Anhedonic Alice

lucycadence:

Not posted in ages, so here’s a quick photo.

I’m trying to raise money for hormone blockers. Could you please please please help me or even just signal boost? It’s a real big thing for me. Thanks <3

http://www.gofundme.com/2v1low

signal boost

Arch

It was warm

fuckyeahneuroscience:

sexartandpolitics:

What Neurons Look Like (as Drawn by Students, Grad Students, and Professors) - Rebecca J. Rosen - The Atlantic

What would you draw if somebody told you to draw a neuron?

According to a new study, your sketch will depend on how much science education you have, but not in the way you’d expect. In the image above, the top row — those detailed, labeled, neat renderings — are the work of undergraduates. The bottom row, with their janky, sparse lines, come from the leaders of neuroscience research laboratories. That martini-glass looking thing over there on the left? That’s a neuron, as drawn by a professional scientist. The middle row, some intermediary step, shows drawings from postdocs and graduate students. 

These drawings come from a new study published in the journal Science Education. Its authors, a team at King’s College London led by education professor David Hay, found that nearly every single undergraduate student they studied (all but three of 126) faithfully reproduced textbook-style neurons, something akin to a canonical image from an 1899 book detailing the brain, which, the authors say, “has enjoyed an unusually pervasive influence.” These drawings are “typified by a multipolar cell body and truncated, feathery dendritic processes around a clearly demarcated nucleus.” Many of the drawings were annotated.

For the “trainee scientists” — those in PhD programs or completing a postdoc — the neurons appeared more like what would be seen in a microscope image. Nuclei were excluded, the number of dendrites was reduced, and orientation was inconsistent — all characterizing neurons as you would see them “in nature” not in the pages of a textbook.

The final group, those drawn by lab leaders, are characterized by their variety. “Whether by virtue of their simplicity or naturalism,” the authors write, “there is a strong impression that these images exhibit the privilege that each researcher appears to reserver for his or her hypothesis about the hidden neuron cell identity.”

The authors believed that the undergraduates were missing a “central imaginative step” — the “ability to embody a neuron’s perspective” — and that it was holding them back from deeper learning. Could they be taught to understand neurons like the more advanced scientists without going through the years of enculturation and research?

Self

Teaching fire poi

feminerdism:

wrestleforgold:

greenteaandgreatworkouts:

descroissants:

In 1967, Kathrine Switzer was the first woman to run the Boston marathon. After realizing that a woman was running, race organizer Jock Semple went after Switzer shouting, “Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers.” However, Switzer’s boyfriend and other male runners provided a protective shield during the entire marathon.The photographs taken of the incident made world headlines, and Kathrine later won the NYC marathon with a time of 3:07:29. [Wiki]

Awesome women in history.

ALWAYS REBLOG

I can’t explain how much I love rulebreaking, society changing, progressive women.

1967.

NINETEEN-SIXTY-SEVEN.

Not that long ago.

(Source: sabino, via quaffalyre)

I also go by ‘scunner’

scienceing:

mybluedecember:

princess-munchkin:

How the fuck does Bill Nye expect this to happen? What do you want to do, force women to enroll in science courses, regardless of whether or not they want to do it? Just for the sake of having “enough” women? Why the fuck do these fractions matter so much? It’s not like people are holding guns to our head and threatening to kill us if we become interested in science.

Maybe, just maybe, a lot of us DON’T FUCKING WANT to be scientists. Is that a crime?

Hi there, princess-munchkin. Female engineering student here. 

Bill Nye is not saying that you HAVE to be a scientist, and you are right that no one is holding a gun to my head because I am interested in science, but let me tell you some of the struggles of being a woman in the STEM fields. 

1) Because I am a woman, I am not expected these fields. I first fully realized this when I was in high school, on my robotics team. See, although my robotics team was about 50% female, most of the women were part of the “business administration” side of things: finance, marketting, PR, membership, etc. Was this a problem? Absolutely not. But I was there to be an engineer, and specifically, to be the robot programmer. This was met with a lot of hesitation at first from some of the other students (all of whom happened to be male. This is not necessarily a bad thing.) You see, all of the robot programmers before me were guys. Computer programming is just a thing that guys do, or so they thought. Even after I had proved myself to the mentors on the team, many of the students still underestimated my abilities. There were rumors going around that I wouldn’t have been able to program the robot at all if the lead software mentor wasn’t there to help me. This was just flat-out false, but it wasn’t until I won an award for the team that the other students actually saw my merit. 

2) There is not a lot of encouragement for women to go into these fields. I first noticed this when I was in elementary school. I was always interested in math, science, you name it, but many of my teachers and family members pushed that to the side for a long time. When I asked for legos for christmas, I would get ballet slippers. In fact, for a long time, I was training to be a professional dancer. I loved to dance. I loved math more, but no one seemed to notice that about me. It wasn’t until I had a long conversation with one particular teacher in high school that I decided to look into engineering. I had never even considered it as an option before, because no one decided to encourage me to pursue my interest in science. If it hadn’t been for that teacher, I would probably not be at the school I am at right now. 

3) For a long time, Engineering/Science/Math WAS a “boys only” club. Let me tell you when some of the top technical schools and societies started letting women in:

• RPI, The oldest tech school in the country, founded in 1824. Started admitting women in 1942 to “replace men called to war.” Campus housing for women wasn’t constructed until 1966. 
• Tau Beta Pi, the Engineering Honors Society - Founded in 1885. Started admitting women in 1968.
• Caltech - Currently rated #3 in undergraduate engineering. Founded in 1891. Started admitting women in 1970. 
• Georgia Tech - Currently rated #5 in undergraduate engineering. Founded in 1885. Started admitting women in 1952. 

Do you see the implications of this? Engineering has been a part of our society since around the late 1800s (in the case of RPI, since the 1820s), but women weren’t even allowed in for the most part until the 1950s, regardless of their merit. 

4) Because of the fact that it was a “boys only” club for such a long time, there are not a lot of women engineers and scientists to look up to. When you’re reading your physics, chemistry, and math text books, the majority of those theories were came up with by men. It is true that much of our history was written by White Men, but this does not mean that the fact that there are few women scientists to look up does not matter. 

So, as you can hopefully see, princess-munckin, or anyone else that shares the opinions of princess-munchkin, Bill Nye was not arguing that women that are not interested in STEM should go into those fields anyway. But he IS arguing against all of the systematic barriers set up against women who ARE interested in engineering and science. There are several women out there who are just as good as the boys at math and science, but will never pursue their interests because it just doesn’t seem like an option. That was me for a long time. I am super grateful for the fact that I fought against that, and that I ended up where I am. 

if you don’t like science, fine. Don’t be a scientist. But if one day you have a daughter and she shows interest in being a scientist, PLEASE encourage her. Because Bill Nye is right, there needs to be more women scientists in the world. 

A+ comment

Boom, headshot

(via probablyhuman)

http://tomfrenchart.com

Seriously though. 

fuckyeahmedicalstuff:

Polish heart surgeon after 23 hours long heart transplantation. Surgery was succesful. His assistant is sleeping on the floor (1987)