(no subject)

[naath]

happydork gave me questions in the question meme. Reply saying "Kitties" and I'll ask you some.



1) I say this to all the girls, but my housemate has just been reading me six word stories -- write one?
(HALP! a writing assignment!)

Girl marries girl. Happiness. The End.


2) What's your favourite thing about physics?

Must I have *one* :-) I loved lots of things. Even when I was crap at them. I love that we look out at the world and we try to work out how it works and *then* go back to work out why we were wrong, it's adorkable, although that's all of SCIENCE really. I love the silly theories about QM even though I think they are mad. I love Inference and I Don't Care that it's Probably Not Physics Really. General Relativity is just amazing, but a pain in the brain.

3) If you could travel back in time to any era, any place in the world, for just a day (with, like, disease and things not being an issue), where would you pick and why?

I hate picking dammit! OK, pick one. Um. I should like to visit a castle at during the Dark Ages in East Anglia. What I want to find out is how they spun and wove and made clothes. And what they ate, and how they cooked it. I'm interested in the history of Things Women Did in both a theoretical and a practical way and early periods are poorly documented; other periods would also be very interesting of course, East Anglia is My Place, going and staring a the strange furrin folks would probably be kinda creepy.

I'd have to have a magic translator though. If I don't get a magic translator I think I could cope with early Tudor without total FAIL, and if I was going to actually have to talk maybe I'll go watch Dinosaurs instead.

4) Who's your favourite author and why?

I still hate picking! I'm fickle. I love whoever is about to have a book published that I can wait impatiently for or whoever's book I just finished reading and loved. PTerry is a pretty constant favorite, and I can always go to him for a laugh and an easy read. I adore Egan's use of Real Science in SF, I jumped up and down like an excited bunny rabbit when I got his latest short story collections (no, this doesn't assist in understanding the stories). Robert Jordan (now Brandon Sanderson dammit) has me on tenterhooks still, I would say he's a master of the interminable fantasy brick (if you hate the genre you'll hate it though).

And GODAMMIT women. Women Write Books Too Naath. I think my favorite female author is probably MZB because Darkover is just So Damn Cool (and she's totally up there with those men up there ^^). diziet has been lending me Cherryh novels and so far the impression is positive.

5) If I remember rightly -- and I'm not sure on this -- you went to a woman's college. Why did you pick it, and did it live up to what you'd hoped? (If I'm remembering wrong, then why didn't you pick a woman's college.)

I totes did. Newnham (Cambridge). Yes, I did pick it. I had gone to a girl's school, and found that the female-only learning environment had been a great advantage over other schools where girls were often ignored in favour of boys, especially in maths and sciences. Cambridge has an appalling gender ratio in the sciences (although my year was about 50/50 over all) and I really wanted to have female teachers (Newnham has a male DOS of maths, this is really SAD, it's like... they actually couldn't find a qualified woman who wanted to do it (I dunno the reality here, but they do seem to try to get women where they can)) and to start out knowing some other women on my course.

In that respect Newnham totally won - I certainly think I had more female teachers than I would have at other colleges (although physics does have some lecture courses given by women). Newnham has a long history of fighting for women's access to the university, and I was proud to be a (teeny) part of that. It's not isolated from men at all these days (although I'm sure some parents wish it were). I am a bit conflicted about the Rightness of all female colleges now that all the All Male ones have gone away, but I really was very happy there, how much of that is down to the all female nature I don't know.