fauxklore

Celebrity Death Watch: James Wright was the president of Dartmouth College from 1998 to 2009. Dick Ellsworth was a pitcher, primarily for the Cubs. Michael Callan originated the role of Riff in West Side Story on Broadway. Charles Sherrod was a civil rights activist. Mary Adelia McLeod was the first female bishop of an Episcopal diocese. Lucious Jackson played basketball for the Philadelphia 76ers. James McDivitt was an astronaut who flew on Gemini 4 and Apollo 9. Jan Rabson was a voice actor who played the role of Leisure Suit Larry, among many others. Robbie Coltrane was an actor who got a lot of attention as Hagrid in the Harry Potter movies. Noel Duggan was an Irish musician who was part of Clannad (and was, by the way, Enya’s uncle). Benjamin Civiletti was Jimmy Carter’s last attorney general. Alan Halsey was a poet who managed The Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye for 18 years. Carmen Callil co-founded the magazine Spare Rib and founded Virago Press, which publishes feminist works, including books by such authors as Margaret Atwood, Adrienne Rich, and Naomi Wolf.


You can’t possibly need me to tell you who Angela Lansbury was. She was such an iconic actress, whose career spanned film, stage (5 Tony awards, plus a special one for lifetime achievement!), and television. This Interview with the New York Times was recorded in 2010, under the condition that it not be released until after her death.

Bruce Sutter was a relief pitcher for the Saint Louis Cardinals. He was the first pitcher to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame without having ever started a game. He was also a pioneer of the split-finger fastball. Overall, he was one of those rare players who actually changed the sport.


Family Death Watch: I recently learned that my distant cousin, Aharon Schwartzbard, died in August of 2021. I’d never met him in person but we were connected on FaceBook. I guess it’s another reminder that I’m part of the older generation.


Faraday Prize Lecture: The Royal Society gives out the annual Faraday Prize to a scientist who excels in communicating to the general public. The winner gives a public lecture, which was available on-line. This year’s went to neuroscientist Professor Sophie Scott, whose lecture was titled Funny, peculiar? The Science of Laughter. Here are a few of the highlights:

• She talked a lot about laughter in other animals, including apes and rats (who, apparently enjoy being tickled. Who knew?)
  
• Laughter is associated with play. All animals play when juvenile.
  
• In terms of the rib cage, laughter is prioritized over breathing, so laughter is literally trying to kill you.
  
• Contagious laughter is a learned behavior and may be unique to humans. You are 30 times more likely to laugh if other people are around.
  
• We all laugh more than we think we do. (As someone who laughs a lot, I find this slightly frightening.)
  
• Laughter serves to de-stress situations.
  
• There are no convincing examples of humor in wild animals, though they do laugh.
  
• Humans are th only animals that produce emotional tears.
  

Overall, this was a fascinating and entertaining lecture. You can find a recording of it here


Book Club: My book club met Wednesday night and we talked about The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. Overall, pretty much everybody liked the book and we had a good conversation about whether or not we’d want to have a similar experience of seeing how things would have turned out had we made other choices in the past. I admit to some curiosity about some decisions I made, but I don’t have regrets associated with them.


Storytelling: The Musical: On Thursday night, I watched Better Said Than Done’s virtual storytelling show. Storytelling: The Musical. The gimmick was that each of the six tellers had (primarily original) songs interspersed in their stories. Ed Stivender’s material was largely excerpted from his show (and book), Raised Catholic, Can You Tell? It was entertaining, but felt a little bit long. Gwendolyn Napier told a story about taking herself out to dinner and meeting a man who she fell in love with. Norm Brecke did songs based on “The Three Billy Goats Gruff” and “The Three Little Pigs.” Lona Bartlett told about the songs she sang to her children and the struggle to find ones that weren’t full of death. Alton Chung talked about a community theatre production of Into the Woods. Saving the best for last, Anne Rutherford had a very funny version of The Princess and the Pea, somewhat along the lines of Once Upon a Mattress. All in all, it was a fun show.


Jonathan Richman: It is apparently Bostonian month at the Lincoln Theatre in D.C. I went to see Jonathan Richman on Friday night and will be seeing the Dropkick Murphys next week. Because it was open seating, I made a point of getting there early (after grabbing a quick bowl of vegan chili at Ben’s Chili Bowl, which is an iconic DC place) and ended up having a great, far-ranging conversation with a couple of other people who were there early. As usual, Jonathan was brilliant. He did several songs that drew on works by Rumi, including “He Gave Us the Wine to Taste.” There was a great mix of old and new, ranging from “That Summer Feeling” and “Dancing at the Lesbian Bar” (which had everybody singing along - and wishing we could dance along) to “Everybody Loves Dolly,” “People Are Shameless,” and an instrumental piece called “Guitar in Orange, Drums in Pale Purple.” I was particularly pleased to hear “The Fenway,” which I hadn’t heard in ages. And everyone enjoyed singing along to “Cold Pizza.” All in all, a great show, full of child-like sincerity and laughter.


Once On This Island: On Saturday afternoon, I went to see the Constellation Theatre Company’s production of Once On This Island at the Source Theatre. While I do own the original cast recording of this musical, I hadn’t listened to it in a long time and I admit I didn’t really know much about the show. I was very pleasantly surprised. The basic plot involves a French Caribbean island that is divided into two worlds, primarily along racial lines. A poor peasant girl rescues a member of the rich beauxhommes after he crashes his car and decides her fate is to save him. She offers her life to the god of death, in exchange for his. Throughout, the gods influence what happens, for better or worse. The story is interesting and the music is effective in moving it along and telling the audience how the characters feel. I was hooked right from the beginning, with the Afro-Caribbean beats of “We Dance.” I will definitely be listening to the cast recording more often!

After the show, we stopped by Ice Cream Jubilee, where I had a scoop of their maple rye pecan ice cream. I got home in time to eat a somewhat healthier supper and go to the monthly Voices in the Glen story swap, where I inflicted my seasonal story “Lyle and the Ghost” on my friends.


And now I am pretty much caught up.

Back in October, fansee asked me (in response to my retirement) how I came to be a satellite systems engineer and, more specifically, about my experiences as a woman in that field. I have plenty of other catching up to do, but I’m in the mood to write about this.


As far back as I can remember, I was interested in science. As a child in the 1960’s, I had a particular interest in space. The first book I remember, from about age 5, was You Will Go to the Moon. Later on, I recall writing to NASA and getting pictures of spacecraft and planets. The first news story I remember was John Glenn orbiting the earth, And the moon landing was one of the major events of my childhood.


But, when I asked if girls could become astronauts, my mother said, “no, but maybe when you’re old enough...” For a while, after reading a biography of Maria Mitchell (part of a series my elementary school library had on childhoods of famous Americans), I thought of becoming an astronomer. Or, at least, going to Vasaar College, like she had. But then I read about Marie Curie in the back of a Classics Comics (possibly one about the story of the atom) and decided I wanted to be a chemist. I did go through other potential careers throughout elementary school and junior high, ranging from being an actress to becoming the first woman to win the Indianapolis 500. But I pretty much stuck to chemistry as the plan. For a while, I specifically wanted to be an analytical chemist for the police department, like Barry Allen (the alter ego of The Flash), which would also solve the problem of how I would get super powers without having been born on Krypton or being an Amazon princess. By high school, I was primarily interested in biochemistry and, specifically, neurochemistry.


That pretty much continued to be the plan. I did well in chemistry class (and other science classes). I also went to two National Science Foundation programs. The Columbia University Science Honors Program was held on Saturdays and I spent 3 years taking the train into the city (and the subway uptown) for it. I took a wide range of classes, not just biochemistry related. I remember one about statistics for psychology, one on elementary particle physics, and a biochemistry class where we extracted DNA - something far more exciting in 1975 than it would be now. There were also afternoon lectures a few times each semester, with the most memorable of those having to do with topology. There were also social benefits, including meeting my first real boyfriend. When there weren’t afternoon lectures, he and I hung out in the city and perpetrated public displays of affection in Central Park. But that’s a whole other story. (Before I met him, I sometimes went to the headquarters of the socialist Zionist group that ran a summer camp I’d gone to for a couple of summers and spent the afternoon handing out leaflets on the street.)


The other NSF program was the Program in Biochemistry (PIB), the summer after my junior year of high school. It was held at the Loomis-Chaffee School in Connecticut and was a mixture of lectures and research projects in small groups. I had actually spent the previous summer taking a summer school class (at my high school) on biochemistry research, which I remember as being almost entirely focused on individual projects, with a few field trips thrown in. I did a project in which I injected the nerves of clams (which are big red threads) with neurotransmitters. I don’t remember what I was trying to prove. As for the field trips. we did one or two to various institutions within a couple of hours of our school. I know we went at least once to Waldemar, which was a medical research facility that had its own summer program for high school students. And I know we went to the Coney Island Aquarium, but I don’t remember if that was an official event.


Anyway, PIB was a fun and intense summer. We took pride in sleep deprivation and people signed up for one hour naps on the sofa in the lounge, for example. We learned how to “sacrifice” mice and grind up their livers in a blender and an unlucky member of my team got a taste when mouth pipetting some of the resulting liquid. We did have papers to write and the various instructors (who were upperclassmen at prestigious universities; the head of my team was a junior at Harvard, if I recall correctly) graded them according to their own systems. There was one instructor who favored the use of classical compositions as grades. To this day, I have no idea whether “Glinka’s Summer Night in Madrid” was or was not a good grade. We also had various extracurricular trips. I know I went to concerts at Tanglewood a few times. There were tours of various colleges. And there was a trip to New York to see Equus on Broadway.


So, when I was applying to colleges, I was still planning to be a chemistry major. But my brother was busily setting a Michigan State record for changing majors and someone I knew from high school was rethinking his plan to major in math at Yale. I chose MIT over Yale largely because I figured that, if I did change my mind about my major, I would still want to do something scientific.


Freshman year included 5.41, which was an Intro to Organic Chemistry class. I was reasonably well prepared and went on the next semester to the next class, 5.42. (I was also taking a lab class.) I discovered that, while I could think of lots of reactions that could happen, I often had no idea which one would happen. More significantly, I was not enjoying either of those two classes. At the same time, I read about some work that people in the mechanical engineering department were doing on prosthetics that used the body’s nervous system. That sounded fascinating and I looked further at ME as a major. (Or, in MIT lingo, Course 2.) The biggest advantage is that it would give me a broad engineering background, meaning I didn’t really have to make up my mind. There was a program (2A) that let you design your own major within the ME department and I used that to design what was, essentially, a biomedical engineering major.


One of the first classes I took was 2.02, Introduction to System Dynamics. This was focused on modeling and it just clicked with my desire to view the world as simple. There were a few times that I rushed back to my dorm room after class to work on a problem set right away to see if it all made as much sense as I thought it did. (I assure you that was not normal behavior for me.) Anyway, people said that if I liked that class, I should take 2.14, which was Introduction to Control Systems. I did and it continued to click with me. So I kept taking classes in system dynamics and controls and enjoying them. And I pursued that into grad school (at UC Berkeley).


While I was in grad school, I got a fellowship from NASA, which came about mostly because one of my professors knew somebody and helped me write the application. When I was nearing completing my doctorate and was job hunting, I did look at things in various industries, but most of the interesting controls issues were in the aerospace industry. I went to work at The Aerospace Corporation (aka The Circle-A Ranch) largely because it offered the opportunity to work across a wide range of systems. And that worked out we’ll for me, obviously, since I stayed there (in various jobs) for 35 years.



This has been fairly long and I haven’t gotten to writing about the specific issue of being a woman in the field. The short version is that I certainly had to deal with individual assholes, but I was always able to find support. As an undergrad at MIT, I chose to live in an all-women’s dorm, partly to have other women to vent to. Most of that was in the form of mircroaggressions, e.g. the instructor who headed a research project I worked on who kept a ruler with Playboy pictures on his desk or another professor who would make comments like “those co-eds are always turning in things late.” The most egregious example was a professor who had started every lecture for years by addressing the class as “:Gentlemen.” I was the only girl in the class and he’d then start with “Gentlemen,…and Miss Nadel.” On the plus side, he definitely knew who I was and I did well in his class. (I am fairly sure he was entirely unconscious of why this was annoying.) I should also mention that my undergrad advisor was a woman.


In grad school, I remember a reception where our department head proudly announced that he had doubled the number of women on the department faculty. They’d hired one person. (They did hire a couple more while I was still there.) But there were a couple of other women working on Ph.D.s and, even though we were in different subfields, we often had coffee together.


Job hunting was another story. A few places made a point of having me talk with a token woman in their group. More than one interviewer expressed surprise at seeing a female job candidate. One organization even sent me a thank you letter addressed to “Mr. Nadel” after my interview.


Circle-A was pretty good from that standpoint. Yes, I often found myself counting the number of women in the room at meetings (which included government and contractor employees, too), but I can think of only a handful of inappropriate comments. I do know of one woman whose (female) boss told her she should wear makeup. And I’ve heard of a few incidents of sexual harassment. On the plus side, we did have an African-American woman as our CEO for several years.


Overall, I had a career that suited me well.

Work is busy but frustrating.

I have been in sort of a swirl of trying to get caught up on the chaos that is my condo, but getting distracted by other things (mostly reading things on-line and catching up on crosswords) instead. I had particularly good intentions for Saturday, but spent much of the day in suspended animation, i.e. alternating between reading and napping.

Sunday, on the other hand, was a swirl of activity. The morning was One-Day University, with three presentations focused on the theme of Genius. I will write more about those below. I was supposed to rush from there to rehearsal for an upcoming storytelling show, but realized I had misremembered when One Day University ended, so opted to run my story (which is not a new one) over the phone on Monday instead. That gave me roughly an hour at home to get some housework done before heading to Arlington for dinner and trivia at Heavy Seas Alehouse with some Losers, i.e. devotees of the Style Invitational. I was clearly tired as I badly misinterpreted a cocktail I ordered. Any Port in the Storm turned out to have ginger syrup and golden ale, not ginger ale. I was thinking it would be sort of like a Dark and Stormy, but it was too sweet. We did, however, win at trivia, even though we were completely hopeless at a fill-in-the-blank lyrics component, which involved a rap song none of us had even heard of.

FDR: The first was by Jeffrey Engle of SMU on Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He started by pointing out that a lot of politicians – including George H.W. Bush, Osama Bin Laden, and Kim Davis – have claimed to be acting in the name of freedom, but that most never define what they mean by freedom. FDR, however, was very specific in his Four Freedoms speech, which he noted came 10 and a half months before Pearl Harbor. Those four freedoms are, of course, freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

Anyway, his main point was that FDR’s success was due to his skill with rhetoric, his optimism, his pragmatism / flexibility, and his empathy. Regarding the latter, he believed that bad things can happen to people through no fault of their own, probably because of his own experience with polio. (By the way, Professor Engel noted that people actually did know FDR was paralyzed, even if they didn’t see photos of him in a wheelchair.) As for political ideology, FDR stated that he was: 1) a Democrat and 2) a Christian. He thought aerial bombing was immoral, but realized it was a valuable tactic. Similarly, he (and the Democratic party of the time) believed in a balanced budget, but was willing to experiment with government spending to end the Depression.

Overall, this was an entertaining talk, especially because of a lot of trivia Engel threw in. For example, he talked about how disliked William Jennings Bryan was as Secretary of State because he was a teetotaler who banned alcohol from diplomatic parties. And he noted that "Make America Great Again was Warren G. Harding’s campaign slogan.

Marie Curie: The second talk was on Marie Curie by Susan Lindee of the University of Pennsylvania. She started out by pointing out that genius is a social category. That is, just being great at what you do is not enough. You have to work to get the recognition, too.

Anyway, Maria Sklodowski and her sister, Bronislawa (who became a doctor) were encouraged by their father in their studies. Originally, Maria was supposed to work as a nanny to pay for Bronislawa’s education, but their father got a good job, enabling her to enroll in the Sorbonne instead. She got top grades in math and physics. Her need for lab space led to her introduction to Pierre Curie and she married him in 1895, a little over a year after they met. Fun trivia is that they spent their honeymoon on a bicycling trip, complete with fashionable biking outfits.

The Curies shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Henri Becquerel. Pierre insisted Marie (as she had modified her name from Polish to French) be included. In 1896, Pierre was killed in a cart accident after slipping on a wet road. (By the way, this was the day before the San Francisco earthquake and fire, so was a bit overshadowed in the news.) Marie went on to win the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. She also went on to a scandalous affair with Paul Langevin, who was married. The affair resulted in five duels, only one of which involved Langevin himself. Langevin eventually did go back to his wife, by the way.

Other notable things Marie did included creating x-ray wagons for use on World War I battlefields (and drive one herself, as well as teaching other women how to drive them and read the x-rays), writing a biography of Pierre, and persuaded an American journalist to raise money to buy her radium for her research. And she had two daughters, one of whom, Irene, shared a Nobel prize with her husband, Frederic Joliot-Curie, while the other (Eve) wrote a biography of Marie. Eve’s husband, Henry Richardson Labouisse, Jr., went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1965 on behalf of UNICEF. More fun trivia is that Irene’s daughter, Helene, married Michel Langevin, the grandson of Paul Langevin.

Final point was that Marie Curie never made any statements about the rights of women. However, she did hire a lot of women in her lab, which may be more practical feminism. And she was very good at promoting herself, which is why we know more about her than a lot of other women in science. That goes back to the idea of genius as a social construct. Self-promotion is, alas, an element of genius.

Mozart: The final lecture was on Mozart and was given by Craig Wright of Yale. He started with having us sing, which was a good way to make sure everyone is awake after a couple of lectures. Unlike the other lecturers, Professor Wright gave an actual definition of genius as involving a person whose creative works or insights change society in some significant way (for good or ill) across time and across cultures. He then went on to talk about two types of cognitive processes in music – 1) perceiving and replicating music and 2) creating music. I’m not sure he is completely correct about the first of those. I believe that I perceive music well, but I am not good at replicating it. That is, there are various tests I do well at, e.g. of the ability to perceive intervals But I am no good at the mechanics of reproducing those to sing or play an instrument by ear. Mozart was very good at both aspects of the former, reportedly having perfect pitch, which enabled him to hear a piece once and them play it. And his manuscripts are lacking in corrections.

Wright than discussed aspects of creativity, which he said is facilitated by opportunity, motivation and an active and vivid imagination. Some of the things he talked about as far as creative thinking are associative thinking (which also included verbal, as well as musical, sounds in Mozart’s case), combinative thinking / synthesis, homospatial thinking (which he defined as multiple strands of information superimposed in one temporal space), iconoclastic thinking (including scatological thinking), and dhildlike thinking. The latter two could be combined as a lack of barriers to imagination. He showed various examples of these aspects of Mozart’s work throughout, including clips from the movie Amadeus. One of the most interesting was an animated visualization of the Jupiter Symphony.

At the end, somebody asked what other composers Wright would consider geniuses. He cited Mahler, Beethoven, and Bach. I’ve been pondering that question all week. I think there’s an inherent difficulty in thinking about it because we can’t really hear a piece of music the way people heard it when it was first written. I value the revolutionary aspect of genius, which is why I’d put Balakirev on my list for his work fusing traditional (Russian) folk music with classical practice, leading to whole idea of nationalistic music. So, while I think Mussorgsky was the most musically talented of The Five (or would have been if he hadn’t fallen to drink), Balakirev is the more historically important.

I am not entirely consistent, however, because I’d list Gershwin above Berlin, even though the latter is the one who really emphasized jazz and ragtime as fundamentally American music. And, yes, Mozart and Bach belong on the list, too, because I am a product of Western culture.

Two quick notes before getting into the main subject: 1) Disco singer Donna Summer has died. 2) We get various alerts on our computer system at work. Most of them have to do with things like a fire alarm in some corridor or a ceremonial flyover at Arlington National Cemetery. Yesterday, however, there was one that was new to me. We got an alert about a swarm of bees at one of the entrances. There was a follow-up an hour or so later reporting the arrival of a bee remediation team.

Anyway, I spent the last Saturday in April emceeing the main stage at the USA Science and Engineering Festival. Overall, it was mostly fun, but there were a few annoyances. One was a guy who showed up claiming to be one of the emcees who was really supposed to be at a different stage. That just meant some quick reshuffling. Another was that the sound system was set up in a way that limited the emcees to using the podium microphone, rather than handhelds which would have let us go out into the audience. One big problem was crowd control. There were huge crowds for the big name performers on the stage (e.g. The Mythbusters and Bill Nye, the Science Guy) and people filled the aisles and every inch of available space. Frankly, I believe this was a real safety problem. Another problem was keeping people on time. The Mythbusters arrived late, but finished close to on-time, since they were mostly doing a Q&A. Bill Nye, however, had a complicated set-up and tear down and ran about a half hour over his time. The person who followed him (Science Comedian Brian Malow) very graciously cut his presentation down to about 10 minutes, but it really wasn’t fair to him. I understand that the big names draw people in, but there needs to be a better way to manage both them and the crowds that come to see them.

I should explain why the inability to use a handheld microphone was an issue. We had various things to give away – periodic table posters, candy, and a few t-shirts. The other emcee opted to use trivia questions for these. My brilliant inspiration (which worked very well) was to print out slips of paper with various child-suitable science jokes and have volunteers draw a slip from a bag to determine which joke I would tell. I then gave posters to all the volunteers. This would obviously have been easier if I could have gone out into the audience to do it, instead of having kids come up to the edge of the stage (which also meant I had to go back to the podium to read the joke they’d chosen).

Overall, I’d say the event was a success. The glitches didn’t seem to have a serious impact on anyone’s enjoyment of the event.

( click here for selection of science jokes I had on hand )

I had an incredibly busy week (mostly preparing a briefing for a high muckety-muck), followed by an incredibly busy weekend. Much of that activity had to do with the
USA Science and Engineering Festival.

There had been a previous, smaller event in San Diego, but this was the first national event. Apparently, there were satellite events in several cities, but the festival on the National Mall was the culmination of the festvities. There were 1500 exhibitors and over 75 performers, so the whole thing was pretty big. I'd volunteered in response to an email from the MIT Club of Washington and was assigned to work at the info booth in the Mellon Auditorium. I should note that when I signed up, I checked the boxes for Saturday morning and Saturday afternoon, assuming I would be assigned to one of those times, but they signed me up for both. Several other people commented on this, so it would help to clarify this for future events.

I got down there fairly early Saturday and checked in at the Command Center. Then I walked over to the Mellon Auditorium where the security guards checked my ID and told me to go to the third floor. As it turned out, they were confused - the third floor was where Lockheed Martin was checking in their volunteers. I went back downstairs and found where the information booth was. We had some scrambling to do to set things up before the festival opened.

Once the festival opened, it became clear that the lay-out of things did not make a lot of sense. The auditorium security funneled people a particular way, so the info booth was actually on their way out, not their way in. We sent people over to stand near the entrance to hand out maps. But all of this could have been solved easily by switching locations of the info booth and the t-shirt sales booth. Again, this is stuff to know for the future.

The actual work was not too bad. The most common questions were predictable things - people wanting to find the restrooms or the shuttle bus stops or the exhibits out on Wilson Plaza. In the latter case, the map was partially at fault, since it made it look like there was an exhit from the back of the auditorium building, which there isn't. Early on, we had a few exhibitors who complained about not getting people to their exhibits, so we did a little pushing. We had also been told to push the "Meet the Scientists" talks, which were in a room at the very back of the building, but that turned out not to be a problem. I went over there to hear Marc Abrahams of The Annals of Improbable Research and his talk was SRO, as was the talk before his.

There were sone questions that were harder to answer. We didn't have an alphabetic list by title of exhibit, so we had to do a lot of scanning (or, in some cases, radio calls to other info booths) to find out where a few specific exhibits were. A couple of people thought that the people who wrote blurbs for the insert in the Thursday Washington Post (e.g. Norm Augustine) were actually speaking at the festival, so were looking for non-existant talks. The resource list told us where things like hardware stores and Starbucks were, but did not give locations of nearby ATMs. (I know the city well enough that I could point them to banks on Pennsylvania Avenue, but some of the other people at the booth were stumped.) Our biggest gap had to do with stamps and stickers that attendees could get on their maps. Some booths were giving out prizes for getting certain stamps, but we weren't given any information at all about those. We did find out about a couple of them, but it was frustrating not to know more. But, overall, these were pretty minor glitches and we were able to be reasonably helpful.

The questions I liked were things like parents looking for activities suitable for children of particular ages (which we did have a list of). My favorite of the day was the young woman who said she wanted to be a meteorologist and asked what booths to go to. Fortunately, I knew exactly where the American Meteorological Society booth was and pointed her there.

My two longer breaks during the day were used to hear the Marc Abrahams talk and to take a couple of things over to the Lost and Found. The latter was partly an excuse to see the exhibits out on Wilson Plaza, Pennsylvania Avenue, and Freedom Plaza, though there wasn't enough time to really do much at most of them. The Improbable Research talk was short and entertaining. It was mostly a summary of the Ig Nobel prizes, with a nice note about the recent Nobelist who had previously won an Ig Nobel. At the end, there was a demo of the bra that converts into two emergency face masks.

I went back on Sunday with a friend who I hadn't seen for a while. Since I could only spend a couple of hours, she brought along another friend and I discovered that going to this sort of thing with a kindergarden teacher can be pretty entertaining. We pretty much wandered the exhibits on the National Mall. We did make a point of stopping off at my company's booth, which had a couple of satellite models, comic books and tangram kits to give out, and an infrared camera. (People could get their photos, but there was aline and it is hardly a novelty for me.) The best exhibit we went to was the Laser Haunted House, which had various laser demos. To be seasonal, many of those involved skulls and other creepy things.

Overall, I think the festival did a great job and I hope it happens again.

Yesterday was my Zero-G flight and I'm barely getting down to earth enough now to write about it.

As a reminder, I saw the booth from Zero-G at the adventure travel show a few weeks back and immediately said, "oh, wow!" And, yes, I said that out loud in public. Their video showing the weightless experience has got to be one of the most effective marketing tools ever. Since I was already aware that they existed and, in fact, had been thinking about their flights that very morning, I took that as an omen that I was meant to do this. I hesitated over the cost and told myself that I could spend the money if I finished in the upper half in the ACPT. Also, it may be expensive but it's still only about a quarter of what a trip to the North Pole costs.

Anyway, yesterday was the day. I got to the meeting place (the Hyatt at Dulles) early since I had inevitably worried about being late. They had a light breakfast out (basically fruit and pastries) and I drank some ginger tea on the grounds that ginger is a good motion sickness preventative. (Well, also because I like ginger, but I like other sorts of tea, too.) We checked in (which required showing photo ID to TSA agents) and got our flight suits. I'd worried about it fitting, but it was fine. You can wear the flight suit over your clothes, but they recommend you don't as it is better to be cooler in the plane. (By the way, you get to keep the flight suit.) We all noticed that our name tags were upside down. The staff explained that it's a NASA tradition that you get to turn it right side up after you've experienced weightlessness.

There was a bit of a glitch with showing the briefing video, so we didn't see the whole thing. Instead, one of the staff went through the explanation of how parabolic flight works and we only watched the mandatory safety part of the briefing. The most important thing they tell you is, "don't jump." You're also advised not to kick or swim, since that would tend to make you hit other people. They also consider it important that you know things like where the oxygen masks are, since they're not where they are on a normal airplane. There isn't any more chance of needing them than there is on any flight, but the FAA takes hypoxia seriously.

The plane itself is a converted 727. The only thing done to it mechanically had to do with the hydraulics. The interior, however, is very different. There are 6 rows of seats at the back, while the rest of the plane has no seats and is padded on the floor, ceiling and sides. There are only two windows and nobody bothers looking out of them at all. The padded area is divided into three zones, one for each "team" of 12 people. The teams are differentiated by color (gold, silver, blue - I was on silver) and identified by the color of their socks. (Shoes are collected after take-off, since you don't want anybody wearing them while floating around.) Each team has a coach to help them with the experience. There are also two flight attendants and a photographer. We never really saw the pilot, co-pilot and navigator.

After a TSA wanding, during which you have to take the barf bag out of your flight suit pocket since it has a metal strip in it, we went to the plane. We had photos (both by team and of the whole group) taken and then boarded via a rear staircase. We took our seats and waited impatiently to get to the designated airspace for the parabolic flight that creates the different gravity conditions. It took a while but, eventually, we were able to go to our float zones where we lied down on the floor. The first part of each parabola is the increased gravity (1.8 G) part and it mostly feels just like added pressure. You get thirty seconds of that. Then comes the fun part.

The first parabola was Martian gravity (about 1/3 Earth gravity). Most of us spent those 30 seconds doing things like push-ups, including one-handed ones. All too soon the call came out, "Feet down, coming out" and we got back down onto the floor. (The point of the call out is that you want to land on your feet or butt, not your head.) The next two parabolas were lunar gravity and we all practiced bounding around during those. Then came two weightless parabolas. It's very hard to describe. Basically, you're lying on the floor and all of a sudden you're floating. You can flip over and fly like a superhero and curl up and spin and so on. It all got a bit crazy, since were weren't used to things at all. I'm not sure exactly how it happened since everything was going on so quickly, but my glasses got broken somewhere in one of those weightless parabolas. (One of the other people on my team thought she kicked me. I don't remember that - I think they just got knocked off and, since I had them on a tight elastic strap, the bridge broke.) The flight attendant took them from me and I did the rest of the flight somewhat blurrily. (I had my spare glasses in my car, so it wasn't a major issue. If I hadn't had those, it would have been a real problem, since I couldn't have driven home.)

After those 5 parabolas, there was a brief period of level flight. Then came two more sets of 5 weightless parabolas each. During the last set, I got to be the "ball" as two people played catch with me. There was also the opportunity to release M&M's and try to catch them in one's mouth (which I did not attempt without glasses). And our coach released water for people to try to catch globules of. Had I thought of it, it would have been cool to get into a lotus position.

I didn't get motion sick, whether due to natural resilience or my acupressure wrist bands. A few people felt a bit queasy during the last couple of parabolas. As far as I heard, the only person who had to use a barf bag was one of a group of 8 Mexican men who had won the trip as a reward for sales for the Modelo brewery. (There was also a guy who won the trip in a radio contest and a couple of people who'd bid on it in charity auctions. And a writer who is working on a story for GQ about NASA.)

We continued lying on the floor for a while on the way back. Eventually most people sat up and we were served water and snacks. When we got close to Dulles, we had to return to our seats and buckle up. We got our shoes back and we each had our photo taken exiting the plane. We also got our name tags turned right side up.

Back at the Hyatt, I grabbed my car key and got my spare glasses. That let me enjoy the luncheon and "regravitation ceremony." Each person got called up and got a diploma certifying that he or she "has defied gravity, communed with floating objects, levitated, and otherwise successfully completed the Zero G weightless experience." That also included a copy of one of the pre-flight group photos. I should have other photos in a couple of days.

The whole thing was incredible fun. I feel truly blessed to have had this experience. You already know if you're the type of person who might enjoy this and, if you are, I highly recommend it.

1) I've sorted out most of my vacation plans, though I still need to get my Cambodian visa. Their embassy is in a very strange location. I can actually do the visa electronically, but I like going to embassies. It still amazes me that I can reserve a room in a cheap guesthouse in the developing world via email.

2) In a fit of energy, I've also gone through a bunch of household paperwork, including ordering film festival tickets for Robert's visit.

3) How on earth can eggs get tainted with melamine?

4) Looking at another of my scrawls, I assumed for a minute that the word "delicacy" referred to food. Actually, I was reminding myself to tell somebody about a potential problem with composite materials.

5) Hill's Kitchen is a very cute name for a kitchenware store on Capital Hill. I need to remember to stop in there some day and buy a cookie cutter shaped like Virginia. (They have all the states plus D.C. and now I wonder how they do Hawaii.)

6) I finally solved a problem with a story I used to tell and stopped because world events no longer made it make sense. I once tried working on this story in a coaching workshop and got very frustrated because the workshop leader had his own ideas and did not respect my process. I am even more annoyed because I realize now that he could have led me to a solution by asking one question.

7) If this gadget were still available, it would be perfect for the white elephant gift exchange at my company's holiday party. (By the way, a real lickometer is used to measure how much a rodent licks.)

8) When a teenager is murdered on a bus (as happened not too long ago in Maryland), why is it relevant that he was an honor student? Dead kids get no grades.

9) Light pollution has become a serious problem for fireflies in Thailand and Malaysia.

10) Clive Barnes died. His theatre criticism, while I didn't always agree with it, was often interesting.

The 2008 Ig Nobel Prize winners were announced Thursday night. They involve everything from armadillos to slime molds to lap dancers.