Weekend Reading: The Happy Things Edition

It is a long holiday weekend here, and I'm not in the mood to think about any of the serious topics that have been all over my various feeds this week. So let's just have some happy things.

First up, Mr. Snarky found this sweet animated short just a little too late to include in last week's post.

I found this post from Parisienne Mas Presque charming. However, it brought a funny incident from my time in Sweden back to me. There was one older gentleman who was determined to have me prove his pet theory about how ignorant Americans are. I was torn- he was right that we Americans are often ignorant of things that happened in older countries, but I dislike being used as a patronizing object lesson. So when he was going on and on about how America doesn't have any buildings as old as some church in his home town I couldn't help but remark: "oh, but we do! There are buildings in my home state of Arizona that date from 1300 or before." He spluttered something incredibly offensive about those not being "real" but then left me alone.

This is a much nicer story than mine, of how Marilyn Monroe helped Ella Fitzgerald get her career established.

I found this short advice post oddly compelling. Perhaps because I love to fall down internet rabbit holes?

But this advice from Bill Watterson is better (and perfectly illustrated by Gavin Aung Than).

And on that note, I'll close this post. Enjoy your weekend, everyone!

Reclaiming Time to Do

My little corner of the internet has been suffering through another of its periodic outbreaks of earnest male contemplation about the relative dearth of women in the tech world, and as before, the diagnosis is a problem with the women. We're just not interested, see. We didn't evolve the patience and focus required to code.

I won't link to the latest outcropping of this, because really, you've read it all before. And I won't waste my time debunking that nonsense, because you've probably read all of that before, too.

OK, I'll allow myself one indignant splutter about how men who think women haven't evolved the ability to focus and be patient know as little about traditionally female work as they do about evolutionary biology, but then I'll move on.

I've decided that instead of spending energy defending the idea that I might be capable of doing awesome tech work, I'm just going to try to do some awesome tech work. This is not to belittle the work other women are doing of swatting this nonsense down. I think that is vital, useful work. I just need a little break to focus on the things that drew me to computers in the first place.

Namely, the fact that I love organizing information and computers are really good at that.

Also, I like creating things, and computers let me do that despite my relatively poor hand-eye coordination.

My paid work is mostly management these days, so I have to turn to my personal project for some tech joy. The problem, of course, is how to make time to work on my project when I am expected to be at my paying job roughly 40 hours per week, and I also want to spend time with my family.

I've been squeezing project work in around the edges, tinkering with it during "quiet time" on the weekends, or while the kids watch a show after bath (they're both pretty wiped out after full screen-free days at day care and camp, so I refuse to care if they ask for a Sid the Science Kid before bed). I have made really good progress, but have been dancing around the edge of a deeper technical issue I need to solve. The issue needs some uninterrupted quiet time to really tackle, as opposed to the constantly interrupted noisy time that is more the norm in my life.

So I decided to try something different. After dinner on Tuesday, I packed my project laptop, project notebook, and a couple of relevant books into my bag and drove to our local library. I set up at one of the work tables, availed myself of their free wi-fi, and tried to solve my problem.

I intended to stay for one and a half hours, but I left after an hour, convinced that the experiment had failed. I hadn't been able to solve my problem, I had just read a bunch of websites that seemed to be about a similar topic, but not quite the topic I was trying to address. I was starting to feel a bit lost, like I'd bit off a bigger problem than I could solve. The guy across from me was streaming something with a lot of crashes and screaming, and despite his headphones, it was getting on my nerves. The woman across from me kept getting phone calls, and her ringtone was some annoying pop song. So I drove home before I yelled at anyone at the library, accepted the happy hugs of my kids, and figured I'd have to try again some other night.

But an interesting thing happened later that night. I finished reading Pumpkin her bedtime stories, and did the dishes. Since it was only about 9 p.m., I got out my laptop again, and poked some more and my problem. And at some point, the answer came into focus. I didn't have time to implement it, but I am pretty sure I know what I need to do now. I just need to carve out another hour or so in which to do it.

Where to get that hour, though? I don't want to miss too many after dinner play sessions with the kids, even though Mr. Snarky is perfectly happy to let me do so.

I probably also know the answer to this time management project, but haven't figured out how to get there, yet. About a year ago, I instituted a routine of getting up 30 minutes earlier than I "had" to and spending that time on me- exercising and writing, mainly. It was a great thing, while it lasted, which was about 9 months. I've unfortunately let that habit die out this summer. Petunia's bedtimes stretch to 9:30, if I do anything at all after that, I don't get to bed in time to get a full 8 hours of sleep before my alarm goes off at 6, and I am someone who really does better on 8 hours of sleep. I envy people like my husband, who are perfectly happy with 6 hours! But that is not me, and there is no way I know of to change that, so I have to work with the constraints I've been given.

I could try to do my project work at night, after the kids are in bed, but I'm usually done with mental heavy lifting by that point. I can type out rambling blog posts like this one, but not work through technical conundrums.

I think I need to reclaim my "before breakfast" time. My initial experiment with getting up early was inspired by reading Laura Vanderkam's "What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast" ebook. It has just recently come out paperback form, bundled with the other two "time makeover" ebooks she wrote and some extras just for the paperback. Perhaps I should take that as a sign from the universe that it is time to figure out a better routine for myself, get to bed earlier, and get up in the morning for some project work time.

Which means that I should stop writing this post and go to bed!

The Method to My Meals

Tragic Sandwich has been doing a series of posts on "Mom-friendly meals" around the premise that we all have to eat, but dammit, what a pain in the ass that's become.

I can sympathize. And did sympathize, in a tweet about the PITA that is meal-planning, which prompted me to say I'd post my meal planning method at some point.  (Is anyone surprised that I have a meal planning method? I thought not. Although the fact that I have a plan for how to make a plan is perhaps a new level of optimization, even for me.)

The method has evolved over my 6+ years as a mother, and continues to evolve. In fact, one of the best parts of it only came to me in the last few months. Part of that is because as my kids get older, this is one thing that actually is getting easier. But the insight that came in the last few months? As you'll see, that was just me suddenly getting a clue.

Basically, my method boils down to having a pattern (because the kids like predictability) with variation at every point in the pattern (so that the adults don't become catatonic from the boredom of the same damn meals, over and over). I should say upfront that we prioritize having family dinners, not because I think that is The One True Way to Eat but because we like to eat together and there is no way I'd get multiple different meals on the table in time for that. Also, it seems to increase the likelihood of the kids trying new things. The actual trying of a new thing remains a completely unpredictable stochastic event, but these events seem to occur more frequently when we are all having a "family meal." Of course, this is just my kids. Your kids might be more likely to try something new if it is presented to them as a special, cool, kids only thing. Kids are annoying like that.

Also, I am only responsible for dinners Monday - Friday. Mr. Snarky does weekend dinners, and for the most part I happily accept whatever he wants to cook, even though that usually means that the kids get either plain pasta (because he's including a pasta salad) or chicken nuggets (because nothing else he is cooking stands an iota of a chance of being consumed by one of our children). The exception was when he served grilled lamb with an asparagus-goat cheese pasta salad two weekends in a row. I will eat lamb, asparagus, and goat cheese, but I'm not particularly enthused about any of them, and having all three in one dinner two Saturday nights running was just too much for me. I mostly ate bread, just like Ellyn Sater says picky eaters should.

Anyway. My pattern is:

Monday: Baked good + healthy liquid

In the cooler months, this is soup + pumpkin parmesan scones, with the variety for the grown ups provided by varying the soup. Sometimes the soup is homemade (that cream-free Cream of Zucchini soup I keep threatening to post, a great crock pot potato and carrot soup, a curried butternut squash soup I love) and sometimes it is from a box/can/jar/whatever (Trader Joes has some good options).

In the warmer months, this is more likely to be waffles or scones with smoothies. Tonight, I tried out popovers.

Easily produced honey substrate

Popovers are ridiculously fast and easy, so they'll probably become part of the rotation. Also, Pumpkin liked them so much that she ate three. Petunia wouldn't try them. This was exactly the reverse of what I expected. Kids are annoying like that.

If the baked good is something light like popovers or waffles, I will sometimes make bacon, too. Everyone in our house likes bacon, except for Pumpkin.

Tuesday: Leftovers

Tuesday nights are workout nights, so I don't cook, I heat up leftovers from the freezer. Mr. Snarky generally produces the adult's leftovers on one of his nights cooking. I periodically have to make mac and cheese for the kids, and that is usually the kids' leftovers. Petunia also likes to eat leftover pancakes. Pumpkin, for some reason, doesn't eat pancakes, even though she'll eat waffles, and now popovers. Kids are annoying like that.

Wednesday: Tortilla Night

The kids love tortillas with butter and cheese, and refuse to try even a nibble of any other filling I have produced to date. So I let them eat the tortillas and cheese, and make a wide range of fillings for our tacos. If I am feeling guilty for not eating fish, I make Fish Hater's Fish Tacos. Or I do sloppy joe filling. Or- and here is my recent flash of insight- I brown bite sized chicken pieces and dump any number of jarred sauces on top of them.

So far, I have found two jarred sauces I really like: Iron Chef Orange-Ginger glaze (I dust the chicken with seasoning salt and five spice before browning, and add enough soy sauce to about 1/3 of a jar of the Iron Chef glaze to make a nice sauce) and Pace Garlic-Lime Verde Restaurant Style salsa (I dust the chicken with seasoning salt and cumin before browning, and use roughly 1/2 of the jar of salsa).

Easy fusion tacos

My current seasoning salt is a grinder with sea salt, some black pepper, and some red pepper flakes in it- so nothing fancy.

I serve the Orange-Ginger tacos with feta, cilantro, and chopped up mixed greens, and the Garlic-Lime Verde salsa tacos with Mexican-style preshredded cheese (which I am reasonably sure is nothing like what you get in Mexico, but makes great quesadillas, so we always have this on hand), diced tomatoes, chopped mixed greens, and cilantro if I have it.

So far, I have had one failure, which was a lemongrass sauce that wasn't bad, but was sort of bland, and I couldn't really figure out how to spice it up. I'll be trying more, though, as this feels like a magic "eat something different!" option for the adults.

If it is not too hot and I don't forget to turn the oven on when I get home, I serve the tacos with sweet potato fries, so that I can pretend my kids ate a vegetable.

Thursday: Pasta Night

I rotate through plain pasta, gnocchi, and cheese tortellini. The kids will eat all of those. Pumpkin likes them plain, with just butter and cheese (Italian style preshredded cheese. I have no shame.) Petunia likes plain to be like her sister, but then always asks for some with red sauce, too. The red sauce comes from a jar. I read the ingredients on the Classico jar and realized they were essentially what I'd use to make the sauce from scratch, so I buy it. Sometimes I get wild and divide the pasta three ways and put pesto on the grown ups' pasta. But usually not, because that seems a bit ridiculous. If we're having plain pasta, I often microwave some meatballs, too. I found a brand with reasonable ingredients, so I just buy frozen. When the kids get older, maybe I'll try making them. Pumpkin won't eat meatballs, but Petunia loves them.

Sometimes I get really adventurous and try a new pasta recipe. As long as I save plain pasta out for Pumpkin (and Petunia, if she doesn't like the look of the recipe I make),  I can get away with this. I like Cooking Light and an old cookbook of mine called While the Pasta Cooks for pasta recipe ideas.

Pasta is served with either a green salad or a veggie, usually sauteed zucchini, but occasionally Picky Eater's Green Beans.

Friday: Pizza Night

Either we order in, eat leftovers from the last time we ordered in, or eat a frozen pizza.  Basically, by Friday night, I don't care enough to worry about the source of the pizza. I do make a green salad (mixed greens + cherry tomatoes + walnuts + parmesan + (sometimes) carrot sticks + balsamic vinaigrette) to go with the pizza, though.

That's the plan. The variety afforded by tortilla night in particular keeps me and Mr. Snarky reasonably happy with this plan, but it is predictable enough that I don't have to spend heaps of time pouring over recipe books on Sunday morning, which is generally when I write the menu plan and the grocery list.

What's your meal planning system? Or do you just wing it?

Weekend Edition: The Why Do We Have to Make Life So Unfair Edition

I've got a bunch of links about the various way we make life unfair.

Note: I updated this post a few hours after I posted it. We've instituted a new bedtime routine with Petunia that involves snuggling for three songs and then sitting next to her bed while she goes to sleep and reading on my Kindle. Tonight, I caught up on links in tweets I favorited, and found some additional links relevant to the topics in this post, so I added them.

First up, Jordan Weissmann had an interesting blog post at the Atlantic about the characteristics that correlate with successful entrepreneurship, and whether these characteristics might be tolerated more by society when they are exhibited by white men.

Perhaps women and minorities are underrepresented as entrepreneurs because when we exhibit traits like rule breaking we're more heavily sanctioned for it... but I suspect plain old fashioned bias has something to do with it, too, and this post by Lisa Suennen about what the lack of a handshake means is a good example of the bias that persists, even in people who don't necessarily think of themselves as biased.

Another way we might be creating an environment that leads to under-representation of people of color and people from less wealthy backgrounds in top positions is by short changing their educational opportunities. Bad Mom, Good Mom has another one of her excellent posts looking behind the test scores that I really wish all education reformers would read and really think about.

This post from Simply Statistics is quite suggestive on the role of poverty in educational problems. Just think how many other problems we might find solved if we ever truly tackled poverty in this country.

And then, of course, there is just the tiring accumulation of bullshit. I agree with Allison Wright: I want to live in a world with less of it.

Some of the bullshit that accumulates is the way characters who are not white men are portrayed in films, and they way they are just not there. You may have heard of the Bechdel test for films, but I really like the Mako Mori test the Tumblr user Chaila proposes. I found her post via this post, which I think was tweeted out by William Gibson. I sent both of these to Mr. Snarky to help him understand why I wanted to see Pacific Rim but refused to see Elysium. I'd heard that in Pacific Rim the world-saving was inclusive. Elysium, on the other hand, is a bit like a film implementation of the white savior mythology.

Roxane Gay makes a similar argument at Salon about how we set the bar for diversity on TV too low.

I am not a big consumer of either TV or movies. Maybe that is because I rarely feel like they expand my horizons, whereas I can easily find books that do so.

Finally, Lindy West has a really good post up about fat shaming and thin shaming and just the policing of women's bodies in general. She is responding to a problematic post by a thin woman who feels shamed, and acknowledges that slogans like "real women have curves" are misguided and hurtful, but does a good job of explaining where they come from. And she says this, which I think is a good rule to live by in general:

"When people act out against their own marginalization (even in unhealthy, hurtful, misguided ways), I try as hard as I can to react with empathy and not defensiveness."

In case you aren't familiar with fat shaming as a problem, this post from Ragen Chastain gives a suitably horrifying example.

So, that's a lot of frustrating things. Let's end on a bittersweet but uplifting note, with a post from Jay Lake, a Sci-Fi writer who has cancer, giving us his special dying person wisdom.

" I have been thinking a lot about what life means to me, and what I see it meaning to people who seem to enjoy their own life the most. I come down to two basic concepts.

Be kind, and don’t miss your opportunities."

It is good advice. I think I'll try to take it.

Innovation, Growth, and Hackable Pacemakers (among Other Things)

Awhile back, a NY Magazine article about the ideas of Robert Gordon, an economist who thinks that the growth experienced for the majority of American history is a historical anomaly.

It is a long read, but an interesting one. The basic premise is that the economic growth that has fueled what we consider to be the "American dream" was an anomaly, caused by a huge boost in productivity from the back-to-back industrial revolutions in Europe and America, and that no such productivity boost is on the horizon. He argues, in essence, that our boom is over for good, and our current anemic recovery is actually our new normal.

I am no economist,  so I can't really delve into his methods and judge his data. But I am inclined to think he undersells the potential productivity gains from our current information revolution. He seems to be arguing that because we haven't had huge gains from the advent of computers, the information age can't deliver such gains.


I disagree with both parts of that statement. I think we have had a lot of gains from the information revolution- it is just that a lot of them are focused more on leisure than productivity. Think about the huge difference in how you do things like find a restaurant. Mr. Snarky and I were up in Orange County for a little break last weekend, and he found us two excellent breakfasts just by using Google Maps and the online ratings, all accessed from his phone. Ten years ago, we would have either asked at the hotel (and been directed to their own restaurant), had breakfast at a chain, or just driven around and taken our chances. (Or maybe I would have pulled out my HandSpring and used the Vindigo app I loved back then.)

So it isn't that information technology isn't capable of transforming the way we do things. Maybe we just haven't aimed it at the right problems yet.

I'm not sure how to change that. I, after all, work in a corner of information technology that is far removed from things like finding good breakfast spots in an new city. I work to use IT to make scientists more efficient and productive, and I think my team does a pretty good job at this. But there is still a lot of room for improvement. Why don't we improve faster? Well, we don't have the budget to do as many projects as we've identified, and there are probably quite a few other projects out there that we haven't even identified. There are almost certainly scientists at my company who are working through problems with no inkling that computers could help solve those problems. And there are definitely scientists putting up with a manual process just because we haven't had time to come automate it yet.

And that is at a company full of scientists, with a higher than average amount of money.

Imagine how many other corners of the work world are even worse off, while we meanwhile expend vast sums of money and programmer effort optimizing our shopping experiences and making it easier to find restaurants.

Don't get me wrong. I am happy with my better shopping experiences and easy to find good breakfasts. And I think a lot of those innovations have done genuine good in the world- think, for instance, about how many small entrepreneurs flourish in the ecosystems Etsy and Amazon have created.

I just think that we could also apply some of that same technology to less flashy areas.

Maybe we need more people to get a handle on what computers can do.  It seems like there is too much of a disconnect between the people who understand the problems and the people who understand what is possible with computers. I've been thinking about this a lot recently, after reading Noah Veltman's post about his imposter syndrome, and how the world is not divided into Coders and Muggles.

I don't think everyone needs to be a professional level coder, or even that everyone needs to know how to code at any level... but maybe we'd be better off if a lot more people were exposed to coding, and learned to understand what sorts of problems computers are good at solving, and what is involved in solving them.

For instance, I heard a story on NPR a few weeks ago about the fact that someone has discovered that a lot of medical devices, like pacemakers and insulin pumps, are hackable. (I couldn't find the NPR story, but here is a Forbes story on the same topic.) This was a completely avoidable problem. All that was required was for the people involved in developing and regulating these devices to recognize the risk. They didn't have to understand how to protect against the risk, but it sure would have been better if they had understood computers well enough to know to hire someone who did understand how to protect against that risk.

I also think we need to work for more tech diversity. I've blogged on this before- I firmly believe that if we had a more diverse group of techies, we would see technology applied to a more diverse set of problems. No matter what white men on the internet tell you, there is no reason to think that white and Asian men are uniquely suited for understanding STEM. There just isn't. In all the capabilities that matter for this, the difference within each sex is bigger than the difference between the sexes, and that is even when we measure after years of conditioning in differences. (Lise Eliot does a good job of summarizing the available research in her book Pink Brain, Blue Brain, which I discuss a bit here and here.) Roughly the same is true of the various races, although I don't have that data at hand. As long as STEM fields remain so completely dominated by white men, I am confident in saying that we are wasting a lot of talent in these areas.

And no, I'm not worried about a glut of STEM trained folks in the job market. For one thing, I think that is an acceptable cost to pay for having not just a more fair society but more diversity in problems tackled. Also, I just argued that maybe we should expand that job market. But more importantly, I really, truly, think we need to stop equating studying STEM fields with having to have a career in STEM.

I've linked before to Shawn Lent's post arguing for the importance of having artists in a wide variety of fields. I agree with her argument, and think it also applies to scientists and techies. The skills and ways of approaching problems that you learn by studying these fields would bring a lot to other areas of endeavor.

Yes, I know- people are frustrated to spend so many years training for one career only to discover they need to go find another career. But how much of that is due to the expectations we set going in and the lack of respect we accord to people who have left science and pursued other options? Would we ring our hands so much about "wasting" the time to get a PhD if instead of seeing it as a track that leads to only one destination, we saw it as a chance to get paid (albeit not a lot) to work on some really interesting things and pick up some skills that could be used to steer a person to a lot of different destinations?

Of course, I am fundamentally an optimist, and that colors my opinions. However, I don't ridicule or dismiss the pessimists. As I mentioned back when I wrote about reading the  Rational Optimist, I think pessimists do society a great service by pointing out things on which we need to focus problem solving resources.

I am also fascinated by the irrefutable fact that societies sometimes collapse. One of my favorite books is The Dream of Scipio,by Iain Pears, which explores what happens when a society collapses, and how individuals find their way through the chaos and upheaval.

So I do not discount the possibility that Robert Gordon is right, and that we will never return to the growth levels to which we have become accustomed, and that if this is true, our society faces some grave problems that could in fact bring it down around our ears.

We're not to this stage yet.

However, even if we really are at end of productivity growth from innovation, we could probably still save our society. We have a lot of wealth now. Truly, we do. It is just incredibly unequally distributed. If we can no longer rely on a rising tide to raise all ships, maybe we need a blossoming of innovation in politics and in our thinking about how we organize our society. Maybe we need a period of increased productivity in ideas.

And maybe this is actually something that the information revolution is already helping to bring about- think of all the people (like me! But also a host of really smart academics and industry types) whose ideas you would never have read even 10 years ago. Sure, there is a downside to the fact that anyone can publish their thoughts on the internet (e.g., The Birthers) but maybe there is a big upside yet to be realized, too. I don't think we are there yet. It is too hard to find the useful ideas in amongst all of the crazies, and it is too hard for the people who produce the ideas and take the time to write about them to get paid for their efforts. We cannot hope to have a big boost in the generation and discussion of ideas if we expect people to produce and explain ideas for free. But- here's my fundamental optimism again!- I think we could solve those problems, and I think we could come up with the ideas we need to either innovate our way to growth or innovate our way to a method of handling the lack of growth.

Maybe I'm wrong. But I think we should try.

This turned into a long, rambly post. Bonus points for anyone who stuck with it to the end! And I'd love to read your comments on any of the topics I touched on.