I got tagged a few times, but I don’t like forcing memes on people. Sorry for not lj-cutting this, but it’s going to facebook … anyway, maybe you will learn something about me from this?

25 things… blah blah blah

1. I’ve always lived in the same city. I had a moment of panic before leaving on my Otesha Tour this past fall because I had never been away from Montreal for more than 4 weeks at a time. This means all of my seasonal cues are specific to this place, and I really should move one of these years to get some perspective.

2. I am living with my mom in the house of my youth during this year off business, and it’s great. I get along really well with my small family, in part because we all respect each other too much to infringe on privacy or judge hastily.

3. My father died unexpectedly when I was 8 years old. This was traumatic and the most identity defining part of my life until I graduated this past year, legitimizing my ambition of becoming a music researcher.

4. If you’ve never seen me do my “letter box mouth” trick, ask. I have won every can-you-do-this-weird-trick-with-your-face competition with this amazing oral formation since I was eleven because I can do everything else, and no one I have yet met has managed to recreate the pagoda sillouette. But please do try; your attempts are hilarious, and a great example of the broken way we interpret the actions of others in our incomplete physical empathy.

5. I have three explanations for being vegetarian and when asked why I eat the way I do I have to judge which would be best recieved/most useful to the interested audience. From ethical to absurd, my reasons are: “dude, I am trying to eat sustainably”, “If I can’t kill a cow, why should I let someone else do it for me?” and “eating meat feels like cannibalism”.

6. TV programs that adults find funny often freaked me out as a kid. Bananas (kids in the hall) and laundry hampers (red dwarf) continue make me uncomfortable, and I still expect vampires to pour out of the laundry room when I am going up the basement stairs.

7. At thirteen I decided, in my young feminist way, that if I shouldn’t judge people because of what they look like, then I shouldn’t romantically discriminate based on sex. So in a way, I’ve been bisexual (or pansexual if you want to be picky) since that conclusion, though I did wait for repeated evidence of sexual responses to women before coming out. I knew enough as a teenager to realised that as much as I should define interesting partners by things other that how their bits jiggle, I couldn’t just force cold logic over my deep set human prejudices.

8. I love talking back to movies. I think to most fun I’ve had in a movie theater was going to see Tomb Raider 2 and being the hooligans in the front row of the theater yelling at the inconsistencies with the games and absurd sexual objectifications and throwing popcorn at the screen.

9. I am a huge Jane Austen fan. I read her works like candy, but my least favourite work is Northanger Abbey because Catherine is too silly and naive for me to relate to. I like to think of myself as a Jane, or an Elinor, or maybe even an Elizabeth, but I am afraid I might be more of an Emma.

10. I am not really addicted to coffee. I drink it a lot, and I appreciate its function in social interaction patterns, but I am a total failure as an addict because I forget about my habits at the slightest distraction.

11. Similarly, despite my conscious intentions, I avoid developing routines. There are some things I do regularly, like reading until I fall asleep every night (a bad habit, I assure you), but I think I am afraid of the days bluring together with the same thing over and over, so I willfully neglect bits and pieces of how things could be done regularly and efficiently to keep me on my toes. Or maybe I am just messy.

12. I really want a two year old child who is always asking why because I foolishly think I could always come up with an interesting answer.

13. I have currently a three octave vocal range, from E3 (164.8 Hz) to E6 (1318.5 Hz). I used to go up to G6, but I haven’t been singing much recently, and biking in cold weather is not good for the vocal chords. I am hoping I might get it back some day. But even without that top bit, I can comfortably cover soprano and alto ranges well, and so I honestly do not know which I “should” sing.

14. I really like frogs. At times people have missguidedly given cow themed things, and cat themed things (my cat broach collection is embarassing) but really, all I want is frogs.

15. I am incapable of following recipes. I read them happily, but even when I mean to stick to the instructions, I’ll substitute something or other without thinking and again will not have made what was intended. This probably has something to do with that routine avoidance thing.

16. I grew up watching my brother play video games, or rather watching the video games as my brother played. Because of this, I often make little noises to accompany regular every day actions, like crossing the street, or opening doors.

17. I also squeak when poked. Please do not abuse this admission.

18. I rarely shower, I occasionally bath, and I often wash out of a bucket with a spounge and plastic container. Showering daily dries out my skin, causing break outs on my back and chest, so it is for personal comfort as much as water conservation.

19. I own and play (rather badly) way too many instruments. From most to least currently sharable musical sound devices: voice, piano, bassoon, djimbes, guitar, penny whistles, tamboa, gourd shaker, finger cymbals, panpipes, a Laotian Khaen, dijeridoo, and a few mouth organ like Southeast Asian instruments. I need to add brass and bowed strings at some point in the future. I also need to host jam sessions to make use of this excess.

20. One of my more educational university experiences was failing and retaking Algebra 4. It was a very much needed wake up call, as I had been neglecting the subject and the rest of my studies in my extracurricular overload, and going over the material a year later gave me the chance to see how I could approach the class differently. I still only handed in half the assignments though, and got an A-. It’s also nice to laugh at people who assume I am a “straight A” student.

21. I hate impolite cyclists. I don’t always obey traffic lights, but I am selective about my infractions so that I am not inconveniencing others. Cars often find bikes scary, so it helps everyones comfort levels if cyclists are visible, signal when changing lanes and turning, and don’t sneak into tight spaces in traffic to jump the queue. It also drives me crazy to play leap frog on the bike paths with slow helmetless cyclists that never stop for reds. arg.

22. English is my first spoken language, but french is my first written language, and so I have a difficulty with both on a regular basis. Some major consequences of this bilingual beginning is a phonetic representation system that forgets the great vowel shift, excessive comma use and randomly distributed ending e’s.

23. In consequence to the former, I used to pronounce chaos (a mathematical concept very dear to my heart) like a slowed down version of “cows”.

24. I value and justify every action and experience in my life in terms of “learning” as if wisdom, rather than happiness or piety or virtue, was the goal of life. Honour comes up as a close second, but learning always takes the cake. That isn’t to say I don’t do anything for fun, but understanding new things is fun, so it always goes back to the same principal. This also means I get really impatient when people explain things to me, or others, that I already know. I wish there was some kind of short hand cue for “yes, I’ve already thought about that, let’s move on.” I get over it by remembering that a different mind will lay emphasis in different patterns and might expose aspect I haven’t been able to consider, but that doesn’t always work.

25. I expect to finally come into my own in my late forties, early fifties. Middle age will be a rockin’ time for this bird – just wait and see!

1. Mind as Landscape

2. Eating as Improvisation

***

Organic metaphores for our cognitive process are pretty common. Artists from Ani Difranco to Marcil Proust have described our internal states (thoughts, souls, etc) in terms of the cultivated, dynamic and somewhat unpredictable nature of gardens. A landscape really doesn’t need our help – ecosystems will work themselves out without the deliberate interference of humans – but it can also adjust to the changes we make to it. More so than in many other art forms, gardening is the practice of building with uncertainty. If we install a rose bush it will likely grow; we can’t really tell it how to branch but careful pruning can influence where the plant sends its resources. The french garden style of sharply defined beds I find very uncomfortable because of the intense control placed on the life forms in attempt to keep them in some kind of stasis.

Anyway, I like the idea of the mind as a landscape, some mixture of deliberate and incidental, to capture the complexity of the nature/nurture effects on how we think and behave. Before we even start working with some piece of land, it has rules of interaction with weather, ground, plants and animals. We have the power to reshape a great deal, but only constant vigilance can stop stray seeds from taking root, and nothing we can do to keep out all the bugs and squirrels and deer that eat the fruit of our labour. If fact, if we did keep all these critters out, these minute uncontrollable factors, most of our flowers wouldn’t bare those fruit, and the soil would suffer, and growth in the garden would struggle to fill the void left by these participants. In other words, some degree of uncontrolled material is helpful to a healthy mind. There are a lot of factors that we do not understand, or can’t know directly, about the land we are working with, including the bacterial and fungal populations in the soil, air and water and the nutrient concentrations. We can influence these conditions without really understanding how they work (say by spreading fertilizers, or funguicides) and the same is for the mind – there are aspects, factors, whatever you like to call them, that we do not have much awareness of, but we can effect these states in our naive way, counting on experience (science and folklore) to give some prediction of impacts.

(this is one example of how I should never try to write while listening to singable music)

***

Improvisation is a artistic technique that is usually treated with awe. In some ways it is an amazing test of skill and understanding, to create on the spot some kind of experience that others will appreciate! They say it takes 10 000 hrs to become an expert at something, well, chances are we are all experts at eating, specifically eating in a way that we enjoy. I am not talking about satisfying our nutritional needs, no, I am interested in the sensual experience of injestion, where the instrument is the meal, and you are both performer and audience.

There are a bunch of constraints on how we eat: the shared food and air pathway, two hands, the physical characteristics of the food, and circumstantial etiquette standards. Within those constraints (like topics and rules in improv comedy, melody and tonality in jazz) we have a lot of options as to how we go about bringing in this material. We have practiced and found patterns we like (bite size, what to start with, path from plate to mouth) and by now these are mostly relegated to the subconscious. We are very sensitive to what we put in our mouth (flavours, textures, temperatures) and we satiate desires/expectations in the process of eating. The happiness of a mouthful (or full mouth), the captivating odours, the scrap down our throat as we swallow, these all take part in making food a satisfying experience.

Like may temporal experience, it is important for us to end the process in a state of comfort, when possible. There are likely strategic differences in eating to eat forever and eating to reach an end-state, though what those are a couldn’t tell you. I know what when I am eating, I often try “end with a finish”, saving a big tasty bite to go out on a high note. I am sure there is a huge amount to be learned by considering the patterns experienced and performed while eating; I just need to find a way to study it without being the creepy person taking notes at a restaurant.

Finn

I’ve recently connected with a group starting a women’s bike collective in Montreal! This is exciting for a number of reasons, including women, bicycles and collectives.

Empowering women to take care of their bikes is an important issue for me. My trusty steed is not a complicated contraption, and I don’t need someone else to take care of it for me, but I do need a place to learn how, particularly a space that doesn’t make me feel like I am infringing on other peoples (mens) turf.

Also, people look at me like I am crazy for biking in the city, particularly in the winter, and keep offering the excuses of it being so hard, and how I must be so in shape, and how they could never do that. But the truth is that it’s not that hard, and I would have been a regular urban cyclist way earlier if I had felt like I knew what I was doing with this thing between my legs. I admit that doing the cycling all the time has impacted my lifestyle, but there is plenty of room between occasional recreational biking and hardcore every-outfit-I-own-includes-bike-grease cycling for those less extreme.

I want to support cyclists in the city. It’s not always a easy ride between the potholes and the aggressive traffic, and it won’t get easier without more people on the roads with two wheels instead of four. To give more people the option of bicycling by making it less weird or scary, and to bolster those that need some encouragement, some sharing and awareness raising is in order.

I hope this project becomes a vehicle for change in transportation issues, womens issues and the cycling scene in Montreal.

Finn

(ha! ha! get it? transportation, vehicle…. sorry)

Considering how long I’ve been trying to develop this particular set of ideas, it’s somehow hilarious that in the space of a week I’ve finished an article draft, presented at a colloquium on some of my more “alternative” analytic approaches, and submitted an abstract to a conference. Years of holding my research close to my chest have come to an end, at least for a first time, with this spurt of knowledge sharing.

I hope everything goes as well as todays talk. It wasn’t perfect, particularly considering Keynote somehow refused to give me the presenter view, but there was discussion afterwards which gave me hope that I might not be barking up the wrong tree.

Finn

Oh boy.You may recall, back in 2005, some controversial statements from Harvard’s President Laurence Summers on the issue of the underrepresentation of women among the faculty of hard science and mathematics departments in top tier research and higher education institutions. Most of the responses to this event were underinformed on the current social science evaluation of factors as well as facts, but one exception to this trend was a debate held at Harvard on The Science of Gender and Science between the cognitive scientists Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke. Fortunately for me, and maybe you, they filmed and transcribed this event, so feel free to catch up if you have a couple of hours before reading my responses.

They spend most of their time debating mathematical aptitude and gender differences, a subject that is near and dear to my mathematically sensitive heart. Both parties agree that there are statistical differences (i.e. trends, not absolute binaries) between the sexes that have biological bases. The conflict in the debate lies in how we can measure mathematical ability, and what impact is made by implicit descrimination.

As a mathematically inclined female with experience, at least as an undergraduate, in the field of mathematics, I was surprised at both the conclusions of the studies they cited and at their assumptions about success in mathematics, and hard science, in higher education and academia.
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