Stuff worth reading.

I want to share some of the items I’ve been reading elsewhere. Some of them strike me as having a very “summertime” feel to them, while others are just about the non-seasonal issues that are part of life.

• At Cocktail Party Physics, there’s a truly excellent post on rollercoasters, including some history behind the coolest way to make your stomach drop. (Last time I took the sprogs to The Tech, they had a station where you could design your own rollercoaster ride, putting together loops, corkscrews, and straight rises and falls, then experience it on a simulator. It frustrated the sprogs, however, that they were prohibited from making some of the loops and corkscrews as tall or as tight as they wanted, owing to the built in constraint in the program that you couldn’t string together elements in such a way that the G-forces might kill the riders. Did anyone ever die from the G-forces in a simulation? Sheesh!)
• If part of your summertime chore list includes repainting, you’ll want to check out Lab Lemming’s illustrated argument against sanding first. Hey, we just saved you some time there!
• SkookumChick writes about the “Design for the Other 90%” exhibit at Cooper-Hewitt and reminds us that a lot of the engineering that has the potential to really make life better isn’t all about robots and iPods.
• Geeky Mom has an excellent three part series on the influences that set her on a path other than science. Looking at the trajectory of any life, it’s hard to know exactly what sends us in one direction rather than another, but I think it’s a useful exercise, every now and then, to think about how small differences long ago might have affected where we are now.
• FemaleScienceProfessor is disappointed in a recent radio story about dual-career academic couples:
  

  There are couples who have made the 2-career situation work. These examples are not so rare as they used to be, and it wouldn’t be hard to dig up an example or two. Instead, the story ends with this sad quotation from one member of the long-separated academic couple: “God, I don’t want to do this forever. It’s such a hard existence.”

  It’s true that it would be misleading to say that the world (academic or otherwise) is working just as we want it to, but showing us some examples of ways people are getting it to work better might inspire us to keep pushing things in the right direction.

• In a similar vein, Jenny F. Scientist considers why it’s so hard to imagine the right balance of being a PI and a parent:
  

  The dilemma is about guilt. If I can’t have what I want- intellectually satisfying work AND children- I don’t want to play that game. If I have to pay a high price for motherhood, especially in the academic world, I don’t want to be there. But maybe I should. If we, as women, don’t fight the good fight to make it better for the next generation in science, are we at fault? If we choose to leave ‘science’, i.e. the work of a PI in academia, is it because we don’t want it enough?…
  Academia tells me that I should stay and make sacrifices for the greater good. I should see the barriers in front of me, and they should be overcome by the force of my desire to be professorial. I should compare what I want to what I can have in academia, and give up what I want. I should see the price of motherhood in academia and elsewhere, and pay it.
  I know that this kind of system benefits no-one: not parents, not single people, and certainly not single parents. At the same time, I have never once heard a young man in my class say ‘I don’t know if I could have children and tenure.’ As long as women are asked to pay such a high price, the percentage of women scientists will creep up ever so slowly…. just like it’s doing now.

  It’s hard not to think that sometimes the system changes when people make decisions that don’t satisfy some rational calculation. But those people do get tired.

What are your must-read posts this week?