Tuesday, September 09, 2008

NY times RSS special du jour

Welp, if it's not the Mayan doomsday, it's the newest particle collider. CERN goes online tomorrow, and while I rationally understand that the solar system and its immediate surrounds will likely NOT collapse as a results of kooky scientists playing God, the outside possibility is humbling and amusing. It's a very "find your higher power" moment - with or without my approval, someone will flip that switch in Switzerland, and we either will or will not continue to exist. I've been putting a lot of stock in Recovery lingo lately - accepting the status quo and focusing on personal development rather than what I cannot change, etc - and it's definitely a result of the new job. I'm the only person on staff (that I know of) who is not in recovery, and it's even more humbling than Higgs bosons or potential cataclysmic destruction. We are all works in progress, little personal construction zones who create ripples upon ripples overlapping other personal construction zones. That said, my ripples can't control whether or not we all get mooshed into a walnut-sized mass in a matter of hours, so I'm not going to sweat it too much.

Speaking of sweat, my boxing class hurts so good.

From another interesting NYT article:
For social-role psychologists, the bad news is that the variation is going in the wrong direction. It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India’s or Zimbabwe’s than in the Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France. The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge.
I can't help but speculate that gender is becoming a more visible, more acceptable place to hang one's identity. Does that make it ripe for codification? Must we all be something-boys and something-girls: party boys, sporty girls, butch ladies and bro-dawgs? The whole thing makes me wish we could all bypass gender in a sense. It's never been the hugest deal with me, and I now embrace a sort of genderqueerishness that I resisted for a while. Identity is not necessarily equal to gender in my head, but maybe that's just me.

Palin rant and Chi-town pictures coming soon. I promise. am housesitting, so it's hard to get my pictures up and running with this damn dial-up.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I was looking for blog articles that mention the LHC and I found yours.

I think a lot of conspiracy theorists who have latched onto the LHC/doomsday scenario don't understand that what is being done at CERN is not anything that doesn't already happen at much larger velocities in our atmosphere every second. If the world were going to end, it would have happened already. Besides, the same theory (Hawking radiation) that tells us a mini black hole might be formed also says that it will disappear instantly. Unfortunately people like to pick and choose their science (not unlike picking and choosing which parts of the KJB to believe, eh?).

Anyway, I like your blog. Okay, that probably sounds lame but I don't know you, so I don't know what else to say.