Bias and Fairness.

Manu Saunders on science community blogs: recognising value and measuring reach.

Women in STEMM Australia has been steadily putting out profiles of women in science. One I particularly enjoyed was Dr. Gretta Pecl, marine ecologist:

I think unconscious bias is a big challenge to gender-equity in general, regardless of the field. There is so much research now demonstrating that both men and women evaluate women much more harshly in many ways. It’s frustrating we don’t recognize that more broadly given the evidence. I was taught a trick to identify such bias very early on my career: when you have a negative reaction to a woman in the workplace run the same scenario through your head with two or three men at equivalent level and see if you’d have the same response. At the start I was horrified and surprised at my own gender bias – but that’s exactly the point of unconscious bias – it’s unconscious, and it’s pervasive throughout our whole society. But we can all do something about addressing it, starting with ourselves.

Can’t Hold Us Down

Why it’s so important for girls to find role models in female scientists – Q&A with Wonder Women author Sam Maggs. (Who, by the way, is in Becoming Dangerous with me and Mey.)

The Women in Games community on Facebook is approaching 3000 members.

Manifesto Jam — a digital gathering to collectively uncork utopian energy for the field of videogames — was recently held, and submissions are posted for your perusal if you want to read some good shit! Notably, The Communist Sister would like no more LGBTQ+ people to die in art this year, and Emma Dee says straight people are banned from making Let’s Play channels in 2018.

The Death to “Git Gud” notecard mini-festo by Emma Dee.

Hey, look! Sally LePage, your fave queer lady scientist on YouTube, has some good news to share about coral reefs:

Why Pay Secrecy Is Inherently Anti-Feminist

Meltdown

Gender inequality in the tenure evaluation process – likely operating through subtle or unconscious mechanisms – contributes to the gender gap in tenure.

Impact of Cleaning Products on Women’s Lungs As Damaging As 20-a-day Cigarette Habit.

Anna, structural engineer and Army veteran on “Fuck you, I like guns.”

Let’s be honest. You just want a cool toy, and for the vast majority of people, that’s all an AR-15 is. It’s something fun to take to the range and put some really wicked holes in a piece of paper. Good for you. I know how enjoyable that is. I’m sure for a certain percentage of people, they might not kill anyone driving a Formula One car down the freeway, or owning a Cheetah as a pet, or setting off professional grade fireworks without a permit. Some people are good with this stuff, and some people are lucky, but those cases don’t negate the overall rule. Military style rifles have been the choice du jour in the incidents that have made our country the mass shootings capitol of the world. Formula One cars aren’t good for commuting. Cheetahs are bitey. Professional grade fireworks will probably take your hand off. All but one of these are common sense to the average American. Let’s fix that. Be honest, you don’t need that AR-15. Nobody does. Society needs them gone, no matter how good you may be with yours. Kids are dying, and it’s time to stop fucking around.

Here’s what I have to say about gun control. I wrote it two years ago and we’re still having the same goddamn conversation, what the fuck. I’ve been donating to Pride Fund to End Gun Violence, maybe you’d like to too.

Notes From A Queer Engineer is a recurring column with an expected periodicity of 14 days. The subject matter may not be explicitly queer, but the industrial engineer writing it sure is. This is a peek at the notes she’s been doodling in the margins.

Notes From A Queer Engineer: A Tiny Dino With Rainbow Feathers

Header by Rory Midhani

Feature Photo by #WOCinTech/#WOCinTech Chat

Good morning, do you think it would be too much if I printed Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and posted it at my desk?

And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Would this make me more approachable at work, y/n? Big picture, we’re all going to be dust one day. Yes I’ll have those slides for you tomorrow, why do you ask?

Lady Scientists

Podcast: Anna Jane, Mary Anne and Ann Friedman on “No Place Like Home” discussing how hierarchal domination mindsets harm both women and the environment

A Pioneering Woman of Science (Maria Sibylla Merian) Re‑Emerges After 300 Years

Women of science on Antarctic mission to save the planet:

As a veterinarian from Bungaree in rural Victoria, I am one of 79 women selected from across every continent who, on February 18, will embark on the largest-ever female expedition to Antarctica. Each of us has a background in STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine and Mathematics) and all are participants in the 2018 Homeward Bound Project – a 12-month leadership program which culminates in an intensive three-day course in Ushuaia, at the southernmost tip of Argentina, followed by a 22-day on-ship program in Antarctica. The expedition will include workshops, group projects, shore landings to research stations and lectures in person or via video from an international teaching faculty and luminaries such as Dr Sylvia Earle and Dr Jane Goodall.

Video: CERN electronics engineer, Evangelia Gousiou

Robin Bell Doesn’t Think Science Should Be Political — hated the title, but I loved this:

The National Science Foundation has a program called Advance, where instead of just trying to hire individual women, you actually try to change the culture, like instead of dropping individual salmon in the stream, we’re actually trying to change ecosystems so that more salmon will survive. I did that for five years, and we managed to go from having both the teaching and research faculty at Lamont go from having single-digit numbers of women to having double digits. We still don’t see women in as many leadership positions as I’d like, and the harassment issue is probably one of the reasons we lose so many women in the pipeline in particular. Considering the cultural conversation, this is our chance to see if we can address those problems within science and to sit down and say: “What have we let go by? What have we not spoken up about? And how can we make it so we can understand what our code of conduct is going to be?”

Video: Give Me Inspiration! The Paradigm Shift with Dr Helen Czerski, hosted by Professor Dame Athene Donald

Via ASSMB.

Meltdown

The Arctic is full of toxic mercury, and climate change is going to release it

Open letter to the geomorphology community about ongoing online harassment

Does facial recognition software have a racial bias problem? (Bet you already know the answer, but it’s an interesting discussion.)

Geekery Grab Bag

What motivates us to act on climate: fear or hope?

Itsy bitsy spiders discovered in 100-million-year-old amber

Ready to learn more than you ever wanted to know about spider sex? Male spiders don’t have penises, so they instead deposit their sperm on a ready-made swatch of web, suck up that sperm with their pedipalps and inject it into a female. The whole affair typically ends with the female spider eating her mate.

Laser mapping uncovers dozens of ancient Mayan cities

Analysis reveals tiny dino with rainbow feathers

Illustration by Velizar Simeonovski, The Field Museum, via UT Austin Jackson School of Geosciences / EarthSky.

Can’t Hold Us Down

Parents in the Pipeline: Retaining Postdoctoral Researchers with Families

Treating Domestic Violence As A Medical Problem

More doctors now screen their patients for signs of abuse and more agencies place victims’ advocates inside health centers. Education and counseling for people experiencing violence is also more widely available in clinics and hospitals. … This growing collaboration between the medical profession and anti‐abuse agencies is driven in part by the Affordable Care Act, which requires that health plans cover domestic violence screening and counseling.

I Spent Two Years Trying to Fix the Gender Imbalance in My Stories

Women engineers, what a novelty! This article made me laugh out loud that it was written so earnestly in 2018.

#LGBTscience Celebrates The Work of LGBTQ Scientists Around The World

Do Make Say Think

A tip in the A+ inbox alerted me of a call on twitter to create positive, non-sexist, and diverse science gifs featuring women.

When you search for science GIFs, no women pop up.

Y'all, we gotta change this.

I and @XDr_AnnaX challenge you to create GIFs feat. female scientists! Use #femsciGIF so we can see them! #scicomm #WomenInSTEM pic.twitter.com/J2Vi0KrKsh

— Imogene Cancellare, PhD (@biologistimo) February 5, 2018

Perhaps you’d like to contribute! #femsciGIF #womeninSTEMgif

Notes From A Queer Engineer is a recurring column with an expected periodicity of 14 days. The subject matter may not be explicitly queer, but the industrial engineer writing it sure is. This is a peek at the notes she’s been doodling in the margins.

Notes From A Queer Engineer: A Land Built On Dikes

Header by Rory Midhani

We’re 369 days into this presidency, 285 days to midterms, and I’m feeling ready to pour myself into change making. We’re reclaiming what’s ours, goddamnit. 2018 is our year, and I’m going to draw strength from every nook and cranny. All that’s before me, all that’s beneath me, everything around me.

In Boston in particular, what’s around me is land that, until a few hundred years ago, mostly used to be sea. About one-sixth of Boston today lies on made land, including most of the area set aside for Logan International Airport (visible below as the light green fill connecting Bird, Apple, and Governors Islands).

Recently, I’ve been making my way through Nancy Seashole‘s Walking Tours of Boston’s Made Land, feeling inspired by the huge changes that have taken place here. Here are a few of them.

The original shoreline, from 1630, is visible in dark green on this map. Land made between 1630 and 1995 is light green. Image from the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library via National Geographic.

Boston’s first landmaking occurred in the 1630s, when Puritan settlers began to fill in and straighten out their shores using a technique known as “wharfing out.” As the name suggests, they built wharves (platforms extending from the shore over the surface of the water), then filled in the spaces between the platforms. As these activities made it easier for boats to land in the area, the place became known as the Town Dock, and later, Dock Square. The area continued to be filled in, including in 1728-1729 when the town collected trash from nearby taverns and craft shops to fill the entire southern half of the dock with shoe leather, broken dishes, clay smoking pipes, and other discarded materials. In 1734, a public market was built over top. Though the market was quickly torn down by a mob, in 1742, Faneuil Hall was erected as a gift to the town from wealthy French merchant Peter Faneuil.

This past August, founder of the New Democracy Coalition Kevin Peterson called on Mayor Marty Walsh to rename Faneuil Hall due to Faneuil’s involvement in the slave trade. (Worth noting here: Boston was a center for the slave trade throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, and like much of New England, its early economy was built on slavery. The earliest slaveholder in the area is believed to have been Samuel Maverick, who arrived in 1624 with two slaves. The first slave ship to Boston arrived from Barbados in 1638, and three years later, Massachusetts became the first American colony to formally codify slavery. This remained in effect until 1783.) Peterson suggested that Faneuil Hall be renamed after Crispus Attucks, a black man who was the first person killed in the Boston Massacre. The idea didn’t get traction with Walsh last year, but again: no time like the present.

Faneuil Hall is currently closed for renovations.

Present day wharf on the Charles River, Cambridge.

Present day Charles Riverbank.

During the 1800s, most land creation in Boston was accomplished via sea walls, aka “dikes.” The outer perimeter of the fill area would be marked by a stone sea wall, then gravel, dirt, and other materials would be dumped inside. Fill would continue being deposited until the level of fill rose above the level of high tide… or at least, that’s how it was supposed to work.

When Boston’s Suffolk Street District was built in 1829, the city constructed a mud dike and filled the intervening flats with mud. Because the water in Back Bay was kept abnormally low by a dam built in 1821, the area was not originally filled above the level of high tide. Water levels changed when Back Bay was filled in the late 1850s, and Suffolk Street District began flooding regularly with storm water and sewage. (At the time, it was regular practice for sewers to discharge raw sewage at the nearest shoreline, where it was supposed to be carried off at the ebb tide.)

Nearby Church Street District (now Bay Village), experienced many of the same problems, having also been built in the 1820s/30s below high tide. Explains Seasholes in Walking Tours of Boston’s Made Land:

In the 1860s the city considered several solutions: fill up the cellars and abandon then, install pumps to drain the sewers, or raise the ground level of the district by adding more fill. Surprising as it may seem today, the city chose the last alternative and in 1868 began raising the level of the Church Street District. Buildings were jacked up and underpinned, gravel fill brought in by railroad was placed under them, and then the buildings were returned to their owners.

The same procedure was followed in Suffolk Street District from 1870-1872, and Northampton Street District in 1874. Today, if you walk around those areas, you can still see the impact of this activity on the landscape and in the architecture. These houses on Melrose Street, for example, appear not to have been raised, as their bottom floor windows look out below street level.

Windows below street level on Melrose Street.

By the way, we’re not dumping raw sewage straight to the water anymore. Here the Metropolitan District Commission has large sewers parallel to the banks of the Charles, intercepting the old sewers that once flowed directly into the river.

Today, parts of the South End that were filled in the 1830s remain much lower than those filled in the 1850s and 1860s. The Tremont Street area (which was never raised above high tide) is protected by a pumping station on Union Park Street that has been in place since 1915. Though this measure has been largely effective at protecting residents over the years, low lying areas must now also be prepared to deal with the effects of climate change. Currently, sea levels are predicted to increase nine inches by 2030, 21 inches by 2050 and 36 inches by 2070.

Per Boston’s “Climate Ready” report:

Due to sea level rise, significant flooding will result from storm surges less powerful than those causing flooding today. The South End and East Boston can expect to see the greatest increase in land exposed to stormwater flooding as sea levels rise and rainfall becomes more extreme. … In the near term, areas near the Courthouse and adjacent to Fort Point Channel will be exposed most frequently to coastal flooding. By 2050, portions of the Orange Line will be impacted by major flood events. Mid century, exposure will extend to the Conley Terminal, Raymond Flynn Marine Park, Fan Pier, and Joe Moakley Part. Later this century, much of the Seaport will be exposed to flooding during the average monthly high tide.

The city’s most recent urban development plan, released November 2017, outlines infrastructure to block floodways into East Boston and Charlestown via elevated pathways and parks. It also calls for raising Charlestown’s Main Street by two feet.

View of Charlestown and Tobin Bridge from South Boston.

A present day pier off Boston Main Channel.

One thing I find particularly interesting and impressive about all this made land is that structurally, it’s still held up by the original wooden piles. When the last continental glacial ice sheet retreated, it left behind a variety of interesting soil formations. The carved out area of Back Bay was an ideal location for developing thick marine sediments, which hardened when they were exposed to air; elsewhere, glacial meltwaters caused localized sand and gravel deposits to form. So when humans wanted to make land, they usually wound up placing loose fill over top of soft mud deposits. To make a solid foundation, trees were stripped of their limbs, turned upside down, and driven into the ground with a falling weight (“pile driving”). Once installed, these wood piles became important structural elements for the area.

Though I doubt the original engineers intended or expected these wooden piles to last hundreds of years, they’re doing just that — and holding up just fine, so long as the wood stays submerged below water lines. Writes James Lambrechts in “The Problem of Groundwater and Wood Piles in Boston: An Unending Need For Vigilant Surveillance” (!!),

The major problem with wood piles occurs when groundwater levels drop and expose the wood at the top of the pile to air, which will trigger spores of fungi that are naturally in the wood to produce the wood rotting organisms. Once started, the fungi will slowly and steadily work through the wood cell structure and cause the wood to progressively weaken, eventually to the point where there is not enough sound wood left to support building loads. The rotting seen most often works its way from the perimeter in towards the center of the wood pile. In some instances it may take only a few years for most of the pile top to rot away, but in other cases it may take a few decades, and the rate will often vary from pile to pile (or from tree to tree).

Via BostonGroundwater.org.

Wooden piles are usually replaced with steel or concrete today.

Notes From A Queer Engineer is a recurring column with an expected periodicity of 14 days. The subject matter may not be explicitly queer, but the industrial engineer writing it sure is. This is a peek at the notes she’s been doodling in the margins.

3 Ways To Actually Improve Electoral Process Integrity (With Science!)

Header by Rory Midhani
feature image via shutterstock

High profile questioning of electoral integrity in US elections has been ongoing for over a year now. After losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, Trump alleged that he lost due to illegal voting, despite the complete lack of evidence for this claim. Last May, Trump launched the “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity,” co-chaired by Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. The very next month, the commission requested extensive voter information from all 50 states, with Kobach writing:

I am requesting that you provide to the Commission the publicly available voter roll data for [State], including, if publicly available under the laws of your state, the full first and last names of all registrants, middle names or initials if available, addresses, dates of birth, political party (if recorded in your state), last four digits of social security number if available, voter history (elections voted in) from 2006 onward, active/inactive status, cancelled status, information regarding any felony convictions, information regarding voter registration in another state, information regarding military status, and overseas citizen information.

This invasive request was unprecedented and ill received. (The last four digits of voters’ social security numbers, by the way, is considered public information in exactly 0 states.) Among red and blue states alike, there was broad resistance. Republican Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann memorably replied, “They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great state to launch from. Mississippi residents should celebrate Independence Day and our state’s right to protect the privacy of our citizens by conducting our own electoral processes.”

Although no state provided the full list of items requested by Kobach, many did eventually respond with some amount of public data. And this is where things get really dicey.

Numerous states provided some amount of public information, the definition of which varies state by state.

As of today, it’s unclear where that data resides or what will be done with it. Upon the shuttering of the commission last week, the White House issued a statement that Trump was directing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to essentially take up where the commission left off. However, attorneys for the administration have denied that the documents were transferring to DHS or anyone else, and as of Friday, DHS agency officials were saying that there were no plans for DHS to investigate voter fraud.

Maine Secretary of State and former commission member Matthew Dunlap — who began a lawsuit in November in an effort to force the body to behave in a transparent and bipartisan manner — wrote in a powerful editorial on Monday,

It may be that the president knows full well that there’s no evidence to back up his claim that he would have won the popular vote if 5 million illegal votes hadn’t been cast and that scuttling the commission will save his administration the embarrassment of facing those facts. The dissolution of the commission does not void the force of the District Court ruling, and I am still committed to obtaining the documents generated by the commission. In the American system of self-governance, the people have a right to know what their government is working on.

The president’s action shows that he never took the process seriously, and when it wasn’t going his way, he pulled the plug. The directive to move the commission’s work to the Department of Homeland Security is another hide-the-ball trick designed to find a different way to get the results that he and Kobach seek. But if I’ve learned anything in this process – based on the intense and passionate input from the American people – it’s that they won’t be able to do this in the dark anymore.

So! Here we are. Despite lack of evidence supporting Trump’s theory of widespread voter fraud, we continue to be plagued by the president’s conspiracy theory/inferiority complex over having lost to Hillary Clinton. We don’t know where all that data from the initial investigation is going, but nothing good will come of it, I expect. But while we’re on the topic — there is room for improvement in our voting system! And with midterms coming up (and a presidential election after that), it’s really important that we have a system people are able to trust. 

Rather than continuing to chase the specter of voter fraud with shady commissions, invasive data requests, and voter ID laws that disenfranchise our community, here are three real ways we could improve electoral process integrity.

1. Design ballots with a human factors focus on usability, preventing invalid votes due to user error.

Psychology Professor Philip Kortum described the issue to Scientific American,

I think we’ve got two sets of problems. One is that the system is completely decentralized. The states are the ones who set the foundational rules for the elections, but every county creates its own ballots and its own rules about how it’s going to conduct elections. And so. we’ve got thousands of jurisdictions creating their own ballots, and the election officials are doing their absolute best, but they’re not trained in psychological science, and so they may not understand all the issues that could arise.

I think the other issue is that it’s not like you can create a ballot once and then say, Okay, this is perfect, and reuse it. You create a ballot, and then for the next election you have to create another ballot, and it may have different constraints, such as more races. So you’re constantly changing the content of what you’re presenting to users.

The solution? Follow good design practices when designing new ballots (The American Institute of Graphic Arts put together a great resource via Design for Democracy), and conduct ballot usability testing prior to election day to ensure that any new ballot designs are clear enough for voters.

Example ballot that includes lowercase letters (which have better readability vs. all capitals), uses sans-serif fonts with clean strokes, support process and navigation, includes accurate instructional illustrations, and employs contrast and color to support meaning. Via AIGA.

2. Use cryptographic numbers to issue voter receipts, improving verifiability.

Here’s Massachusetts Congressional candidate Brianna Wu, responding to a prompt asking for a non cryptocurrency use of blockchain technology:

Blockchain is an ideal tool for ensuring fair elections. You give voters a paper receipt with a cryptographic number and publish a public ledger.

Which citizen cast which vote cannot be known. But anyone can make sure their vote was counted in the final public record. https://t.co/BM28DOJiZL

— Brianna Wu (@BriannaWu) January 1, 2018

An interesting idea. Not a serious policy proposal at this point (or at least, that’s how I’m reading it), but I absolutely love the approach Wu is taking here, leveraging her tech expertise and unique perspective to bring innovative ideas to the table on civic issues. It’s exciting!

For more thoughts on blockchain + voting, here’s Follow My Vote with an explanation of how blockchain works, and Dr. Ben Adida (who has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Cryptography and Information Security group from MIT) with some opinions on what such a system likely would and would not fix.

3. Add routine post-election audits, providing quality assurance backed by statistical rigor.

Right now, audits of election results are not part of normal procedure, and generally a Big Deal. They happen most often in controversial cases, resulting in lots of unhappy people at great monetary expense. One possibility for states to improve efficiencies in this area is to make audits a routine procedure, varying the size of ballots audited based on the victory margin.

Per Ars Technica:

“When the public policy space was less sophisticated about statistics, lawmakers picked a fraction of precincts or auditing units to examine—one percent or something like that,”[Computer Scientist Alex Halderman] told Ars. “But, over the past decade, the statistical science about election auditing has really blossomed.”

“You want to treat the process of auditing an election as a process of gathering evidence that the election result was right,” Halderman says. “You start examining ballots and you stop after you’ve gathered enough evidence to convince yourself at a defined level of certainty.”

“An audit isn’t necessarily a recount if an election result is not particularly close,” Halderman says. “You don’t have to look at that many ballots in order to audit it to high confidence. But if an election result turns on one vote, obviously you do need to look at every ballot to know that for sure.”

Such a policy would boost confidence in our voting system, as well as providing a strong deterrent to potential fraudsters. Senator James Lankford and Senator Kamala Harris have co-sponsored a bill proposing to do just that, creating an advisory committee of election security experts to develop the auditing standards. The Secure Elections Act is a bipartisan effort (three Democrats, three Republicans), and also includes incentives for states to eliminate insecure paperless voting machines.

In order for the auditing requirements to impact the 2018 general elections, it needs to be passed ASAP. Call your representatives and urge them to pass the Secure Elections Act today.

Notes From A Queer Engineer is a recurring column with an expected periodicity of 14 days. The subject matter may not be explicitly queer, but the industrial engineer writing it sure is. This is a peek at the notes she’s been doodling in the margins.

Notes From A Queer Engineer: SpaceX Satellite Launches and Librarians Saving the Internet

Header by Rory Midhani

Good morning, wind chimes! I’m back to work today, dreaming of butter cookies and what I’m going to do with my 2018. Here are some STEM links to ponder as you build out the frameworks of your road maps for your moonshot initiatives. I’m going to strategically lean in to buzzwords to the point of nonsense and obliteration this year!* It’s gonna be great!

(*At work. I’ll spare you guys.)

Lady Scientists

A Mathematician Who Decodes the Patterns Stamped Out by Life — Corina Tarnita deciphers bizarre patterns in the soil created by competing life-forms. She’s found that they can reveal whether an ecosystem is thriving or on the verge of collapse. Super interesting!

The BBC is doing a miniseries on sound with neuroscience professor Sophie Scott

The Remarkable Career of Shirley Ann Jackson

How One Brilliant Woman Mapped the Secrets of the Ocean Floor (National Geographic video about Marie Tharp, not closed captioned)

Mathematician Dr. Hannah Fry was on NPR talking about her book The Indisputable Existence Of Santa Claus: The Mathematics Of Christmas

The Independent: 20 female groundbreakers of 2017

Throwback: remember when Autostraddle talked to SpaceX Engineer Joy Dunn about Falcon 9? So cool. Check out these awesome photos of last week’s Iridium4 launch, which carried 10 Iridium Next communications satellites into orbit. As the first stage of the rocket passed through an area of cold, dry air, the exhaust froze, creating this striking image in the post-sunset glow.

Photographer Erica Kelly Martin captured this amazing view of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket soaring over the palm trees of Hollywood, California after its launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base on Dec. 22, 2017. Credit: Erica Kelly Martin via Space.com.

Meltdown

Brain Drain at the EPA

The departures [including some 300 scientists and environmental protection specialists over the past year] reflect poor morale and a sense of grievance at the agency, which has been criticized by Trump and top Republicans in Congress as bloated and guilty of regulatory overreach. That unease is likely to deepen following revelations that Republican campaign operatives were using the Freedom of Information Act to request copies of emails from EPA officials suspected of opposing Trump and his agenda.

Hundreds of government scientists blocked from attending the largest gathering of Earth, space and climate scientists in the world.

What makes some men sexual harassers? Science tries to explain the creeps of the world.Two things grabbed me here:

1. All the work is all pretty recent. Psychologist John Pryor‘s “Likelihood to Sexually Harass” scale, described in the article as “a cornerstone of research on sexual harassers,” was developed in 1987.
2. Louise Fitzgerald, a psychologist at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign who has spent three decades studying the effects of sexual harassment, is pessimistic about the likelihood of #MeToo movement to change anything. “I remember thinking the same thing during the Clarence Thomas hearings, that the cultural moment had come and everything would change,” she said. “But here we are 20-some years later when people are suddenly rediscovering yet again that sexual harassment exists.”

Can’t Hold Us Down

Did You Like or Follow Facebook Pages from a Russian Troll Farm? Use the tool to check your Facebook and Instagram accounts here.

The Librarians Saving The Internet

Learning for EveryBody: Lessons from Susan Burch by Adriana Salerno

PBS: A Map of Gender Diverse Cultures — This is a couple years old and the language is imperfect and clunky. But! I think some of you will really enjoy the little interactive map, which includes such entries as, “Bangala (DR Congo) – In the centuries before European colonists arrived, the Bangala people’s animist beliefs were carried byshamans would dress in women’s clothing in order to gain the ability to solve crimes such as murder.” Murder! I am fascinated, going to read more now.

Protesters march from the Utah State Capitol through downtown Salt Lake City during President Donald Trump’s visit Monday, Dec. 4, 2017. Roughly 3,000 demonstrators lined up near the State Capitol to protest Trump’s announcement of scaling back two sprawling national monuments, and his declaring that “public lands will once again be for public use.” (Benjamin Zack/Standard-Examiner via AP / The Salt Lake Tribune.)

Geekery Grab Bag

Should You Shower in the Morning, or at Night? (Yes.)

Does raising your arm to the sky improve your cell reception? (No.)

Nature’s top 10 videos and podcasts of the year

This Week in Science Podcast (TWIS) – “We take a moment to reflect on the whole of earthling history. This once humble rock spinning lifelessly in space… Without an atmosphere to call its own… Has come quite a long way in the last past 4.5 billion-ish years.”

Five Fun Facts About Reindeer – “Unlike most deer species, both male and female reindeer grow antlers. So we really don’t know the sex of Santa’s reindeer.” Related: this Snopes article, which incorrectly describes the reindeer as having masculine names. Are you seriously going to tell me that “Prancer,” “Vixen,” “and “Blitzen” aren’t drag loving dykes?

Notes From A Queer Engineer is a recurring column with an expected periodicity of 14 days. The subject matter may not be explicitly queer, but the industrial engineer writing it sure is. This is a peek at the notes she’s been doodling in the margins.

5 Videos of Solid Advice for Women in STEM for Your Consideration

header by Rory Midhani
feature image via shutterstock

Hello, fighter jets! I ordered myself 14 identical pairs of wool socks last week, with the intent to eliminate all other socks from my drawer (and thus the need for matching). They arrived on Monday and I feel like a GENIUS, would recommend.

Anyway, here are some other humans with potentially life changing advice for you to take!

1. Lift as you climb by redirecting conversations to highlight other women’s contributions

Developer Crystal Martin gave an excellent talk at TEDxStLouisWomen last week, providing specific tips on how to shut down nonsense in the workplace and advocate for women coworkers. I particularly like that this video invokes community, which is something that drives me personally but doesn’t often get discussed in career-related contexts (where individual advancement is usually the focus).

2. Don’t undervalue your time

Genetics Graduate Student Alex Dainis with a good reminder for us all: don’t undervalue your own time! Stop doing things that aren’t worth the time, and start (or continue) doing activities that you value more highly! This is especially good to pay attention to if there’s financial compensation involved; don’t cheat yourself!

3. Make an impact by building and spending inclusion currency

Director in Global Equities Lanaya Irvin at Lesbians Who Tech 2017. I love her perspective on authenticity — that one way she brings her whole self to work is by engaging in things she cares about, which in turn has opened up many opportunities for her. She is now Co-chair of the Human Rights Campaign’s National Business Advisory Council; sits on the Board of Directors for the New York City LGBT Anti-Violence Project; and is on the executive leadership team of OPEN Finance, a consortium of LGBT leaders advancing inclusion across Wall Street.

4. When hiring, look for transferable skills to open up a broader range of candidates for consideration

President of Tech Savvy Women JJ DiGeronimo interviews techie/author Mala Kumar about diversity in tech. Around 4:05, they start talking about recruitment practices and how hiring managers would do well to look for transferable skills rather than “purple unicorns.” Here’s the original article Kumar wrote, if you prefer a written article.

5. Create an anti-burnout cocoon

Web Developer/Engineer Jamie Chung at Lesbians Who Tech 2017 on how to make space for yourself and avoid burnout. Really feeling their comments about “finding nope” and disengaging from the news cycle!

Notes From A Queer Engineer is a recurring column with an expected periodicity of 14 days. The subject matter may not be explicitly queer, but the industrial engineer writing it sure is. This is a peek at the notes she’s been doodling in the margins.

Notes From a Queer Engineer: Dinosaur Footprints, the Mathematical Joy of Smarties and More

Header by Rory Midhani
Feature image via #WOCinTechChat

This evening, I turned to my fiancée and asked in all earnestness: “Do you think it would be too mentally taxing for us to watch something new tonight? Or should we watch something old again? I’m undecided.”

If you, too, are running low on decision making power, just go ahead and watch Alias Grace. It’s great.

Lady Scientists

+ How I Get It Done: Jane Goodall, Primatologist

+ Helen Quinn will receive the prestigious 2018 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics for her pioneering efforts in developing a unified theory of the electromagnetic, weak and strong interactions

+ UNSW scientist Michelle Simmons named NSW Australian of the Year

+ Lisa Buckley: Visiting A Dinosaur Tracksite In Northeast British Columbia

We won’t know for sure how many footprints are preserved until we uncover the entire surface, but our initial surveys show that there is at least one footprint per square meter, so we know that we are dealing with potentially thousands of dinosaur footprints. That noise you hear is very excited science-y squealing.

“This shot of me from Kakwa Provincial Park in 2006 (taken by R. T. McCrea) is typical of most of our dinosaur footprint sites in northeastern British Columbia: steeply inclined.” – Lisa Buckley

+ Meet Naomi Wu, Target of an American Tech Bro Witchhunt. Dale Dougherty, CEO of Make magazine, accused her of being fake because… she’s pretty?? Get it together, men.

What Dougherty and the other sexist Americans writing about Wu don’t understand is that Wu’s home of Shenzhen, China, has allowed femininity to exist at the intersection of technology and art. The city is almost 35 years old—”one of the youngest cities in China,” Wu explains—and it can have a “cyber punk” quality (think Los Angeles in Blade Runner or Neo Tokyo in Akira). So while Wu might wear tiny outfits that accentuate her large synthetic breasts, dressing outlandishly isn’t that unusual in a city like hers. “I know it can seem odd by Western standards,” she explains on her Patreon page, “but it’s not disrespectful or frowned upon here.”

Meltdown

+ Trump’s top environmental pick says she has ‘many questions’ about climate change. :(

+ Budget shortfalls and aging ships are starting to undermine key climate-change data-collection programs that help scientists gauge the state of the world’s oceans.

+ Update from the New York Times on disaster capitalism in Puerto Rico: “The [Whitefish] Lineman Got $63 an Hour. The Utility Was Billed $319 an Hour.” Outrageous gouging. Furthermore, Puerto Rico’s electric company disregarded its own lawyers’ advice when it signed the $300 million contract that offered so few protections that it allowed some workers trying to fix the battered power grid to bill for “nearly every waking hour” they were on the island.

+ Government Agencies Not Taking Action Against Dangers of Electric Generators in Puerto Rico

+ Finally, a more accurate death count in Puerto Rico

+ The New Yorker: The Tech Industry’s Gender-Discrimination Problem

+ It’s Not Just Hollywood, It’s Time to Sound the Alarm on Sexual Harassment in Our Schools

+ 15,000 scientists — the most scientists to ever co-sign and formally support a published journal article — have issued a warning to humanity:

To prevent widespread misery and catastrophic biodiversity loss, humanity must practice a more environmentally sustainable alternative to business as usual. This prescription was well articulated by the world’s leading scientists 25 years ago, but in most respects, we have not heeded their warning. Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory, and time is running out. We must recognize, in our day-to-day lives and in our governing institutions, that Earth with all its life is our only home.

Geekery Grab Bag

+ Be kind to spiders; myths and legends dispelled

+ Can Carbon-Dioxide Removal Save the World?

+ What Museum Collections Of Century-Old Birds Tell Us About Our Dirty Air. Spoiler alert: humans ruin everything.

+ Study of Secret Sex Lives of Trees Finds Tiny Bees Play Big Part

+ Revel in the mathematical joy of Smarties with Vi Hart:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4orZQ9Z0WL4

Can’t Hold Us Down

+ Your company’s Slack is probably sexist. (Here are some ways to fix it.)

+ Science’s Next Frontier? It’s Civic Engagement

+ How the ‘Shalane Flanagan Effect’ Works – Okay, this isn’t STEM specific, but it’s about women coworkers supporting each other and outperforming men! I found it legitimately inspiring.

Do Make Say Think

+ The Women in Planetary Science & Exploration Conference is now accepting abstracts on geology, astrobiology, computer science, robotics, space policy, Women in STEM issues, and more. Deadline: November 22.

+ Would you like to take this survey about #IronViz? Emma Whyte, Eva Murray, Emily Chen, and Lorna Eden are taking a data driven approach to fix the gender inequality among participants

+ Tired of #AllMalePanels and #AllWhitePanels? Check out these resources for finding diverse voices in the US and around the world.

Notes From A Queer Engineer is a recurring column with an expected periodicity of 14 days. The subject matter may not be explicitly queer, but the industrial engineer writing it sure is. This is a peek at the notes she’s been doodling in the margins.

Notes From A Queer Engineer: Robot Birds and More News About Disaster Capitalism

Header by Rory Midhani

It’s a new day, and global warming could soon release ghost towns from their icy graves. What a world! Here are some links for your face.

Lady Scientists

+ Emily Graslie made a video about parasites and why they’re not all creepy.

+ Following what sounds like an interesting panel on decolonization put together by Mandi Smallhorne at WCSJ, scientists have been having tweeting under #decolonizescience.

+ Ecologist Gail Patricelli is one of a few researchers using robotic birds to study avian courtship. For the past decade, her current research has focused on the Greater Sage-Grouse, and she calls the latest versions of her robotic birds “fembots.”

“Anything brown and round is fair game,” says Patricelli, who says she’s even seen Greater Sage-Grouses try to mate with dried cow poop when nothing more promising was around. “The bar is pretty low for us in trying to fool the males.” Photo: Gail L. Patricelli. Via Audobon.

+ Emily Lakdawalla: The Moon’s Giordano Bruno crater through many eyes

Meltdown

+ Record surge in atmospheric CO2 seen in 2016. Methane levels are rising too, scientists not really sure why. So that’s not great.

+ Rigged: How Voter Suppression Threw Wisconsin to Trump.

+ In unprecedented shift, EPA to prohibit scientists who receive agency funding from serving as advisers. At least three of the listed replacement appointees have backgrounds working for large corporations whose activities are or could potentially be regulated by the EPA.

+ Bacteria can begin evolving resistance to antibiotics that they haven’t even encountered yet.

+ Short-Term Rental Boom Leaves Yosemite Struggling to Fill Jobs

+ Remember a few weeks ago when we discussed energy restoration in Puerto Rico and noted out that the contractor situation with Whitefish was being handled in an unusual way? Well, a leaked copy of the contract recently revealed terms that barred penalties for work delays and prohibited the project from being audited. It also turns out Whitefish Energy is based in the tiny hometown of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, and the head of the private equity company that backs Whitefish, Joe Colonnetta, was a Trump campaign donor.

Following public outcry, PREPA canceled the $300 million contract. Fluor is now the primary contractor on Puerto Rico. As of Tuesday, roughly 70 percent of Puerto Ricans have no electricity, and 20 percent are without water. The US military has also started pulling troops. We should continue watching what happens here, and in particular, watching where money is going; disaster capitalism is clearly in full effect.

Here’s Carmen’s list on ways to help Puerto Rico.

+ President Trump Apparently Would Like to Open Up the Gulf of Mexico to Oil Companies

Geekery Grab Bag

+ The Unforgiving Math That Stops Epidemics

+ The Hidden Dispute Over Biodiversity’s Health Benefits

+ I found this fascinating: Vikings Razed the Forests. Can Iceland Regrow Them?

Can’t Hold Us Down

+ The Herstory of Hepeating

+ Women confronting sexual harassment in chemistry. (Because academia has a sexual harrassment problem, too.)

+ Lisa Munro on saying “no” and having boundaries:

As an academic, you’re supposed to say yes to everything and everyone in order to make your CV longer and more substantial. Not only are you supposed to say yes to everything, but the people around you expect that you’ll say yes to all kinds of things that they want you to do at your expense. You might recognize this model as exploitation and you would be right. One of the truly empowering things about being an ex-academic is this: you don’t have to participate in exploitative labor practices.

+ A call for Simons Collaboration Grants to re-rethink its policies

Do Make Say Think

+ Professor Helen Roy would like your observations of ladybirds, please.

+ Chemist Dr. Raychelle Burks and biologist Dr. DN Lee are visiting London from November 18-24 and will be doing a London #BlackandSTEM meetup, a #scicomm peeps meetup, and a Superhero Hackathon. More info here.

Notes From A Queer Engineer is a recurring column with an expected periodicity of 14 days. The subject matter may not be explicitly queer, but the industrial engineer writing it sure is. This is a peek at the notes she’s been doodling in the margins.

Interview With Two Queer Engineers: Katie and Kelly Votolato

Header by Rory Midhani

Hello pumpkins! How’s your week treating you? Last night my fiancée and I went out for after-dinner ice cream and bourbon and had a long discussion about career goals. We both work in STEM fields, and it’s just like, the best thing. I often find it weird to talk about my work stuff in queer spaces – not because my stuff is any more or less exciting than anyone else’s, but because there’s usually a huge income gap in the room. (A problem I suspect is linked to the systematic oppression of people in my network, specifically via the undervaluation of work associated with women. Thanks, patriarchy!) There’s a structural problem there, which I’m unlikely to solve as an individual, but one thing I’ve found helpful is to purposefully build a network of people who are willing to talk things out with me and compare perspectives.

My network includes my fiancée (obviously), and it also includes Kelly (who was in my undergrad engineering program) and her wife, Katie (another engineer, and a delight upon this earth). I visited them this weekend and had a chat with them about their careers, their move to Indiana, and how they stay connected with queer community.

Here’s Katie and Kelly.

Katie and Kelly with their three month old daughter.

Katie, what’s your engineering background?

Katie: Over the past 10 years I’ve done probably 10 different jobs at about 3 different companies. It spans operations and supply chain, mostly, with some quality engineer type roles as well. I worked for Toyota for about three years and did their rotational training program. I ended up in their purchasing engineering group, working with suppliers on supplier quality and acting as kind of an internal consultant pool for improvement projects.

Then after my wife and I moved to Boston, I worked for General Electric at their aircraft engine plant in Lynn, Massachusetts. I was a quality engineer there and then a production control specialist; I also worked as a supervisor during some of that time. And then I went to a different GE site in their oil and gas group and worked as a Lean leader there. They made oil valves.

There was a clear path forward at GE for me to kind of move on to the next management step, but when I looked five years ahead at what that would actually look like, it wasn’t the work-life balance I wanted. When I looked back the different roles I’d had and thought about what I liked the best and what I wanted to be doing, I really liked that Toyota role where I was traveling around and helping suppliers figure out how to do things better. I thought, if I could just do that, that would be a lot of fun. So that’s what I decided to do. Then I went back to get my MBA so that I would understand the business side of things a bit more – both in terms of running my own business, as well as consulting for people and being able to understand their business a little bit better too.

Now I have a little consulting group that’s just me. I consult part time on any kind of business process improvement. Right now I’m working with an HR group, so it’s very much off the manufacturing floor. I’m working with them to help their processes for recruitment and starting to think of that more as a process and what are the metrics they should be looking for and how do they do better at that.

Kelly, what’s your engineering background?

Kelly: I worked for three years at Raytheon in Andover, Massachusetts. I had a variety of roles there in manufacturing positions. I worked as a production supervisor, a new products lead, a production planner – a couple different things there. I left Raytheon when we came over to Indiana. I didn’t have a job when we moved here for Katie to go back to school but I found Boston Scientific and have been working there for about four years now as an industrial engineer. I hadn’t actually done an industrial engineering role after getting my industrial engineering degree, so I thought, well, let me try this!

It’s been good. As an industrial engineering supervisor, I work with pretty much everyone in the plant on process improvement – both on the manufacturing floor, but also in the office areas to improve their business processes.

How did your industrial engineering training help you – or not help you – in the earlier roles you held?

Kelly: It definitely helped me in all the roles I had at Raytheon where I was working with the manufacturing floor. IEs make great production supervisors if they have any inkling of wanting to lead people; it’s the perfect background for production supervisor. As a production planner I learned a lot about SAP – the technical side of it was more about learning about SAP and the system, how that all worked. But from a conceptual standpoint, having an IE background and understanding the need to plan material ahead and have a consistent flow of material and managing it in a smart way, all of those type of concepts came from my IE background. I think it helped me catch on quicker. Same thing for the new products lead. That one was more of a project management type role and it involved a lot of problem solving and change management, which were both part of my IE degree program. There are a lot of applicable concepts and tools in manufacturing operations.

Katie: One of the things I always say about what links these roles I’ve had is each one of them is problem solving. Each has been kind of a different way, a little different focus or whatnot, but everything has been problem solving. That’s what the engineering background prepared me for the most. It’s all problem solving, there’s just all these different tweaks.

Kelly: You know how to apply it to any different situation, any function. So really, hire industrial engineers! That’s the moral of the story.

Katie: On my LinkedIn profile, it says I’m a mechanical engineer by training, an industrial engineer by career, and a “common sense engineer” is what I call most of what I do. It just sort of ties it all together, that it’s all problem solving.

With such similar backgrounds, do you find yourself talking about work a lot when you get home? Do you help each other?

Kelly: Yes.

Katie: Yeah, and there was also that five month stint where Kelly and I both worked for Boston Scientific as industrial engineers in the same department.

Tell me about that.

Kelly: Well, we’re still married!

Katie: People still call Kelly “Katie” at work even this was like four years ago. But having the same last name, and first names that both start with K.

Kelly: We got asked if we were sisters.

Katie: Oh yeah.

Kelly: We got asked if we were sisters-in-law. Like we had brothers or something –

Katie: “Did you marry brothers?” That was interesting.

Kelly: That was probably the best one.

Katie: Like, no, we’re married to each other.

Kelly: They really couldn’t wrap their heads around us.

Katie: But yeah. That was a little intense at points, but it was also – I think we know how to work with each other really well, so it was really effective a lot of times. But it was also sort of like, okay, we’ve gotta take a break.

Kelly: Yeah, when we were working together, we didn’t talk about it at home.

Katie: Because you’ve already talked about it a lot at work. And we weren’t always together, but for a couple months, we were really working on the same stuff together.

Kelly: It’s a lot.

Katie: But we made some really good improvements in that area. And I think at the time, Kelly hadn’t led business process improvement stuff as much. I had done a little more in my last role as a Lean leader at GE, so I was able to show her how we had done it some there, and we kind of teamed together. Like I led the first couple of these and then she was like oh, okay, I see how you did it, and then made some of her own tweaks. I think it worked really well for the area. And at the time – I’m three years older than Kelly – at the time I was just a little bit more experienced in doing that. So I think it was sort of helpful to see how I did it, and then you made your own after that. You might disagree.

Kelly: I’d agree. It was helpful.

Kelly has a B.S. and M.E. in industrial and systems engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Katie has a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Rose Hulman Institute of Technology and an MBA from Indiana University.

Katie: Kelly started in December and I came in like February. And the area was not in good shape. It was doing pretty badly, actually. They were on backorder to multiple customers. They were having trouble getting their arms around just what was going on in the area. And I think knowing that I was only there for a short period of time helped me stay really focused on what it was that I was supposed to do. Coming out of that, I think I was able to help get them on a much better path. It wasn’t just me, it was a team of people, of course – but I felt like I really made an impact and helped make some big steps forward in the direction they were going, as well as the actual status to customers and how well their machines were operating. And I can tell that it wasn’t just me who thought that because both of my consulting jobs that I’ve had since that time period were people that I tangentially worked with at Boston Scientific that went on to other places and then hired me as a consultant to come help them. And they’re people that weren’t even really that involved in what we were doing but saw what we were doing from outside and saw value in it and have brought me into their organizations.

That’s awesome. Kelly, can you tell me about something you’re proud of that you’ve worked on?

Kelly: I was able to work with the materials group – which includes receiving, shipping, warehouse, all the material logistics in the manufacturing plant and on the floor – and the operations group to put together a process flow we called “Build It.” It was basically the entire process flow of planning material, ordering material, inspecting it through incoming inspection with the quality group, delivering it to the floor with our material handlers, and building product. The point was to link together all the processes between those three different groups – materials, production, and quality – because on so many occasions, there was just not good communication between groups. People liked to point fingers and instead of fixing the flow all the way through the whole process, everybody just kind of wanted to look at their own metrics to see how they were doing. The exercise showed how everybody was interconnected and pointed out things like how planning effects production; changes to the production times changes how they can deliver material to the floor.

The project ended up getting a lot of good feedback from Boston Scientific leadership. There’s always a global conference they have for two days at the end of the year with all the VPs from the different manufacturing plants and supply chain organization. We were actually asked to present and it was one of the best practices they shared at that BSC global event. That was pretty cool. I think that it resonated with people because at the time, nobody had put it into a single process before and visualized it like that. We had the whole thing on the wall and each department had their own metrics. The intention was to make everyone think, how is what you’re doing effecting others? I think it opened people’s eyes to how they had to work together to solve these things.

And Kelly, you’re part of a GLBT group at work, correct?

Kelly: Yes, I’ve also been involved in GLBT employee resource groups. We had a GLBT alliance group at Raytheon that I was involved in; I was the treasurer for a couple years. And when I came to Boston Scientific, they had a similar group called PACE, which stands for people accepting and celebrating equality. It’s not my favorite acronym. It doesn’t make any sense and it doesn’t make any reference to GLBT people.

Katie: No one knows what it is until you explain it.

Kelly: We’ve started rebranding that with a tagline that includes GLBT so that people know what it is. But yes, I’m the site lead for PACE at the Spencer plant here in Indiana. We’ve been able to plan events and bring GLBT culture to the site and work with other leads at other sites across the globe. We do some workshops and bring speakers where we actually interact with each other and do a videoconference and everybody’s connected. It’s been nice to be able to do that at work and to have a company that’s very supportive of diversity as a value. They have definitely put their efforts to advancing different diversity causes and they do take it very seriously.

Is that something you worried about moving to Indiana from Boston?

Kelly: I definitely looked – we’re 100% on the HRC corporate equality index, and have been now for three years. That was something I looked for when picking a company. There’s so many of them now that I’d have to think twice about working for a company that isn’t 100%. Unless it’s like some small company that didn’t go through it. But if it’s a big company, if you’re not 100%? I’m just going to narrow you out.

There was a lot of stuff going in in Indiana when we moved here. They were actually about to pass an amendment to the Indiana state constitution banning same sex marriage, basically. Which takes years because you can’t do it in just one session, you have to do multiple sessions, and this was like the last round. But it came at a time when it ended up getting more attention and a grassroots effort helped to squash that successfully. I was involved with that. I pretty much worked there for four months before I got a job in Indiana. So yeah, that was kind of the environment I was coming to from Massachusetts, where you know, they’ve had marriage equality since 2005.

Katie: But we knew Indianapolis and Bloomington were safe, friendly, inclusive places for the most part.

Kelly: I told her if I’d move anywhere in Indiana it would have to be Bloomington. Like literally in Bloomington, you walk around and people have pride flags in windows year round. Bloomington is definitely the place to be for us.

Notes From A Queer Engineer is a recurring column with an expected periodicity of 14 days. The subject matter may not be explicitly queer, but the industrial engineer writing it sure is. This is a peek at the notes she’s been doodling in the margins.

Calls for Renewable Energy Meet Disaster Capitalism in Post-Maria Puerto Rico

Header by Rory Midhani

Feature image via shutterstock

Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico on Wednesday, September 20, causing catastrophic damage as the Category 4 storm tore through the densely populated archipelago. Winds reaching up to 175 mph knocked out electricity for all 3.5 million residents of the unincorporated U.S. territory. As of October 2, 95% remained without power, and according to the latest estimates, electricity will not be fully restored for 4-6 months. With computer and communication systems down, officials have not been able to get an accurate death count. Regardless, it’s clear that the prospect of months without power tops the list of long-term obstacles for Puerto Rico.

Among the many news reports and opinion pieces on the situation, from Breitbart to Wired to Time, a common theme has been to cite the rebuilding process as an opportunity to implement renewable energy. From a September 29 editorial in Bloomberg:

The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, the biggest public utility in the U.S., is notorious for its mismanagement and is currently bankrupt, with $9 billion in debt. Puerto Ricans pay more for electricity than nearly all of their fellow Americans (except Hawaiians). They get most of it from dirty oil-fired plants — many of them decades old — on a system prone to outages and blackouts. By some accounts, the system loses as much as 12 percent of its revenues to power theft and faulty billing, three times the U.S. average.

The collapse of the grid, which will cost billions of dollars just to restore, has amplified calls to privatize Prepa. … However that process plays out — and some form of privatization seems both desirable and likely— a few goals should be paramount. For starters, Puerto Rico needs to replace its oil-burning plants with those that burn cleaner natural gas. It also needs to expand its use of renewables, which provide less than 3 percent of electricity— well below the 15 percent in the U.S. as a whole and trifling for an island blessed with sunshine and wind. … The larger challenge, for both Puerto Rico and Prepa, is creating a stable, pro-growth environment that will attract investors.

On the face of it, any occasion where liberals and conservatives alike are calling to help a marginalized community while simultaneously “going green” sounds like a major win. But there are some additional factors worth considering here — namely, a legacy of colonialist exploitation in Puerto Rico, and the phenomenon of “disaster capitalism.” Let’s take a closer look.

San Juan, capital of the commonwealth, before and after Hurricane Maria. Via NASA.

US Colonial Control

The United States first annexed Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War of 1898. Since the Downes ruling in 1901, Congress has governed Puerto Rico as a separate and unequal territory, issuing a series of contradictory rulings parsing out the exact legal status of the people that live there. This arrangement — in which the United States has exerted significant control over the economic, political and social dynamics of the island — has been repeatedly and explicitly condemned by the United Nations as colonialism, which constitutes “a denial of fundamental human rights.” Although Puerto Ricans today have US citizenship and are subject to the draft, they do not have full constitutional rights, cannot vote in US presidential elections, and do not have representatives with voting rights in Congress. Puerto Ricans are ineligible for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the island receives half the rate of federal healthcare funding even while island residents pay the same Medicare tax as residents of the 50 states.

Over the past century, Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States has left the island in a state of economic crisis and extreme codependency. During direct US military control of the island from 1898-1900, the updated classification resulted in tariff rules that penalized Puerto Rico’s previously successful coffee sector and priced them out of European markets, dramatically reducing their export volume. Sugar instead became the dominant industry in Puerto Rico, promoted by favorable US tariff policies and colonial land taxes that forced many small farmers to sell their farms (making way for sugar’s growth as a monoculture).

Via Shutterstock.

Sugarcane production peaked in the early 1950s, and over the next decade, industrialization led to a continued steady output that required fewer and fewer workers. When large numbers of unemployed Puerto Ricans began moving to the mainland, the US created a policy of tax breaks to aggressively push business in Puerto Rico away from agriculture and towards manufacturing. American corporations flooded in as Puerto Rico became a tax haven for consumer goods manufacturing and pharmaceutical companies. The financial results were strong enough that the generous tax breaks were seen as creating an unfair advantage. So in 1996, Congress began a 10-year phase out, and American corporations began pulling back. Puerto Rico has since been in an excruciating recession.

For two decades now, the Puerto Rican government has been closing structural operating deficits via predatory loans by Wall Street firms “eager to market its triple tax-exempt bonds to wealthy and middle-class Americans and Puerto Ricans.” US investors have been particularly attracted by a legal provision that requires Puerto Rico to pay general obligation debt service ahead of any other expenses, as well Puerto Rico’s special status that denies them Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection. Though the loans are obviously unrealistic for Puerto Rico to pay back in full, with unemployment levels reaching 11%, labor force participation at a mere 40%, and debt coming in at a staggering $123 billion, Puerto Rico has little choice but to accept money and help wherever it can get it at this point.

In July 2016, a US financial control board was created under the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA), which has since promoted austerity measures and generally failed to improve Puerto Rico’s financial problems. Meanwhile, the state has been forming “public-private alliances,” handing off profitable segments of the public sector to private industry, and saving costs by eliminating large scale infrastructure repair wherever possible… which brings us back to the current energy situation.

Puerto Rico power grid. Via E&E News.

Power Grid Restoration

Given Puerto Rico’s dire financial situation, budget items such as tree pruning are generally not at the top of the list. This may not seem like a big deal, except that the bulk of the island’s power plants are located in the south, away from the capital. Two principal high-voltage lines from generators on the south coast must travel through mountain areas and rainforests to reach San Juan, meaning that over time, small items like cutbacks in tree pruning have left the 16,000 miles of primary power lines spread across the island extremely vulnerable. Combined with other scaled back inspections, maintenance and repairs, this has resulted in an extremely volatile power grid, with regular power outages even outside of adverse weather events.

Prior to this year’s hurricane season, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) estimated that it needed more than $4 billion to overhaul its outdated power plants and reduce its heavy reliance on imported oil. With additional millions of dollars in repairs now needed on top of that for disaster recovery, it’s no surprise to hear alternatives being welcomed.

Typically during grid recovery operations, the utility industry plays a central role in coordinating emergency efforts by having line crews come in from distant utilities. Because PREPA is a public power company, that assignment would traditionally fall to the American Public Power Association (APPA). In this case, however, Trump has appointed the Army Corps of Engineers to lead power restoration efforts. FEMA and the Department of Energy are also supporting the effort, and PREPA has contracted with Whitefish Energy Holdings, a Montana based LLC. Whitefish is sending over 400 employees to the island, some from Montana but many others sourced from utility companies in other locations — an unusual move, in that electrical utilities don’t usually work under a contractor.

“Do we feel like we’re being pushed aside [by the Army]? Hell, no! It’s an all-hands-on-deck exercise, and we feel like they will be able to bring resources that will be extremely helpful,” said APPA President and CEO Sue Kelly in an interview with E&E News. Indeed, there will be 100% cost sharing by the federal government for the first 180 days of emergency work. Long term, however, funding and a return to normal processes will be key watch outs.

Geocolor Image in the eye of Hurricane Maria category 3 storm as it headed toward the Caribbean, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Via Shutterstock.

Disaster Capitalism

Something I’ve been thinking about recently, particularly in the context of Puerto Rico’s colonial history, is a phenomenon identified by Naomi Klein as “disaster capitalism.” Per Klein, this is the exploitation of crises for corporate gain, often under the guise of relief or reconstruction efforts. For the past 60 years or so, the theory of economic “shock therapy” has been popular among free market proponents as a means to justify opportunistic economic behavior following the “shock” of a large scale disaster, either natural or manmade.

Let’s go back to that editorial in Bloomberg, shall we? “The collapse of the grid, which will cost billions of dollars just to restore, has amplified calls to privatize Prepa.” With those type of calls to action from the news sphere, combined with Trump’s policy predilections and early indicators of how this emergency is being handled (not wrongly, per se, but breaking with convention), it seems clear to me that we are heading down a familiar path. Given what we know about why the grid weakened in the first place (a legacy of colonialist exploitation), furthering that pattern via additional US profiteering seems tacky at best, damaging at worst.

As we continue watching the response to Hurricane Maria unfold, those of us who care about sustainability should be mindful of who we’re enabling to gain figurative power as well as literal. Keep an eye out for where the money’s going, and stay engaged. As much as we want renewable energy, how we get it matters; whatever we do should not come at the cost of additional long term damage to Puerto Rico.

Looking for ways to help with hurricane relief? Check out Carmen’s recommendations here.

Notes From A Queer Engineer is a recurring column with an expected periodicity of 14 days. The subject matter may not be explicitly queer, but the industrial engineer writing it sure is. This is a peek at the notes she’s been doodling in the margins.

Notes From A Queer Engineer: A Volcanologist Heartthrob and Goodbye to Cassini

Header by Rory Midhani

Feature image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Jason Major. This mosaic made from raw images acquired by Cassini is the last close-up image of Saturn we’ll get for a long time. It’s the final full image from September 13, 2017, as Cassini made its dive into the planet’s atmosphere. 

Hello barnacles! Do any of you work with Excel a lot? I do, and one of my favorite things is to watch other people futzing around in spreadsheets so I can see the shortcuts they use. Last week I learned that you can press CTRL+(semi-colon) to get today’s date. Another favorite: CTRL+(down arrow) gets you to the last entry of whatever contiguous data set you’re working in. Small good things to cling to!

I’ve been aggressively expanding my comfort zone at work recently and it sometimes makes me feel like my lungs are collapsing but I am gonna STICK IT OUT and GROW. Hope you all learn something interesting today!

Lady Scientists

+ New podcast “Ologies” with Alie Ward interviews volcanologist Jess Phoenix. Swooning so hard right now.

+ Women Force of Open Source: Hong Phuc Dang (Video)

+ Pioneer botanist Elizabeth Herriott was the first woman to be appointed to the teaching staff at Canterbury University Colle

+ Biologist Danielle N. Lee is #59 in The Root 100

+ Verena Haunschmid on her experiences as a first time rOpenSci package reviewer

+ Carolyn Porco, who led the imaging science team on the Cassini mission, reflects on its remarkable success

+ This Week In Science interviews Emily Lakdawalla on the end of the Cassini Mission

Meltdown

+ Laura Doering and Sarah Thébaud: How gender bias negatively affects women and men

When men stepped in to work with clients who had initially worked with a male loan manager, clients were highly compliant with their directives. But when men were paired with clients who had initially worked with female loan managers, clients afforded them significantly less authority.

This finding runs contrary to the dominant narrative around gender bias. Gender bias doesn’t merely disadvantage women. It also disadvantages men when they work in roles that are associated with women and femininity. This finding is important because it raises one possible reason why some men resist pursuing female-dominated occupations: not only are these jobs paid less, on average, but the men who pursue gender atypical paths may also experience a loss in social status at work.

+ Disappearance of right whales from winter breeding grounds a mystery for scientists

+ Public trust in science news is dangerously low

+ Nature has published a truly awful editorial encouraging [mostly women] scientists to take side jobs to cover their living expenses

+ Rose Eveleth: Why I No Longer Do Internet Harassment Talks

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Can’t Hold Us Down

+ Dr. Imogen R. Coe: “How diversity makes science work better”

+ Te Awaroa inspiring kiwis to take care of their waterways

+ Here are some free to print 11×17 inch posters to show students math is still happening and by diverse researchers

Geekery Grab Bag

+ Scientists Don’t Want You to Call Cassini’s End a ‘Suicide’

Still, several Cassini scientists I’ve recently spoken with have invoked death in their thoughts on the mission’s end. One likened the end of the mission to a wake or memorial service. Another said that the end of Cassini’s signal transmission would be like “watching somebody’s EKG and waiting for their last heartbeat to come.” A third sent me a quote from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust in the original German, which, depending on your translation, declares: “I am the Spirit that Denies! / And justly so: for all things, from the Void / Called forth, deserve to be destroyed.”

+ Where Do Birds Go In A Hurricane?

+ A Scientist’s Guide to the Coziest Sweaters

Do Make Say Think

+ Applications for the Science Ambassador Scholarship (a full–tuition scholarship for a woman in STEM) are open from now until December 11th, 2017.

+ Hey, do you know anyone looking for engineering work in the Boston area? I’m hiring a quality engineer and a data scientist for my team. Message me!

Notes From A Queer Engineer is a recurring column with an expected periodicity of 14 days. The subject matter may not be explicitly queer, but the industrial engineer writing it sure is. This is a peek at the notes she’s been doodling in the margins.

Notes From A Queer Engineer: Nerd Utopias, Drone Sheep Videos, and a Penguin Expert

Header by Rory Midhani

In between video games and board games this weekend, a group of friends and I watched Sean Wasabi’s OTTER POP video together. Two things happened: 1.) I got the Otter Pop song stuck in my head for the next three days, still going strong. Can’t stop won’t stop. 2.) My girlfriend pointed out, “People wonder what everyone would do if we had universal basic income. It’s this.”

I don’t have any science to support that statement, but it definitely feels true! Universal basic income = more people getting into weird, nerdy hobbies. What a utopia. I’m 100% here for it.

Lady Scientists

+ Laurie Winkless on SciFoo, an invite-only ‘unconference’ held at the Googleplex

+ Penguin expert Dr. Michelle LaRue discusses her adventures and new findings

+ Cathy O’Neil‘s TED talk on “weapons of math destruction” and why the era of blind faith in big data must end

+ Dr. Ellen Roche has won international acclaim for her work in creating a soft robotic sleeve for patients who live with heart difficulties

+ BBC 100 Women: Nine things you didn’t know were invented by women. Windshield wipers! Who knew.

+ Dr. Rima Jabado is saving sharks in the Middle East

+ At 72, acclaimed scientist Diana Beresford-Kroeger still goes from continent to continent hunting for old trees. Interesting perspective, not at all what I was expecting to read.

Meltdown

+ Here’s a roundup of some science-based articles about extreme weather as it relates to climate change. TLDR: Hurricane Harvey was probably worse because of climate change.

+ Relatedly, here’s an opinion piece by Sarah Myhre:

If I had known how to advocate for the people of Houston, I would have. What does it even mean, to advocate? Both a noun and a verb, it is both an act and an identity. It seems banal—simply the public support of a cause. However, it is hugely problematic in my circles, where the rubber of science hits the road of the real world, of lives and dollar bills and power. Did you know it’s seen as compromising for a scientist to be an advocate? That’s right, public dispassion is required for this club, unless, of course, you are willing to risk the derision of your peers. Indeed, the term “advocate scientist” is used as an insult.

…

I cannot possibly divest myself from myself. Public experts should not be expected to contort themselves into a pretzel of objectivity; you can be a scientist and be a human being at the same time. But, if we are to actually look directly at the enormous and necessary task of greenhouse gas emission reduction, then scientific advocation is fundamental. It is the gateway. We must, together, advocate for our shared future—a cooler, safer, saner future we are all invested in.

+ Fire Ants Are Yet Another Hazard in Houston’s Flooded Streets

+ Three reasons why pacemakers are vulnerable to hacking

Can’t Hold Us Down

+ When Antarctica stopped being only for men: how toxic ideas about masculinity blocked women’s access to Antarctic science

Spiny Flower Mantis (Pseudocreobotra wahlbergi). Via @suncana on iNaturalist. Here’s a Mental Floss article with 8 facts about these insects.

+ ICYMI: A Community for Moms to Learn How to Code Has Emerged

+ STEM.I.AM coding workshops help Indigenous girls learn a new language

Geekery Grab Bag

+ Hey, watch this soothing video of sheep taken by a drone.

+ GrrlScientist: Almost All Modern Horses Descended From A Few Oriental Stallions

+ An enormous black hole one hundred thousand times more massive than the sun has been found hiding in a toxic gas cloud wafting around near the heart of the Milky Way. If the discovery is confirmed, the invisible behemoth will rank as the second largest black hole ever seen in the Milky Way.

+ Here’s a neat geometry thing!

Do Make Say Think

+ Here’s a crowdsourced Google doc syllabus of women/gender nonconforming folks writing about tech

+ How to use common cognitive biases to increase website conversions

+ How to talk to an anti-vaxxer parent (and why you should). Activism through gentle conversation is fine! You’re not going to die!

+ Call For Articles – Game Studies Special Issue: “Queerness and Video Games: New Critical Perspectives on LGBTQ Issues, Sexuality, Games, and Play”

Notes From A Queer Engineer is a recurring column with an expected periodicity of 14 days. The subject matter may not be explicitly queer, but the industrial engineer writing it sure is. This is a peek at the notes she’s been doodling in the margins.

How To Make Beer and Wine Popsicles, Win at Life Using Science

Header by Rory Midhani

Hey, remember that time Liz Castle made boozesicles with Piña Colada mix? How about when Ali set our hearts aflame with Bourbon Hellfire Fudgesicles? Ooh, or when Vanessa made out with a cute girl on a rooftop after a couple French 75 popsicles? What I’m about to share isn’t a new idea, but times are hard, life is short, and dammit, we all deserve something good right now!

Enter beer and wine popsicles, aka the secondary coping mechanism I’ve developed to get myself through August 2017! (The primary one is working myself into oblivion.)

My adult popsicle experiments all began with a Lifehacker article titled “How to Turn Any Alcohol You Like Into Tasty Frozen Popsicles.” Per Claire Lower,

To make an alcoholic ice pop that won’t slush out the moment you remove it from the mold, you’re going to want to aim for an overall ABV of 8%. Some beers fall under this threshold, so you are free to freeze those as is, but you’ll need to do a bit of math when working with the stronger stuff. Luckily, it is very easy math. Using the basic dilution formula that you may have learned in chemistry class, we can quickly find how much booze we can add to our popsicles: C1V1=C2V2 where “C” stands for “concentration” and “V” stands for volume.

Popsicle 1: 14.5% ABV red wine and mint popsicle. 50% dilution with sugar water.

Following the dilution formula above, I mixed one part water with one part red wine (14.5% ABV), making an easily freezable popsicle that came in around 7.25% ABV. I also stirred in a teaspoon of sugar and some chopped mint leaves. Result: a refreshing, wine-like popsicle with very large ice crystals. Very hard, very cold, not particularly nice for chewing. Also not the most alcoholic. A solid first attempt, but I knew I could do better!

For trial number two, I decided to go with beer. Not thinking too hard about it, I poured an oatmeal stout named “dessert” into the freeze pop mold, added some raspberries, and stuck it in the freezer. When I came back one day later, it was much meltier than expected. Turns out the ABV of that beer is 11%. And the taste of that beer, friends, is heaven on a plastic popsicle stick!

Popsicle 2: 11% ABV beer and raspberries.

Texture wise, there was still room for improvement. The beer was great (you could bite into it and it felt like a pretty normal popsicle), but the raspberries inside were solid little ice cubes. Delicious, but jarring! Further research into the matter yielded the following key facts:

• Pure ethanol has a melting point of -173ºF (-114ºC). In contrast, water has a melting point of 32ºF (0ºC).
• The amount of ethanol in the most common commercially-available alcoholic beverages (by volume) is pretty low: 4-6% for most beers, 12-15% for most wines, and 40+% for most liquors. The rest of the volume consists of water and solutes (salts, sugars, etc.).
• Most home freezers maintain temperatures between –9ºF and 0ºF (–23ºC and –18ºC).

What this means is that there’s nothing special about 8% ABV. So long as your freezer is colder than the melting point of your liquid, it will freeze. It just might take a long time if the ABV is high, and when you take it out of the freezer, it’s going to melt more quickly, potentially requiring you to shotgun your alcoholic popsicle. Challenge accepted.

I went for wine next: a 13.5% ABV chardonnay, plus blackberries. I stuck a wireless digital thermometer in the back of my freezer and measured the temperature range: -2ºF to 4ºF over the course of a normal week. Not bad; and with a little patience, it’s definitely cold enough to freeze my wine.

Popsicle 3: a 13.5% ABV chardonnay and blackberries.

Here’s some more science for you!

• Hydrogen bonds (the attractive force between the hydrogen attached to an electronegative atom of one molecule and an electronegative atom of a different molecule) are the reason why water forms ice crystals when it freezes; they naturally create an open hexagonal lattice.
• Any molecule containing what is called a hydroxy group (-OH) or an amino group (-N-H) is capable of forming hydrogen bonds with water. Sucrose (table sugar) contains eight hydroxy groups, making it very soluble in water. It actually bonds so well with water that it literally slows down the motion of the water molecules.
• The more sugar there is, the lower the freezing point. Sugar physically interferes with the growth of ice crystals, and smaller ice crystals translates into less graininess in the final popsicle.

To cut down on the “ice cube” texture, I chopped my berries into smaller pieces and coated them in sugar. My popsicle turned out splendidly.

Popsicle 4: 12% ABV rosé and strawberries.

I didn’t actually get to try this out yet, but honey is another sweet option to lower the melting point. The sugar in honey is mostly fructose and glucose, two “small sugars” that lower the freezing point and prevent iciness even better than a larger sugar like sucrose. Light corn syrup is another option, preferred by Cook’s Science for decreasing ice crystal size and raising the melting point for ice cream. For something that doesn’t add sweetness at all, gelatin or carrageen are two other options. Those two also thicken things up and reportedly lessen the overall meltiness.

What popsicle combinations are you going to try?

Notes From A Queer Engineer is a recurring column with an expected periodicity of 14 days. The subject matter may not be explicitly queer, but the industrial engineer writing it sure is. This is a peek at the notes she’s been doodling in the margins.

Notes From A Queer Engineer: Messed Up Middle-earth Mountains, Building Demolition And More

Header by Rory Midhani

Feature image via shutterstock

I got a promotion this week at work! After asking for one! Woooooooo!

Lady Scientists

+ Sarah Tesh at the International Conference on Women in Physics in Birmingham

+ Genetta Reeves: Valedictorian to financial analyst to first year DeKalb math teacher

+ Wonder Women: Celebrating Female Heroes of STEM

+ Alyssa Carson, y’all. 15 years old. Probably going to be the first person to go to Mars.

+ Unsung: Marie Maynard Daly, The first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry made important scientific contributions to the study of cardiovascular disease.

+ I contributed to our career path roundtable, in case you missed it and want to read about a whole bunch of fabulous writer types and one weirdo engineer

+ This is from 2014, but I think you might like this open letter to brogrammers:

Yes, you read that right. Ada was so fucking baller she wrote code before computers had even been invented. You think you’re hardcore because you can use agile development strategies to link a big data repository to a high-performance querying front end without SQL? Pfaff. This woman invented coding before there was anything to code on.

Meltdown

+ US federal department is censoring use of term ‘climate change’, emails reveal

+ I don’t know, do you want to watch some things blow up together? I feel like I can’t even read the news anymore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H93bgnTmb0s

Geekery Grab Bag

+ People Are Falling In Love With A Video Game Mouse Who Uses Sign Language

+ Why do you need to apply sunscreen before sun exposure? De-emulsification!

+ What Made the Moon? New Ideas Try to Rescue a Troubled Theory

+ Tolkien’s Map and The Messed Up Mountains of Middle-earth

+ There’s a really fascinating piece in the New York Times Magazine this week about the loyal engineers steering NASA’s Voyager probe across decades and space. Straddler Jo tipped me off, check it out!

At the mission’s outset [in the 1970s], the flight-team members were mischievous kids. They relieved stress with games and pranks: bowling in the hallway, using soda cans as pins; filling desk drawers with plastic bags of live goldfish; making scientists compete in disco-pose contests. Now, by 1990, they were older, with kids of their own. They had experienced the deaths of colleagues and watched others’ marriages falter as a result of long hours at the lab. With no planets to explore, they spent the decade doing routine spacecraft maintenance with a fraction of their bygone manpower. Six of the current nine engineers were on the team then. Sun Kang Matsumoto, who joined the mission in ’85, studied so diligently to master the new roles pressed upon her that her sons learned the spacecraft contours by osmosis. When her eldest was 8, he surprised her with a perfect Lego model; now in college, ‘‘he calls and asks, ‘How is Voyager?’ Like, ‘How is Grandma?’ ’’ Matsumoto says.

Can’t Hold Us Down

+ Why we need to end the culture of “Cultural Fit”

+ Right Here, Right Now: 27 Simple Actions to Support Women in Tech

+ I love this article by Yonatan Zunger on the Googler’s manifesto, a dumbass thing a dumbass man wrote about wanting to exclude women from engineering because he misunderstands both gender and biology.

Essentially, engineering is all about cooperation, collaboration, and empathy for both your colleagues and your customers. If someone told you that engineering was a field where you could get away with not dealing with people or feelings, then I’m very sorry to tell you that you have been lied to. Solitary work is something that only happens at the most junior levels, and even then it’s only possible because someone senior to you — most likely your manager — has been putting in long hours to build up the social structures in your group that let you focus on code.

All of these traits which the manifesto described as “female” are the core traits which make someone successful at engineering. Anyone can learn how to write code; hell, by the time someone reaches L7 or so, it’s expected that they have an essentially complete mastery of technique. The truly hard parts about this job are knowing which code to write, building the clear plan of what has to be done in order to achieve which goal, and building the consensus required to make that happen.

All of which is why the conclusions of this manifesto are precisely backwards. It’s true that women are socialized to be better at paying attention to people’s emotional needs and so on — this is something that makes them better engineers, not worse ones.

Do Make Say Think

+ A list of Diversity in Tech Conferences you could go to

Notes From A Queer Engineer is a recurring column with an expected periodicity of 14 days. The subject matter may not be explicitly queer, but the industrial engineer writing it sure is. This is a peek at the notes she’s been doodling in the margins.

5 Scientific Shark Facts With A Small Side Of Misandry

Header by Rory Midhani

Feature image via shutterstock

Happy shark week, minnows! Did you know that dolphins are just gay sharks?

SCIENCE!

Okay, this isn’t true — dolphins are mammals, whereas shark are fish; dolphins have bone skeletons, whereas sharks have cartilage; and dolphins have to go to the surface to breathe air, whereas sharks can use their gills to extract oxygen from the water. But (some) dolphins are gay. So, at least there’s that!

Here are five more scientific facts, in honor of shark week. I’ve also included a small side of misandry, in honor of me being true to my feelings. Enjoy!

1. In January this year, a female zebra shark named Leonie was found to have reproduced without any genetic contributions from a male partner.

This makes her the first shark ever known to have switched from sexual reproduction to asexual.

Writes Rachel Feltman for Popular Science:

Parthenogenesis—asexual reproduction in a female—has been seen in other animals before, though it’s rare enough to cause a bit of a stir whenever it’s caught on the record. … In one of the two other known cases, a female eagle ray switched from sexual reproduction to producing a pup asexually less than one year after being separated from her male partner—which seems like an awfully short grieving period. The other case was even stranger, with a female boa constrictor giving birth to parthenogenic pups after reproducing sexually and while there were males available for her to mate with.

A zebra shark in Madagascar. Via shutterstock.

2. Nearly every single person ever bitten by a shark has been a man.

According to data from the global shark attack file, for every 100 shark attacks, a little over six will involve women. This disparity holds up pretty much across the world.

Why does this happen? “Probably because men are more likely to do stupid things,” speculated John West, curator of the Australian Shark Attack File at Taronga Zoo, to the Fairfax Media (subsequently picked up in the Sydney Morning Herald). “It reflects a historic pattern of more males engaged in marine aquatic activities, especially those that put humans most at risk, for example surfing, diving, long distance swimming, kayaking, etcetera.”

Image from Shark Attacks Globally.

3. Sharks have a cartilaginous skeleton, meaning that when they die, they don’t leave mineralized osseous tissue (bone) behind in the fossil record. Typically, all that remain of them are their bone-like teeth.

Perfect for biting men. Here’s Emily Graslie with more on fossil sharks:

4. The first effective shark repellent was discovered by “Shark Lady” Eugenie Clark, a marine biologist and leading shark researcher.

Check out this fascinating remembrance piece on her in the Washington Post:

The first time Dr. Clark encountered a massive, pregnant whale shark, off Baja California in 1980, she grabbed on to a fold of skin under the animal’s dorsal fin and rode it for an extended period of time, holding on to her air tank as it slid off her back.

“It was incredible,” Dr. Clark said in a 2008 interview, recalling how she lost sight of her colleagues who had remained on their vessel. “When I finally came up, I could barely see the boat, I was so far away.”

One of Dr. Clark’s most significant academic contributions came in the late 1950s, when she proved sharks could be trained to pick a target based on visual clues and could learn tasks as quickly as mammals. She eventually published her findings in the journal Science.

“It was the first demonstration of sharks’ intelligence,” said Robert Hueter, director of Mote’s Center for Shark Research, in an interview. “Before, people thought these were primitive, dimwitted animals, and she showed they were capable and had an important role in the marine environment.”

Clark had five husbands throughout her life, and in an interview with Florida Trends once reflected, “I want to be remembered as a nice person who didn’t hurt people — except my ex-husbands, maybe.”

Clark examines a whale shark pup in her lab. Photograph by David Doubilet. Via National Geographic.

5. On Sunday, Michael Phelps raced a great white shark. He lost.

The “shark” was actually a simulation, but I’d prefer to imagine that it was Katharine, the “misunderstood but sassy girl just tryin’ to get some fish” who you can follow on Twitter, thanks to @OCEARCH. Katharine is a 2300 lb white shark who was tagged in August 2013 and has traveled 32k miles since.

Live your life to the fullest. #MondayMotivation pic.twitter.com/SGXnb8Yjjh

— Katharine The Shark (@Shark_Katharine) July 24, 2017

Notes From A Queer Engineer is a recurring column with an expected periodicity of 14 days. The subject matter may not be explicitly queer, but the industrial engineer writing it sure is. This is a peek at the notes she’s been doodling in the margins.

New “Game Of Thrones” Lesbian Power Couple Or New Dead Lesbian: A Special Scientific Investigation

Header by Rory Midhani

Game of Thrones returns on Sunday, and from the looks of things, it’s going to be a delightful time for us all. Two important items:

1. At the end of last season, Daenerys Targaryen and Yara Greyjoy bantered and made serious flirty eyes at each other while forming an alliance.
2. A recent trailer shows Yara and Ellaria Sand kissing on the mouth, which the more hopeful parts of the internet are interpreting as the formation of a new lesbian power couple.

Here’s that trailer! The kiss is at 1:22.

If you haven’t been following along at home, I’ll be honest: this is a tough show to catch up with. It has a huge cast of characters, everyone has very complicated motivations, and the show often moves at a breathtakingly ridiculous pace. Marathoning the show with a detail-oriented friend is probably the best way to catch up. Short of that: the basic premise is that we’re in medievalish times, magic is real, and everyone is fighting with everything they’ve got to gain power and have their family rule the seven kingdoms.

Early on in the show, Ellaria (a widowed, unofficial princess of Dorne), was established as bisexual and polyamorous during a visit to the brothel with her lover Prince Oberyn Martel. A couple seasons later, Yara (Queen of the Ironborns, a grim, seafaring people), was also shown with a female sex worker. In my eyes, these two are the most prominent, canonically queer women in the TV series. Daenerys (Queen Across the Sea and mother of three literal dragons) had a brief thing with her handmaid Doreah, but it largely focused on learning how to please her new husband, which feels categorically different to me. Maybe you disagree! Here’s some nuanced discussion about the show’s lesbian representation, if you’re interested.

Or if you’re just interested in the kissing:

Yara and Ellaria. Via Winter Is Coming.

Now onto the current order of the day. Does this look like a lesbian power couple to you? I’m not so sure. Ellaria’s definitely getting in there, but it’s not clear to me whether Yara is kissing back. Is that lust on her face, or is she opening her mouth in surprise/protest? We obviously need more information, but here’s my theory: what we’re looking at is actually another dead TV lesbian in the making, because this is a murder scene. DUN DUN DUN.

Here’s what we know.

Poison At The Purple Wedding

The first major poisoning we see within the Game of Thrones universe takes place at King Joffrey’s “purple wedding.” In S4E2, “The Lion and the Rose,” we see Joffrey largely ignore his new wife Margaery, choosing instead to threaten and belittle his uncle Tyrion. Following an ominous back-and-forth where Joffrey forces Tyrion to serve him wine, we see Joffrey cough, tense up, gasp for air, fall to the ground, vomit, convulse, and turn purple. Blood leaks out of his nose and bloodshot eyes, and in less than two minutes, he’s dead. The murder plot is a bit difficult to piece together through the show alone, but it’s very clear the books: Lady Olenna Tyrell slipped a poison known as “the strangler” into Joffrey’s wine to help her granddaughter Margaery take full control of the throne.

The strangler, of course, is entirely fictional, as it is made from the leaves of a plant found in the Jade Sea of Essos. We do, however, see some striking similarities between the strangler’s description and a real world toxic alkaloid. Here’s analytical chemist Dr. Raychelle Burks to explain:

Yup, it’s strychnine! Some facts straight from the CDC:

• Strychnine is a strong poison; only a small amount is needed to produce severe effects in people. Strychnine poisoning can cause extremely serious adverse health effects, including death.
• The extent of poisoning caused by strychnine depends on the amount and route of strychnine exposure and the person’s condition of health at the time of the exposure.
• Strychnine prevents the proper operation of the chemical that controls nerve signals to the muscles. The chemical controlling nerve signals works like the body’s “off switch” for muscles. When this “off switch” does not work correctly, muscles throughout the body have severe, painful spasms. Even though the person’s consciousness or thinking are not affected at first (except that the person is very excitable and in pain), eventually the muscles tire and the person can’t breathe.

People exposed to high doses of strychnine may reach respiratory failure within the first 15 to 30 minutes of exposure. Other immediate effects may include agitation, apprehension or fear, restlessness, uncontrollable arching of the neck and back, rigid arms and legs, jaw tightness, difficulty breathing, dark urine, painful muscle spasms possibly leading to fever and to kidney and liver injury, and/or muscle pain and soreness. Nosebleeds aren’t mentioned, but it certainly makes for a striking visual. And it doesn’t disqualify strychnine, so I’m going to go ahead and say close enough.

Returning to the scene of the crime, you’ll note that Ellaria was nowhere near Joffrey or Olenna during the events, nor did she have anything to do with the transportation of the poison via a light blue gem on Sansa’s necklace. She was in attendance at the wedding, though, so we can surmise that she either witnessed the death or became aware of the very high profile poisoning shortly thereafter.

The Assassination of Myrcella

In the next poisoning of a Lannister heir, Ellaria takes a much more active role. In S5E10, “Mother’s Mercy,” we see Ellaria give Princess Myrcella a long, uncomfortable kiss on the lips as she says goodbye. Minutes later (the timeline is unclear because the implied rowboat travel to meet the larger ship takes place off screen, but it seems safe to assume 20 minutes or less), Myrcella gasps for breath, blinks confusedly as blood drips from her nose, and collapses into a quick death in her father’s arms. Back on the dock, Ellaria wipes away a very similar looking nosebleed, then removes the dark purple lipstick she had on while she was kissing Myrcella. She pulls a vial of light blue liquid from her necklace, takes a swig, and walks away, apparently no worse for the wear.

Here’s the full scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxK92bDmrfA

Unfortunately on this one there’s no corresponding book scene, so we have limited information about the toxin used. From previous plot points, we do know that Ellaria had access to lots of knowledge about poisons. Until Oberyn’s untimely end, Ellaria was romantically involved with “The Red Viper,” who studied poison at the citadel and used a spear dipped in manticore venom to painfully putrefy Gregor Clegane’s flesh.

Manticores don’t exist in real life (as far as we know), but we do have snakes, scorpions, and many other creatures with painful, deadly venom! Here’s National Geographic with wilderness medicine doctor Dr. Luanne Freer:

Within the GoT universe, we’ve been told that the effects of manticore venom cannot be stopped, only slowed, so it’s very unlikely that Ellaria would have chosen to expose herself in the process of poisoning Myrcella. A far more likely candidate is the poison Ellaria’s daughter Tyene uses in S5E7, “The Gift.” Tyene stabs Bronn in combat and taunts him when he slumps to the floor with a nosebleed not long after, explaining:

My dagger was coated with a special ointment from Asshai. They call it the Long Farewell. It takes time to work, but if a single drop makes contact with the skin, death.

Only after Bronn agrees that Tyene is the most beautiful woman in the world does she toss him the vial of light blue liquid antidote. His breathing returns to normal and he eventually makes it out alive. And that is all the information we have about the poison at this point! I looked up Asshai in a few Game of Thrones wikis, and it appears the city is in the far southeast of the continent of Essos, on the eastern shore of the Jade Sea.

Wait, hang on… that’s a weird coincidence. Could the strangler and the long farewell the same poison?

The Strangler and the Long Farewell

We know that both the strangler and the Long Farewell come from the same geographic location. When administered orally, they result in similar effects (gasping for breath, loss of muscle control, and nosebleeds). We don’t know what the strangler looks like, but we did see a container it was held in: a light blue gem on Sansa’s necklace. We also don’t know what the Long Farewell looks like (possibly Ellaria’s purple lipstick, possibly some inconspicuous liquid on her finger), but we do see the antidote: a light blue liquid, contained in Ellaria’s necklace vial. The antidote to the Long Farewell is in an opaque blue necklace, but when we see Ellaria remove the vial, the liquid appears light blue, similar in shade to Sansa’s necklace. Hmm!

Getting back to our theory that the strangler is a fictionalized version of strychnine, what does that tell us about the antidote? According to the CDC, there is no specific antidote for strychnine toxicity, but “treatment consists of removing the drug from the body (decontamination) and getting supportive medical care in a hospital setting. Supportive care includes intravenous fluids (fluids injected directly into a vein), medications for convulsions and spasms, and cooling measures for high temperature.” So if you’re poisoned by strychnine in real life, get yourself to a hospital; there is no instacure magic potion. Within the GoT universe, though, our frame of reference isn’t modern medicine, but medieval. And in those days, poison hemlock was the drug of choice to reverse strychnine effects.

Poison hemlock.

Like strychnine, poison hemlock is also a toxic alkaloid that can induce respiratory failure in humans. While strychnine enhances synaptic transmission to the end result of convulsive muscular contractions, though, coniine (the alkaloid of interest in poison hemlock) tends to relax and paralyze muscles. During medieval times, it was applied to “reverse” the effects of strychnine by visibly relieving muscle spasms. It isn’t a true antidote (nor is it blue), but again, I’m going to go ahead and say say close enough.

Power Couple, Dead TV Lesbian, or Both?

So now we have two suspected poisons, one of which is also an antidote. Why the two blue necklaces? It could be a weird coincidence. Or! What about this:

• Joffrey was poisoned by the strangler, aka. fictionalized strychnine.
• Joffrey’s poison was stored in the rightmost jewel of Sansa’s necklace, which was given to her by the Tyrells (which Olenna took the poison jewel off of and emptied or crushed into Joffrey’s wine).
• Inside one or more of the other jewels in Sansa’s necklace was the “antidote,” poison hemlock. Olenna would have wanted to keep some on hand in case Margaery accidentally drank the poisoned wine, but she wouldn’t have wanted to have it on her person, because it would be suspicious if she was caught with a poison.
• The jewels of the necklace were purposefully chosen for their light blue shade so that nobody would notice the hidden antidote.
• Myrcella was poisoned by the Long Farewell, aka. fictionalized strychnine.
• Myrcella’s poison was mixed with Ellaria’s dark purple lipstick, which transferred lips when Ellaria kissed Myrcella goodbye.
• After administering the poison, Ellaria wiped it off of her lips to limit contact, then gave herself some “antidote”, aka. fictionalized poison hemlock.
• We don’t have any reason at this point to believe that Ellaria would want to kill Yara (we don’t even how or why they get together), except that Yara is allied with Daenerys, and Ellaria is a wild card who seems to be primarily driven by vengeance at this point.
• Maybe Ellaria wants to get with Dany, and Yara “Shane of Westeros” is in the way? Maybe Ellaria is just an aggressive kisser and not a killer? Maybe Ellaria gets with Dany and Yara both, and there is no problem here except that it isn’t Sunday yet, and a girl can only live so much through a sub 1 second clip of decontextualized kissing?

I hope it’s the third option, but I feel like it’s probably the first one. What do you think? Do you have any other theories or wild predictions for this season?

Via Oohlo.

Notes From A Queer Engineer is a recurring column with an expected periodicity of 14 days. The subject matter may not be explicitly queer, but the industrial engineer writing it sure is. This is a peek at the notes she’s been doodling in the margins.

Notes From A Queer Engineer: Dumpster Honey and Tricky Nature Documentaries

Header by Rory Midhani

Feature image via BLDGBLOG/Reuters/National Geographic.

Hey guess what! This past Saturday, I took final exams for the business classes I’ve been taking at Harvard extension since February. This means two things: a) I know more about business now, and b) I’m getting 10-12 hours of my life back every week. It may not sound like that many hours, but I am PSYCHED to have this extra time back for writing. And sleeping. And pondering bees.

I’m very tired but full of excitement and I have so many links for you today!

Lady Scientists

+ British Museum scientist Joanne Dyer is revealing polychrome secrets of art from the past

+ Astrophysicist Katie Mack discusses Star Trek

+ Izabella Laba, a mathematician and former young math prodigy, reviews Gifted:

Mckenna Grace and Chris Evans have great chemistry. It’s also a film about three generations of female mathematicians, written and directed by men, with the participation of four mathematical consultants, all of them male. And it’s a missed opportunity. It’s not that men should not make films about women: I believe they absolutely should. It’s not that I would have preferred a social treatise about gender and math: I get my fill of that elsewhere. But I think that it was possible to go much deeper, dig through the clichés and explore a much more interesting territory. That road was left not taken.

+ How ethical concerns yanked biochemist Jennifer Doudna out of the ivory tower

+ How actress Hedy Lamarr became “the mother of Wi-Fi,” a title I find on par with “mother of dragons.”

+ Chemist Dr. Raychelle Burks on Theblerdgurl to discuss King Joffrey’s death, a better way to handle zombies in The Walking Dead, and what HULK’s pants might be made out of

+ Meet “rocket woman” (astrophysicist) Sophia Nasr

+ These Scientists Are Running for Office to Fight Trump’s “Anti-Truth” Agenda. Cosmopolitan, y’all!

Meltdown

+ Scientists in limbo as US Supreme Court allows modified travel ban

+ Pruitt Is Paving the Way for an Industry-Led EPA

+ Attention Scott Pruitt: Red teams and blue teams are no way to conduct climate science

+ “Your Love Of Fashion Is Interfering With Your Role As A Lady Intellectual” lol

+ Women are flocking to wellness because modern medicine still doesn’t take us seriously

Dumpster honey. Photo by Vincent Kessler via BLDGBLOG/Reuters/National Geographic.

Geekery Grab Bag

+ Some clouds are full of little lollipop-shaped ice crystals

+ You Could Probably Make Wine In Space

+ Artists tinker with grass & photosynthesis to create huge living canvases

+ THIS IS VERY COOL ONLINE JOURNALISM it’s about eggs

+ Why No One Under 20 Has Experienced a Day Without NASA at Mars

+ Ladybugs fold their wings like origami masters

+ Also nature documentaries are tricking you, it’s fine

+ How Legendary [Gay] Computer Scientist Alan Turing Described Nature’s Beauty With Numbers

+ I enjoyed this:

Can’t Hold Us Down

+ Real talk — every time I’ve significantly advanced up the corporate ladder has been due to my people skills rather than my technical skills. I mean, yeah I have those, but it’s pretty much a given that engineers have technical skills, whereas people skills are way less common? Anyway, I really dug this web of skills, check it out!

+ Anita Sarkeesian on VidCon, harassment & garbage humans 

+ Being anti-choice is anti-science

+ Science That Unsettles by Shay-Akil McLean:

Systems of domination are generated by processes, continued by the collective everyday actions of human beings and can be interrupted, challenged, and categorically converted. Decolonization is then a historical process, which scientists can contribute to generating through the production of knowledge that does not reproduce damned subjects as well as through innovations in service of a vision of social justice rather than for profit. Scientists must ask ourselves who our work in impacting, benefiting, and whether or not we are actively working to upsetting settler colonial relations.

+ A study published by JAMA Pediatrics found that states with same-sex marriage policies had a 7% reduction in adolescent suicide attempts

Want (or need) to be more productive? Simple changes in your daily life can make the biggest differences! #ANUHDR #phdchat #phdadvice pic.twitter.com/P7syo5BvfW

— Research at ANU (@ANU_Research) June 25, 2017

+ We need to stop calling professional development a “pipeline”

Pipelines are filled early on and travel under pressure. (There are many routes into STEM, and quality scientists can be trained from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. Art majors can become scientists. Community college students can become scientists. New immigrants can become scientists. Your mom can become a scientist, if she isn’t already. The idea that you just need to grab and focus on traditional first-year undergraduate students — or any other demographic stage — and then prepare a single pathway for them — is doomed to failure. When “pipeline” initiatives are planned, they focus on identifying specific places that are thought to be rich in “product” – and these approaches tend focus on identifying “talent” rather than developing the potential of the population at large. A single pipeline can’t work for nontraditional students, students living on reservations, students living in inner cities, students in the exurbs, and so on. To diversify, we need to develop a system that isn’t focused on training a small number of individuals with similar backgrounds. As long as we continue with this approach, there will never be enough “product” to increase representation in a meaningful manner.)

Do Make Say Think

+ Mark your calendars for a total solar eclipse on August 21

+ Science is holding its 10th annual “Dance Your Ph.D.” contest

+ Kat Middleton has written a how-to reference for science communicators on how to get your gif on

Notes From A Queer Engineer is a recurring column with an expected periodicity of 14 days. The subject matter may not be explicitly queer, but the industrial engineer writing it sure is. This is a peek at the notes she’s been doodling in the margins.

Notes From A Queer Engineer: 5 Facts About Rainbows

Header by Rory Midhani
Feature image by shutterstock

It’s June and everything’s coming up rainbows! Because unique market segments make for juicy targets under capitalism, and I guess that’s what we are now that “dangerous criminal deviant” has become passé. What a time to be alive, huh? One minute I’m thinking about corporate exploitation of low income members of our community and feeling repulsed by NYC Pride™’s priorities; the next I’m pondering which rainbow sneakers would make my feet look gayest and gleefully “pride” reacting everything in sight. Life under President 45 is grim and shocking, and I’ll take small joys wherever I can find them.

In that spirit — here are five facts about rainbows! Everything is fucked, but at least we still have science and each other. Happy pride, however you do or don’t celebrate.

1. Isaac Newton originated “ROYGBIV” because he thought the range of visible colors should be analogous to the seven note musical scale of traditional Western music.

Video via The Atlantic.

Newton came up with the seven designations after projecting white light through a prism onto a wall and having a friend mark the boundaries between colors. Though the classification was largely arbitrary, it continues to be taught in schools today.

Interestingly, you’ll note that pride imagery typically show only six distinct colors today, although the original flag included eight.

Via Shutterstock.

2. The sky above a rainbow is darker than the sky below a rainbow.

None of the light can make it out above red, because each color refracts at a particular maximum angle. Here’s Physics Girl with more:

3. In addition to single rainbows, there are double rainbows, tertiary rainbows, quaternary rainbows, supernumerary rainbows, and twinned rainbows.

Here’s Maddie Moate creating a circular rainbow and explaining double rainbow physics:

See also: LeVar Burton’s breakdown of double rainbows and National Geographic’s coverage of atmospheric scientist Jean Ricard’s rainbow classification scheme.

4. If we lived on Tatooine (or a non-fictional planet that orbited two suns and had raindrops made of water or something with similar refractive properties), rainbows would always be overlapping.

Via xkcd.

Yup! For the full explanation, check out xkcd.

5. Similar to rainbows, a “glory” is a highly distorted image of the sun reflected off aerosols in the atmosphere, but with rays passing near droplets (instead of directly through them).

Glory seen at the Venus cloud tops, 70 km above the planet’s surface. Via European Space Agency.

The above photo is the first sighting of a full extraterrestrial glory, taken by ESA’s Venus Express orbiter in July 2011. Here at home, glories are most often seen by air travelers looking down at the clouds, or hikers atop misty mountain peaks. Nature has a good piece on the phenomenon, including what the above photo signified for scientists studying Venus’s atmosphere.

Notes From A Queer Engineer is a recurring column with an expected periodicity of 14 days. The subject matter may not be explicitly queer, but the industrial engineer writing it sure is. This is a peek at the notes she’s been doodling in the margins.

How To Safely Make Yourself Slippery (With Lube!)

Header by Rory Midhani
Feature image by shutterstock

Happy masturbation month! In a previous installment of this column, I’ve explained what happens when you use silicone lube on a silicone toy. But lube makes for such juicy subject matter, and there’s plenty of room left for exploration; I say we go for round two. So crank up some mood music and let’s get into it!

Frankie, aka. “my hero,” surrounded by bottles of “Say Grace” lube. Via Netflix.

What is lube?

“Lube” is short for “sexual lubricant,” and refers to any material used to provide slickness on the genitals during sexual activity. Solo or partnered, lube is a great way to reduce friction and enhance wetness. It can make fisting and anal (among other activities) easier, more pleasurable, and sometimes even safer. Lube makes a good present for any occasion, including routine bike maintenance and sexy games of spin the bottle. If you’re on the go, lube sample packets are easy to tuck in your bra or back pocket. You can also throw them any TSA-compliant liquid baggie and still have room for toothpaste. Versatile! Fun! Totally normal and not gross! Yay lube. You can really never have too much of the stuff.

One of the earliest recorded instances of lube is the use of olive oil to lather up leather dildos in Ancient Greece. (Warning: olive oil is the worst cooking oil for sexual use; do not try this at home.) In 17th century Japan, a slick lube called “tororo-jiru” was made from mashed yams. A few hundred years later, Vaseline entered the scene as a “cure-all” ointment, quickly becoming the first commercially available lubricant as everyone figured out what it could “cure” sexually.

Today, there are a wide variety of commercial liquids, creams, gels and oils available. As in the past (with olive oil, yams, and petroleum jelly), there isn’t anything in particular that ties these materials together from a scientific point of view; it’s more humans being humans, brainstorming about what would make our junk slippery without hurting ourselves.

Probably don’t try this one either. Via Shutterstock.

Rules and Regulation

While there’s little government regulation around sex toy safety in the United States, the FDA does regulate lubricant. Since 1976, it has been classifying personal lubricants as medical devices… depending on how the product marketed itself. Explains Scott Geibel in the Journal of the International AIDS Society,

Under the 1976 FDA regulation 21 CFR 880.6375, a lubricant is considered a “medical device” when “intended for medical purposes that is used to lubricate a body orifice to facilitate entry of a diagnostic or therapeutic device.” Personal lubricant products that claim to “moisturize” or “cleanse” have often been considered as a “cosmetic.” In 2003, the FDA announced a safety and efficacy review, and clarified how moisturizer/lubricant product claims to decrease pain, enhance sexual pleasure or contain spermicide would be categorized. Such product statements would be considered to be “drug” claims since they are related to easing discomfort or alleviating a condition (“mitigation or treatment of disease”). Furthermore, the FDA announcement stated they would not consider lubricants/moisturizers to be “cosmetic claims because they do not relate to ‘cleansing, beautifying, promoting attractiveness, or altering the appearance.””

Around 2013, following a handful studies showing worrisome range in the safety of lube on the market at th time, the FDA began to consistently enforce the categorization of lubricants as medical devices, notifying noncompliant companies and seizing shipments. Today, the General Hospital and Personal Use Device section of the General Medical Devices Panel within the FDA’s Center for Medical Device & Radiological Health considers “patient lubricants” to be Class II (higher risk/special controls) medical devices when promoted as being compatible for use with condoms. This means that prior to putting their product on the market, lubricant manufacturers must register and list their product with the FDA; label it according to FDA requirements; report adverse events in the same way other medical device companies do; and follow basic manufacturing quality assurance requirements set by the FDA. Effectiveness testing is not directly required, but manufacturers do have to check biocompatability, following international test standards to show that the product will be safe for mucosal membrane contact.

One item notably missing: human clinical trials. These are not required by the FDA in cases where the manufacturer can demonstrate that their product is “substantially equivalent” in safety and effectiveness to a product already on the market. For most lubes, there is a “predicate” product already being sold with similar ingredients, so manufacturers simply disclose the chemical makeup and test safety of the final product with female rabbits or guinea pigs instead. PETA has raised objections to this and proposed alternative test methods, but not all companies have the resources or interest to pursue non-animal testing (which is usually more expensive). The FDA has stated that it will accept in vitro testing for toxicity assessments, but there currently exists no approved in vitro test for vaginal irritation and sensitization.

Via Shutterstock.

From my perspective (as someone who used to work as lead compliance manager for a company making children’s products), FDA regulation of personal lubricants is excellent news for consumers on the whole. While not foolproof, applying medical device standards helps to keep to dangerous products off the market. It also means that anyone with questions about a particular product can look it up the company’s submissions in the FDA database. For example, here’s the February 2017 Health & Human Services letter concerning Astroglide® Diamond Silicone Gel Personal Lubricant. Among other things, we can see that it has a shelf life of at least two years, and has passed compatibility testing for condoms made of natural rubber latex, polyurethane, and polyisoprene. In comparison, Love Liquid Personal Lubricant is not compatible with polyurethane condoms, and only demonstrated a shelf life stability of 9 months at the time it wrote the FDA in February 2016. (Both products passed biocompatibility testing, though.)

One downside to FDA regulation is that it does create an additional barrier for smaller companies to enter the market, as manufacturers bear the cost of all required third party testing. In a 2015 interview with Vice, Simply Slick CEO John Goepfert estimated the approval process took about two years and over $200,000. On the other hand, as he shared with Hopes and Fears, “It doesn’t matter if it’s [financially] manageable. If I make an unhealthy product, if you get genital warts or breast cancer, is the fact that I didn’t want to spend $40K ok with you? If you don’t understand from a chemistry standpoint how your product interacts with human beings, if you do damage in that process, is that ok with you? So if you’re in the business to make a lubricant, $40K is the cost of business.”

Via Shutterstock.

Frisky, Risky Business

Outside the realm of regulation, there are some things individuals can watch out for when it comes to lube safety. Namely:

• Nonoxynol-9 (spermicide). Stay far away from this stuff, particularly if you’re having sex with a partner who may be HIV positive. Nonoxynol-9 not only is ineffective in stopping HIV spread, it’s actually shown to increase the risk of HIV infection among women who use nonoxynol-9 containing products frequently, according to the World Health Organization.
• Benzocaine and other numbing ingredients should also be avoided. Decreasing your body’s ability to sense pain means you’re willingly decreasing your body’s ability to warn you if an activity is hurting you! Obvious recipe for disaster/injury. Plus, benzocaine is an irritant.
• Compatibility with different condom materials, if using. Check the packaging of your lube, and if it doesn’t list any restrictions, take a minute to read the company’s website and search FDA.gov to see what information is publicly available in their filings. Keep in mind that older products may have been tested under more relaxed standards, and that oil-based lubes are incompatible with latex.
• Osmolality of water based lubes (ie. how prone the product is to promoting osmosis, or water diffusion). This is a bit of a tricky one because there’s so little information out there, but osmolality is good thing to pay attention to if you’re trying to conceive or have a compromised immune system. Smitten Kitten has done some really excellent in-depth research on the subject, which you can read a writeup on Dangerous Lilly about here or purchase the original pamphlet from Smitten Kitten here. While you’re there, check out their information on pH and specific product recommendations.
• Allergens, irritants and things that feel yucky to you. This is specific to you and your body, but many people have difficulties with warming and cooling lubes. Microbicides such as chlorhexidine gluconate or sodium hydroxide can cause genital dryness, and vulva-owners prone to irritation and/or yeast infections are often better off avoiding glucose and glycerin (present in most drugstore lubes). Propylene glycol and parabens are two other commonly reported irritants. If these ingredients don’t cause a problem for you personally, great! Feel free to use products that include them. If you run into problems, though, keep track and make sure you’re only using products that work with your body.
• Misinformation. There is so much bad sex information out there! For example, a couple weeks ago Gwyneth Paltrow published a piece on GOOP with the advice that “if it’s safe to eat it’s generally safe to apply [as sexual lubricant]” This is absolutely not true! Ingesting something orally is very different from applying it to one’s genitals. When you hear new information that seems questionable, look it up. Read widely, think critically, and if something sounds questionable, look for another source.

Now go forth and lube!

Notes From A Queer Engineer is a recurring column with an expected periodicity of 14 days. The subject matter may not be explicitly queer, but the industrial engineer writing it sure is. This is a peek at the notes she’s been doodling in the margins.

The 13 Stages of Klub Deer, In Robots

Header by Rory Midhani
Feature image by shutterstock

I saw the most gorgeous robot arm the other day. Its task was to take small cast iron parts and place them in another machine for cleaning — nothing dangerous, nothing sexy, nothing complicated. But oh, the way it moved! So graceful and precise. I wish I could embody such elegance for even five minutes. Robots don’t worry about things like what their larger purpose is; they do the exact thing they’ve been designed to do, and if there’s any question, reference-ready work instructions are usually posted on the nearest vertical surface. So satisfying, don’t you think?

Anyway! I’ve been thinking about robots lately, and also A-camp. I’ve spent the past two weeks touring factories, and I’m so, so ready to go into the woods and be surrounded by queermos. Whether or not you’re joining me at A-camp this week, I’d like to think that both of us are exactly where we’re supposed to be right now, doing exactly what we’re supposed to be doing. And if what’s required of you right now is to look at gifs of dancing robots, well! So be it.

Here are the 13 stages of Klub Deer, in robots.*

1. Waiting for the rest of your cabin to get ready.

Robot name: Alpha 1. “Why is there so little mirror space?”

2. (Literally) rolling up to Klub Deer.

Robot name: PaPeRo.

3. 10 p.m. dancing.

Jimu Robot.

4. Approaching your camp crush.

Asimo robot.

5. Dancing with a partner.

“Femisapiens.”

6. “Dancing” with a partner.

From CeBIT show 2014. Angela Merkel watched this, no joke.

7. Smoker’s circle feelings debrief.

Aldebaran Robotics’ Nao.

8. Running back inside because “Dancing On My Own” just came on. (Or “Pony.” Or whatever the A-Camp Dance Team is jamming out to this year.)

Robot name: WildCat.

9. 12 a.m. dancing.

Robot name: Pepper.

10. 2 a.m. dancing.

Mindstorms NXT Biped Walker.

11. Back to the cabin for the night.

Via DARPA compilation.

12. Next day, 8 a.m.

Robot name: Morgui.

13. Next day, 8 p.m.: “So… who’s in for Klub Deer again?”

Robot name: Robosapien X.

*Klub Deer is choose your own adventure! If your experience looked nothing like this, that’s beautiful and you should def leave a representative gif in the comments.

Notes From A Queer Engineer is a recurring column with an expected periodicity of 14 days. The subject matter may not be explicitly queer, but the industrial engineer writing it sure is. This is a peek at the notes she’s been doodling in the margins.