Multiple Magnificent Mathematicians

This is not a rant!  Nor is it a long-winded reflection on a topic of interest to me.  Nay, it is a fan tribute of the geekiest kind!

You see, I simply must tell you about two amazing mathematicians I encountered in recent ramblings on Wikipedia.  Well, I say ramblings, but really I was turning to Wikipedia in desperation for SOME sort of plain English description of two rather hairy (but very very cool) mathematical thingamabobs*.  Oh, and did I mention they're female**?

*I am absolutely certain there's a more correct term, but I am completely blanking right now on what that would be.  This is what two finals after three years of no exams will do to a person.
**The mathematicians.  Not the thingamabobs.  In English, at least, mathematical thingamabobs have no gender.  Also, the mathematicians do not appear to be particularly hairy.

Thigamabob #1: Wavelets.  Of the Daubechies kind.

Wavelets are COOL.  What is a wavelet, you cry?  Well, you know sine curves?  Those things you had to mess with in trig*?  Well, a wavelet is kind of like just a little part of a sine curve.  Sine curves, you see, don't end.  They just go on and on and on FOREVER going up and down, up and down, etc etc.  Wavelets, on the other hand, go up once (or a few times), down once (or a few times), and then they're done.  That's it.  That's all you get.

*For the record, I hated trig.  Although that was more to do with having a teacher who hated teaching, and was one year away from retirement.  I still, however, shudder when my sister asks me for help with trig identities...

THIS IS A SINE CURVE!  It goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on....

This is a wavelet.  It doesn't.

So WHY are they cool?  Well, first I have to tell you about a Fourier Transform.  DON'T PANIC.  They're awesome too.  Okay, who here plays a musical instrument/sings?  Oh heck, who here listens to music?  That would be everyone.  Okay.  Great.  SO.  A note is caused by something (Piano string, vocal chords, rubber bands, kazoos...) vibrating at a specific frequency.  If you were to track the position of that vibrating thing over time, and make a graph of the position of the thing as time went on, you would get a sine curve (or a cosine shifted by π/2, if you're feeling frisky).  The frequency of the sine curve, which is what determines what note you get, is the time (distance on the graph), between the bumps on the sine curve.  When the bumps are closer together, you get higher notes/higher frequencies, and when the bumps are farther apart, you lower notes/frequencies.

Okay, still with me?  So, say you have a chord.  A chord is made of different notes, so different frequencies.  So if you plotted the movement of the vibrating music thingy over time, you would get something that looks kind of complicated:

LIKE THIS.  Bit more complicated, eh?

So, what if we want to know what notes are in that chord, just by looking at that curve?  Well, it's pretty hard just looking at that curve.  You could make a guess, but it'd be hard.  This is where Fourier transforms come in!!  A Fourier transform takes your complicated sine curve, and turns it into a plot of the different frequencies, and how strong those frequencies are:

LIKE THIS.  See, the spikes tell you what the three notes are!

Ta da! Now we can see what notes were in that chord!  Cool, right??  FOURIER TRANSFORMS ARE AWESOME.  You can use them for all sorts of cool things, like filtering seismic data to see seismic signals that relate to magma moving around, or you can look at gravity data and figure out if you got a lot of deep stuff or a lot of shallow stuff.

*hem*.  So, what more could we possibly want?  Well, there's a rather crucial limitation to a Fourier transform - it assumes your sine curve goes on forever.  Well, what if it doesn't?  WHAT DO WE DO???

Never fear, the wavelets are here!!!  Wavelets don't go on forever, so we can use them to search for notes/frequencies that only pop up for a certain time, and then go away.  How do we do this?  Well, we take the the basic wavelet shape (there are different kind of wavelets, more on this later), and we stretch it, make it bigger, etc., and then run it across our signal and figure out which distortions of the wavelet fit where.  So if a signal had lots of low notes in the beginning, that's where all the way stretched out wavelets would fit well, and if we had lots of high notes in the end, that's where all the squished wavelets would fit well.

The thing on the left is the basic Haar wavelet.  The basic form is called the "mother wavelet".  The things on the right are the mother wavelet shifted and stretched, kind of like how kids might get a real mother all bent out of shape...

So a really simple kind of wavelet is the Haar wavelet.  That's the one above this paragraph.  It works pretty well for some things, but you'll notice it's pretty blocky.  What if our signal isn't particularly blocky?  The Haar wavelet might not work so well for analyzing it.

And now comes along the very much awesome Ingrid Daubechies.  She developed a class of wavelets (now known as, unsurprisingly, Daubechies wavelets) that are both more detailed, and easier to work with than Haar wavelets.  And here I must confess my knowledge runs thin, because although I've had great fun playing around with Haar wavelets, I don't know all that much about the nitty gritty details of Daubechies wavelets.  However, I DO know that they get used A LOT.  The way I encountered them first was through inversion of gravity data - some of the files used in the inversion program can get pretty huge in the computer's memory, which limits the size of the data sets you can deal with and how detailed the models are.  However, you can use Daubechies wavelets to compress these files, which allows us to get some pretty freaking cool looking gravity models.  The way you've likely encountered wavelets is through our friend the JPEG!  Daubechies wavelets are part of the standard algorithm for compressing JPEG images, so that all those photos of your cat only take up 50% of your computer space rather than 99.999999%.

This is a Daubechies wavelet!  See how it's got a lot more complicated features to it?  This makes it easier for the shifted and stretched version to match more complicated looking signals.

Thingamabob #2: Generalized Cross Validation

Okay!  You ready for some MORE math??? No wait, wait, come back!!  All right, for those of you who didn't just run screaming away from your computer, causing great consternation for your loved ones and roommates, I'll now tell you the tale of Generalized Cross Validation (GCV for short).  This will be a shorter explanation because I know less about it, other than I thought it was really cool when I first encountered it in the inversion course I audited*, I just wish I had actually gotten to play with it more so I would remember more about the specifics!

*With the professor who really didn't want me there, but I showed up anyway....

ANYWAY.  Now we get to talk about inversion!!!  Inversion is awesome!!!*  Okay. So you have gone out in the field and sweated and strained and come back with your gravity data clutched in your grubby fists.  Now what?  Well, maybe you made a nice contour plot of the data, but you're not really sure what this anomaly is telling you. How deep is it?  Is it tilted at all?  Is it shallow, or just really high density?

*I need a word other than awesome!!!

Enter inversion to answer most* of your questions!  So, if you've got a Dense Thing in less dense stuff under the ground, that causes an area where gravity is stronger than other areas - a gravity anomaly.  If we know the shape of the Dense Thing and how dense it is, it's a relatively simple problem to calculate what the gravity anomaly should look like - this is called the "forward problem".

*Always work with geologists.  Always.  They keep your geophysics connected to those rock things all geophysicists seem to be terrified of.

The orange line is what you measured out in the field, braving heat, steep slopes, high winds, killer bees, and angry cows.  That orange blob is the focus of all your efforts - how dense is it?  Where is it?  Is it going to explode? (That last being only applicable in volcanic situations, generally)

But we're not dealing with that, are we?  No, we have the data, and since we like trees and grass we're NOT going to go digging to figure out what that Dense Thing* looks like.  So, we do the process in reverse - we use the gravity data and do the physics backwards to get the shape and density of the Dense Thing.  This is called the "inverse problem".

*Otherwise known as a "density anomaly".  But I rather like the term Dense Thing for now, as it puts me in mind of a rock with a beard, a bandanna, and a peace sign pendant just chillin' beneath the ground.

So there are some tricky things about this.  We want whatever Dense Thing we end up finding through this inversion to produce gravity data that matches the data we measured.  BUT, not exactly, because we know this data has noise - that is, we know our measurements aren't exactly accurate.  Maybe a cow walked by and made the gravity meter unhappy.  Maybe that measuring line on the meter wasn't REALLY on the 2, it was on the 3.  So we want the Dense Thing we create to match the data, but not too well.

Second tricky thing - physics!  See, gravity is what is known as "non-unique".  There are, mathematically speaking, an infinite number of ways you could build your Dense Thing to get the same gravity data.  Oh gods, what now??? ALL IS LOST!!!  Nope! We gots math, and we gots geology.  See, we do know some things about this Dense Thing.  We know it should be smooth - that is, you don't have one part of it that has a density of 0.000001 and one part right next to it that has a density of 10000000.  Geology generally doesn't do that.  We also want it to be small - we're assuming the simplest shape is the best, because on the scale that gravity surveys can detect stuff, things tend to not be spiky*.  Spiky things are large, and smooth things are small.  So we put in a bunch of math that says, only choose Dense Things that have sane variations in density and aren't too spiky.

*TEND TO BE.  I heard you geologists and geochemists wailing just now.  Just bear with me, k?  Most of the time you know it's true....  And I know sometimes it isn't....

So when you run the inversion stuff, it's a balancing act between the two.  Dense Things that are really smooth and laid back might be nice, but they probably won't fit your data very well.  Dense Things that fit your data well will probably be too spiky.  We have thing called a "regularization parameter" that controls the balance between the two.  I'm going to call it Bob, because "regularization parameter" is just too dang much to write multiple times.  So if Bob is really high*, we get smooth Dense Things that don't fit the data too closely, and if Bob is really low, we get models that fit the data really really well, but are unbearably spiky.

*Oh dear.  Maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all....especially in this state....

So how best to choose Bob?  This is where Generalized Cross Validation comes in!  And you thought we would never get there...  GCV was developed by the amazing and wonderful Grace Wabha, who is apparently STILL an active professor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, at the age of 80.  I want to be HER when I'm 80.  So anyway.  My rough understanding of the method, drawn nearly entirely from the very useful explanation by the UBCGIF group, is this:

1. Do an inversion with a certain value of Bob, but leave out one data point.
2. Calculate a number that says how close the Dense Thing your inversion gave you matches the original gravity data.
3. Do steps 1 and 2 for all the data points.
4. Sum up all those "how close you got" numbers from step 3.  This is called your "cross validation value".
5. Do steps 1 through 4 for a range of values for Bob.  This gives you a cross validation value for each Bob.
6. Figure out which Bob value gives you the lowest cross validation value.  This is the best Bob to use to get the best model of the Dense Thing!

Tada!  Now you have a Dense Thing that fits your data, but not too close, and is not too spiky.  Isn't GCV awesome?  Aren't we glad Grace Wabha is awesome?

So sometimes I get all discouraged when I read all the stuff about how being female in a STEM field can be tough.  And how it seems like all those scientists you hear about in class who made all those really important discoveries that define your field, well, they're all male, so I guess the females just had too much to fight to really contribute, so I guess everyone's going to assume women are too stupid to be good scientists.  But THEN I keep encountering these methods that are so fundamental to what I do, and hey, these really incredible women developed them!  So hey, maybe we can do cool stuff.  Maybe I can do cool stuff.  If they could make it, and I mean REALLY make it, in the face of what were undoubtedly much higher odds than I face today, then, heck, I can do this.  I can stay in, I can make lasting contributions to my field.  They gave me such amazing tools to play with, it's the least I can do....

Still haven't had your fill of nerdiness yet?  Well, check out these spectrograms of famous classical pieces!  Each vertical line is a Fourier Transform of about a second of the music.  High notes show up higher up in the image, lower notes show up lower down on the image.  Start with the Dvorak's 9th Symphony to get the idea, and then move on to The Imperial March to multiply the geekiness factor to eleventy-seven...

Bad Bus Behavior

No, you are not this guy.  This woman wants you to GO AWAY.

(And, as it turns out, this photo is actually from a film about just that...)

<rant>So I have no problem with talking to guys on the bus.  I have actually had a few great bus encounters recently with guys, including reminiscing with a guy about living in the Pacific NW, and then later running into him and his daughter, whom he had taken to see the film Lucy because he wanted her to see films with strong female characters (!), and then some time later having a great debate on geophysics vs. geology with a petroleum geologist I ran into.

I DO have a problem when a guy asks to take the seat next to me, and then I look up and notice there are plenty of other empty seats around me he could have taken.  By taking this seat, he has boxed me into my seat, blocking off an escape route, thus instantly making me edgy.  He then  proceeds to ask me if I believe in fate, because he saw me on the bus that morning and "wanted to compliment me on my hat" (so he was watching me all morning).  Meanwhile, I'm trying frantically to be VERY involved in poking my phone, hoping he'll get the hint (spoiler alert - he doesn't).  He pulls out a can of something that smells like beer and asks me do I have a particular seat I like to sit in.  I mumble something, wondering if I should get off a stop early, even though it's about 10˚F outside, just so I can make sure he doesn't follow me home.  At some point I give him the false name of "Rachel", all the while really, really hoping he doesn't try to follow me off the bus, and he doesn't start making this his normal route.  Thankfully, he doesn't follow me off, and by this point the friend I've been texting with calls me so I guess the guy at least knows someone knows where I am if he decides to try anything.... I got off at my normal stop, but walked a different route home... just in case.

And yes, I live in a lower income area, but it's not a scary one.  I like riding the bus, and I'm not planning on stopping because of one creeper.  This was probably just some guy who thought I was cute and wanted to try his chances.  Okay, fine.  BUT I DON'T KNOW THAT.  All I know is this guy has boxed me in and WON'T GO AWAY.  Guy probably thinks he's on a romantic encounter, I'm wondering if I've picked up (another) stalker.  You know those romantic comedies where the guy goes after the girl who obviously hates him in the beginning but he wins her over by the end?  I hate those movies. </rant>

<siderant>Venturing into dicey territory here, but I should point out that both of the great bus conversations I had were with black men.  My (God I hope) former stalker and this more recent creep?  Both white.  So, from a totally significant sample size of four, I can reasonably conclude that white men are to be avoided at all costs.</siderant>

<addendum>No, I'm not saying all men are creeps.  I'm not saying all white men are creeps.  The vast, vast majority of the white men I know are perfectly wonderful human beings, including my friend who called me to give me a conversation ending excuse.  I'm saying that based on my experiences thus far, my race's all-too-common back-of-the-mind fear of black men is looking pretty dang stupid.</addendum>

Geophysical Gems

I know, I know, I know I still owe the last installment of my Matlab series.  I do apologize, but grad school is happening again, as it does.  I'll get to it eventually, I swear...

However, these two gems were just too good to pass up:

Gem #1: In my mining geophysics course today, we learned the proper definition of a geophysicist, as originally published in Northern Mining:

"A geophysicist is a person who passes as an exacting expert on the basis of being able to turn out with prolific fortitude infinite strings of incomprehensible formulae calculated with micrometric precision from inconclusive experiments carried out with instruments of problematic accuracy by persons of doubtful reliability and questionable mentality for the avowed purpose of annoying and confounding a hopeless chimerical group of fanatics known as geologists who are themselves the lunatic fringe surrounding the hard-working mine operator."

Accurate, every word of it.  Although I am a little disappointed that I don't get to be "chimerical".

Gem #2: I also ran across the following when clearing my desktop of approximately 5 years worth of clutter.  I cannot attest confidently to its provenance, only to say it smacks strongly of a certain Male Parental Unit of mine....

"And lo for he who praises the Lord shall receive unto him proportional understanding of the mass which lay below his feet. And God spoke "Let the firmament have a multitude of kinds and shall each hill and valley be corrected as free-air, " and He saw it and it was Bouguer."

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have some lightening bolts to dodge.

Marvelous Matlab Must-haves: Part 2

A continuation of my Matlab series from what, gasp, only two weeks ago?  I'm setting up some really unrealistic standards for myself here, mostly because I've been copy-pasting from the original partially-written big long ginormous* post and lightly editing from there.  So when I hit the 1.5 month gap between posts, you'll know I reached the point of actually having to write something.  The horror.

*Fun fact - "ginormous" is apparently a valid word in Google's spell-check

In keeping with the theme of the first post of this series, these are all stupid little things that are not particularly artful or earth-shattering, but they are dang useful tool/concepts that really helped me to be a lot more productive once I understood them.  So here's hoping this also helps you!

To read Part 1 of this series in which I covered the joys of Google and debugger, go here.  To read the currently non-existent next post, don't go here.

And now.....

Functions and Scripts and Cell Scripts, oh my!

You were expecting the Wizard of Oz, weren't you?  Life is full of dissapointments, isn't it?  On the other hand, you may enjoy reading about the Venezuelan Trench Moose.

Functions:
Stuff in, stuff out.  Basically a make-your-own version of Matlab's functions (think "plot","mean", etc.).  You feed in variables, crunching happens, and it plots what you tell it to plot and spits out what you tell it to spit out*.  The thing I like about functions is that they don't spit out all the intermediary variables into your nice clean workspace.  So if you've got some calculation that requires 17 steps, you only have to deal with step 1 and step 17.  It's also possible to stick your custom functions inside other functions, thus giving you 9 or 17 or 200 less lines of code to sift through.

*And therein lies the danger of coding, because computers are like extremely literal-minded 4-year-olds with access to ALL your data.  They follow instructions VERY well.

Of course the catch is that if something goes wrong in the middle, you don't see it.  Which is why we need debugger!  And because it can sometimes be obnoxious to have to run functions over and over and over again to get them right, I'll sometimes work out algorithms first in a....

Script:
Stuff in, stuff happens and all of it (variables, plots, etc.) gets kept.  Basically it's a faster way of executing a whole bunch of commands in the workspace (the place next to the >> symbol where you generally enter single commands).  For this reason I like using scripts to record how I made figures*, especially if they're finicky one of a kind figures.  I can keep track of what data I used and exactly how I plotted it, so if I lose the image file or need to alter something, I don't have to start from scratch.

*Grad students! THIS IS IMPORTANT!!! LEARN FROM MY MISTAKES!!!

In the same vein, scripts are incredibly useful for batch-importing data, or basically any task where it's a pain to do the steps one at a time in the command line, but you're likely not going to do it again so it's not worth the effort to create a slick function.

Run the whole script by either pressing the green "play" button at the top, or by typing the name of the script file in the command line and pressing Enter.

Cell Scripts:
Like a script but with structure.  You can split a script into cells by putting "%%" in a line between cell blocks.  You can then run the script a cell at a time by placing your cursor inside the cell and hitting Enter to run the cell or hitting ctrl+Enter to run the cell and then advance to the next one.  Cell scripts are mostly useful for keeping an unruly script organized, or for situations where you're going to want to execute part of a script several times (say for adjusting parameters on a figure).  HOWEVER, you can't use debugger in cell mode (at least I think you can't), which is annoying.

Command history

Another sanity saving tool.  Too lazy to keep hitting up in the command line to get that previous command back?  Just go find it in command history, and double click to execute or copy-paste it in the command line if you want to alter something.

I also find this highly useful for building scripts and functions, and just keeping track of what I've been doing.  When I'm processing data at work, I'll typically keep a chart going with fields for variable, the exact command I used to create that variable, and comments on the outcome*.

*i.e. Wow.  According to this gravity meter the world clearly just exploded.

If you're not being good and keeping track in a handy chart, you can also word-search the command line to try to find just what exactly you did to create that graph two months ago!  Unfortunately, it only goes back so far, so better to keep a chart/script going...

Save

Save the workspace!  SAVE THE WORKSPACE!!*  Preferably BEFORE you accidentally close Matlab after wrangling that data set for three hours.  Instructions here.  This is incredibly useful if you ever have to go back and look at old data, or heaven forbid reprocess it.

*Bonus points if you figured out this is what I was referencing.  I hope from now on ALL of you read anything beginning with "save the" in Julia Child's voice.

Next up: Plot editor, the File Exchange, and Concatenation

Marvelous Matlab Must-haves: Part 1

I do believe at some point I may have promised a post on the joys of Matlab.  Well, that long awaited promise shall now come to fruition.  I have assembled, in no particular order or completeness, a jumble of some features and functions of Matlab that have proved of immense use to me in avoiding baldness when using the glorious program.

Computer programming is perhaps best done by those with fast-growing thick hair.

I initially planned to make this all one blog post, and then realized a) it was going to be a really long post that might never get published and b) if I split it up I could make it look like I was all prolific and stuff.  SO. Part 1 of the series!

If you have used Matlab extensively, many of these will no doubt be old hat to you, but if you're just learning and are fearing for the fate of your remaining cranial covering,  I hope this post (and those to come) will be of some aid to your beleaguered follicles!

Google

Perhaps a bit of an obvious one, but I include this because, just in case you needed to hear it, yes, it is okay to search the interwebs for ideas/help, and no, it does not mean you suck at programming and will never get it.  Google searching "Matlab how to do xyz" is a surprisingly excellent way to figure stuff out.  About 9 times out of 10, someone has already asked the same question, someone's written a function on File Exchange (more on that later), or there's a built-in function in Matlab, because Matlab is awesome.  The other 10% of the time you can usually get a partial answer, or at least something that will get you on the right track to the correct question.

Debugger

Learn how to use Matlab's debugger!  Seriously!  You can use the debugger in both functions and scripts (but not cell scripts).  (I'll be explaining the differences between functions, scripts, and cell scripts in a later post)

The most basic way to use debugger is to tell Matlab to enter debug mode when it hits an error.  This is instead of Matlab hitting an error and making that annoying "ting!" sound and throwing up red script with some highly technical error message that tells you nothing because you've been booted out of the function that has the variable that caused the error, but now you can't LOOK at that error because you've been booted out of the function.

But if you stop in debugger, all is well!  The variable is there, in all its empty array glory.  *sigh*.

You can get to this most useful of features by going to the "debug" menu in the editor window (the window where you write functions and scripts), and selecting "stop if error".

If your code isn't dying because of errors but is throwing up completely nonsensical data, you can also insert what are called "breakpoints" so that the function/script will stop in debugger at that point so that you can look at all the variables and make sure they're what you thought they were!*  To insert a breakpoint, click on the little line next to the line of code where you want the function/script to stop, and a little red circle will appear.  The function/script will execute everything up until that line, and then stop.  At this point you can discover that your squid variable is 10 times larger than it needs to be, turning your moose variable into the dreaded "NaN".  Or some such.

*Spolier alert - they're NEVER what you thought they were.  Ever.

You can also make a conditional breakpoint by right clicking the line and selecting "Set/Modify Condition" (you'll get a yellow circle).  This is often useful for loops, where for instance you know everything is just dandy up until i = 10 (out of 23523430 iterations) at which point all hell breaks loose and demons infest your variables and you can't remember how to properly call the Matlab "exorcise" function*.  In that case you'd set your conditional breakpoint to stop on that line when i==10, and figure out just what the heck is going on!

*Because I haven't written it yet.

Next up: Functions, Cell Scripts, and Scripts, oh my! 

(....sorry.....)

Stay tuned for more to come, at no particular scheduled time in the hopefully not-too-distant future!

Office Update #√(π/17)

Because I believe in including ALL the numbers.

Public Service Announcement:

This

≠

This

Dear any owners of gravity meters who are planning on sending in data to my company, asking if their meter is working,

Please,  do not, by any means, tell me where your meter is located.  This will not at all aid me in determining if that weird signal you saw is real or a sign of busted meter-itis.  It will certainly not help me to avoid developing a whole erroneous theory to explain said signal involving heavy flooding in a European country.  And most certainly do NOT, when I present this whole theory to you, which is the best I could come up with given the data, and even though this theory necessitates the somewhat troubling appearance of 7 m of water a scant 12 hours after the onset of the beginning of rain to explain the magnitude of the gravity signal, do NOT, I repeat, DO NOT, take this opportunity to explain that this theory makes absolutely no sense because your meter is not, in fact, somewhere in the European countryside, but is, in fact, ON A VOLCANO IN THE MIDDLE OF THE PACIFIC OCEAN.  This information will in no way prevent me from tearing my hair out trying to figure out why I keep getting residual tide signals in the data, because this is in no way relevant to the fact that the meter is located ON A VOLCANO IN THE MIDDLE OF THE PACIFIC OCEAN.

In conclusion, please, I beg of you, do your utmost to send me chasing after completely incorrect theories for about a month by withholding this one piece of completely non-critical, trivial information.

Yours sincerely,

The recently bald geophysicist

Derivations from Deliberate Dancing Deviations

Google images also does not believe that women can lead in social dance.  However, men can apparently follow - in case you're interested, here's the article that goes along with it - it made me smile.

So I am very glad that I am not, in fact, a professional columnist, or that my capability to acquire edible food is in any way tied to the frequency of posts on this blog, else I'd be a might bit peckish at the current time.  In my defense, April happened.  Everything happens in April.  This is what April is for, apparently.

So, if you have perchance read any of my other posts* or you know me personally** you most likely know that dancing is one of my critical needs for mental survival.  At the moment, this need is primarily filled by salsa and contra dancing. And I really must highly recommend the dancing community in Boulder, because unlike many experiences I've had in the salsa dancing scene in Vancouver, I actually still have yet to encounter the Token Creepy Guy at the Boulder salsa dance, which I count as nothing short of miraculous, frankly.

*There's all of, what, nine of them currently, it's not too hard....
**Highly likely, as I rather doubt anyone beyond my Facebook-verse encounters these posts, which is...really, okay.

The dancing environment is so good, in fact, and the lessons beforehand so cheap, that I've felt comfortable enough to take the leap and start learning to dance lead*.  Aside from the initial kerfluffle of explaining to several very courteous men that thank you, I'm dancing lead for the lesson, and feeling just a twinge guilty about dancing lead when there was a shortage of follows, things weren't actually all that awkward.

*Whilst wearing a cute skirt, naturally.

The only aspect that bugged me, at first a little, and later, a lot, was the comments I kept receiving from my follows (all female):

"Oh, you're dancing lead!  I'm so impressed, I could never do that!"
"Oh, that must be so difficult."
"You're doing what I could never do!"

At first, these comments made me feel flattered and proud.  They approved of me dancing lead!  They admired that I was taking on something difficult!  But that inevitable follow-up comment, "I could never do that," just kept bugging me.

It finally dawned on me why - why did all these women think they couldn't do it?  I mean, goodness, I've danced with enough struggling male beginner leads to know that they certainly find leading difficult at first.  And good following, in my opinion, isn't necessarily easier.  It may be easier to pick up in the beginning, but to really follow well requires a considerable practiced ability to listen and understand a myriad of subtle non-verbal cues, that are all going to be different from person to person.  So why are all these women so very convinced that they lack the capability to lead?

I keep reading articles expounding on a common theme, that women don't advance, particularly in STEM fields, because they aren't confident, because they're socialized to think that if they struggle with something, it means they're too stupid to understand it and therefore they'll never get it.  I don't think I really believed that idea, until I realized I was most likely witnessing some of that very aversion to struggling in my salsa class.  And it made me just a tad annoyed.  Annoyed, because I know it doesn't have to be this way.

The whole idea that women apparently keep getting this message that if they struggle with something, it means they're innately incapable of doing it, makes me fume just a bit because it is just so alien to my own experience.  I mean, people keep telling me I'm "smart", but I've encountered really smart people, and personally I don't think I'm one of them.  Okay, maybe I'm a little quicker on the uptake sometimes in some areas.*  But really, I think the reason I seem smart is that I can be dang stubborn, and I've always been taught to be that way.  My parents rarely if ever let me give up because it was hard, although I'm sure there were times they would liked to for the sake of our collective sanity.

*As long as it's not a pop culture reference.  I make a bad trivia team member.

And if I continue along that thread this post will turn into "blah blah, BACK IN MY DAY, blah blah".  I could go on all day about this or that thing that programmed me to not give up in the face of something hard, and end up trivializing the struggles of all the girls in trigonometry or physics or [insert hellishly hard STEM class here], which I don't want to do, because, yes, they are hard.  Even with all the things I had going in my favor, they were really hard for me.  And no, you may not get some of it, or a lot of it, the first time round.  Or the second.  Or maybe even the third.  But, I've learned recently, rather to my surprise, it doesn't mean you can't.

I've been finding this to be true more and more in my current job, and this is one of the aspects of my work I think I most enjoy.  Okay, does anyone out there remember Taylor series?  .....I hear crickets.  Anyway, it's this thing where you take a derivative of a function and multiply it by the value of that function at 0, or whatever, and then you make a series out of all these second and third and so on derivatives, and I really don't remember the exact definition and I'm feeling too lazy to look them up and it would be in math-speak anyway.  For a long time I knew them as these things I learned at the very end of calculus, and they were tedious, and they were hard, and I had no concept of any use for them.  They certainly weren't something I really understood.  I mean, I think I passed the tests, but I'm also pretty sure the knowledge only stuck around just as long as it needed to, for survival purposes.

So, enter my job now.  Erm, I'm going to struggle explaining this a bit, but basically when you measure gravity, the gravity meter has to be level, so you're consistently measuring the vertical force of gravity.  Since we do not live in an ideal world, the meter isn't always going to be level, so you track how off-level the meter is and correct for it. Well, there are these constants you have to set that determine how the computer translates the electrical signal from the levels into a signal than actually means something in terms of angles, rather than volts.  If these constants are off, the angles the sensors spit out aren't correct, and the tilt of the meter isn't being corrected for properly, and you see a corresponding signal in gravity vs. time, which we want to be flat (because gravity at one location isn't actually supposed to change*).  The way to remove this pesky extra signal is to tweak those constants.

*Unless VOLCANOES.

And this is where Taylor comes in*.  See, these constants for converting electrical signal to actually useful data signal are wrapped up in this nice nasty formula involving multiple trig functions**, which mean you can't just take the level data the meter spits out, multiply it by a number, and yay, you're done.  No, you have to multiply the level data by a number and then take the COSINE!  And then MULTIPLY the cosines!  And subtract THAT from something ELSE!  All of which makes it an absolute nightmare to figure out what these special constants should be after the fact.  And this is where Taylor series come in - you can make a Taylor series of this nasty trig expression, and the resulting Taylor-ized expression IS something you can easily just multiply constants by and poof, no more tilt signal!

*And you thought I had totally gone off on a tangent.  You were almost right...
**Regardless of how I feel about Taylor series and least squares now, I STILL hate trig.

You still with me?  Okay, I think there may be at least three of you who haven't run off screaming in horror.  Anyway, the point of all that was, a) Taylor series turned out to be kind of cool and actually useful and b) I didn't really understand Taylor series in my math class years ago, but I was, in fact, able to dust off what remnants of that knowledge I had left, and use it to make a hard problem actually doable, for a practical purpose.  And there's all sorts of other math examples like that I'm finding - things like least squares, FFTs, various aspects of matrix manipulation, and so on.  Things that, despite my earlier encounters, I find I can understand after all, and better yet, can apply to do some cool stuff.  I'm actually finding I like math, and although I've never felt I was bad at math, I never used to feel like I was good at math or that I liked it.  Honestly, I still don't feel like I'm good at math.  BUT, I can use it, and that's really all I need.

So I want to send out some encouragement to all the women and girls out there struggling with science or math - no, you don't have to get it all right right now.  Enough to pass the class is probably helpful, enough to understand the science, also good.  But you don't have to get it perfect, you don't have to be that kid who knows out to 100 digits of pi*.  This isn't your last chance.  You will get many more chances to bang your head against a wall with this stuff, and eventually, most of it will get through.  Or at least, enough to makes some pretty graphs of properly corrected gravity data**!

*Something tells me at least three of my friends are that kid.
**Because all of you are going to go into gravity geophysics, right???

So, back to dance - I think it also dismayed me so much that all my follows found it intimidating to lead because I think I developed the guts to attack math – and, by extension, leading – from following in salsa dance.  There's something about following, at least for me, that grows a kind of gutsiness.  The kind of gutsiness from knowing that, although I have no idea what this lead's going to throw at me, I'm going to try my best to follow it, and if I end up flat on my face, well, at least I've got a great story for later, and will have probably learned a thing or two.  And the overwhelming majority of the time, I end up doing things I didn't think I could do.  Like, for instance, gracefully handling getting flipped upside down.  That was fun.  And, for me, after being challenged like this over and over, and still (rarely) falling flat on my face, it's not really so big a leap to make the jump to lead.

So, yes, it's hard, yes, there's that annoying kid who gets everything in three seconds - but you can do it.  If not now, the next time, or the next, or the next.  But I promise you, it is possible.  Embrace the fight – it doesn't mean you're weak, it's just what you have to do to learn something new and potentially awesome.  If you find yourself thinking, "I can't do this" – do it anyway.  You might just surprise yourself.

That post got a bit mathy/sciencey, so I most whole-heartedly welcome your stupid questions, because they are my very favorite kind.

Alone

In the past few years, I've read stories from many other women in the sciences, little bits and pieces of their experiences that I've learned from, taken heart from.  Part of the reason I wanted to starting writing is that I wanted to share my story, so that I might help some other woman of science in the same way I've been helped.

I also want to be honest.  And I feel like I wouldn't be telling my story honestly if I didn't write about the bad experiences with the good.  And right now, I'm finding it hard to be my normal cheery self.

I don't want to be an angry feminist. I don't want to be mopey and depressing. I would much rather be a hoorah cheerleader for LOVING my science. But dang it, this week... I'm tired.


I'm tired of being the only female in my office.

I am tired of not fitting in because I'm not a tomboy and I don't mountain bike or climb or ski.

I'm tired of being unable to participate in conversations about cars.

I'm tired of only being able to drink one beer if I want the slightest chance of being able to function after.

I'm tired of the whole office clearing out for lunch, and no one thinking to so much as pop their head in my office to let me know, before I raise my head from my work to suddenly notice how quiet the office is, and how empty the lunch room is.  

I am tired of dealing with a capricious boss who will sing my praises as a genius one day and effectively call me an idiot to my face the next.

I am tired of seeing every person who comes in for a job interview be male.

I am tired of torturing myself wondering if this new (male) geophysicist they hired, who has a bachelor's degree to my master's, is making more money than me and will eventually replace me before I had planned to leave.

I'm tired of being the one who doesn't quite fit, and of the treacherous fantasy that whispers that if I just changed the way I dress, researched cars, learned to mountain bike, then, then I'd have my in.

I'm tired of the nagging fear, thinking on how many female geophysicists I know who are my age (maybe two?), that this environment I encounter now will be the only environment I will ever know in my career.

I know in many ways I've got it crazy easy.  No one is sexually harassing me, no one is questioning my right to be there, and I do happen to like the work I'm doing – a lot.  But all these constant reminders of how I don't fit and how precarious my position is in this world.... that drags on a person.

Thankfully, there's a light at the end of this tunnel.  I'm getting out.  I know for sure now I'm starting my PhD in the fall.  I know there's at least one other female in my research group, and from what accounts I've heard thus far my future adviser is one of the nicest in the department.  I can have some hope that my life past the PhD would be different than my situation now, as I'm currently in the strange situation of a geophysicist working in what is effectively an engineering company.  In reality, I have yet to experience what working at a true geophysics company would be like, so I'm holding out the hope that working with geophysicists might be better than working with engineers (or at least these engineers).  I have to hope in the power of statistics – that my sample size of one is not statistically representative!

I find that my awareness of my situation as a female in a STEM field is something of a double-edged sword.  On the one hand, I am that much more aware of the negatives I face.  The gender disparity in my workplace and all it creates is all the more vivid for my awareness.  On the other hand – I can see around the negatives, I can know it's not just me.  This situation doesn't have to be "just the way it is".  Maybe I can't make it better, for myself, right now, but I can hope that in some small way I can make it better for the next female engineer or geophysicist or technician who walks through the doors.  I'm here.  I'm not going away.  I'm damn good at what I do.

And yes, I am wearing pink.

Office Update #395.23: Four reasons it's probably a good thing I don't have an office mate right now

I have arbitrarily decided, as the benevolent dictator of this blog, that Office Updates and Fails are exempt from the alliteration rule.  Accidental alliteration is acceptable.

1. Balkan music boogie-ing
2. Incessant mumbling whilst coding
3. High frequency of data-related moaning
4. Reduced likelihood of chocolate or favorite pen theft
5. Spontaneous air fist-pumps over successful code

Of course, part of me is secretly looking forward to seeing the look on my unsuspecting coworker's face when they find out what I'm also doing when I analyze their data....

Geeking out with gPhones

By way of brief summary, a gPhone is a gravity meter that sits around for days or weeks or months or years and measures gravity very extremely precisely.  People usually use them for measuring Earth tides really really well, because apparently that's interesting to some people.  Me, I'm primarily interested in figuring out how the gPhone has gone haywire this time.

Oh dear.  I haven't explained Earth tides OR measuring gravity on this blog yet, have I?  Right then, that'll be a future post.

For now, though, you are going to indulge me in my nerdiness by geeking out with me over this lovely seismic signal that showed up in all three of the data sets I was analyzing today:

Isn't it GLORIOUS??  You can even see the P and S arrivals!!!!  This is the 6.9 magnitude earthquake that occurred off the coast of Northern California on the evening of Sunday, March 9, 2014.

It turns out that in addition to being good at measuring Earth tides really really precisely, gPhones also make pretty good long-period seismometers.  What's really cool is that these meters are so sensitive they can detect ocean waves crashing on the shore - and we're in Colorado.  Now, you won't see individual wave crashes, more just a lot of noise in a certain frequency range, but if you set up two gPhones right next to each other and look at the gravity they measure over time, this "noise" will look exactly the same, which means it's a real signal, not just some noise from the machine itself.  This completely blew my mind when someone first told me what that was.

GRAVITY IS AWESOME!!!

Stubbornly Stylish Scientist

I WANTED to go contra dancing in Boulder tonight, but, as usual, Mother Nature had other plans, and I am thus stuck at home hiding from the snow that didn't come and almost certainly would have had I driven out.  So, instead, I finished off this post.  Be GRATEFUL for your good fortune.

Since late undergrad or so I began what I thought of, in my vainer moments, as a one woman rebellion against the culture of masculinity in the Earth sciences – I wore a skirt every now and then.  Then, it became a hairstyle more elaborate than the braid and/or headband combo I wore daily for the first three years of undergrad.*  Then, a non-binary selection of shoes.  Then, tentative eyeshadow experiments.  Bit by bit, I pushed back against what I perceived as the boundaries of appropriate attire for a true Earth scientist.

*In defense of my fashion choices, it's somewhat challenging to find anything ELSE that will fit under a bike helmet and then survive the removal of said helmet without leaving the wearer looking like the more stereotypical mad scientist. **
**It's very important not to blow the cover, you see.

Eventually in grad school I progressed to near-daily eyeshadow use, and wearing *gasp* dresses to campus on a regular basis.  After a rather nasty and slow-healing wound on my knee made wearing jeans painful for months, the only clothing I could wear that I felt not-embarrassed-in-public-in were skirts and dresses, and now I find I wear jeans maybe once or twice a week, if that.  I will even, on not too infrequent an occasion, wear PINK.*

*More of a rose-pink than, say, bubblegum.  I leave the bubblegum-pink-wearing to my sister, who is much more skilled in the art than I.

What I've come to realize only recently is that I wasn't really rebelling against the dress-code in Earth Sciences.  (Well, okay, maybe a bit.)  I came to realize I was instead rebelling against my own internal definition of what it meant to be feminine.

I place a great deal of my self-worth in my intelligence.  For better or for worse, I've pretty much always been told that I'm smart, and so I've always been loathe to do anything that detracts from my "smartness", or others' perception thereof.  And it seems that somewhere along the line, I decided that "feminine" equalled "stupid".

Ever since I graduated from the EVERYTHING MUST BE PINK phase around late elementary school or so* I developed this knee-jerk instinct against anything even hinting of femininity (with notable exceptions for formal events like church, recitals, or school dances).  My dress code from about middle school on was jeans-and-t-shirt, no skirts, maybe a sweater/hoodie if I was cold.  Pink was to be avoided at all costs.

*And promptly moved on to the EVERYTHING MUST BE YELLOW phase, followed by the EVERYTHING MUST BE GREEN phase.

Back in my pink phase I also went through a phase for each successive Disney princess – hard.  Think Barbie-doll Snow White cake, taking mandatory naps holding a rose to my chest a la Sleeping Beauty, a hand-sewn Belle costume made by my mother that was a verifiable work of art, a three-tier Cinderella birthday cake....*  I had it bad.  Fast-forward back to the present, and enter the current Disney princess debate.  I never quite lost my love of the Princesses, my repressed feminine side making me squirm just a bit when I saw the anti-pink tirades, the YouTube videos trumpeting the subversive messages revealed in the Princesses' characters.**

*I should also add that this occurred during the first 8 years of my life when I was an only child with an extremely clever and talented mother who had, it must be emphasized, ONE child...

** Which I'm in complete agreement with as far as Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are concerned.  I mean, seriously, you meet the guy ONCE and you're in love, and then all you do is fall asleep for a while??  Now, Belle, on the other hand.... Stands up to bullies and is an incurable bookworm who follows her passion despite her peers' intolerance... Now THERE'S a role model.  

When I first saw the Disneyfied real-life heroines by artist David Trumble and his commentary on his motivations (Why should fictional heroines all look the same when real ones don't), I simply filed it away under "Anti-Disney" stuff with the usual flag of "vague unease and annoyance", as, generally, I did agree with the artist's point.  Like a good feminist, I viewed the sparkles and swirly dresses with the proper scorn every time the article popped up on my Facebook newsfeed, even though deep down I was secretly envious of Marie Curie's sweeping ball gown of science*.

*Which would probably be INCREDIBLY impractical in an actual lab

Some months later, I ran across this article.  I'd highly recommend reading the actual article, but in case (like me) you're too lazy to follow every link included in a blog, here's the quote that really got me:

"As I've noted before, the discomfort with princesses often seems to be a discomfort with those things considered feminine—frilly clothes, romance, sparkles, kittens, and sunshine. Making Gloria Steinem a princess is supposed to be silly and artificial because traditional femininity is silly and artificial.

But, as it turns out, making Gloria Steinem a princess is not silly and artificial. Instead, it is awesome. Which suggests, first of all, that femininity is, or can be, awesome."

Hang on a minute, what?  It's okay to be feminine?  It's awesome to be feminine?? Giving into some bits of femininity every now and then doesn't mean sacrificing my credibility as a scientist?  Well, heck.

So.....maybe my internal equation of feminine=stupid wasn't just coming from me.  I mean, it's the cheerleader stereotype, right?  Cheerleader is pretty, cheerleader is feminine, cheerleader is thus always stupid.....except I had a cheerleader in both of my AP Spanish classes.  School dances are stupid, vapid, vain, feminine affairs.... except I learned most of my organizational and people skills from helping organize groups of friends to go, plus I began my love affair with data by building the spreadsheets I used to help organize the events.

Why does it seem like a woman has be become masculine in order to become smart?  That beauty and brains are mutually exclusive?

Now, I realize when I discuss beauty I'm running the risk of opening a whole other can of worms with respect to the issues women face in the world, because of course the immense social pressure for women to be beautiful is generally regarded as Not A Good Thing.  Let me take this opportunity to say unequivocally that I'm not advocating that all women should be feminine.  I want women to could be feminine – if they want to be.

I'm not arguing that women HAVE to dress up pretty, I'm arguing that we need a world where the perception of a woman's intelligence is not dependent on whether she's wearing a dress or hiking pants, high heels or hiking boots.  I demand the right to be ALL the things!  Just as many in my mother's generation fought for the right for women to be masculine, I want it to be okay for them to be feminine, too.  We need a world where the idea of a female scientist a) exists (I'm looking at YOU, Hollywood) and b) can look like this or this or this or this or this.  There's so much talk of how stereotypes about women hold women back, that I wonder if this stereotype, feminine = stupid, isn't another one we should be trying to away with.  We need more sparkly scientists.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go do some hair physics.

5 Ways to Welcome a Woman

There are no small numbers that complete the alliteration, sorry.

This list was inspired by my first few weeks working at a company where I am literally the only female in my building, and I believe the total number of females in the company is something like 5*, out of some 40ish employees**.

*Take that, Rand Paul.  I defy your statistics with my one singular data point.  Sort of like how climate change skeptics are almost certainly using the current winter.... but I digress...

**Who, as far as I can tell, share about 8 names total among the male portion.  Yelling "Ryan" would easily summon half the company.

Bolstered by a year or so of reading feminist articles via ESWN (Earth Science Women's Network, HIGHLY recommend), I was prepared for belittling, attack, rejection, stereotypes.  What I wasn't prepared for .... was loneliness.

I realized quickly that I had taken for granted how easy it was to make friends in a new academic setting, where there was almost certainly a cohort of similar aged companions all new in the same way you were, with veteran students ready to welcome new companions, and, crucially, at least one other female.  Now I faced the double whammy of "welcome to the workforce" and "welcome to minorityhood".

But, goldurnit, I think there's plenty of articles bemoaning what it is to be a woman in science.  Instead, I offer something different - a practical guide, based on nothing else than my expert opinion on all of five weeks in the workforce, for welcoming the first woman (or any woman!) to your company or place of work.  So, without further ado, I present:

5 Ways to Welcome a Woman

1.  Talk

2.  Ask

3.  Inform

4.  Include

5.  Swear

Talk
This is probably the most basic thing ever, and good policy for welcoming ANY new person - talk to them!  Something as simple as saying hi in the hallway, or asking them about the last place they lived/worked, etc., can do a world of good for helping that woman feel welcome.  I promise I will not jump down your throat with a feminist diatribe the second you open your mouth.  I am scared, I am new to this job and this city*, I just want a conversation.  I know I didn't really feel like I could be settled at my current job until I'd had around three longer than three-minute conversations at my work**.  Conversations make us all human, rather than scary faceless others.

*sort of...
**One of which involved a lively discussion on various creative methods of killings spiders, the sizes of which seemed to increase in roughly the same manner as "the fish that got away".

Ask
Probably more a corollary of Talk, but....ask the new woman questions!  Give her a chance to talk about herself, and give yourself a chance to know her.  Obviously, innocuous questions like "what do you do when you're not doing geophysics?" are probably better than "so, cutie-pie, wanna go downtown tonight and analyze MY data?"....

Also, in the first month or so, questions like "Do you know where x is in the building" or "Do you know how to use x software" are good, as they give the new person a chance to either say "yes!" and feel really über confident, or "no" and get help without having to try to figure out just who to ask, and then suck up the courage to ask.  Not that I'm incapable of asking, but.... with all the mental stress of being new AND outnumbered, one less hurdle to jump is a good thing!  In my case, I really appreciated it when one of my coworkers stopped by when I was working late one night to make sure I knew how to deal with the alarm system... because I definitely a) did not know how to use it and b) would not have enjoyed accidentally setting it off!

Inform
These are getting a bit redundant...whatever, five is a nice number.  ANYWAY, make sure your new woman knows the basics.  Who to ask for help (who is IT guy, who is fixit guy, who is finance person, etc.), where to get stuff, how to do things.  It's the little things that help... I think he felt rather awkward about it, but I was glad one of my coworkers was able to brave embarrassment enough to let me know I could ask him if he needed to supply any special bathroom stuff for the women's bathroom.... In case you're wondering, guys, we generally handle the "extra stuff" on our own*.... :)

*I'm still rather mystified by the 3+ bottles of lotion in the women's bathroom.  Is THAT what he meant?  Free hand lotion paid by the corporates?  I actually can't stand wearing lotion during the day, but now the temptation for abuse of supplies requisitions is definitely there...

Include
If you've got a running out-to-lunch day, invite her to join!  A ritual after-work beer?  Hand her one!  These sorts of informal gatherings can be really important down the road for making connections, gaining insight in your field, and getting jobs, so if you care about women's success, include them in these too!  I also like whiskey....

Swear
For the love, I will not shrivel up and blow away if you drop an F bomb in front of me.   Really.  You should have been a fly on the wall of my car when I was driving in Vancouver.  I may not swear in front of humans on a regular basis, but that certainly doesn't mean I can't if I want to*.  If you're directing something AT me..... that's debatable.  But, seriously, I find it hilarious that guys (typically those my dad's age and older) get tied up in knots trying to guard their tongues around me.... just relax, and I'll be able to relax too when I slip up!

*The fact that I wrote out "F bomb" notwithstanding...

Apologies if this post verges on the saccharine cheerful, but I'll defend myself in the lamest way possible by stoutly declaring that it is way easier (at least for me) to write whining sarcasm than cheerful sarcasm.  But if any way this helps some other woman feel welcome in her male-dominated office in the future, or, very much also importantly, it helps a guy feel like yes, he can do something other than be the big bad enemy of woman everywhere, my saccharine sacrifice will not have been in vain!*

*Including that last sentence.  Wince.

Fail #1

This is what happens when you try to calculate a level correction with imaginary numbers:

Not what I showed to my boss

Reminding you of just about the only thing I remember about imaginary numbers - they make stuff curve-alicious!

Feminine Field Work

So if you're someone in a STEM field and either are female or have at least one STEM friend who is female, you've probably seen something of the recent push for greater gender equality across the board, particularly in STEM fields.  I'll spare you the stats, as you've likely heard them and variations on a theme ad nauseam by now.

What I would like to share is my own encounter with the awesomeness that is working with others of my gender.  I never, of course, doubted that having more females in science was a good thing (I'm generally of a "more the merrier" mindset regardless of situation*), but it wasn't until recently I had a first-hand taste of what that might mean.

*With caveats.  There are always caveats.  For instance, bills and mold.

By way of background, I have a somewhat love/hate relationship with fieldwork.  As a geoscientist, it's something you'll encounter sooner or later, even, I'm told, if you're a pure geophysicist (which I, most decidedly, am NOT), so every geoscientist has to learn to at least endure it if they hope to have credibility in their field.

On the "love" side of things, I have seen some truly AMAZING places doing fieldwork or field related activities, including intimate views of several national parks, travel to foreign countries, and LAVA, the red-hot kind.  I also derive a great sense of pride that I've generally survived and usually not made a total fool of myself in these experiences - I'm not the fastest hiker in the world, but I'm lucky enough to not faint or get heat exhaustion, and thanks to SEVERAL spring break field trips in the Colorado plateau, which featured some IMPRESSIVELY windy weather, I can usually pitch a tent and expect it to STAY pitched.*

*Several large rocks and burly geo-friends may or may not be involved.

On the "hate" side of things, I do not feel I've ever been able to describe myself as an "outdoors" person.  I can exist semi-competently in the outdoors, but it is not my element.  I am not one of those women whose skin magically clears up when I spend three days straight sweating my brains out with no more than a wet wipe for sanitation.  I get prodigious dirt beards and prolific acne.  I HATE hills (despite the wonderful views they always seem to have at the top, those darn things), up OR down.  As mentioned before, I am NOT a fast hiker, although a propensity to pick up weird shaped rocks along the way probably doesn't help that.

My fist field season for my master's degree was a bit traumatic.  Yes, we stayed in a hotel overnight (lugging around solar panels for charging geophysical equipment in an area with chronic theft problems is kind of a non-starter), yes, we had a nice air-conditioned vehicle to take us to and from the field site every day, but we also had long days outside in 35+˚C (95+˚F) heat, often on nice black rocks, with no shade*, and a 30˚ talus slope to boot**.  AND a field partner, male, with legs approximately twice the length of mine (seriously, I tried walking in his strides once, it was like doing ballet leaps across the floor).  I remember hours and hours and HOURS of staring in despair at his retreating back (he was navigating, which was good, or NOTHING would have gotten done) some 30 meters upslope from me, that distance getting larger with every passing step.

*Sometimes, as an added bonus, scrubby trees that blocked NO sunlight and ALL the wind, on nice black ash - INSTANT oven!
**Ask me about my great boot stories.  These are the stories I'll be telling my grandkids 50 times in a row in the nursing home.  In a nutshell, BELIEVE your adviser when he tells you to wear leather-sided boots on recent 'a'a flows.

My worst night was the night I cried myself to sleep (as quietly as a I could) after he told me the amount of magnetic data we could get would probably be limited by how fast I could walk.  I knew he was right.  I knew I just couldn't walk as fast.  And I hated, HATED, that my physical weakness (and I'm not really a weakling), and stupid short stubby legs, were standing in the way of my science.

I was also angry and frustrated that I had fit into the stereotype of the weak, slow female in the field.  I have a very contrarian nature, and so part of what draws me to geophysics, I have to admit, is that it's not overly populated with females.  So I have this subconscious urge to blast all these feminine stereotypes (wears pink and lace all the time, can't do math, high pitched silly giggling) out of the water with everything I am.

But I still have to face the reality of who I am, and that I am, yes, a girl.   And that, no, I'm not a super-human field machine.  But I hate, HATE, that I might give someone the impression that I'm not a super-human field machine BECAUSE I'm a girl.

So, some 18 months later, enter my Eureka moment.  Another field experience, but this time I was the field assistant ("field wench"), in MUCH more environmentally pleasant central B.C., with, zounds, a female as the researcher in charge.

And it was AWESOME, because for the first time I wasn't wasting more than half of my brain cells on worrying about keeping up, because my field "master" was, for once, NOT a speed hiker.  Which meant that I had so many MORE brain cells* available for the actual SCIENCE.  And you know what?  We still got good science done.  Well, at least until the gravity meter died on us, but that's besides the point....

*At this point anyone who knows anything about neurology is probably tearing their hair out.  My sincerest apologies.

I also noticed I was WAY less self confident when I didn't know something, either science or field related, because suddenly, with another girl around, the fact that I didn't know something wouldn't send the message that ALL girls didn't know this thing, it was just THIS girl, this human.  This simple realization made it SO much easier for me to ask for help or advice when I needed, rather than tying myself in knots about image.

And before you think something like "Oh, you just shouldn't CARE about image!", may I just say, good grief, image DOES count for something*, and, for context, I'm the girl who doesn't think twice about walking across campus at 9 AM on a Saturday with a kilt on**.  Or singing along, with gusto, in a kareoke bar in front of some of the leading/up and coming scientists in my field - on at least two occasions.  Or highland dancing along to Gangnam Style in public.

*Even if your image is "I couldn't care less what you think of my image"
**Which is technically cross-dressing.  Not that anyone would really care in Eugene...

 The point being, if I'm concerned about image, when I usually take such glee in being unconventional, I'll bet there are many other women who are much more held back by concerns of how they're perceived doing fieldwork, or writing computer programs, or giving talks, in situations where they are the only representative of "female" currently present.

So if there's some initiative on the table promoting diversity, whether it be of gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, you name it - I'm for it.  Because life is so much better when you're a human being rather than a specimen.