Deirdre Saoirse Moen

Caitlin Flanagan of Vanity Fair has taken the art of the first paragraph to a new level in her article The Dark Power of Fraternities. I’m not going to quote it here. Just: coffee & cats warning, okay?

There should be a trigger warning on the subject matter of the rest, though, which is about the warring dynamics of student safety, fraternity traditions and independence (not all of which is bad), and universities knowing where their fundraising dollars come from and not wanting to upset the balance.

[T]he majority of all fraternity insurance claims involve booze—I have read hundreds of fraternity incident reports, not one of which describes an event where massive amounts of alcohol weren’t part of the problem—and the need to manage or transfer risk presented by alcohol is perhaps the most important factor in protecting the system’s longevity.

And, after a truly horrifying set of crisis-management steps:

As you should by now be able to see very clearly, the interests of the national organization and the individual members cleave sharply as this crisis-management plan is followed.

Indeed.

I love the descriptions of two sides of the fraternity vs. injured-by-fraternity representatives.

Fierberg is a man of obvious and deep intelligence, comfortable—in the way of alpha-male litigators—with sharply correcting a fuzzy thought; with using obscenities; with speaking derisively, even contemptuously, of opponents. He is also the man I would run to as though my hair were on fire if I ever found myself in a legal battle with a fraternity, and so should you.

…and…

And then there is Peter Smithhisler, who is the senior fraternity man ne plus ultra: unfailingly, sometimes elaborately courteous; careful in his choice of words; unflappable; and as unlikely to interrupt or drop the f-bomb on a respectful female journalist as he would be to join the Communist Party.

Worth a read even if you don’t actually care about fraternities.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

(Repost of something I wrote on LiveJournal in 2010)

A while ago, Jay Lake talked about his privilege in his cancer treatment, and it got me to thinking about my privilege in a number of contexts.

I’m white, and that comes with power in our culture, but it’s not that that makes my own set of privileges interesting, at least I don’t think so.

Without further ado:

1. My parents, grandparents, and so forth, went to college. My mother has documented family members going to college as far back as the 1400s. My great-grandfather had three doctorates, one of them an M.D. So I never had to struggle with family to get a better education. It was expected.

2. Not only did my father work in the sciences when I was born, so did my mother. Not only that, my mother appeared in a science textbook in the 1950s, as though that were perfectly normal. More to the point, I was raised thinking this were normal and common, and that is a very odd privilege indeed.

   

3. My parents worked at an atom smasher:

   

   Later, my dad worked in aerospace. He worked on one of the Viking Lander projects (his specialty was mass specs, and the GCMS project was affectionately known as the “Green-colored Martian sniffer”). An early project where I worked for him was measuring the helium line of the sun. Later, he won a NASA prize for his work on the TOMS (ozone-mapping mass spec) project.

4. While I certainly know people who know more decorated scientists than I’ve met personally, especially as an adult, the fact that I’d met any as a child is a form of privilege. (My father taught the Feynman course on physics as a grad student, just as one example, and was asked to write part of the handouts for it.)

5. When I was a teenager, my father suggested I take a programming class. After I finished it, he asked me if I wanted to do programming — that’s how I got started on my career. He thought, correctly, that I would enjoy it, and his urging me to take classes like that was partly motivated by the fact that he didn’t enjoy programming that much but did have programming work that needed to be done. So it wasn’t just a class, it was the beginning of 35 years of work (so far) in the industry.

   It was a long, long time before I met another female software engineer; I’ve never worked on a team that was even majority female. In many cases, I’ve been the only woman with a group of a handful to more than 30 male software engineers.

6. Even when I wanted to be a musician, both my parents were willing to support that choice if and only if I got adequate education for a plan B. I got lured in by the consistent money in programming and for quite a while resented that I’d gone that way, but later came to peace with it after a summer off busking in Ireland. It met enough of the music goal that I was able to move on with my life. This is not to say that I don’t burn out occasionally — I have.

7. After my mom remarried, we always had a plane and a boat, and tended to travel places. I got to see a lot of places that other people just don’t. San Clemente Island while it was being shelled in a military exercise, for example.San Miguel Island, where a ton of stuff floating in from Japan landed on the long beach, and its odd caliche forest:

   

8. I didn’t realize how odd my upbringing was until I was in college and we were asked to write about our mother’s cooking, and most people wrote about white kitchens and poultry. Here’s an excerpt from my piece:

By far my favorite sea dish was the one I usually got to prepare–abalone. Abalone clings very hard to rocks and has to be pried not only off the rock but out of its shell. Once out, it doesn’t have the decency to just sit there and behave. No, it has to crawl all over. Abalone is inherently tough, so I would pound it with a meat tenderizer as it crawled across the cutting board. I’d stop wailing on it with the metal tenderizer and watch it to see if it had stopped moving, but it would curl up its edges and slide away.
So it’s hard for me to remember that some people have to fight to attend even two-year college, hard for me to remember that some people fight with their family about careers in the sciences and so on. It’s just so normal for me.

Then again, I grew up thinking radioactive hazard signs were normal, too….

So, yeah, I’m the weird kid, but I come by it honestly.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

Our local community college, Foothill College, has one of the best sets of online classes I've seen. This fall quarter, they've got over 200 available. List of classes here.

Costs are particularly reasonable for in-state residents at $24/unit. Non-resident and foreign registration are higher (see further down that page), but still less than many other locales.

They've even figured out how to do things like two-dimensional design classes over the net. (Taking a photo of your work and uploading the photo.)

They've got a lot of computer-related skills and programming classes, so if you're looking to pump up your skills in that area, well, they're taught by Silicon Valley veterans: everything from HTML to CSS to XML to Illustrator to Photoshop to Java and PHP and all kinds of programming classes.

This is an amazing movie and, imho, Colin Firth deserves an Oscar for it.

I don't talk about my own speech problems earlier on in life. I never stammered, as the late king did, but I did freeze up when put on the spot.

My college required speech class in order to graduate. They still do. (link, p. 45)

I enrolled in speech several times -- seven, I believe -- before I finally was able to complete the class. (At that time, California community colleges permitted dropping classes without penalty.) I'd get almost to the speech, then drop the class in a fit of sheer terror. Once I gave a speech, froze in the middle, then dropped the class.

The last time I took it, the teacher had the rather clever idea of having everyone introduce themselves, say one quirk about themselves, then introduce everyone to the left of them. By the time we got all the way around (about 35 people), we had all stumbled over each others' names and there was a cameraderie about it. We'd pretty much all embarrassed ourselves, so might as well continue to do so in a group you knew, right?

That was in 1989, and I was able to get through the class. You know I have spoken at science fiction conventions (the first of which was a Worldcon, no pressure), and I've spoken at LinuxWorld and MacWorld Expo. I've taught classes, and not just in grad school and as a part of my bachelor's.

It took me a while to get my groove as a speaker. What I discovered: I can't really write a word-for-word speech and deliver it. That's a sure way to freeze me up. I need to write down things I want to talk about, maybe time it some, add some extra stuff in there in case I go quickly because I'm nervous. Then I'm fine, or at least fine enough.

So I can imagine how much worse it would be for someone who suddenly became king because his brother abdicated -- and he'd always been a stammerer, and he had to deliver important speeches.

Truly worth seeing.