My Talk

Me giving my first "real" physics talk to a room of about 20 physicists (aka my senior project presentation). It was well-recieved, which is always good, and I've discovered that I have a tendancy to crack jokes when nervous. I'm certain this surprises absolutely no one...

Be back in this space when exams are done. Cheers!

My Modest Proposal

Today is the last publication of the year for The Observer, meaning I am out of a writing job for about four months. I am sure this will be a very sad thing once I'm done with my finals and have time to reflect on it, but that's a week and some days off just yet.

So as my last hurrah of the year, I wrote a piece titled "A Modest Proposal for a New Alma Mater." The modest proposal bit is, of course, a tip of the hat to Jonathan Swift and an indication that it shouldn't be taken too seriously, but it turns out the adviser to The Observer is uncultured and didn't get that. There was some arguing over a certian stanza- I'm sure you can guess which one- but once I reminded my editor it's the last issue so she doesn't have to worry about printing letters anymore we ran it as is. Hooray! Column in full-

One thing I never quite understood about commencement at any institution is the singing of the alma mater. The alma mater is, of course, the official school anthem which you might have heard once four years ago during orientation, except you don't remember it because you were too busy checking out new classmates to see if any were cute. In hindsight, you feel kind of silly that you fell for that blockhead idiot whereas it might have been avoided had you paid attention to the alma mater in the first place, so during convocation you will try your best to sing along from the sheet to cover up this prior transgression.

Let's all admit it together: it's a farce. No student knows the words or the tune to this song, and there's no reason for our relatives to magically know them either. (In fact, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't know the CWRU alma mater is Shine On, Case Western Reserve, written by a student who graduated in the early 1990s, unless I told you.) So why do the organizers of convocation feel obliged to put it in the program each year? You're not going to suddenly start feeling nostalgic for your time at university thanks to a song you never heard while attending. It strikes me very much as one of those traditions in convocation we have because it feels like we should have because all the other universities do, even if our alma mater was written fairly recently and no one knows the words or tune.

Personally, if this were up to me we would sing a song – I'm the sort always looking for a socially acceptable excuse to sing in public – but the song would be revamped. Something to properly evoke nostalgia for my college years, which would go something like this:

Dear Case Western Reserve, that great fountain of knowledge,
Where we hung out and did our four years of college,
Our time would be incomplete unless we do acknowledge
The things that shaped us to who we are today.

There were those humid stifling nights and horrid winter squalls,
The doors that locked behind you in the residence halls,
And there were those obligatory late night homework calls
To see if anyone knew how to do number three…

There were the sporting events that we never attended,
The pranks which, in hindsight, should have got us suspended,
And those labs which dragged on and never ended
But were pretty damn sweet nonetheless.

And of course the friendships forged which were truly incredible
While pondering if Leutner's food was actually edible,
How the "Macarena" in the jukebox was truly regrettable,
And cool, they have brownies today!

And there was the guy over 21 who bought us our liquor,
And those shots we took down quick, and then quicker,
To that subsequent morning where we couldn't feel sicker,
(Because hey, this was college after all…)

Soon we'll scatter, each toward a separate vocation,
But fear not: regardless of your means or location
You'll soon get letters asking for an alumnus donation
To our dear school, Case Western Reserve!

Anyone who finds him or herself singing the above words at convocation will receive my utmost respect and adoration, if not necessarily a diploma. Either way, thanks for a great year everybody! It's been fun, it's been grand, and we'll see you next fall.

Garfield Minus Garfield

I came across a website today called Garfield Minus Garfield. Basically some insightful soul went through a bunch of old Garfield comics and deleted Garfield himself from all the scenes, thus leaving Jon as the only one to carry the show. As someone who is deeply saddened that Garfield went downhill in recent years (and I checked the older collections- it's not just me growing up, they were funnier), it was good to laugh at a few strips even if they were sort of missing the main guy in the show.

(By the way, I am vaguely aware that in recent years Jon and Liz are now dating and, yes, this means Jon actually has a girlfriend. What?)

(Second comic courtesy xkcd, of course.)

On Star Trek

The semester is winding down, and I devoted my second to last column of the year to Star Trek, and how I've never seen it. In my particular line of study this stands out as a rather odd state of things, you see, and I've gotten quite a few interesting reactions!

I hate the headline though- I forgot to make one up again so one was made for me. Even if I learn nothing else from writing Quarked this year it should be that you should always take a second to think up a good headline, as there's no reason for the layout editor to be clever in your stead.

My First PR Shot

Remember how I went to Boston several weeks ago to the AAAS conference because I won that snazzy science journalism award? Well when that happened the chair of my physics department decided to tip off the university public relations people in charge of writing press releases and what not for around here, and they came and interviewed me and took a few shots of me standing by the setup of the Michelson-Morley Experiment in the basement of the physics department (my favorite of which is on the left, though they chose another for the article itself). Then for about two months nothing happened as the university has a several month backlog on press releases, so I'd forgotten about the whole thing.

Then last Thursday while I was taking a break from my GRE Physics exam studying (I took it on Saturday) someone in the hall told me "hey, saw you in the Case Daily!" The Case Daily is the university's email newsletter where they print various articles regarding what's going on on campus, the university in the news, and, of course, the latest batch of press releases. I go to check it out, and promptly laughed upon reading the first line. The main headline for the day was "Now reporting from the American Association for the Advancement of Science Meeting in Boston... senior Yvette Cendes," and the article begins as follows:

Case Western Reserve University physicist Lawrence Krauss—a writer of popular science books—may have some future competition for the bestsellers' list. Recently the National Science Writers Association (NASW) chose senior physics major Yvette Cendes as one of 10 undergraduates to participate in the American Association for the Advancement of Science's (AAAS) annual meeting in Boston...

Full text of the article can be found here. Or you can go to the main website of CWRU, aka www.case.edu, and click on the link there as my name's on the main page, which is neat.

So now I have PR shots, which will surely come in handy when I need something for the dust jacket of all those bestsellers I'm apparently going to write soon.

Oh, and because I forgot to mention it then, this is actually my second PR thing as of late. The first was me being one of the March staff members of the month for the Journal of Young Investigators- quite nice of them seeing as I hardly ever find time to write for them anymore- and you can see that press release here. And before I forget something else, my picture is also in the March issue of QST, the largest Ham radio magazine in circulation, because a picture of me doing ham radio is in their files and they like to pull it up periodically for random articles...

Alright, this will end now because while it's always nice to have your accomplishments noted the limelight gets embarrassing. That and your thesaurus starts running out of different things to say when every conversation with passing acquaintances you have is on the lines of "hey, I saw you in the Case Daily..."

All The News That's Fit to Print

A few people who know me know that I often like to set things in motion that end up being a big deal even though I am no longer associated with it. Usually I keep these end results to myself because I tend to think I'm more important than I really am, but when The New York Times gets involved I feel like perhaps it merits a mention.

These past few weeks, see, we've been having a few letters and guest columns that appeared as the result of my column a few weeks ago about women in science. This was written well over a month ago, but it has sparked the longest running dialogue this year in our campus newspaper's editorial pages, including a letter from the dean, a guest column, a letter saying this was an overreaction, and yet another letter from the women's studies center saying it wasn't. The guest column was particularly noteworthy- it was written as a secondary response to my original piece, and detailed an incident in the writer's engineering class where a lecturer showed an image of a topless woman when discussing a new advertising technique.

I won't go into details about the classroom incident because the actual seriousness varies depending on who you ask. (Though I am no longer on speaking terms with the physics major who told me it was an overreaction by stating "It was silly for that girl [who wrote the column] to be upset. She's not attractive at all so no one's looking at her like she's a piece of meat anyway.") Further, this extended dialog happens quite often in university newspapers- it's one of their charms honestly- and when done right the person who had the first say fades out pretty early on. My name stopped getting mention in the third week or so, which I was perfectly okay with to be honest because I have enough else to do than get heavily involved. Only a very narcissistic person would think their initial column should be the focal point several weeks into the future anyway, as this implies your work was too weak to allow the debate to evolve beyond it to the issues themselves.

Then, of course, The New York Times showed up and decided to do an article about the advertising technique from the engineering class, which is a rather silly effort to place bar codes around campus. Because the human element is always nice, sure enough our dialogue and the sexist incident in particular worked its way in there. (And they quoted my friend, the lovely news editor and physics major Ms. Alison Dietz. Yay!) As I've already said, how much this has something to do with me is arguable, as this was not the primary focus of the article, but it amuses me nonetheless that a newspaper of international repute has reported on our campus exchange. A columnist above all likes to get people talking, and I think it's fair to say that I've achieved that.

And as a final postscript to those interested, I have now learned more about sexism at my university than I ever cared to know. The stories are not mine to share so I'm not repeating them here, but any decent person would be upset at some of them and we definitely still have a long way to go on this issue.

From the Evolution Debate

"I would rather have an ape for an ancestor than a man who ridicules serious scientific discussion." -Thomas Huxley

I'm writing a paper for my history of science class about Darwin, and came across this. It's from a famous debate about evolution at Oxford in 1860 against a man named Wilberforce, and the above was apparently the pinnacle of the debate. Several people gasped, and one woman fainted outright.

God I love history. Even if I have to feel a little sad because I've never been to a scientific debate so intense that people fainted.