leading females.

books. Oh, how I love them. Though I've read few 'for fun' books in the past 5 years than ever before, I still love to read - I'm currently working through The Most Human Human, testing out my new Kindle :) Recently, when I was back at my parents home, I was searching through the bookcases and experienced a small 'aha!' moment - while I know my independent and feminist tendencies today are partially a product of being a first born and my awesome roommate, I realized that the majority of books I picked up during some pretty formative years all featured strong female protagonists, doing all sorts of fun things.

All my boxcar children books. Not pictured: all the ones I borrowed from the library! Love the independence and fun times had by all the Alden siblings.

With the number of historical fiction / biographies I read, it's surprising I didn't love history more. I certainly didn't read any books about chemists :/

 I had two big loves growing up: horses and ballet. Granted, there are not many books about young ballerinas, so my shelf has many many more books about horses, usually featuring a girl. And while some people may think ballet is super girly and wondering why it's listed here, I remember Drina as being a very strong and independent young woman who worked hard at her craft.

I didn't seem to enjoy many books with leading male characters, probably because I didn't identify with them as much as a female lead - just going to show me, once again, how powerful the young adult literature genre can be.

Oh, and American Girl dolls / stories - love, love, love them. So accessible for young girls and subtly taught so many good life skills. Plus, my first foray into designing clothing was for my doll, Molly. Oh, and my cat, but she wasn't as great about posing as Molly.....

Other favorites included pretty much any book by Tamara Pierce and many of Anne McCaffrey's books about the dragons of Pern:

to read: Sophie's World, Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Space Trilogy, The Evolution of Adam, and sooo many others!

to finish: The Most Human Human, The Design of Everyday Things (had to go back to the library :/), The Problem of Pain, Hood, Apollo's Angels, and sooo many others!

Clearly, I'm not just reading books with female protagonists now :) but I am glad I'm finally finding some non-fiction to enjoy. Generally I find non-fic kind of boring, but that's because I grew up on fantasy fiction....

Also, does anyone have good sources to borrow ebooks? I have four different library cards but can always used more resources :)

{apollo's angels}

Ballet...was a system of movement as rigorous and complex as any language. Like Latin or ancient Greek, it had rules, conjugation, declensions. Its laws, moreover, were not arbitrary; they corresponded to laws of nature. Getting it "right" was not a matter of opinion or taste: ballet was a hard science with demonstrable physical facts. It was also, and just as appealingly, full of emotions and the feelings that come with music and movement. It was blissfully mute, like reading. Above all, perhaps, there was the exhilarating sense of liberation that came when everything worked.


- a PhD graduate student in physics to the author of apollo's angels. 


probably one of my favorite descriptions of ballet.

{via ballerina project}

10000 Hours

Recently, I read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. Since I don't have the most fantastic memory in the world, I don't actually remember it in too detail (and let's be honest, I've shoved a whole boatload of new grad school related information into my brain since I finished it....) but it was an interesting read. If you haven't read it, it revolved around analyzing the context of successful people in a variety of arenas, debunking our favorite American myth of the self-made man. I'm not sure I agree with everything he generalized, but it was fascinating to learn that Jan-March are the best months for a hockey player to born in and that June - Aug are the best for people who want to play baseball. Of course, your cultural context can also indicate how successful you can become, but it was interesting to see that idea applied in the case of Korean airline crashes. Before not-too-long-ago, your chances of crashing were drastically higher if your pilots were Korean, due to the hierarchical culture and communication issues it created.

{If you want a taste of what the book covers, you should head over to RadioLab and listen to their podcast interview with Gladwell covering some of this book (but it could also be this podcast, I can't remember exactly). It's the reason I picked it up. Plus, RadioLab is just plain awesome!}

Long story short, he also subscribes to the 10000 hour theory - that the greatest people are only great at what they do because they put in the physical work hours, inferring that anyone can be good at anything, as long as the put in the time (the benchmark being ~10,000 hours). I'm not sure that's entirely true, but lots of good/correct practice always seems to pay off in the long run.

(I also have related thoughts about the kind of less positive side of this idea, that it's really difficult to get out of the conditions you were born into, but they aren't formulated enough at this point in time to merit more words than this side note.)

Why bring this up at 1:30 in the morning? Because I needed a brain break. And because, right now, I'm hoping this time I'm putting into learning about photovoltaics, nanomaterials, and writing this report for my advisor counts towards my 10,000 hours.

Outliers  is one of the few books I actually have with me in Seattle, so let me know if anyone wants to borrow it for some fun reading!

And I always think a good blog post needs a picture, so here's one of my favorite Hubble pictures :)