sistawendy | Entries tagged with science

A bit of background: I'm supposed to be injecting 0.2 ml of 20 mg/ml estradiol valerate weekly. I've been averaging more like 0.25 over the last several months because, well, I wasn't happy with my breast development. Gotta fill those C-cups I bought back in the spring.

There's been one other notable effect: ( body stuff involving naughty bits under the cut. )

Am I worried? Nah. Am I curious? Yup.

Current Mood: curious
Current Location: the living room of the Devil Girl House

As part of my post-tax refund home improvement projects, I got some metal shelves so I could unpack the boxes containing my sewing stuff, plant stuff, and circumflatulation supplies. As I was putting the first set of shelves together, one of the vertical members fell off the edge of the loft and hit one of my fourteen (14) African violets.

My poor little green fuzzy friend got messily bisected: the crown, which contains most of the leaves, snapped off. About two dozen leaves fell off the crown. Luckily, I have one gigantic pot containing one sad, little violet that's still recovering from an accidental uprooting early last year followed by too much sun after I moved into the Devil Girl House. I hurriedly planted the now-rootless crown and the most likely-looking of the loose leaves in the giant pot as well.

The worst case scenario? Losing all pieces of the struck plant plus perhaps the original resident of the giant pot. The best case scenario? I'll end up with even more African violets. I'll bet on the crown and at least some of the loose leaves taking root, but the root & stem minus the crown look doubtful. Luckily, my potting soil and empty pots are now easily accessible, because I just unpacked them onto the new shelves yesterday. I have a few windowsills that could accommodate plants.

Current Mood: hopeful
Current Location: the living room of the Devil Girl House
Current Music: Vampire Weekend, "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa"

I just got a most unusual phone call from Good Sister. She's been talking to Mom's doctors as ever, and they believe Mom's dementia is unusual in that she has "whole-body" hallucinations, that is hallucinations that aren't obviously so. The docs told GS about a research outfit called the Brain Bank. As generalissima of the United Sister Front, she gets the ultimate say over whether we donate Mom's brain to science when she dies.

Being the conscientious Good Sister that she is, she called the other members of the USF and asked us if we were cool with it. We both said yes. As GS points out, until she actually came down with dementia Mom would surely have been in favor of this kind of thing, probably noting that she won't be using her brain at that point anyway.

From the Dept. of Good Examples, my father, whose medical history was even more unusual and heartbreaking than my mother's, donated parts of his body to medical research. If there's even a chance it'll spare anyone what the four of us – Mom as well as the USF, because we all know it's terrible for her – have gone through, donating Mom's brain is the right thing to do.

Edited to add: Mom's middle sister Aunt H, who passed away earlier this year, had schizophrenia. It manifested no later than her late teens. I can't help but wonder if that accounts for Mom's distinctiveness.

Current Mood: righteous
Current Location: the dining table at the Devil Girl Pad
Current Music: The Beach Boys, "In My Room"

So, there's someone who I'm reluctant to identify, but who has a lot of mutual friends with me. She dug herself out of "the mud", as she put it, of small-town Washington state, then wrestled ADHD to the mat to get through college, then got a Ph.D.

And now? You know those scientists in the movies who save the earth from asteroids? She's the real thing. You've no idea how much I admire her; what's in this entry isn't the half of it.

Why am I posting about her now? Well, we've kept in touch, even though she's long since moved far away. She's involved in NASA's DART mission that just launched last night. She sent me the link to the live video, and we both watched it.

Mazel tov, Dr. Wyvern. You've earned it.

Current Mood: amazed
Current Location: my desk in the Devil Girl Pad

As recommended by

trystbat (Right?) I went on the tour of the west side of Highgate Cemetery. Yes, the tour is worth the money.

But first! The east side of the cemetery is the one where they're still burying people, and the one where you can walk around without a guide as long as you have a ticket. Karl Marx is on the east side, but that's not who I came especially to see. I came to place a ballpoint pen, as custom dictates, into a flower pot on the grave of Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I will admit to getting a little verklempt. He was a good guy and a great writer who died too damn young. I'm one of tens of millions who loved his work.

On to the west side! Here's the educational stuff:

A graveyard is associated with a church. A cemetery is not. I had no idea!
Highgate is seriously overgrown. It was completely neglected for much of the 20th century. It's the only place I've ever seen horsetail growing in the open, which says something about the climate in southern England. A Seattle summer will bake horsetail to death if it isn't shaded.
The cemetery's Egyptian Avenue was the cemetery's way of capitalizing on mid-19th century Egyptomania, as surely the British Museum and its neighbors did, too. It's extra, because London is always extra.
The first British surgeon to use anesthesia, Robert Liston, is buried in the catacombs (pronounced "catacooms" over here).
I didn't know who John Radclyffe Hall was, but I knew her* most famous work: The Well of Loneliness. That novel, the subject of legal battles in the UK & US, was the first to depict homosexuality in a positive light. It's come in for criticism in recent years for depicting queerness as a whole lot of misery, but I have to wonder how fair that criticism is. Someone recently discovered hundreds of letters written to Radclyffe Hall from queers thanking her for her book.
Probably the most-visited grave at the time it was new was that of bare knuckles boxer Tom Sayers. The working classes of London thought of him as a hero.
Michael Faraday, devout "dissenter" Christian, autodidact, and arguably the most influential scientist who ever lived, is buried in front of a large if not ornate headstone that he told his wife he didn't want.
Speaking of missing headstones, there are twenty thousand people in unmarked, common graves throughout Highgate. Some of them are underneath paths.
In the 1840s when the cemetery was first proposed, Highgate was just a village. Its residents tried to stop the cemetery from happening there for fear of poisoned water. But when you've got the world's largest city right next door and it's desperate for burial space and a break from all the grave robbing, you can't fight (the neighboring) city hall.

I walked enough in the cemetery that as soon as I got off at my tube stop, I grabbed a sandwich from Pret** across the street, devoured it on Islington Green, went back to where I'm staying, and without much further ado fell asleep for an hour and a half. I think my feet have recovered.

Tomorrow: the Tate Modern. I've already planned the tube trip because, it seems, I'm a maniac. There's an honest-to-goodness pub on my way from Angel tube that's two blocks from where I'm sitting. Google reviews say it might be OK. So pub grub is also on the agenda.

*Our guide said that that pronoun is correct.
**

trystbat and I concur that Pret A Manger needs to take the US by storm. It's begun on the east coast.

Current Mood: Several of them.
Current Location: Donegal Street, London

I have a cold that's positively operatic in scope. It took me nine hours to get seven hours of sleep thanks to violent coughing fits. Yes, I've stayed home from work. And I resent greatly the necessity of postponing a rare lunch date with

cupcake_goth.

But this is an opportunity for SCIENCE. For some time, my son has sworn by an over-the-counter remedy called Umcka, whose active ingredient is Pelargonium sidoides, a.k.a. South African geranium. It's supposed to shorten colds, but I can't help but wonder if I've gotten a week's worth of cold in a day and a half. Given that Halloween (observed) is coming up, though, even that might be worth it. The sore throat did last less than two days.

I'm pretty sure I got this from the Wendling - he does, after all, work in a supermarket and is therefore in contact with a lot of people. I just hope I didn't give it to the Proprietress.

Current Mood: sick
Current Location: the dining table at the Devil Girl Pad
Current Music: DJ Shadow, "Mashin' On The Motorway"

I partied with the MOO kroo on Saturday night. I had a delightful time in my birthday outfit talking about Araucaria spp. and how to do paleobotany with

lotsofplants. Worthy of note: wearing my corset & heels didn't cripple me this time, possibly because I wasn't working and standing all day in them.

What did nearly cripple me was swapping out by bed frame. My old one, which I got for free from a friend of Ex's when I moved into my lake place, was made my a carpenter. That's right: heavy, wobbly, creaky, ugly, and even with a step stool hard to get into. Its main virtue: it was a loft bed, which meant I had vital extra storage space for my one-bedroom apartment.

So, I replaced it with another loft bed. This meant moving all that stored stuff into the rest of the apartment, sweeping, partially disassembling the old frame, getting the old frame out (and gouging the hardwood floor in the process despite some efforts not to), assembling the new frame, putting all the stored stuff back, and cleaning up. End to end time: about eight hours.

The good news is that even diminutive ladies like Much Younger Woman should be able to get into my bed without difficulty, which is good news indeed if you're a lesbian. And the new frame has rails, so the Tickler won't roll out of it and fall four feet to the floor if she has one of her occasional night terrors. The bad news is that I've got to cover six feet of floor scars with, essentially, crayons.

ATTN

lotsofplants: I did remember correctly. The Wollemi pine is an Araucaria. And it was attacked by a fungus, Phytophthora cinnamomi, that probably arrived on somebody's feet. No mention of where that fungus came from, but Uncle Wiki suggests that P. cinnamomi has wreaked havoc in the Americas in historical times, which to me suggests a recent arrival there as well. No mention, however, of how the Great American Interchange affected Araucaria populations.

Current Music: The Beach Boys, "Help Me Rhonda"

I got a ticket to an undergroundish ravey thing last night, but I didn't relish the thought of going to Pioneer Square alone for an event that started at 2300, especially when I'd been awake since 0435 yesterday and I have a hot date tonight. So I stayed home and slept for eight hours. Je ne regrette... OK, I regret it a little bit.

And on to this beautiful sunny morning in Seattle. Ever since the end of my days of going to yoga classes paid for by Microsoft's gold-plated benefits, I've been doing tree pose at home most mornings for some sorely needed better balance.I long ago noticed that this is a lot harder for me in a dark room, which is the default situation at 0630 in November around here. Sure, I can solve this problem by turning on a light, but I think it's noteworthy that, at least in my case, my eyes are giving me much better information about which way is up than my inner ears are.

On a related note which just occurred to me, I did engineering co-op - what engineers call an internship - in Rosslyn, VA, just across the Potomac from DC. The Rosslyn Metro station is one of the deepest in the system because of the underground river crossing, and it's fairly old. There was what I believe to be a design flaw in the escalator tunnel: the joints in the concrete segments were perpendicular to the axis of the tunnel, not parallel to the vertical. What that meant for me was that my inner ears were telling me which way was up correctly, but my eyes were telling me it was several degrees forward (going down) or backward (going up) from true up. I had to shield my eyes in that tunnel if I was walking on the escalator so I didn't get dizzy. I've also noticed that in at least one newer station, the joints in the concrete segments are parallel to the vertical like diagonal slices, so I speculate that I'm not the only person who had this problem.

Current Mood: curious
Current Location: the dining table at my lake place
Current Music: Janelle Monae, "Make Me Feel"

A little over seven years ago, I posted a poll in an attempt to learn something about relative breast size vs. hand preference. My conclusion was that which of your boobs is larger doesn't correlate to hand preference, but asymmetry in general just might.

But the original study isn't quite what this entry is about. A few of you breast owners told me then that breasts are changeable creatures, and which one of yours is larger can be influenced by lots of factors. In other words, boobs happen. I've finally experienced this in the last few months: my left one used to be bigger, and now my right one seems to be.

I haven't changed my hormone dose since around the time I posted the poll. I've been eating & exercising the same for years. Could this be a breast explosion like the ones some of my cisgender friends report undergoing in their teens? I don't think so, but if I find myself in need of 38D (!) bras a few months hence, that'll will be a) scientifically interesting, b) rare as hens' teeth because yo, trans, and c) not unwelcome because a 38" chest makes even reasonaboobs look small.

Current Mood: curious
Current Location: the dining table at my Lake Place
Current Music: morning traffic on my street

Long, lovely dinner on Broadway last night with

rigel_p, who's up here for Norwescon. I had advice for her about migrating to Dreamwidth; she had advice for me about where to shelter in case the North Koreans nuke us. (Capitol Hill station isn't bad and UW is better, but the DC Metro was built as one giant network of fallout shelters. Freaky, yet logical.) Talking science with her makes my brain fizz. I missed that and much else about her.

She stayed last night at a friend's place in North Bend, which we had an... entertaining time finding in the dark. Luckily, North Bend has low speed limits and not much late night traffic. I pity anyone who commutes from out there, because it's 30 miles from Seattle and high enough in the Cascade foothills to get plenty of snow.

On the way I finally saw the diner that's featured in Twin Peaks, twenty-seven years after the show was first aired. Too bad it was after 2200 or I might have stopped in for cherry pie. It's appalling but not surprising that

rigel_p has never seen Twin Peaks; she was, after all, a ten-year-old Mormon when it aired. I told her to watch the first season because a) it's a fantastic show, and b) it changed American TV for the better.

Current Mood: indescribable
Current Location: the dining table at my Lake Place
Current Music: R.E.M., "Everybody Hurts"

Ever since I can remember, sudden exposure to sunlight has made me sneeze. This happened on the bus this morning - a rare sunny day in winter in Seattle - so I asked on certain other social media sites about this. Photic sneeze reflex is a thing! It's a common thing! And its genetics are well known and fairly simple.

solarbird for your daily dose of outrage.

Current Mood: enligtened
Current Music: Journey, "Don't Stop Believin'"
Crossposts: http://sistawendy.livejournal.com/850371.html

Remember my poll about breast size vs. hand preference? I did that waaay back just five months after I started hormones. I've now been on them for more than six years, and now my answer to this poll question has changed.

My left breast is no longer the larger one, it seems, as of a few months ago. It's now my right. Some of you longtime breast owners told me this sort of occurrence is common. Evidence of that is now attached to me, even though my hormonal cycles are entirely artificial and therefore regular.

I can only speculate as to why: my weight is nearly the lowest it's been for about twenty years, which may have something to do with it.

Current Mood: nerdy
Current Location: the dining table at my Lake Place
Current Music: Cut Copy, "We Are Explorers"

On the way back from Kirkland to Seattle last night, my Sanctimobile passed 100,000 miles. I tweeted this, and before long somebody in Zuckerberg's data mine asked just how much carbon dioxide I'd not emitted over the years. What follows is, I hope, a more ~~precise~~ accurate calculation than I did elsewhere.

The Sanctimobile helpfully tells me that it gets 43 MPG. This is about 20 MPG more than the average car, and certainly over 20 MPG more than the average car ten years ago. So how much gasoline haven't I burned?

100K miles / 20 MPG = 5000 gallons ≈ 19,000 liters

The specific gravity of gasoline averages 0.74 depending on the grade, so:

19,000 liters * 0.74 kg / l ≈ 14,000 kg

Converting that to raw carbon is where things get a little hazy. [ETA: No pun intended.] Gasoline is a mixture of many different kinds of hydrocarbons, with octane being about the mean by molecular weight. C₈H₁₈ has a molecular weight of 114 and change of which 96 is carbon, so that's 84% carbon in gasoline:

14,000 kg gasoline * 84% ≈ 11,800 kg carbon

Since the molecular weight of CO₂ is 44 of which 12 is carbon:

11,800 kg carbon * 44 AMU CO₂ / 12 AMU carbon ≈ 43,300 kg CO₂, or 43 tonnes (metric tons). That works out to nearly 49 short (i.e., reg'lar USA) tons of CO₂ not emitted by Imminent Ex, the Wendling, and me over the last ten years.

Not too shabby. I seem to recall

gfish calling Priuses "faggotty" when I first got mine. Not that he was jealous or anything. I wonder if he'd say the same today.

Current Mood: curious

When you're coming down with something, do you ever get a sensation that seems, for lack of a better description, as if you're smelling the inside of your own nose? Or maybe some secretion in there that isn't there ordinarily? It's subtle, but also sharp and meaty at the same time.

I'm pretty sure I'm coming down with something because I have a swollen lymph node in my neck, a sore throat, a sore back, and the occasional mild dizzy spell. I wonder if The Tickler brought me something back from the Middle East besides a psychedelic pashmina (which, by the way, I love).

Current Mood: sick
Current Location: the dining table at my Lake Place
Current Music: Emerson, Lake & Palmer, "Lucky Man"

You guys know I have an Evil Sister, the eldest of the three siblings. One of the things that she told me as part of her effort to talk me out of changing sex* was that taking hormones would give me breast cancer.

Well, first of all, the nice boob-squashing lady said yesterday that there are simply no studies on trans women's breast cancer risk. (Also none for women who've had IVF.) Yes, that sucks, but no data means no data, even if the hypothesis is plausible. And oh by the way, the negative result was even sweeter to me for letting me think, in regards to Evil Sister, 'Suck it.'

*Briefer and quieter but much nastier than Good Sister's attempt.

Current Mood: Nyeh heh heh heh.

Christmas dinner included ham, i.e. Southern style, at my Lake Place with m'boy and Mom. (She did the cooking.) Afterwards a walk around Green Lake in the sun. When you walk three miles, you're three time zones west of home, and you're three quarters of a century old, you may be excused for falling asleep three hours before everyone else does.

Today: the Seattle Art Museum for the (mainly pre-Columbian) Peruvian art exhibit. Yes, it's lovely, stunningly crafted, and occasionally sexually explicit, but what really got to me was the number of indigenous civilizations that have risen and fallen in Peru in the last 3000 years, sometimes mysteriously. Sure, the Inca conquered the Chimú et al., but it looks as if the Mochica and the Wari, who preceded both of them, succumbed to climate change and a resulting collapse of the social order. That's something to think about as you gawk at 1500-year-old pornographic ceramics.

Yours truly got a wild hair and we three went to Red Mill for burgers because my son loves them even more than I do. So there we were, carless and busless, at the top of Phinney Ridge, while my place is at the bottom. That means a ten-block walk, which is no biggie for my son & me - his whining notwithstanding - but m'boy & I had to hold onto Mom to keep her from barreling down 70th St. I thought we could relax once we got to level-ish ground, but neau: poor Mom tripped on a sidewalk joint. I got a piece of her, but I couldn't break her fall. Luckily, she's ambulatory. For now.

Current Mood: relieved
Current Location: my desk at the Lake Place
Current Music: Cut Copy

I got to introduce two friends who cosmically needed to meet each other:

elspethdemina and

gement.

elspethdemina is the sex toy maven extraordinaire with a pressing business need to make the porn section at her place d'emploi, Wild at Heart, easier to find things in.

gement has a degree in library science.

Even a relative innocent like me knows that porn comes in many, many flavors. (Ixnay on the oke-jays.) These flavors even come in many flavors, which

gement prefers to call facets: ethnicity, body type, gender, publisher, etc., etc. Porn customers are often interested in only a tiny subset of the flavors, so helping them find that subset is a real money spinner.

Said

gement, with that many facets, hardcopy catalogs as

elspethdemina originally envisioned aren't going to cut the mustard. You have lots of facets with porn, so you'd need many thick binders. Ergo, you'd end up with something we in the software industry call unmaintainable.

The solution is 'pooters, said our esteemed librarian. Old junk would suffice, but

elspethdemina says it would be difficult to prevent even the oldest and junkiest of junk from being stolen. I can't help but wonder if that would be a problem if her store were in a better location or her bosses weren't idjits who insist on making it easy to steal stuff. We didn't come up with a solution on the spot, but what they both said made sense.

( quote of the night )

gement and I agree that

elspethdemina is the awesomest of sauces.

Icing: I got to take

gement home and measure em for a costume afterward.

Current Mood: amused
Current Location: my desk at the Lake Place
Current Music: Underworld, "Dirty Epic"

Reflections on sushi with

gement:

Transgender and genderqueer people appear to be taking over the world.
I'm really glad I'm not carless anymore, especially since I live on the east side. gement is right that it's a lot of money, but when you've got a kid in Kirkland, job in Redmond, and friends and sanity in Seattle, you need quick, convenient transpo.
I'm pretty sure "lesbian sheep syndrome"* isn't something I'll suffer from for the forseeable future.

Reflections on going out with

cupcake_goth: being underaccessorized drives me batty. I blame getting ready while chatting with and showing (ahem) things to

gement.

*Lesbian sheep syndrome, a.k.a. lesbian bed death, is the condition whereby queer women in a relationship just stop having sex. The name refers to a recent observation that when ewes wanna, they stand very still. So, a pasture full of lesbian sheep looks like a bunch of ewes standing very, very still, and none of them get any. This was why biologists failed to observe lesbianism in sheep as opposed to other mammalian species for some time. A tip o' the hat to

kathrynt for that factoid.

Current Mood: tired

I got six hours of electrolysis on my face today. That's a lot for one session, in case you were wondering.

Good: The only hairs left above my jawline are a few strays, sideburn hairs, and gray hairs only on my upper lip.
Bad: It takes three to six strikes with the needle to kill a hair follicle forever, but...
Good: Ms. Zappy has already reached that limit for most of my brown hairs above the jawline, and they're the most visible little bastards.
Bad: She hasn't touched the area below the jawline in ages, but...
Good: That area isn't as visible as the face.

Don't get me wrong. I'm thrilled to see those hairs gone from my face.

From the Dept. of Neurology: I'm pretty sure I've mentioned here that I occasionally get restless leg syndrome. Today I realized that I was getting an uncannily similar sensation when Ms. Zappy worked on the hairs near my ears. Whichever side she was working on had the leg that got the horrible crawly feeling. I'd actually had the sensation before during electrolysis, but until today I'd never correlated it to a particular area of the face. Zaps to the upper lip make me tear up, which you'd expect, but zaps near the ears give me restless leg? Somebody get Oliver Sacks on the phone.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: Shangri La

Here are the results of yesterday's breast poll:

	left larger	right larger	asymmetric (sum of left & right larger)	neither larger
left-handed	0	0	0	6
right-handed	8	9	17	2
ambidextrous	1	1	2	1

Conclusions:

Breasts are dynamic. I've collected anecdotes (and I'm sure others have collected data) suggesting that plenty of events, hormonal and otherwise, can affect breast symmetry: puberty, childbirth, even asymmetric exercise. If this was a duh to you, it wasn't to me.

That said, I was struck not by any correlation of hand preference to either breast's being larger, but to more general asymmetry. Clearly this merits further study.

randomdreams, morthael, and ionan are sillyheads.

In other news, we had a FiOS outage here at the Abbey for about 16 hours. Nibs & m'boy were Displeased. It wasn't the fiber that had trouble, though; it was the crufty cabling on the outside of the house.

ETA: More data points!

ETAA: Even more data points!

Current Mood: geeky
Current Location: the Abbey couch

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Maura's Illuminated Manuscript

Non-Papal Bull

Entries tagged with science

The end of squirt?

an unintentional botany experiment

Gonna slice & dice my mom's brain.

Mazel tov to a truly amazing woman.

Nun visits some of London's famous dead.

cough aria

talking plants and twisting screwdrivers

Nun fails at being a raver, succeeds at being a yogini.

The b(r)e(a)st of science marches on.

Nun dines with wyvern.

TIL: photic sneeze reflex!

the science of boobs, revisited

the Sanctimobile vs. global warming

From the Dept. of Freaky Observations

mammogram postscript

adventures with Mom, part 4 of n

a mighty fine Thursday night at my friendly neighborhood sex shop

Thursday night social activity

Megazappy!

breast poll results