The Slightly Disgruntled Scientist

Dear spiders —

Please try harder. If there are cockroaches the size of mice in the garden, you should be the size of birds. In fact, anything up to chihuahua size is an acceptable local evolutionary trait.

Wasps —

Bird size limit remains, sorry.

Actual birds —

You're still creepy, but I accept that is a prejudice I will just have to overcome. If you could take a few minutes out of your busy schedule of flying directly at my head to devour said cockroaches, you may build a nest out of my hair for all I care.

A tweet by ProfessorFunk brought me to this article on The Science of Makeup, explaining that the reason women wear make-up is all about sex.

First, there's some science showing that women do, in fact, undergo barely perceptible changes in appearance in relation to fertility. And then, there's this:

Study after study has found that when shown pictures of women with and without their makeup, men consistently rate images with makeup as more attractive, confident, and healthier. Men also think women wearing makeup come off as more intelligent and having higher earning potentials and more prestigious jobs. I'm not saying wearing makeup is more likely to get you hit on at a bar... but Nicolas Guéguen is. He found women wearing makeup were approached sooner and by more men.

There is no way a connection between these two things can be posited as science.

This is actually a response to a friend of mine proclaiming that she is not cool. In fact, it's in response to her request for a diagram explaining details of social interaction. (The fact that I immediately thought of using differential geometry to explain it is not up for discussion.)

Last week Scitech, the best damn science centre in Western Australia, asked the question:

Using comics to communicate medical information - a good approach for science topics too?

The fact that this is worth asking might just be an indicator of our potential for success in our bid to host the Square Kilometre Array — the largest radio astronomy project in the history of James Bond. Yes, it's a long bow, but I'm drawing it and here's how.

I first discovered this video campaign, created by the government sponsored "internet safety program" ThinkUKnow, via Sexting and Slut-Shaming on Hoyden About Town. The more I thought about it, the more incensed I became (which is fairly unusual for me, as the incandescent rage that usually powers my ranting tends to saturate quite quickly).

(Embedded video is in the full text — you can see the video on YouTube).

Recently I have had cause to reflect upon sexual harassment and the effects that it can have on a person. As I mention in the email below, while I don't see it every day, it's damn near impossible to work in a technical field without encountering it at some point.

But that didn't quite explain my unusually visceral response to this, and eventually I realised that there's another reason that it touched such a nerve with me — it recalled an incident during high school when a female student was mercilessly bullied under vaguely similar circumstances. I found it absolutely disgusting at the time, and I can still recall my frustration at being unable to do much more than be a bystander. (It kind of scares me that my brain can throw up the emotional response a good day or two before the memory itself. I know a neurosurgeon-in-training, maybe I can get them to take a look at that for me.)

Of course, this little anecdote should not be taken as a disclaimer or qualifier for my letter. My reaction to that incident years ago was driven by the same thing that prompted me to write this email to ThinkUKnow today, and I mean every word of it.