UW Update Tuesday Mar. 2

1.     UW Update Tuesday Mar. 2

a.     Finished paper for Cows

b.     Went to Cows; interesting discussion of an excerpt from “Sexual Politics of Meat”. The author, Carol Adams, made a compelling case that meat-eating is linked to male cultural superiority. Meat was often reserved for male household members when it was not affordable for everyone; meat is associated with men in cookbooks, in analogies about strength and “beefiness”, in sometimes fallacious nutritional arguments delegating meat to the “worker” of the house. To a lesser extent, meat is associated with class and race (this was more true when meat was scarcer and when racial theories categorizing “savages” as animals, closer to plants in the “Great Chain of Being” quasi-evolutionary thinking, held sway; now interesting changes have occurred; lower-class workers may be more likely to embrace the manliness of meat, maybe because they are more likely to celebrate the associated physical strength). The second part of the syllogism concerns the positive connotations of meat and beef and the negative connotations of vegetables. To “beef up” an argument is to improve it; to be a “vegetable” is to be passive. Traditional dinners emphasize the central, climactic meat course. In conclusion, since meat = man, vegetable = woman, and meat > vegetable, man > woman, and meat-eating culture reinforces gender biases.

c.      Eat lunch in HUB; read awesome Ribbonfarm synthesis http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/02/25/the-mother-of-all-2x2s

d.     Head to research commons. Help Daniel with physics homework. Tricky to find and convey the right balance between intuition and mathematics. Daniel prefers working from calculations, so I argue benefits of visualization, so Daniel wants to visualize more complicated concept, but this is really hard, so I end up having to conclude that once an idea (relativistic velocity) reaches a certain amount of complexity (and you haven’t picked up simplifying intuition yet) you basically have to think about it in terms of a simpler model (math). Hopefully the math later leads into the intuition.

e.     Met with Ayush and pounded out interview questions.

f.      Interviewed awesome CS professor Jeff Heer, who works with data visualizations, runs a startup, and manages multiple PhD students, but was somehow able to give us half an hour of his time. He told us  about his crazy career path and the work he’s doing now.

g.     Returned to dorm. Played some basketball at Denny Field.

h.     Went to Glee Club, where I regained my feel for the internal space that allows me to sing high notes, which I had temporarily lost.

i.       Grabbed some dinner and read physics.

j.       Returned to dorm, worked on Cows and Teaching projects. Read for Cows. Grabbed Rick’s. Wrote this log and hit the hay.