Collisions with Reality

Another long week, another list of fun things I’ve seen this week!

• There is actually a new library opening in Oakland this weekend. And not just any new library in any part of Oakland — a large, beautiful space in one of the rougher parts of Oakland. It’s so great to see this much enthusiasm and excitement over a library. (Although, while the library is on the site of a school, the article notes, “School Superintendent Troy Flint said that not every school in the district has its own library, though all have access to online resources.”)
• I’ve never played much with Flickr Toys, but after seeing someone’s mosaic of orange photographs, I really want to. Unfortunately, the Flickr Toys do not actually analyze the photos for color — the photos are all selected based on their tags. Many of my photographs are tagged with their predominant color, but I’d still have to go back and manually tag many of my pictures.
• Last night’s 30 Rock had my husband and me in search of an old Saturday Night Live sketch where an anchor is prerecording the news, so that he could go on vacation for the winter. I thought it was a recent sketch, maybe even in an episode hosted by Brian Williams. He thought it was a classic one from the 70′s. Turns out we were both wrong — it was from the 90′s, and it wasn’t even on SNL, but The Dana Carvey Show. It’s still pretty funny (even if I can’t embed it, dang it!). And if you hang on until the closing credits, there is a funny and surprising little bonus for you.

Have a great weekend!

Celebrities are having kids left and right nowadays, and every once in a while, one of them has a natural birth and mentions it in an interview. The response online then ranges from cheers to indifference to disbelief to scorn. (Most recently with Miranda Kerr, but see also Gisele Bundchen.) The questions that frequently come up in the comments generally boil down to “Why is it worth mentioning?” So as someone who had a mostly-natural birth — and without painkillers — here’s why I think it’s important to talk about natural birth.

The general perception of childbirth, at least in the U.S., is that it’s the most horrible and agonizing physical pain that a woman can experience. This perception is so pervasive that people will dismiss women’s stories of natural childbirth to their faces. My son is only fifteen months old, and people have said that I just didn’t remember how bad it was, or I just remembered the endorphin rush from afterwards, or that humans have an amazing ability to forget traumatic events. No. It wasn’t traumatic, and it wasn’t even that painful. Yes, it was long and strenuous, and like any physical activity, required physical and mental preparation by me beforehand (mostly prenatal yoga). But it wasn’t much worse than a day of downhill skiing in the Rocky Mountains. (I hate skiing.)

For those who have not given birth, where does this perception come from? Not from talking to other women, but from pop culture in general. From the way that childbirth is portrayed on television and in the movies — ER, Knocked Up, LOST, and so on. What do these shows and movies all have in common? They were all written by men. But they feed into a public perception that is so strong that people dismiss my experience in favor of holding on to the idea that childbirth involves hours of agonizing pain. They say that there’s no need to be a martyr, but I never said that I felt like one. (Do people say similar things to marathoners? Because that’s the best analogy for childbirth that I can think of.)

In short, women who talk about natural childbirth aren’t doing it to be smug or superior or judgmental. We’re talking about it because we’re trying to reclaim the story of childbirth from the way it’s portrayed by male-dominated culture.

It seems that in selecting his cabinet, Governor Kasich of Ohio has so far selected only white agency heads. The twenty agency heads consist of sixteen white men and four white women. Meanwhile, the state of Ohio is about 85% white. African-Americans make up the largest minority population in Ohio, at 12%, and have been very active in political and leadership capacities for decades, even though the state has historically been dominated by Republicans. (See the list of Cleveland mayors, for starters, as well as the note in the original article that this is the first all-white cabinet since 1962.)

What are the odds of selecting zero minorities in a sample of twenty people, in a state with a minority proportion of 15%? Our old friend the binomial distribution can tell us! I’ll work this out twice — first for the case of zero minorities in the sample of 20 people, and then for the case of 16 white men in the sample of 20 people. Read the rest of this entry →

Believe it or not, this week I actually read things that weren’t about the Michigan coaching search!

• This article about the dearth of taxis at 4 p.m. in New York is fascinating. It’s not easy to balance 12-hour shifts, equity of rush hours for the drivers, and skyrocketing rents for the cab companies.
• If you’re feeling a bit bummed about the past decade, Charlie Stross has a post on how the world has gotten better. Lots of medical advances!
• I was poking around the Onion AV Club site, and found their television reviews. And in their classics section, they’re reviewing episodes of Batman: The Animated Series. I absolutely adore that incarnation of Batman, and am so excited to see a serious analysis of it. (I’m not sure it shows up anywhere in syndication nowadays, but the series is available on DVD.)

Three-day-weekend! Yay!

I finally made good on my promise to make a False Equivalency Watch tumblr.

It’s weird, because I’m not sure I entirely “get” Tumblr. I read everything through Google Reader, so to me it doesn’t matter whether or not a blog is on Tumblr. But Tumblr seems ideal for very narrow topics and short posts. I keep telling myself that it’s False Equivalency Watch, not False Equivalency Analysis, so hopefully I’ll keep it moving.

I wasn’t blogging over the holidays, so here are some of the interesting things I’ve seen in the last few weeks:

• I adore this picture of New York City from 1907 (via Shorpy, go there to see larger version).
  It’s such a familiar perspective, looking at Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge. There’s something about the faintness of the buildings — it’s almost as if you could see today’s skyline if you could peer through the haze.

• The A.V. Club has a list of some of the crazy swag they received in 2010, with their recommendations for improvement. I can’t decide what my favorite is — the Russian nesting dolls depicting Kirstie Alley? Or the visor that looks like a brain?
• I was really excited to see this study that shows that treatments can have a placebo effect even if you know it’s a placebo (via @mskyle). I have a cold that is just not going away, and I’ve reached the point of scrubbing the house and doing all the laundry in hopes of thwarting it. Next up today: buying out the entire cold remedy section at CVS in hopes that something kills it.

Happy Friday!

The most successful resolution I ever made was to go to the beach more often, for 2009. It worked because it was a fun resolution, and it forced me to manage my time better. I never would have succeeded at just resolving to manage my time better. On the photography side, in 2010 I learned that I’m much better at project-based goals, not deadline-based goals. (In other words, no Project 365 for me.) With that in mind, here are my resolutions for 2011:

1. Learn one new thing every day. This could be anything — a Python trick, an interesting spot in the neighborhood, a weird factoid about the state of Delaware, you name it. This is a fun resolution that i think will help me combat some of the inertia I get stuck in.
2. Go to the dentist. I have good health insurance, and haven’t been to the dentist in about five years.
3. Do physical therapy or yoga at least once per week. I’m having some neck and shoulder issues that, if not preventable, should at least be more manageable.
4. Create photograph collections. I haven’t decided exactly what projects I’d like to do. But what I want to focus on in 2011 is on creating cohesive series of photographs. I’m stuck in a mode of wanting each picture I upload to Flickr to be able to stand alone. But sometimes, a picture is more interesting in a series, and that’s okay. Of course that’s okay. So I want to work on seeing the big picture more often in my photography. (No puns in this resolution intentional. Sigh.)

I think that’s a reasonable and fun list. Happy New Year, everyone!