Changes

If you are a regular reader, you may have noticed that I have changed the title of this blog from "Women in Wetlands" to "The Singular Scientist".  After much thought, I decided to make this change because much of the blog content is not focused on either wetlands or women, although I have discussed many gender-related issues.  I originally established this blog to be a forum for a society section I wanted to support, but it soon grew into more than that.  Also, that group has created a more open-forum blog, which serves a different purpose (sharing society/section news and information). 

My intent with this blog has always been to encourage science practitioners to excel in their work and in life, whatever their field or gender.  With the change in title and emphasis, however, I think the blog will better reflect my overall intent.  I'm not changing the URL as yet, partly because I'm unsure how to do this without screwing everything up on Blogger.  Maybe I will do this in the future, but for now, I'll leave it alone.  I plan to continue talking about the challenges that women face in STEM fields, but want to ensure that the blog content does not appear to be restricted to that topic or of interest only to female readers. 

I've also worried about giving the wrong impression that women in science need "special help" to succeed. That is certainly not the case, but it is invariably the reaction I get from some people.  There's a lot more to be said on this topic, but I'll leave it for another post.

After some thought, I came up with the title, The Singular Scientist.  The term, singular, means extraordinary, exceptional, remarkable, one of a kind.  The new name refers not to me, but to you, the reader.  Too often, we settle for less than this, especially when being exceptional in your work is discouraged by peer pressure.  I know this pressure all too well and continue to experience it, even as a senior scientist.  During the almost four years of writing for this blog, I've become painfully aware of the difficulties that many students, postdocs, and early-career scientists face, which eat away at their confidence and desire to persevere in their chosen fields.  Female scientists and students working in male-dominated fields are particularly susceptible, but anyone can find themselves in a similar situation at any stage of their career. 

You may wonder why anyone would shun the opportunity to be outstanding.  For some, the desire to be accepted overrides the desire to achieve one's potential.  For others, there is simply a lack of basic confidence in one's ability to excel, which may be rooted in early experiences and/or inherent personality traits.  Even for highly successful people, there will be instances when we are faced with new challenges that appear to exceed our capabilities (such people are possibly most vulnerable, not having had much experience dealing with failure). In other words, we all need help and encouragement from time to time. 

I've worked through a number of challenges that I faced in my career by writing about them in this blog, which helped me to see solutions and/or to gain some perspective on the problem.  By simultaneously sharing these thoughts with readers, I have possibly helped others who might be experiencing similar challenges.  I also wanted to contribute to the growing online documentation of the experiences of scientists and especially those of female scientists.

Anyway, those are the main reasons I've changed the title.  I don't anticipate changing the content of posts, but hope to write a bit more frequently than I have in recent months.

Holiday Memories

It's that time of year when families reunite for the holidays. These get-togethers can be fun or stressful depending on the health status of the older family members or the employment status of the less successful family members. They are always the settings for indelible memories. 

If you only see your parents or grandparents once or twice a year and they are over sixty, it's usually a shock to see how much they've aged since your last visit. At least that was my experience during the latter years of my parent's lives.  Although it was disturbing to see their physical decline, it was more stressful to see the mental decline. When I was a student and visited during the holidays, the first question always was, "When are you going to be finished?" Later, they couldn't seem to remember that I had finished school and had been working at a university for twenty years. Their first question to me when I arrived for a visit was, "How was school this semester? Did you do well?" I suppose their persistent belief in my student status was due partly to the fact that I was in school for a very long time and partly to the fact that both my husband and I were at a university and talked about being in class or doing research, which were also places and activities we talked about when we were students.  It makes sense, in a way....

My husband's parents were in better physical shape than mine, but were mentally worse off in some ways, if you can imagine that.  His parents (and their friends) seemed to get obsessed with certain things...like drugs and whether my husband and I were hooked on them.  We were never sure where they got this idea, except from TV soap operas. They grilled my husband on each visit about our finances (we were fine, no debt), about our friends (no heroin addicts), about our jobs (we had not been fired), etc.  This inquisition continued well into our 40s.  They also were convinced that drug-sniffing dogs were deliberately addicted to the drugs they were trained to find (this explained why they were so eager to find the drugs).

"What about bomb-sniffing dogs?" I would ask.

His parents lived in Florida during the winter, so that's where we would go during the Christmas holidays. One year, I decided that I would visit my parents and my husband would go alone to Florida. That was the year of his infamous encounter with "Aunt Becky", one of those stories that becomes family legend.

Aunt Becky was actually my husband's great aunt by marriage. She lived in an up-scale condo in Miami Beach. That Christmas, his parents decided to visit Aunt Becky one afternoon. She was in her 70s, so my husband was expecting a frail, elderly woman, perhaps needing a walker to get around. When they arrived at her condo, my husband was shocked when the door opened. He described her to me as very healthy, very blond, very tanned, and dressed in a skimpy jogging outfit that showed off her very well-proportioned body.

And that was apparently the least of the surprises in store for him. 

Aunt Becky proceeded to give her visitors a tour of her condo, during which she made suggestive remarks about recent male visitors (she was unmarried, having outlived several husbands).  Everyone, including my husband, was laughing along with her about her raucous remarks. Then, while his parents were taking in the view of Miami from the balcony, Aunt Becky suggested that my husband might be interested in seeing her bedroom. He reluctantly went along with her, not wanting to offend her by saying no.  She pointed out her bed, which was a waterbed (this was the 80s), and suggested he try it.  When he declined, she pushed him down on the bed and jumped on top of him. He said she was incredibly strong, and between her strength and the sloshing waterbed, he could not extricate himself.

It was then that his parents walked in.

His mother yelled, "Aunt Becky, get off [my husband's name]!" They thought it was pretty funny, but my husband was mortified.  His parents told that story for years, much to his chagrin.  Unfortunately, I never got to meet Aunt Becky. I often wondered what would have happened had I been along on that visit.

My husband's parents and my parents are now deceased (as is Aunt Becky). So we are long past the stage of having to make the annual trek to our respective childhood homes (and deciding which set of parents to visit during the holidays). We've also moved past the period of watching our parents' decline from being physically active and mentally sharp to being frail and faltering in body and mind.

We've instead transitioned to watching each other age, both of us being at the point where our parents began showing the first symptoms of decrepitude.  We watch each other for impending signs of dementia and worry over every little lapse in memory or inability to dredge up the name of some obscure (or not so obscure) actor or political figure.  He forgets to turn the oven off, and I make a mental note that it's the third time in the past few months.  I can't remember something he told me the day before (he claims), and I can see he's taking note of my forgetfulness as well.  It gets to be a contest.  I only forgot once this week to set the security alarm. He only misplaced his keys two times. We joke that between us, we have a whole brain.

Neither of us looks our age....yet.  My doctor always exclaims when I go in for my annual visit, "You look fantastic! I can't believe you are only [my age]." (I get the impression he doesn't have too many patients like Aunt Becky).  The nurse, taking my blood pressure, says, "You're going to live forrreeevver." A slight exaggeration.  However, my grandmother did make it to 97 and she had most of her marbles at the end (I'm counting on those genes).

Well, I had planned to talk more about the neurological aspects of memory, but I think I'll postpone that until the next post.

Large Numbers

I saw this video a while back and was impressed with how well it conveyed how large a trillion dollars is.

Most of us have difficulty performing math involving large numbers in our heads. However, it's an ability that anyone can learn and may be useful to enable the average person how to evaluate policies and make decisions.  People fail to make calculations when it involves large numbers; consequently, they may make decisions based on "gut feeling" rather than facts.  However, there are shortcuts to making calculations involving large numbers:

One method involves the power of 10 and exponents. To multiply (or divide) large numbers and get a ball-park answer, one can add (or subtract) the exponents.  The number of digits in a number equals the exponent.  If the first digit is over 3, add one half.  If you want to divide 22 billion by 45 million, then convert to 10 to the 10 (1 billion = 9 zeros; 22 billion adds another digit) and 10 to the 7.5 (45 million = 1.5 digits plus 6 zeros). Subtracting, we get 10 to the 2.5, which is about 500 (the exact answer is 488.89).

Students might also find such methods useful on exams where the multiple choice answers differ by orders of magnitude.