I was talking with a co-worker today after attending one of her hikes about...physics.
Specifically how to communicate the physics in nature as something awe-inspiring and interesting, without calling it physics. Just...large-scale natural laws as they create smaller-scale systems. Maybe the whole ecology is applied biology is applied chemistry is applied physics thing I mentioned yesterday. There does exist a tiny branch of study called eco-physics, and it is easy enough to see plants and animals adapting to physical forces. Some of the things plants and animals do to adapt are darn neat and innovative.
She called it the Big Within the Small, and she wanted me to make my ranger program about that physics-ecology connection. (Ranger program, you ask? I'm interning in a National Park for a very short while.)
The problem is sometimes I think too much in big-picture amorphous concepts instead of hard, concrete ones, at least when I'm first forming an idea. So I can't tell if we are onto something that would be poweful and interesting to other people, or if I'm just trying to grasp at straws within that general sense of "wow the world is so darn cool" that I have long carried with me from ecology over to physics and now back to ecology again.
I mean, I think the world is so darn cool, but my darn cool world isn't exactly the same as somebody else's darn cool world, or at least it's not darn cool for exactly the same reasons.
So this is going to be a project, and I'm not sure if it will be a successful one.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Stamp Collecting
'Twas Earnest Rutherford who said, "all science is either physics or stamp collecting."
I don't think he was meaning to say that physics rules and every other science drools. I think he was meaning to say that you can do physics, or you can do some other applied science that eventually boils down to...physics. Because chemisry is molecules interacting based on rules of chemistry that come from...physics. Biology is life doing life things based on rules of biology that come from rules of chemistry that come from rules of...physics. Ecology is the individual biology of things in concert, which is in tern a bunch of chemisry in concert....etc.
Or maybe he was meaning to say that nothing is worthwhile but physics...and in that case I do not agree.
Well today, I did a fair bit of something an awful lot like stamp collecting. I "collected" the following wildflowers, meaning I saw them on my hike and keyed them out in my Newcomb's wildflower guide:
Jerusalem Artichoke
Green Coneflower
Pink Lady
Wild Violet
Cardinal Flower
Pale Sunflower
Mayapple
There were of course about a zillion more that I couldn't or didn't stop to identify cause I was worried about making loud noises and seeming large and scary to the black bears. And yes, I did see a bear scamper off.
I also collected the following new trees. I thought I was already fairly experienced at trees so the very prevalent ones aren't listed, though I can't separate out all the sub-red or sub-white oak species of blackjack and post and river and hybridized-monkey-fist--okay I made the lats one up just to show you there are a LOT of oak species out there.
Basswood, American or other?
Witchhazel
Mountain Maple (an uncommon species very distinct from red and sugar maple)
Sugar Maple (not so present in southern Appalachians, but quite abundant here)
Black Walnut (that one I am re-remembering)
I don't know what it is about identifying the species of the plants and animals you encounter that is so compulsively fun. It is kind of like building a collection. Okay, got bobcat, got black bear, got skunk, what's next! Maybe delineating out all those oak species. The thing you learn when you get into plant ID and keying out wildflowers, trees, and shurbs is, well, I used to think tree ID was simple. A white oak is a white oak, just like a black bear is, you know, a black bear.
Oh, but black bears actually comprise sixteen, sixteen subspecies in North America. And I already mentioned the long list of oaks that doesn't even count when one species hybridizes with another. Plus, some species, rather like people, have a variety of phenotypes, or, shapes and sizes, so that one particular leaf shape or set of leaf shapes per species is nowhere near all you need to know.
Like any new thing that one tries to learn, you start off thinking it is simple and that, having the basics, the rest is well within your grasp. It is only when you being to glimpse the actual complexity that you can consider yourself something slightly past novice in any subject.
In short: Nature is multifaceted, complex, environmentally dependent and constantly changing. Kind of like the real world. This is advanced stamp collecting.
I don't think he was meaning to say that physics rules and every other science drools. I think he was meaning to say that you can do physics, or you can do some other applied science that eventually boils down to...physics. Because chemisry is molecules interacting based on rules of chemistry that come from...physics. Biology is life doing life things based on rules of biology that come from rules of chemistry that come from rules of...physics. Ecology is the individual biology of things in concert, which is in tern a bunch of chemisry in concert....etc.
Or maybe he was meaning to say that nothing is worthwhile but physics...and in that case I do not agree.
Well today, I did a fair bit of something an awful lot like stamp collecting. I "collected" the following wildflowers, meaning I saw them on my hike and keyed them out in my Newcomb's wildflower guide:
Jerusalem Artichoke
Green Coneflower
Pink Lady
Wild Violet
Cardinal Flower
Pale Sunflower
Mayapple
There were of course about a zillion more that I couldn't or didn't stop to identify cause I was worried about making loud noises and seeming large and scary to the black bears. And yes, I did see a bear scamper off.
I also collected the following new trees. I thought I was already fairly experienced at trees so the very prevalent ones aren't listed, though I can't separate out all the sub-red or sub-white oak species of blackjack and post and river and hybridized-monkey-fist--okay I made the lats one up just to show you there are a LOT of oak species out there.
Basswood, American or other?
Witchhazel
Mountain Maple (an uncommon species very distinct from red and sugar maple)
Sugar Maple (not so present in southern Appalachians, but quite abundant here)
Black Walnut (that one I am re-remembering)
I don't know what it is about identifying the species of the plants and animals you encounter that is so compulsively fun. It is kind of like building a collection. Okay, got bobcat, got black bear, got skunk, what's next! Maybe delineating out all those oak species. The thing you learn when you get into plant ID and keying out wildflowers, trees, and shurbs is, well, I used to think tree ID was simple. A white oak is a white oak, just like a black bear is, you know, a black bear.
Oh, but black bears actually comprise sixteen, sixteen subspecies in North America. And I already mentioned the long list of oaks that doesn't even count when one species hybridizes with another. Plus, some species, rather like people, have a variety of phenotypes, or, shapes and sizes, so that one particular leaf shape or set of leaf shapes per species is nowhere near all you need to know.
Like any new thing that one tries to learn, you start off thinking it is simple and that, having the basics, the rest is well within your grasp. It is only when you being to glimpse the actual complexity that you can consider yourself something slightly past novice in any subject.
In short: Nature is multifaceted, complex, environmentally dependent and constantly changing. Kind of like the real world. This is advanced stamp collecting.
Why Physics?
This is a final post of something I drafted in late July, so if you are following closely then you'll notice that the description of what I was doing at that point no longer matches what I'm currently doing. What am I currently doing, you ask? Maybe I'll explain more later.
Original date 7/28/2010
I came to realize yesterday, while I was tutoring the non-calculus based summer session of physics 2 and wishing I could just say "cyclotron magnetic force is equal to qvB because it's the cross product at 90 degrees" and have that be enough to explain it, and later while I was pouring over a green building design book's section on weatherization in order to study for my hopeful second round of job interview...
For all that I want to do other things and not lock myself in a lab until I'm thirty-five: I'd rather write about science, do photovoltaic or energy efficiency or weatherization work because that helps real people and makes a real difference, for all that I even want to go stick myself in the woods and read/watch/write about evolutionary biology or else just strap people in to fun playgrounds in the trees, I'm a physicist.
That means I know how to look at things and understand the principles of how they work. And I look at things from that perspective all the time, giving me the confidence to do things like super-insulate my parents' house, change my transmission fluid in their garage, feel confident in the safety of a hydraulic-breaking zip-line, without having to sit through training on each. Training would make that knowledge better, sure, and experience even better than that--so now I've seen a 75 pound kid do the zip-line and a 275 pound man do it and decided that anybody much heavier or lighter is not going to have a safe experience--what do you know, the factory weight limits happen to be 60 to 300 pounds.
For somebody who grew up like I did, a young woman who wanted to be creative and imaginative, not necessarily technical, who didn't work on cars or build robots but who did build weird things with an erector set and make her own plans for her treehouse on graph paper, who struggled endlessly with ratios and proportions but who excelled at learning foreign languages...this has been really empowering. Because it turns out that triple integrals are kind of like grammatical sentences that you can spatially think about, taking percents is why God invented calculators, and specific numbers for specific situations can be looked up in tables.
That means when you hand me an equation, it's just not good enough. Just like my tutee, I have to know why, and since she has that attitude maybe she should have taken the calculus-based version and spared herself the trouble of "sorry it's too technical to tell you the truth" explanations.
That's why when my research continues to yield no quantum-mechanically predicted line for no reason that we can figure out, I just can't let it go and I end up thinking that staring at temperature verses frequency plots between 9.2 and 10.6 GHz for four different planetary nebula in search of one particular bump among the many other bumps is actually interesting, why I find tutoring physics a fun nostalgic chance to do the kinds of problems that used to drive me crazy before I had all the tools to do them, why I thought my foray into an environmental studies major was too easy because it glossed over details.
It doesn't matter what else I end up doing, and I fully intend to eventually succeed at employing myself in the energy efficiency or renewable energy field because I am smart and technical and have great interpersonal skills to boot and I can write and speak Spanish fluently...
I'm always going to be a physicist.
Original date 7/28/2010
I came to realize yesterday, while I was tutoring the non-calculus based summer session of physics 2 and wishing I could just say "cyclotron magnetic force is equal to qvB because it's the cross product at 90 degrees" and have that be enough to explain it, and later while I was pouring over a green building design book's section on weatherization in order to study for my hopeful second round of job interview...
For all that I want to do other things and not lock myself in a lab until I'm thirty-five: I'd rather write about science, do photovoltaic or energy efficiency or weatherization work because that helps real people and makes a real difference, for all that I even want to go stick myself in the woods and read/watch/write about evolutionary biology or else just strap people in to fun playgrounds in the trees, I'm a physicist.
That means I know how to look at things and understand the principles of how they work. And I look at things from that perspective all the time, giving me the confidence to do things like super-insulate my parents' house, change my transmission fluid in their garage, feel confident in the safety of a hydraulic-breaking zip-line, without having to sit through training on each. Training would make that knowledge better, sure, and experience even better than that--so now I've seen a 75 pound kid do the zip-line and a 275 pound man do it and decided that anybody much heavier or lighter is not going to have a safe experience--what do you know, the factory weight limits happen to be 60 to 300 pounds.
For somebody who grew up like I did, a young woman who wanted to be creative and imaginative, not necessarily technical, who didn't work on cars or build robots but who did build weird things with an erector set and make her own plans for her treehouse on graph paper, who struggled endlessly with ratios and proportions but who excelled at learning foreign languages...this has been really empowering. Because it turns out that triple integrals are kind of like grammatical sentences that you can spatially think about, taking percents is why God invented calculators, and specific numbers for specific situations can be looked up in tables.
That means when you hand me an equation, it's just not good enough. Just like my tutee, I have to know why, and since she has that attitude maybe she should have taken the calculus-based version and spared herself the trouble of "sorry it's too technical to tell you the truth" explanations.
That's why when my research continues to yield no quantum-mechanically predicted line for no reason that we can figure out, I just can't let it go and I end up thinking that staring at temperature verses frequency plots between 9.2 and 10.6 GHz for four different planetary nebula in search of one particular bump among the many other bumps is actually interesting, why I find tutoring physics a fun nostalgic chance to do the kinds of problems that used to drive me crazy before I had all the tools to do them, why I thought my foray into an environmental studies major was too easy because it glossed over details.
It doesn't matter what else I end up doing, and I fully intend to eventually succeed at employing myself in the energy efficiency or renewable energy field because I am smart and technical and have great interpersonal skills to boot and I can write and speak Spanish fluently...
I'm always going to be a physicist.
Fission Cost-Benefit
Nuclear energy is "cleaner" in the carbon emissions sense, is heckof energy dense, is damn expensive, is here now and growing, is a viable and practical solution to climate change.
There are many ways to do it better: it is theoretically possible to separate the really nasty million-year-half-life stuff and recycle it into a few hundred-year-nasty stuff, getting more energy out in the process. You can better safeguard and better safeguard, and I bet we have the ability to get our safeguards pretty darn goon.
But I am reminded, over and over again, of the phrase "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." And nuclear, just being what it is, can go pretty darn wrong. Yes, there are safeguards upon safeguards. Yes, waste can be managed--although we are not doing a particularly great job at the moment, due purely to political limitations. We're a heck of a lot better at overcoming technical limitations than we are at overcoming political limitations.
But you know, that Deepwater Horizon blowout preventer was not supposed to be able to fail, either. Something going terrible wrong is always within the realm of physical possibility, and in the case of nuclear the consequences for life on earth are really serious business.
Right now, this burning of fossil fuels thing is potentially going wrong for us, and we're gonna run out eventually anyway. So in a cost-benefit analysis between a climate that is definitely warming up and changing even if we still don't know how much, and a remotely possible local but who knows maybe worldwide radiation induced horror, which would I choose?
Honestly, I'd choose a warmer climate.
(But Science! is still good at what it does, so let's keep doing it re: nuclear fission processes that are safe. Keep the physicists employed!)
There are many ways to do it better: it is theoretically possible to separate the really nasty million-year-half-life stuff and recycle it into a few hundred-year-nasty stuff, getting more energy out in the process. You can better safeguard and better safeguard, and I bet we have the ability to get our safeguards pretty darn goon.
But I am reminded, over and over again, of the phrase "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." And nuclear, just being what it is, can go pretty darn wrong. Yes, there are safeguards upon safeguards. Yes, waste can be managed--although we are not doing a particularly great job at the moment, due purely to political limitations. We're a heck of a lot better at overcoming technical limitations than we are at overcoming political limitations.
But you know, that Deepwater Horizon blowout preventer was not supposed to be able to fail, either. Something going terrible wrong is always within the realm of physical possibility, and in the case of nuclear the consequences for life on earth are really serious business.
Right now, this burning of fossil fuels thing is potentially going wrong for us, and we're gonna run out eventually anyway. So in a cost-benefit analysis between a climate that is definitely warming up and changing even if we still don't know how much, and a remotely possible local but who knows maybe worldwide radiation induced horror, which would I choose?
Honestly, I'd choose a warmer climate.
(But Science! is still good at what it does, so let's keep doing it re: nuclear fission processes that are safe. Keep the physicists employed!)
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Alone But Not Usually Lonely
What does it mean to be a functionally outgoing introvert?
It means you joke and make small talk with strangers and co-workers and genuinely enjoy it--but when you go home you can't wait to curl up on the couch with a book.
It means you are recharged by treating yourself to a nice breakfast alone in a restaurant; you sip your coffee and write, you make small talk with the waiter, you feel so calm and alive.
It makes two days alone in a national park--where I am now, in a complete and total change of gears, doing a "volunteer" stint--into utter heaven--but when you think about your SigFig far away, you feel that sharp edge of sadness and wish he could just be there too. Or your best friend who lives in Australia.
You love doing things by yourself and you love having one or two people you love to do them with, too. Very often you do crave, seek out and enjoy social interaction, (and you know very well how to successfully seek it out and enjoy it, contrary to popular belief about introverts) but in a choice between a noisy bar or a quiet book, book usually wins even when you remember those handful of times you had chosen bar instead and had much fun and met new, interesting people. Doing things by yourself is in general infinitely preferable to doing things with large groups of people you don't know, but doing things with a small group that includes one or two new people can be a wonderful way to make new friends.
People tell you there's no way you're an introvert, you're too social, because they just don't realize that you're happy and and socially functioning because you just spent all day hiking by yourself.
People try to say that being an extrovert is somehow better. I think those people just aren't listening.
It means you joke and make small talk with strangers and co-workers and genuinely enjoy it--but when you go home you can't wait to curl up on the couch with a book.
It means you are recharged by treating yourself to a nice breakfast alone in a restaurant; you sip your coffee and write, you make small talk with the waiter, you feel so calm and alive.
It makes two days alone in a national park--where I am now, in a complete and total change of gears, doing a "volunteer" stint--into utter heaven--but when you think about your SigFig far away, you feel that sharp edge of sadness and wish he could just be there too. Or your best friend who lives in Australia.
You love doing things by yourself and you love having one or two people you love to do them with, too. Very often you do crave, seek out and enjoy social interaction, (and you know very well how to successfully seek it out and enjoy it, contrary to popular belief about introverts) but in a choice between a noisy bar or a quiet book, book usually wins even when you remember those handful of times you had chosen bar instead and had much fun and met new, interesting people. Doing things by yourself is in general infinitely preferable to doing things with large groups of people you don't know, but doing things with a small group that includes one or two new people can be a wonderful way to make new friends.
People tell you there's no way you're an introvert, you're too social, because they just don't realize that you're happy and and socially functioning because you just spent all day hiking by yourself.
People try to say that being an extrovert is somehow better. I think those people just aren't listening.
Monday, August 16, 2010
How It Is, Not How You Want It To Be
I'd like to try to spend an entire day entertaining the, idea? can I go as far as conviction? that the planet isn't actually warming and/or planet warming isn't something to be alarmed about because it's not related to anthropogenic greenhouse gases. What if it all really is a hoax, really just incorrect?
(I'm working this week at Climate Science Camp, so expect a slue of Climate themed posts)
It is profound to contemplate this. Because that would be...better. We could focus our attention on other things, happily optimistically solvable things.
We'd still have to deal with peak oil (what are we gonna do when we run out?) and dependence on foreign oil and air pollution, which have some of the same solutions. But maybe we could afford take our time about it.
It's nice to contemplate, but I am pretty darn sure of my climate science, and the moral imperative of "well, the possibility of climate change is very plausible, the physics of climate change is pretty indisputable" is pretty serious. So for me it is only a happy thought experiment.
I have learned a great deal in my past six month stint as a research scientist on a project where the results we expected were just not what we got, and perhaps because I'm just a newcomer to the field of radio astronomy everything was just so hard to interpret.
You stare at graphs, at plots of independent variable vs dependent variable, and you try to understand what it means. You know what you want it to mean because that would mean it's easy or that's what your hypothesis says or that is what would make some frikkin' sense.
But you cannot, cannot, cannot allow what you want it to mean to influence what you can honestly defend with carefully considered application of verifiable knowledge. And even when you do your best you can't always explain everything, so you do your best to lay out plausible reasons for discrepancies while making very clear that you are only laying out the possibilities that you can rationally acknowledge in all of their limitations.
What happened for us is that we did not find evidence of quantum fine-structure electron energy transitions in ionized hydrogen, even though darn-it we should have, we got our resolution five times greater than necessary to see them, and we didn't for four different radio sources. We came up with explanation after explanation: dust which allows the conditions for the transitions isn't as dense as we thought, the hydrogen ions themselves are more dense than we thought, electric fields (which make electrons superimpose between levels) create a superposition which destroys the effect...yet we can get bounds on all of these things based on evidence and theory, and those bound still don't explain it. Sure, maybe the evidence or theory that gave us those bounds is wrong, but finding that isn't within the scope of what we're doing, so we just communicate the theories we proposed and why they don't explain it and leave it at that.
Even though we want to see the lines. But they don't really matter that much to us, and they don't matter at all (that we know of...) to the fate of planet Earth.
I'm sure some climate scientists interpret the graphs as C02 driven global warming because they want it to say that: career and funding depend on it, they like being alarmists (though I really can't understand why someone would like admitting a very unhappy possibility and having to convince happy people to be unhappy about it to), whatever. Certainly nobody likes being wrong, especially not so publicly and especially not after crying out in alarm.
Just like many climate skeptics don't accept climate change because, you know, that would just suck if it were true, and/or they've spent a good amount of work trying to say that it's not true and they don't want to be wrong either.
I am very glad I am in the position, somewhat, of not having to be just told things. The skeptics are lying to you because they want to spread doubt because they have stakes in the status quo and don't want to give up burning fossil fuels. (you know what, I don't much want to give up burning fossil fuels, all externalities removed). The global warming fraternity is little more than a religion, lying to you because of the established political interest and money in climate science and fear mongering for the sake of controlling others.
It's all noise. The facts are the charts. CO2, and temperature, some physics of molecules, some physics of the sun, some physics of weather. And how you interpret it. And buddy, you can interpret a chart all kinds of ways, yet one way is right in the sense that there is only one physical reality (or is there?) and it is certainly very nuanced and multi-faceted--and all the others are wrong.
So I could, be wrong. Climate change may not be man-made. It may not be catastrophic. The world for my children may not be a whole lot hotter than it is today, and my god, the world may really have a lot about it that is totally, happily, awesomely fine.
Nothing the skeptics have said have convinced me, however, that their interpretation is more correct than the interpretation the majority of scientists have come to, the interpretation that I have come to, is wrong. All the things they give me saying that the man-made warming interpretation is incorrect can be satisfactorily refuted.
But in the interest of full disclosure I'm a phyiscal scientist trained and trying to get a green job in renewable energy, I was raised a liberal-leaning (but very much center-reverting, at times) environmentalist, and I'm agnostic. (Because some kid this week asked when deciding how much to trust our statements.) So before you diss my opinion based on those data points, howabout you disclose yours.
(I'm working this week at Climate Science Camp, so expect a slue of Climate themed posts)
It is profound to contemplate this. Because that would be...better. We could focus our attention on other things, happily optimistically solvable things.
We'd still have to deal with peak oil (what are we gonna do when we run out?) and dependence on foreign oil and air pollution, which have some of the same solutions. But maybe we could afford take our time about it.
It's nice to contemplate, but I am pretty darn sure of my climate science, and the moral imperative of "well, the possibility of climate change is very plausible, the physics of climate change is pretty indisputable" is pretty serious. So for me it is only a happy thought experiment.
I have learned a great deal in my past six month stint as a research scientist on a project where the results we expected were just not what we got, and perhaps because I'm just a newcomer to the field of radio astronomy everything was just so hard to interpret.
You stare at graphs, at plots of independent variable vs dependent variable, and you try to understand what it means. You know what you want it to mean because that would mean it's easy or that's what your hypothesis says or that is what would make some frikkin' sense.
But you cannot, cannot, cannot allow what you want it to mean to influence what you can honestly defend with carefully considered application of verifiable knowledge. And even when you do your best you can't always explain everything, so you do your best to lay out plausible reasons for discrepancies while making very clear that you are only laying out the possibilities that you can rationally acknowledge in all of their limitations.
What happened for us is that we did not find evidence of quantum fine-structure electron energy transitions in ionized hydrogen, even though darn-it we should have, we got our resolution five times greater than necessary to see them, and we didn't for four different radio sources. We came up with explanation after explanation: dust which allows the conditions for the transitions isn't as dense as we thought, the hydrogen ions themselves are more dense than we thought, electric fields (which make electrons superimpose between levels) create a superposition which destroys the effect...yet we can get bounds on all of these things based on evidence and theory, and those bound still don't explain it. Sure, maybe the evidence or theory that gave us those bounds is wrong, but finding that isn't within the scope of what we're doing, so we just communicate the theories we proposed and why they don't explain it and leave it at that.
Even though we want to see the lines. But they don't really matter that much to us, and they don't matter at all (that we know of...) to the fate of planet Earth.
I'm sure some climate scientists interpret the graphs as C02 driven global warming because they want it to say that: career and funding depend on it, they like being alarmists (though I really can't understand why someone would like admitting a very unhappy possibility and having to convince happy people to be unhappy about it to), whatever. Certainly nobody likes being wrong, especially not so publicly and especially not after crying out in alarm.
Just like many climate skeptics don't accept climate change because, you know, that would just suck if it were true, and/or they've spent a good amount of work trying to say that it's not true and they don't want to be wrong either.
I am very glad I am in the position, somewhat, of not having to be just told things. The skeptics are lying to you because they want to spread doubt because they have stakes in the status quo and don't want to give up burning fossil fuels. (you know what, I don't much want to give up burning fossil fuels, all externalities removed). The global warming fraternity is little more than a religion, lying to you because of the established political interest and money in climate science and fear mongering for the sake of controlling others.
It's all noise. The facts are the charts. CO2, and temperature, some physics of molecules, some physics of the sun, some physics of weather. And how you interpret it. And buddy, you can interpret a chart all kinds of ways, yet one way is right in the sense that there is only one physical reality (or is there?) and it is certainly very nuanced and multi-faceted--and all the others are wrong.
So I could, be wrong. Climate change may not be man-made. It may not be catastrophic. The world for my children may not be a whole lot hotter than it is today, and my god, the world may really have a lot about it that is totally, happily, awesomely fine.
Nothing the skeptics have said have convinced me, however, that their interpretation is more correct than the interpretation the majority of scientists have come to, the interpretation that I have come to, is wrong. All the things they give me saying that the man-made warming interpretation is incorrect can be satisfactorily refuted.
But in the interest of full disclosure I'm a phyiscal scientist trained and trying to get a green job in renewable energy, I was raised a liberal-leaning (but very much center-reverting, at times) environmentalist, and I'm agnostic. (Because some kid this week asked when deciding how much to trust our statements.) So before you diss my opinion based on those data points, howabout you disclose yours.
Friday, August 13, 2010
Question.
Another strong language post. Sorry, it's just how I work.
When walking down the street, biking, appearing in public in general, etc, as a lone female or even in a small group of females, and being approached or followed in a wholly unfriendly, inpolite, aggressive and creepy manner by a male, what should you do?
Conventional wisdom: Ignore. Because getting pissed off could provoke him to be pissed-off-violent (and when you are walking and he is driving a car, I do actually think this is at least decent advice), being friendly is of course just being a slut (and I'm sorry, in that kind of situation my first inclination is NOT to be friendly), and saying no in any form is especially frowned on because to him it might just be an "actually I want you to try harder" head game. Even giving the finger, which is what I want to do, can be taken as a provocation for more aggressive action, because "fuck you" in the minds of some people means, literally, "you know, I want to fuck you."
There have been two times in my life when some random stranger aggressively displayed sexual interest in me. A third times was about wanting money, not sex, so I gave him my slice of pizza and when he kept following me I told him very pointedly to "have a nice evening." A fourth time I was in Spain, and went down the Wrong Street, and some serious hippie types started shouting profanity in every language they could think of trying to get a reaction by hitting on whatever language we spoke--I reacted in Spanish so they ignored me, but my two companions reacted in English, so they followed us for about three blocks shouting "Fuck you fuck you" in English, Spanish, and German the whole way. I suspect meth was involved, and I doubt it was about sex.
Anyway. The two times the approach has been genuinely oh-my-god-creepy, I have tried two approaches. The first time the guy was in his car and I was walking. I ignored. He followed me for a while. I ignored vigorously. His slurs escalated, my vigorous ignoring escalated, and let me tell you, I was Scared and trying to form a coherent strategy in my plan for effective and non-provoking-him-further escape. He eventually shouted profanity and drove away.
The second time I was by myself in a normally-not-shady-but-I-could-see-Cosmo-telling-me-never-to-go-there parking lot, approaching my car. A staggering man approached me very close, said some slurs, invited me to have a drink with him. Somehow, gut feeling said Ignore would be a very bad idea. So I met his eyes, I was polite but I was firm in my rejection, and kept my hands in front of me and my mace where I could reach it. To my utmost surprise, the politeness diffused him. He sort of nodded awkwardly and scampered off. He was clearly drunk, which is why Ignore Ignore might have just made him go violent. Or it might have made him just lackadaisical with following through on threats.
Sometimes I wonder if "no, thank you," would have kept the first situation from escalating, as well. It's hard to say. The truth is I have absolutely no desire to be polite to this kind of fuckwad. They do not deserve civility. But, at the same time, when you think you have no weapons, if you treat them firmly but somewhat humanely, especially if they are the kind who just Hates Those Stuck Up Bitches and is taking that out on you, you might diffuse that anger a little bit.
Enough to to reassure yourself that your conceal carry in still in place, or to get a good surveying of the surroudings and recognize multiple possibilities for what you could improvise as a weapon and how you could put something between the two of you, because politenes as a weapon is, come on, pathetic. The fact that firm politenes worked once makes me feel better, and I'd rather the world got along through peace and non-conflict and all that...but I don't live in a dream world. Situations like that make me want to conceal carry. They make me want self-defense training, the kind that requires years and money and a long period of having your ass handed to you in a controlled setting until you get to the point where you genuinely do have the ablity to hand someone else's to them if they cross you.
And then you can be polite all you want.
When walking down the street, biking, appearing in public in general, etc, as a lone female or even in a small group of females, and being approached or followed in a wholly unfriendly, inpolite, aggressive and creepy manner by a male, what should you do?
Conventional wisdom: Ignore. Because getting pissed off could provoke him to be pissed-off-violent (and when you are walking and he is driving a car, I do actually think this is at least decent advice), being friendly is of course just being a slut (and I'm sorry, in that kind of situation my first inclination is NOT to be friendly), and saying no in any form is especially frowned on because to him it might just be an "actually I want you to try harder" head game. Even giving the finger, which is what I want to do, can be taken as a provocation for more aggressive action, because "fuck you" in the minds of some people means, literally, "you know, I want to fuck you."
There have been two times in my life when some random stranger aggressively displayed sexual interest in me. A third times was about wanting money, not sex, so I gave him my slice of pizza and when he kept following me I told him very pointedly to "have a nice evening." A fourth time I was in Spain, and went down the Wrong Street, and some serious hippie types started shouting profanity in every language they could think of trying to get a reaction by hitting on whatever language we spoke--I reacted in Spanish so they ignored me, but my two companions reacted in English, so they followed us for about three blocks shouting "Fuck you fuck you" in English, Spanish, and German the whole way. I suspect meth was involved, and I doubt it was about sex.
Anyway. The two times the approach has been genuinely oh-my-god-creepy, I have tried two approaches. The first time the guy was in his car and I was walking. I ignored. He followed me for a while. I ignored vigorously. His slurs escalated, my vigorous ignoring escalated, and let me tell you, I was Scared and trying to form a coherent strategy in my plan for effective and non-provoking-him-further escape. He eventually shouted profanity and drove away.
The second time I was by myself in a normally-not-shady-but-I-could-see-Cosmo-telling-me-never-to-go-there parking lot, approaching my car. A staggering man approached me very close, said some slurs, invited me to have a drink with him. Somehow, gut feeling said Ignore would be a very bad idea. So I met his eyes, I was polite but I was firm in my rejection, and kept my hands in front of me and my mace where I could reach it. To my utmost surprise, the politeness diffused him. He sort of nodded awkwardly and scampered off. He was clearly drunk, which is why Ignore Ignore might have just made him go violent. Or it might have made him just lackadaisical with following through on threats.
Sometimes I wonder if "no, thank you," would have kept the first situation from escalating, as well. It's hard to say. The truth is I have absolutely no desire to be polite to this kind of fuckwad. They do not deserve civility. But, at the same time, when you think you have no weapons, if you treat them firmly but somewhat humanely, especially if they are the kind who just Hates Those Stuck Up Bitches and is taking that out on you, you might diffuse that anger a little bit.
Enough to to reassure yourself that your conceal carry in still in place, or to get a good surveying of the surroudings and recognize multiple possibilities for what you could improvise as a weapon and how you could put something between the two of you, because politenes as a weapon is, come on, pathetic. The fact that firm politenes worked once makes me feel better, and I'd rather the world got along through peace and non-conflict and all that...but I don't live in a dream world. Situations like that make me want to conceal carry. They make me want self-defense training, the kind that requires years and money and a long period of having your ass handed to you in a controlled setting until you get to the point where you genuinely do have the ablity to hand someone else's to them if they cross you.
And then you can be polite all you want.
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