Thursday, March 29, 2007

"Why do straights hate gays?"

You must read the op-ed from Larry Kramer in the 20 March LA Times, written to a straight audience.

Also a must-read: Larry's speech to a queer audience,The Tragedy of Today's Gays, condemning queer apathy and self-destruction.

Larry is 72. He's been HIV-positive for 20 years. He founded ACT-UP and Gay Men's Health Crisis. He lived through the plague years; he saw them die. He has a right to be angry. He can speak for the hundreds of thousands of voices we've lost to the plague.

Monday, March 26, 2007

Physicist sighting!

Went to lunch today at a swanky faculty club. On the way to the table, walked past Stephen Hawking. Tried to look cool, like this happens to me every day.

Thursday, March 22, 2007

"Do I have a right to speak?"

"The double marginalization of gender and sexual orientation makes voicing our positions difficult, and indeed dangerous. Do I have a right to speak? What is my language? How much abuse will I incur for being 'too visible'?"
-Shawna Dempsey, 1994, qtd in "Her Tongue on My Theory"

Ran across this quote, thought it elegant. Also a concise argument for blogging by pseudonym...

Friday, March 16, 2007

Is Academia more tolerant of LGBTQ employees than corporatia?

Over at Cosmic Variance, Julianne asked about the academic climate for LGBTQ scientists. Here's my response.

Is academia really more tolerant than corporatia?

A figure of merit for “tolerance” is policy, e.g: Is the same health coverage offered to domestic partners as to spouses? For the top institutions, the answer’s yes: 80% of the Fortune 50 companies have DP coverage, and 92% of the US News top 25 colleges. More broadly, only 51% of the Fortune 500, and only 64% of the US News 100 colleges offer DP benefits. Larger lists drop the percentages more. In addition, US government labs and observatories do not offer DP benefits. So from this measure, academia doesn’t clearly lead the corporate world. (Stats from 2005 HRC State of the Workplace.)

(People often assume their institution has more progressive policies than it actually does. Readers can check & compare their institution’s equality policies here.)

DP benefits are equal-pay-for-equal-work. If my straight colleague gets health coverage for his wife, and I can’t for my wife, then I’m getting paid less for the same work. Not to mention the financial & health insecurity of not having coverage. The lack of DP coverage makes it significantly harder for queer scientists to balance work & family.

Aside from policy, there’s “environment”. Personally, I’ve had a very positive experience as an out astrophysicist. Most of my colleagues have been swell. We talk about our families at morning coffee. They’ve written letters to city & university leaders, arguing for DP benefits. At the AAS meeting, we LGBTQ folks assemble for a big curry dinner. Aside from a few faggot & dyke jokes, the environment has been great.

What’s caused difficulty has been institutional policy. Right now, I have DP benefits (yay!) Took some legwork, but what a tremendous boon! -- The Wif had health care while job-hunting after our move. My previous institutions had NO DP benefits, despite decades of activism by faculty & staff.

What's interesting is the number of straight (or bi, i suppose) faculty candidates who've asked about DP benefits. They seem to view it as a bellweather -- has an institution caught up with the times?

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

"Day 3: Still just a potato."

Mary Masterman, 17, from Oklahoma just won the Intel science fair's top prize, a $100,000 scholarship. For her science fair project, she built a Littrow spectrograph at home for under $1000, to do Raman spectroscopy of household solvents. She's already presented a poster at an American Astronomical Society meeting.

Holy, crap...

Monday, March 12, 2007

"World Ends. Merge Left."

Sunday we stumbled upon a truck lumbering along the slow lane, flags flapping, advertising the Ten Commandments. Apparently there has been far too much stealing, adultery, and graven idol-making on the freeway.

It being Sunday, the driver was violating #4 at the time.

Here's a crummy photo.

Friday, March 9, 2007

Is Pluto a planet? Is Menudo? Who cares?

Please, somebody, explain to me why people care so much about Pluto!

(triggered by Julianne's likewise bafflement over at Cosmic Variance.)

Is it Disney?

Is it because "My Violet Eyed Monkey..." is the only astrofact people know? (In which case, we have work to do!) Wouldn't you rather know that the universe is flying apart, or is 13.7 billion years old, or began with a Big Bang? Or even, if we must talk about the outer solar system, that there are THOUSANDS of rocks tumbling around near Pluto's orbit, all frozen relics from the formation of our solar system?

Are they pissed b/c the only thing they thought they knew about Astronomy, is wrong? (Which is a great thing to learn about science!! -- that new data can show that old paradigms were utter, utter crap. I think Sagan called this "built-in error checking".)

Or is it just plain rooting for the underdog? Please, somebody, explain!

The Jellyfish Galaxy!

Monday's APOD is cool: a galaxy being ripped to shreds as it falls into a galaxy cluster.

Serious comment: The paper claims that as the galaxy flies through the cluster medium, its gas gets stripped out, shock-compressed, and then forms stars.

Silly comment: See all those star--forming tendrils! I think we should call it the Jellyfish Galaxy.

Thursday, March 1, 2007

"Space-age funeral for Mr. Noodle"

The inventor of Instant Ramen, those pre-packaged, dirt-cheap noodles that fueled the graduate students, and thus, most of the scientific advances, of the past 40 years, died last month at age 96. At his funeral this week in Osaka, attended by 6,500 including an astronaut and two former prime ministers, the body of "Mr. Noodle" was symbolically launched into space. Wow.