Working While Sick

Sometimes when you're at work and trying to focus on the task at hand, your body has other plans for you. You might have a cold or a hangover and find it hard to concentrate, but since it's not a "real" sickness you stick it out as long as you can... you just drink water and hold off until you can go home and nap because you don't want to take sick time or because missing work due to a hangover is too shameful to imagine.

But for some of us (approximately half), our bodies sometimes sabotage us while at work in another way, not a cold or hangover or depression, that in addition to not feeling like a "real" sickness worth going home for, going home would feel like betraying decades of struggle for gender equality in the workplace.

Of course I'm talking about menstrual cramps.

What to do when you get bad cramps at work? I've come up with a few options:

1. Do drugs. (OTC painkiller)
2. Eat chocolate and pretend it also works as a painkiller.
3. Take a walk until it gets better.
4. Take a walk to find some drugs.
5. Take a walk to your house and stay there.
6. Suck it up and pretend you can still do meaningful work because women can do anything men do including write coherent emails while bleeding painfully from the inside.

Today, not having number 1, I tried number 2 and contemplated 3 through 5 until it passed, which means I successfully carried out number 6. I've done number 5 in the past but there is always the guilt.

I absolutely cannot stand when women are referred to as "the weaker sex." I mean sure, on average men have greater strength and muscle mass, but just because they can - on average - bench press more seems a pretty narrow criterion with which to define a whole gender as weaker. And then I get bad cramps and think, "well damn, this would be quite a disadvantage if I was being attacked by a mountain lion right now" or "if I was out hunting wildebeast" or whatever prehistoric men used their muscle mass for... it was probably for fighting other prehistoric men, but anyway.... my point is, it feels like Nature is trying to remind me that women were intended to be weaker whenever my uterus punches my insides.

Obviously I think it would be better if all sicknesses were treated equally. For anything that makes it impossible for someone to work productively - with the possible exception of the hangover because you only did that to yourself - it should be up to that person how to deal with it, whether they go home, nap on a workplace couch, cry in the bathroom, take a walk, or stick it out and pretend nothing is happening.

Personally, I would suggest having some dark chocolate, because it is possible it also works as a painkiller and may have other curative properties.

Disclaimer: As an academic I can pretty much do what I want, so I don't really know what the constraints are in a real workplace setting when you have a "not quite sickness." This is another reason why science wins.

The Christmas Spirit

For some reason this year, I am all about Christmas. I bought a wreath and candles about two weeks before Thanksgiving, and that was it. I held off as long as I could, but I had already listened to Mannheim Steamroller and watched Scrooge before the Season had officially begun.

Perhaps I got into it early because in England they don't have Thanksgiving for a buffer. As early as October, shelves are stocked with Christmas crackers (not for eating) and mince pies, and by November the German Christmas Market is up. Sure, there's nothing particularly Christmas-y about a bratwurst to Americans (though it's a tradition I could get behind!), but there was something about it - the little fake cabins with the fake holly - that put me in the Christmas Spirit.

So what the hell is the Christmas Spirit?

Like all good questions, this has many answers. Anyone who celebrates, or lives in a country that celebrates, Christmas could give you their own answer, and these are all fine by me. I could go on about the things I enjoy... dark red and green together, lighting candles, decorating the mantle in just exactly the right way, cuddling by the fire with hot chocolate, listening to Mannheim Steamroller wrapped in the Christmas blanket, smelling the tree... it's about being warm in the middle of the cold, and feeling good for absolutely no reason.

I'm an atheist and I love Christmas. There I said it. And it doesn't bother me one bit that I'm ostensibly supposed to be worshiping the Sun God. (Do you ever use a word without being certain that you're using it in the right way? Ostensibly that's what I just did.) I don't blog about religion as much as I thought I would. Partly because people can get easily offended, but mostly because I don't care what people believe. For questions of spirituality and faith and love, there are no right answers; for questions that deal with the physical world, such as the age of the Earth and biological evolution, we have science.

But these are complicated philosophical issues, and I digress. I've become more interested not in what people believe, but why. Religions weren't created in a vacuum... there are psychological and sociological reasons for why humans believe what they do and behave they way they do, and that shit is fascinating.

It's no coincidence that the primary holiday of the Northern hemisphere is during their winter, the same as it's no coincidence the Christian church eventually chose December the 25th as the birthday of their savior. Yule, Saturnalia, Solstice... of course Jesus is born when the sun is at it's lowest in the sky, for Jesus is the Son and the Sun. The pagan traditions that Christmas adopted, like bringing a pine tree into your house, are a celebration of life in the midst of death. There is no need to celebrate life in Summer when it is all around you; but Winter is the time for endings. The evergreen tree, the birth of Christ, remind us that life will begin again.

Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall.... let's break the seasons down. You might be thinking that no, Spring is the real time to celebrate life. And you'd be right, too; Easter with its eggs, bunnies, and resurrection celebrates the renewal of life: Spring is the season of Beginnings. Summer follows as the season of Being, and Autumn/Fall as the season of Ending: the trees lose their leaves, and we treasure the last bounty of the harvest.

So where does that leave Winter? What is left after Beginning, Being, and Ending, can only be Non-being. Winter is the season of the Spirit.

The spirit, like the Sun, is constant. The moon symbolizes the cycles of time by its monthly cycle of birth and death, but the sun symbolizes the eternal, which is outside of time. (I will admit that this is from Joseph Campbell, like most of my deep thoughts on symbolism and mythology.) Symbolized by the evergreen tree and the birth of the Sun God, Winter, then, is outside of time; between death and birth; the silence between the sound. Christmas is the time to settle, regroup, reflect, and prepare for the New Year. And eat lots of chocolate.

So that, in a very large nutshell, is what I think about the Christmas Spirit. I didn't even mention how I love the icon and imagery of Santa Clause, with a twinkle in his eye and a deep laugh. To me he is not the fat man in the bright red with white trim, but more of a Mithrandir archetype of the wanderer, doing good where he can, eternally wise and eternally eternal. (Mithrandir is Gandalf, btw. It means the Grey Pilgrim in Sindarin. Do I have to explain everything to you?)

Happy Christmas!

The Philosophy of Cosmology, or: What I Didn't Spend Three Weeks Doing This Summer

Sit a while, and let me tell you a story. About hopes. About fears. About an epic battle between science and philosophy, and a lone blogger caught in the crossfire...

It starts way back in February. There I am, checking Sean Carroll's blog (a cosmologist who regularly blogs about philosophy, i.e. me if I had fame and tenure and was better at blogging), when what do you know, there is a call for applications for a Summer Institute on the Philosophy of Cosmology! My hobby and my day job all rolled up into one!

My first instinct is that I need to apply because Believe in Your Dreams. (Uncertainty Phase 1: Excitement.)

Then after a bit of research, I decide I do not trust the motives of the Templeton Foundation, and I'm not going to get in anyway, so why bother? (Uncertainty Phase 2: Insecurity.)

Uncertainty Phase 3 then slips into cold hard reality...

In tandem with researching the people involved with the Philosophy of Cosmology institute, I watched the Moving Naturalism Forward videos, which seemed the natural thing to do once I was in a philosophical mood. One of the speakers, who was a physicist and is now a philosopher, talks about the practical differences of the two academic fields to emphasize that as a scientist, you just don't have the luxury of taking a broader view and reading literature in related fields - at least not until you go on sabbatical or get old and philosophical! There are teaching duties, overseeing graduate students, solving practical problems in the lab, and writing a ton of grant proposals to occupy your time, and there is only so much time in the day.

The cold hard reality of the situation is that perhaps I don't have the luxury to spend a day thinking about philosophical issues, much less three weeks, because it's normal - even expected - for postdocs to work on weekends. Sure, not all do, and sure, mostly this is my guilt and insecurity about not working enough, but I don't hear faculty talking about how much they slacked off as postdocs. I hear them talk about how much sleep they didn't get. It turns out I love sleep. I also like to pretend to be profound and pretend to be philosophical, but that's not something I should have the time to do as a serious scientist. Crap.

Despite all that, I convince myself (and let friends convince me) to apply anyway. (Uncertainty Phase 4: Action. slash Believe in Your Dreams and Figure Out Later Whether They Are Your Actual Dreams.)

Cut to April, when the most annoying thing happens.

I get in.

Uncertainty Phases 1 through 3 kick in all at once! Of course I'm super excited about getting in, but actually going would mean keeping up with philosophers for three weeks (and actually talking to them! Ahh!)... and then there's the added annoyance that a very relevant conference overlaps with the philosophy institute, and because time only moves in one direction, I can't do both. (WTF, time?)

I almost resolve myself to do it despite my misgivings. Abandon Certainty and Follow Your Bliss and all that. But there's that nagging question of the actually-relevant-to-my-job conference. If you are aware enough to notice things like blog post titles, perhaps you can see where this is going. I get the word from the higher-ups: "if you want a job in astrophysics, go to the science conference. you will be able to do this interdisciplinary stuff once you have a permanent position (if you have time! because no one has time to do anything as a professor, haha!)." I may have paraphrased just a little bit, but the message is clear: scientists are interested in science and nothing else.

Believe in Your Dreams... Later.

This signaled to me that the paranoia behind why I don't have my full name on here or link here from my actual website turned out to be justified. Perhaps I didn't intentionally plan it that way, but at some point I realized that I definitely don't want potential employers to read this blog. First, some would see it as indicating that I'm not serious about science, or think that blogging takes away from time better spent doing research. If this blog were only about science, that would probably be okay - but most of the time I would rather talk about "somethingness" and "nothingness" and "wait what does that even mean?"

Which brings me to my second point: I sometimes write about personal shit and sometimes write about Chakras and sometimes mention how time is an illusion or discuss the unity of duality. Who would hire a scientist who doesn't believe in time? (Of course, I do, really, insofar as "believing in time" is even a useful concept... and of course I don't literally think that chakras are pools of energy in the body that we can open by meditation and yoga... but metaphors are useful and logic can be boring!) Not only am I philosophical, but I have weird ideas...

In hindsight, the science conference did turn out to be very worth it and good for my research/career. Also, as a bonus, the philosophy of cosmology lectures were all put online and seem to be mostly on topics in which I'm not particularly interested... not that it wouldn't have been awesome, but the actual awesomeness level of counterfactuals is impossible to determine. (Again, unidirectional time. What a let-down.) Anyway, another philosophy of cosmology opportunity may come again, and meanwhile maybe I will write about the Copernican vs. Cosmological Principles and how no one understands them because cosmologists are bad at philosophy.

I guess the moral of the story is: Believe in Your Dreams Even If You Don't Necessarily Follow Them All the Time.

I was sat

I've now been in England for one year. Somehow I survived. Perhaps made easier by smuggling brownie mix and Nestle chocolate chips across the border, and by having access to US TV-on-the-internet, I managed to make it through an entire year in the UK. There are many things I could write about living here, but on reflection, nothing made me want to write a blog post until considering the oft heard phrase "I was sat there."

I could, for example, talk about the food. I could wax poetic about a midnight kebab, discuss the subtle lack of any flavor in fish & chips, relate the militant loyalty the English show to their English curry, or express my deep wish that more steak dinners could be had in pie form. But no, nothing makes me realize I'm in a foreign country more than ordering food from a pub and being asked, "Where are you sat at?" I've been here long enough to be used to it, but the briefest pause must have prompted a follow-up: "Where are you sitting?" Ah, that's better.

I could talk about the other funny things they say. An elevator is a lift and an apartment is a flat, and all that... but you've most likely heard that before. I could mention some less well-known and certainly more important translations, like pants are trousers and undies are pants. Exits are ways out and "for here" is have in and "to go" is take away, etc.... all these appear on a running list I started long ago of the unique things you hear on this side of the pond, but top of the list is "I'm sat there."

I could discuss the finer points of how to describe someone you don't particularly like or aren't happy with. What is the distinction between wanker, tosser, and knob? What is the equivalent of asshole, douchebag, and jerk? What is the difference between an American twat (pronounced like swat) and an English twat (pronounced like bat)? (I apologize if you've sat through this blog post only to be offended by my language, but note that I didn't say "if you've been sat," which would be far more offensive to my ears.)

Or perhaps I could try to describe the taste of English "Real Ales," the coziness of an English pub, the smell... there's certainly a lot I could say about that. Pints are larger, and ales are indeed warm and flat to American tastes, but I haven't quite managed to figure out the precise way in which "this ale is quite nice" becomes "I would kill for a Sam Adams" in just a few months. From not knowing the difference between ale and lager, I now appreciate the bounty of American craft-brewed beers, without the hampering "purity standards" that make most European lagers taste exactly the same. But when experiencing these nuanced, beer-hazed musings on a typical Friday pub night, I might be jarred out of my reverie by someone complaining how they "were stood there for an hour" to the realization that no, I am not at home. The people here are different.

Every time I hear something like that, I can't help but wondering, "By whom?"

Look, I'm not a prescriptivist. I care about grammar because it's like the algebra of sentences, and algebra is fun, but I'm sure there's nothing grammatically incorrect with saying "I was sat there" instead of "I sat there" or "I was sitting there." (Yes that's right, algebra is fun!) To me, it seems like "I was sat" implies an unspecified subject - like, for example, "Grandpa sat me down to tell me how the world works." In this case Grandpa is the subject and "I" is the object, and "I was sat and told how the world works" is just refusing to acknowledge Grandpa, the subject. So when people here "were sat at a train station eating a vindaloo pasty," I know, deep in my heart, that "vindaloo pasty" should be the most English thing in that sentence, but I just can't get over the grammar.

So, I have been in England for a year. I've been to Stonehenge, Edinburgh, and London. I traipsed across the South Downs and had an English breakfast in an Oxford college. I was jammy to find a nice gaffe in under a fortnight, and have an app to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit. But you will never hear the phrase "and I'm sat there" cross my lips, (unless ironically), because I am an American.

Cheers, Ta, Thank you very much indeed!

Nautilus

I'm in love with this new magazine, Nautilus. It is named after "a remarkable intersection of science, math, myth, and culture", a mollusk with a fractal logarithmic spiral in its shell. First of all, I love logarithms! In a weird cosmic synchronicity, the random (from a list of names?) band name given to me in Rock Band was "Just a Matter of Logarithms" and you'd better believe I kept it. Second of all, I love science, math, myth, AND culture! I love all of those things! So I was pretty excited to find out about this magazine.

The first article I read, I chose because of the title, "Metaphors Are Us". (I love metaphors!) I was fascinated to find out how metaphors, empathy, morality, and neurology all come together in a beautiful and complicated mess of humanity. Our ability to feel empathy, to connect to someone else's pain and feel it ourselves, relates to very specific functions of the brain:

While in a brain scanner, you’re administered a mild shock, delivered through electrodes on your fingers. All the usual brain regions activate, including the anterior cingulate. Now you watch your beloved get shocked in the same way. The brain regions that ask, “Is it my finger or toe that hurts?” remain silent. It’s not their problem. But your anterior cingulate activates, and as far as it’s concerned, “feeling someone’s pain” isn’t just a figure of speech. You seem to feel the pain too.

Humans also appear to abstract disgust as well as pain. The insula, which processes gustatory disgust in all mammals (to make us spit out poison, for example), also activates when we think about some shameful thing we did. This "moral disgust" also relates to humans as social creatures:

Many cultures inculcate their members into acquiring symbols that repel, doing so by strengthening specific neural pathways from the cortex to the insula, pathways that you’d never find in another species. Depending on who you are, those pathways could be activated by the sight of a swastika or of two men kissing. Or perhaps by the thoughts of an abortion, or of a 10-year-old Yemeni girl forced to marry an old man. Our stomachs lurch, and we feel the visceral certainty of what is wrong. And we belong.

That beautiful paragraph makes me want to read more by the article's author, Robert Sapolsky.

I haven't finished Issue 1 yet because I was distracted by Issue 0, which I got around to reading today. I probably won't write about all of the issues, but here are more reasons I love Nautilus:

In one article, I learn that music is fractal, and so is a coastline!A fractal pattern looks the same on large scales as it does on small ones; put another way, the parts of a fractal system look similar to the entire system. I'm not entirely sure how music is fractal, but it's still cool!

In another article, I get some fascinating insight into psychological epistemology:

According to Rolf Reber, a psychologist at the University of Bergen, in Norway, “there is growing empirical evidence that people use a common source for evaluations of both beauty and truth.” The source he refers to is processing fluency, the state of being able to easily parse and understand a situation. Essentially, the more easily we can get a handle on a situation (because it’s mathematically simple, we’ve seen it many times before, it’s symmetrical, etc.), the more likely it is to seem right.

This explains so much about people and why they believe what they do! (I have just now decided to call this psychological epistemology. It probably already has a more appropriate and boring name like the "psychology of belief" but... boring.)

So anyway, this is very fascinating for psychological epistemology: the easier something is for us to understand, the more likely we will accept it as true. Simple and elegant solutions just seem right. Things that don't make "horse sense" are met with skepticism. And when we hear something over and over again it becomes much easier to believe, even when it has no relation to reality. (I'm glaring meaningfully in your direction, Fox "News"....)

A third article had me at its title, "Where Science and Story Meet", because I've been wanting to read "The Storytelling Animal" but it's not at my local bookstore. The article was not quite what I expected, but that's good; if I only ever learned what I expected to learn, then I probably wouldn't actually learn very much. Anyway, the unexpected thing I learned was that

The pleasurable feeling that our explanation is the right one—ranging from a modest sense of familiarity to the powerful and sublime “a-ha!”—is meted out by the same reward system in the brain integral to drug, alcohol, and gambling addictions. 

Not only are humans good at pattern recognition, but figuring out the pattern produces happy chemicals in the brain! Solving that equation, putting that jigsaw piece in the right place, or hearing someone else tell you something you already know is true - putting things together into a coherent story - makes us feel good, while not solving that equation or puzzle, or having a friend present you with facts that contradict your beautiful story, makes us hate math and angry at our friends. This pretty much explains why I like to do jigsaw puzzles when I'm stressed, and adds to theories I have about the psychology of gaming. (Or maybe theories other people have that I've read...)

There's more Nautilus to read, and learn and think about, but this story is over for now!

Quiet

I got the book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking for Christmas, and honestly I wasn't expecting that much. I had seen her TED talk and thought it was great, but I couldn't imagine how she would fill a whole book. Introverts are awesome, and everyone needs to calm down and stop talking so much - got it. What else is there to say?

As you may have guessed from the fact that I am blogging about it at all, it turns out it had some pretty interesting and unexpected things to say! I highly recommend the book to anyone who is an introvert, or an extrovert who knows introverts, or a parent of a quiet child, or a human being.

One of the more interesting things I learned was about the neuroscience behind temperament, and relatedly, why oral exams are a horrible way to judge knowledge and intelligence. If I could have told my examiners, "Look, I am a 'high-reactive' type of person, which means my amygdala goes into high gear in stimulating situations like being around people and trying new things, so in these situations my neocortex is spending considerable effort to soothe my amygdala, thus interfering with my ability to speak on the fly and 'think on my feet', so kindly bugger off, and anyway what does thinking on your feet have to do with being a good scientist, aren't good results obtained with careful diligence and error-catching?!".... then perhaps I could have saved myself a few years of stress and anxiety. But somehow I don't think it would have gone over too well. Luckily, giving scientific talks has none of the stress-inducing JUDGMENT of exams, and I usually eat some dark chocolate right before speaking. (To stimulate the release of dopamine, of course.)

I interpreted this part of the book as an explanation for why mantras work. Specifically, this quote:

In fact, a recent fMRI study shows that when people use self-talk to reassess upsetting situations, activity in their prefrontal cortex increases in an amount correlated with a decrease of activity in their amygdala. (p. 118)

Fear is a pretty basic emotion governed by the primitive part of the brain, but we can learn to get over it by activating our powerful front brain. However, the fear response of the amygdala never goes away completely, so when the cortex is otherwise occupied, such as in stressful situations, we may find that we do not have our shit together as much as we thought we did. Shit.

"Quiet" covers the basics of introversion/extroversion for people who spend too much time at parties to learn about this fundamental aspect of human personality. (JUST KIDDING extraverts, I love you! but seriously pick up a book sometime okay?) It dispels myths about introverts, such as they are always shy and depressed - though this awesome cartoon might be the best explanation of introversion. "Quiet" also talks about related aspects of temperament like sensitivity (though 30% of sensitive types are extraverts if I remember correctly), which describes people who are "keen observers" who "have difficulty when being observed or judged", "tend to be philosophical" and "dislike small talk", and who "feel exceptionally strong emotions" and "process information about their environments unusually deeply." (p. 136) Does that sound like someone you know?

There are a bunch of other insights that could be drawn from the book, from politics to the media to religion to business to education to relationships.... basically, anything that involves people, because people are either introverts or extraverts or both. So that pretty much covers everything.

But you don't have to take my word for it! Go read it yourself! If you want to. Or you can just take my word for it. It really doesn't matter either way. Do whatever you want! Just calm down.

Nostalgia

At some point in my young adult life, I vaguely remembered a story that was a favorite of mine as a kid and couldn't for the life of me remember what it was. I knew it contained a lion at the end, who perhaps lived in a castle. I suspected it was in a book at Grandma's house, but she had given those away long ago.

I desperately wanted to find this story again, but why? Sure, a lion living in a castle sounds pretty cool, but it wasn't the coolness of the story I cared about. There might not even be any castle! (I was pretty sure about the lion.) It was something about the almost but not quite remembering - the hope that finding this story would unlock a wave of nostalgia that I was robbed of, because I couldn't be nostalgic for something I couldn't even remember.

Many years later, after my nephew was born, I had an excuse to buy children's books. (One copy for myself, one for him!) I found an illustrated copy of the Winnie-the-Pooh books and HAD to buy the DVD of the old cartoons - I had to clarify my vague memories of them getting lost in the woods, and of Tigger getting stuck in the tree. When I would visit and everyone else was tired of watching Winnie-the-Pooh, I would make them put it on, because obviously the DVD was a gift to myself.

When these relics of childhood are found again, they become more than they are. They are valued for their association with happy memories and being a kid, not for themselves. Let's face it, being a kid is pretty awesome! There's something about the initial remembering - the theme song of old cartoons, an image from a story book - that just makes us happy, no matter how stupid the book or bad the cartoon. If we hadn't watched Legend all the time as kids I seriously doubt that I would love it so much now. But now, I can say with certainty that it is objectively one of the best movies of all time. (Scientific fact.)

Eventually, buying Christmas presents for my nephew led me to stumble across Richard Scarry's Best Storybook Ever containing, you guessed it, my long lost favorite story: "Is This the House of Mistress Mouse?" (Spoiler: the lion's castle house was not her house!) On top of that, there were so many other stories and images that I didn't even know that I forgot! I try to read them to my nephew even if he thinks they're boring. But I suppose he is creating his own set of things to forget, to one day half-remember. I hope there's lots.

When I was reminded of Winnie-the-Pooh today, I sort of thought about writing a blog post about the philosophy in the books, but I ended up writing something else (and it turns out someone else has written that already...) Instead I will end with one of many deep and profound Pooh quotes:

“I do remember, and then when I try to remember, I forget.”