It turns out that the first paper I write and submit to a conference is one of the top two student papers for my group.  I am shocked, since I was not convinced my paper would get accepted to the conference at all.  When I first read the news, I think to myself, “wow, I’m not bad at this academic stuff after all…”  But then another thought comes creeping in.  In a way, it is even more delicious to think that I have just said the same kind of thing I was saying as an artist for years, dressed it up in the right language, and FOOLED THEM ALL!.

I don’t think that is really what happened, I think I am being converted.  The knowledge I gained by doing this research and writing this paper has informed who I am in the same way the shows I wrote informed who I am.  The knowledge I have of my field of study comes from who I am as an artist, and I think that might be why the reviewers liked it.  I’ll find out next week when I see the reviews, and I will write more about it then.

I’m actually beginning to think that being a scholar and being an artist are not that different.

Every so often I forget that everything has already been written/painted/photographed/said and I think I’m on to something new.  Then I realize most likely that it is just something that has not been in style is the 1960’s (particularly the 60s because I wish I had been there).  Now that I am in this ivory tower, finding something you thought was original has been written about a dozen or so times by prominent scholars is not usual.  And now, because I need to back up my own words with the words of those giants whose shoulders I am standing on, I am always torn between the little part of me that dies because I am not as original as I thought and the part of me that is relieved to know that I am in good company.

I was thinking to myself, the difference between who you want to be and who you are seems to be only courage.  But I didn’t think courage.  I thought balls.  stones. cojones. heuvos.  Then I thought I wasn’t thrilled that my go-to words for courage all had to do with  male genetalia.  So I tried to think of one that didn’t.  I cam up with guts. Human entrails?  I actually prefer balls, in that case.

Why is it that all of the words I use for courage on a daily basis have to do with the ugliest parts of the human anatomy?  I guess that courage is not always pretty.

I liked this shot. It reminds me of working in Arts-in-Ed. Now that I’ve left, I guess I can start to remember it fondly.

A reminder popped up and told me I should post something to this blog. So I am.

I came across this website yesterday while procrastinating:

http://sciencetattoo.com/

I’ve always thought of a tattoo is something you get when you want to celebrate a deeply held belief; as a permanent way to wear your heart on your sleeve. I’ve often thought about getting a tattoo of either the symbol of phi or a golden spiral (my wedding symbol is 2 interlocking golden spirals).

I can tell you exactly what it is about phi and the golden ration that is appealing to me: it is a mathematical representation of what artists spend their whole lives trying to create. It is a ratio that is often found in nature, and I’ve found that it helps me to express and understand that place between symmetry and asymmetry, between the perfect and the flawed that makes nature so beautiful. As an artist, one of my favorite projects was a set of two 3’ by 6’ abstract charcoal drawings. I began each drawing with a grid. One was gridded into sections that were roughly aligned with this ration (which is, by the way, 1:1.618….). The other was gridded into sections that did not resemble this ration at all. The phi based drawing had an excellent composition, and the other was not successful at all. It just didn’t ‘work.’

I’m writing about this because it seems that my love for this number is just that, an emotional response to a mathematic concept. When these scientists get tattoos of specific chemical compounds, or mathematical equations, they are expressing their love for science. It seems to me, this is a form of devotion (I am not excluded here).

When science provokes worship similar to religion, has it replaced religion? If I believe it is wrong to put all of my faith in any kind of god or mystical being, why am I so eager to put faith into science? Is it science that I worship, or is this kind of spirituality really a language by which I can worship nature? I’d like to think that is the case, that somehow my faith in science is a faith in gleaning the beauty of nature in some profound way. But I worry that it stems from some misplaced need to have a supernatural or spiritual force to guide me. I way to remove myself from power. If that’s the case, then its no better different than any other religion. And by creating redshift, I am merely a science evangelist, trying to push my faith on others. I can’t abide it when Christians come after me, so where does that leave Redshift? Where does that leave all scientific outreach?

Don’t get me wrong, I still think outreach is a good idea. And I still think that the cultural approach to outreach is what matters most (as opposed to risk communication) because I believe that unless people have some kind of emotional connection to science, they are not going to be inclined to do the hard work of deciphering it. I just wonder if I think these things, or I believe them.

I am on my second round of antibiotics for pneumonia. I really thought that my immune system was stronger than this. I usually get sick about once a year, and it last about 4 days (not including allergies, of course), but this one has really kicked my butt.

Is my immune system weaker? Or is Ithaca just a town of supergerms?

I will get back to writing interesting things on this blog soon. in the mean time, I got a new flash for my camera and looky what I took:

…means that while I still vehemently believe that Valentine’s Day is an evil holiday invented by Hallmark and Hershey’s, I want flowers all the same. I used to be far too cool for VDay, unless it had something to do with the Eve Ensler play about Vaginas. I realize there is a great deal of hypocrisy in wanting a traditional Valentine’s Day when you have proclaimed yourself too counterculture for such nonesense for over 15 years. I’m almost okay with being a hypocrite, but hypocrisy is something the religious right does best, so I please, if I start watching Hannity and Colmes, SHOOT ME! Thank you.

A note to my husband: please don’t get me flowers for Valentine’s Day. Don’t feed the beast.

There’s a new member of the Evjen-Halpern family!

Meet Artoo!

Die microsoft die! I have to buy one lousy Microsoft program for my mac. And the only reason I have to have it is because Dima got me addicted to Zotero. I love Zotero even more than I love all of the mac based word processors that are out there. And they are lovely. So lovely. But, I need a citation manager, because there is no way in hell I am doing that shit myself. No thank you. And Zotero is the one for me.

But the irony of the fact that I need to use the monster of all evil software companies in order to use my open source citation manager is not lost on me. No sir.

I use a Mac. I am one of those people. I had the streaming updates of the Keynote of macworld in one window today while I worked on another. I drooled over the macbook AIR. It fits in an envelope. I have envelopes, so it would really be perfect for me. But I digress.

I have been so sick of Microsoft Office’s poor performance on Intel based Macs. They run on Rosetta, which is a translator that turns them into Universal Apps. But it is slow and freezes a lot.

So when Office 2008 for the Mac came out, and I could get it for cheap from my University, I did. I eagerly brought it home to finish my paper in style, and hopefully more speed. I installed the Zotero plug-in. It didn’t work.

I went a searchin’ for a new one or some news about when I’d be able to use Zotero on my new program, and I dug until I found the Zotero developers page, which had a lot of words I didn’t understand, and a few I did. The ones I did confirmed that there was no answer in sight for my dilemma, and that the developers of Zotero could use one codebase for all of the other versions of Word and other word processors, but they would have to develop an entirely new codebase for Word 08. They seemed perturbed about this, like Microsoft had done it just to hurt them. But I know better. Microsoft did it to hurt me.