Christmas in Cambridge!

City Hall with XMas lights. So much for secularism.



Big (and crooked!) tree on Market Square in the centre of town.




Statue with a Santa hat on. That statue is a story high, so who knows how Santa dropped his hat there...




Market fruit stall selling holly wreaths and mistletoe. Really!




Kids at the Clare Hall carol sing, mince pies in hand. (As someone who loves to sing but can't carry a tune, I LOVE loud, festive carol sings. I've been to 4...)


Christmas is a BFD here.
Every college and club and group of friends holds carol sings (where they sing our familiar carols to DIFFERENT TUNES- whoa) and has Christmas parties with mulled wine and mince pies. There are lots of set-in-stone traditions like these for Christmastime, and absolutely no recognition of people who don't celebrate Christmas. I guess that's what happens when you have a state religion?

I'm leaving tomorrow for a week at my grandma's in Florida, then to Spain with Deena for a tourist adventure and a great start to the new year.
Enjoy your vacations and Happy Holidays, whichever you choose to celebrate!
Here's to 2009!!

Catch-up (and mustard?)

In response to popular demand, here is the past 3 weeks in pictures... with captions, since I am a historian and (unfortunately) not a photographer!

MUNICH, GERMANY
My dad was on a business trip to Munich, so of course I tagged along. Munich is cute and efficient and has terrible food. It has 3 modes of transportation (train, bus, streetcar) for a pretty small population (1.3 million) and has an incredible, enormous outdoor market where people go to drink beer and eat sausage with giant pretzels outside even when it's freezing cold.
We spent a day at the Dachau concentration camp, which is almost completely preserved and has an amazing museum. Everything about its function in 1933-1945 is unbelievably well-documented, with photos of prisoners and careful logs of their identities and work assignments in the camp. If you haven't been, ask me about it in person sometime- I was shocked at how little I actually knew about how Nazi camps were run.

My dad grinning (somewhat inappropriately) next to Dachau's "Arbeit Macht Frei" entrance sign ("freedom through work")

Here's what my dad and I mostly did in Munich, in the city's oldest Biergärten surrounded by waiters in traditional Bavarian costumes and men in lederhosen playing the tuba (Really! It was so great!):



MY FIRST GUEST (and hopefully not last!! Come visit me!)
After Munich, my dad came to Cambridge for a weekend while he was working in London. I took him on a tour of my favorite part of Cambridge- its bridges! (Get it- bridge over the river Cam = Cambridge!) The grounds of the most famous colleges span the river and each one has its own beautiful and totally unique bridge, but Cambridge is so small that if you stand on one bridge the next one is only like 50 feet downriver... nothing like college rivalries to create inefficient bridge planning, right? No way would a Trinity student deign to walk across a Clare bridge... or something like that. Anyway, I love these bridges, and here we are on my favorite, Clare College's (not Clare Hall, where I live) Mathematical Bridge, reportedly originally built by Isaac Newton using no bolts or nails, only wooden beams counterbalanced to stay together! (Myth, but a good story)




TOMORROW: IRELAND!
I'm going to Cork, in the south of Ireland, in about 5 hours (thank you, cheap flights, for always taking off so early it's basically the middle of the night). I'm going with this boy. He plays violin in a jazz band, studies engineering, makes his own chocolate, looks like Paul McCartney, and was wearing the same shirt as me the day this photo was taken.



We're going to kiss the Blarney Stone to receive the "gift of Irish gab", enjoy real Irish "craic" (pronounced crack, means "fun involving music and drinking"), and visit the 19th century Cork Gaol (= jail!). We will not be eating any contaminated Irish pork. :)


Happy Holidays to you!! Hope all is well!

11.5 hours til deadline

After 10 of the most crazy and wonderful days ever, during which I've been crazy sick, in Germany, training for my first rowing race, hosting my dad, falling for a British boy, hurting my ankle, and dealing with winter...
I think I've finished my first essay of graduate school.

The story of the pliosaur fossil and the sociology of the fossil preparator's role in paleontology has been spell-checked, has footnotes and pictures, is under the 5000 word limit (after cutting what felt like 10000 words), and has given me 6 weeks of research joy and heartache... so it must be ready to turn in.

HOORAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I hope the examiners don't mind my American spelling. :)
I'll have to wake up tomorrow to print it and turn it in and go to the pub with my classmates and THEN I'm going to sleep for next 10 days and try not to worry about the meaning of this incomprehensible website:
http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/students/markingmphil.html

Happy Monday!
zzzzzzzz

Adventure in social healthcare*

*This entry is of special interest to anyone interested in medicine and anyone who voted Obama in the hope of revolutionizing American healthcare. So that should be everyone reading this blog...

My neighbor convinced me that the British go to the doctor for much less serious illnesses than Americans do. So after 5 days of worsening sore throat and my mother's voice ringing in my head ("Get drugs... whatever it takes, get medicine...") plus a huge and growing curiosity about British healthcare, I called the doctor. When I asked to make an appointment, the receptionist said, "Today or tomorrow?"
Whoa. The only time I've ever heard that from a doctor was when I showed up at a Chicago ER this summer with a broken arm. And that doctor wanted me to choose "tomorrow".
3 hours later, I was in the waiting room. There was no one at the desk, only a computer screen that said "Touch here to sign in." COOL. 10 minutes later, a different screen lit up and flashed my name and a room number. A smiling Irish doctor met me at the door and chatted about the weather. I was at the level of sickness that makes politeness not an option, and I blurted out something like, "I've never been to the doctor outside the U.S., so you'll have to bear with me." He laughed and then chatted about the weather in Chicago. Then he asked when my ancestors had left Ireland (thanks to my super Irish first name) and if I knew my Irish family's last name. Then he chatted about the Donahue clan. I tried to smile and not have it hurt my throat.
Finally he asked what was wrong, and I listed everything very efficiently like a good American patient. He said "awww" and asked how my studies were going. Then he lamented the rise of modern culture that makes it impossible for people to stay in bed and rest when they're sick. He looked in my ears (why?), then down my throat and said thoughtfully, "it's red." Okay.
I waited for him to get the swab and do the 10-minute throat culture that my pediatrician always did to find out if it's a bacterial or viral sore throat. He didn't. When I asked for it, he said that by the time they got the lab results back, I would be better. But he offered to do the test anyway, since "it's no skin off my nose." I guess that's right, he gets paid the same no matter what services he gives me. Imagine that.
After providing me with sympathy, a friendly personality, some social criticism, minimal clinical testing (not even a temperature check!), and a solid 20 minutes of his time, he wrote out a "prescript" for penicillin. I was surprised, since he couldn't know if I had strep throat and penicillin would work without doing a strep test. When I asked if I would get better without the penicillin, he laughed and pointed out that people got sore throats before the 1920s invention of penicillin and survived. Right. Smart ass.
He directed me to the nearest pharmacy ("Are they drug stores in America? Here they're called pharmacies."), with explicit instructions on how to pronounce the owner's name. His directions included how many hedgerows to pass and that it was "just beyond the butcher's." As I left, I asked the receptionist if I needed to do anything like sign out, and she looked at me like I was crazy. Not crazy, just foreign, I wanted to say. It was pretty amazing to walk out of a doctor's office having only given them my name and not my insurance card.
All prescriptions, whether they are for penicillin or chemotherapy, cost 7 pounds 10 pence. I happily forked that over at this charming "chemist" that looks straight out of the 1800s:

And I made sure to pronounce the owner's name right. :)
So in my limited experience, social healthcare = a doctor who listens and wants to be your friend and connect with you culturally (ideally through common ancestry), who doesn't bother to do tests that are not useful, who respects the body's ability to heal itself and instead blames society for sickness, who prescribes medication but advises you on whether or not to bother taking it and leaves the choice to you, and who is part of a community where he knows the pharmacist/"chemist" personally.
This is pretty great, although shocking that my little suburban American pediatrician had more advanced lab capabilities than this clinic.
Come on, America, let's socialize!!

DISCOVERY!!

Today I made a historical discovery.
I have been sort of chuckling under my breath for a month now when people in my department talk about the "historical discoveries" they've made- of a previously unknown book, or an obscure mysterious artifact that makes sense only in the context of the discoverer's new fabulous idea, or the fact that medieval Brits believed that crocodiles were monsters rather than reptiles. These are big deals, obviously, but I was a novice enough historian to be underwhelmed by these "discoveries". I also thought it was ridiculous to consider anything that is not science to be a "discovery". You discover a new species, or a new gene, or a new island, not an old forgotten book.
But now I know. I am of the initiate. I have discovered.
I'm writing my first essay on the role of the fossil preparator (the person who removes the rock from fossils and fixes up the broken parts so the paleontologist can study them, i.e. what I did at U of C for 4 years) in paleontological research. I'm also giving the history of a specimen that a preparator in London (my boss when I volunteered as a preparator there two years ago) worked on, to act as a case study of how preparation is done. This specimen is a pliosaur, a giant Jurassic marine reptile (think Loch Ness monster). It was found in 1848 in England, covered in plaster and cement to hold it together, and put on exhibit/stuck in storage for 150 years. The pliosaur's skull was recently re-prepared (all the old gunk was removed by my friend as I watched over his shoulder in 2006) and studied for a new article about pliosaur ancestry. So I have modern information about it from the museum in Dublin that owns it, from my friend who just prepared it, and from the researcher who just wrote an article about it. But I was missing the original article from 1863 announcing the fossil and giving it its scientific name. I looked all over the internet, I emailed everyone who knows about this fossil, I searched Cambridge online catalogues, and couldn't find it (however I did find, much to my chagrin, that the University of CHICAGO has the article...).
BUT thanks to my department's librarian who knows how to work the Cambridge library catalogue better than I do and was very polite about my catalogue ignorance, I finally had a classmark (= call number) for the journal I needed!!
I biked frantically through the rain to the University Library, rushed to the Rare Books room (after of course stowing my forbidden bag, raincoat, and ink pens in a locker), filled out a "book request form", tapped my foot for 30 minutes while someone searched the treasure trove of the UL Rare Book storage stacks, and THEN was handed an ancient leatherbound book of scientific knowledge from the 19th century... omg.
I stood at the Request Collection Counter and (breaking the rules by not setting up a cushioned Book Support Stand...) OPENED the journal. And there it was! My long-sought article about the new species of pliosaur! It was prefaced by a sentence in italics saying "Read by Mr. Bailey and Mr. Carte [the authors] in 1863". Read! This article was read aloud to an audience of people excited about science 150 years ago.
BEST YET- at the end of the article were two fold-out pages, the pin-up girls of 19th century science: DRAWINGS OF MY PLIOSAUR. (At this point the librarian came over presumedly to yell at me for neglecting the Book Support Stand procedure, but when he saw my face he laughed and asked me what I was reading. I gave him way more info than he wanted, I'm sure, but he politely shared my enthusiasm.)
I was amazed. It was like coming upon a friend in a history book. I wanted to wave and ask my pliosaur what it was like to be drawn in a scientific journal.
Right, so the discovery, besides the surprise of actually finding the article in the usually useless University Library and finding that it included drawings, was that the fossil was drawn missing a foot. The pliosaur as it is now has 4 feet (paddles, really, for swimming), but it was found with 3 feet... somehow my fossil had regrown a foot?! FOSSIL FORGERY, 19th century style!
I'm sure people who have seen the body of the pliosaur already know that one foot is a fake (I've only seen the skull, and a cast of the body), but boy, does it make the history of the specimen more interesting. And it was a huge thrill to see something familiar in such an old piece of scientific research.
Phew, it's exhausting to geek out so completely... thanks for bearing with me. :)

Also, my pliosaur was found on July 27th, 1848. My birthday. It was meant to be.
A photo from Google of the cast of my pliosaur on display on a wall at the Natural History Museum in London- count the feet! Can you spot the fake??
(If you can, please clue me in... :) )

Formals and Fireworks

England is a place of many contradictions. The striking one this week was between the high-society formal dinners held several times a week at each college, and the bonfire and fireworks celebration of Guy Fawkes Day on Nov 5.

(This is Clare in her formal gown at the college bar- funny to see a gown next to all those beer taps, right?)

Clare Hall, my college, doesn't follow any Cambridge traditions and I complained about that enough to my friend Clare (funny coincidental name- she should live in Clare Hall!) that she invited me to the formal at her college, Selwyn, which is ancient and very traditional. (Very kind of her, and probably an effective way to shut me up about missing out on wearing Harry Potter gowns and saying Latin prayers...) So we went to Selwyn on Tuesday (prior to Obama Night, which didn't start til about 2AM our time anyway). There were long Hogwarts tables for students and a separate table, the "high table", for fellows (professors). There was candlelight and an ancient dining hall with an enormous vaulted ceiling and stained glass and an army of bowler-hat-wearing waiters. There was also a laminated card on each table with The Rules of Formal Hall. I eagerly read it, as I was very aware of minding my manners and not exposing myself as clueless about anything formal. The rules included no picture taking in the presence of the fellows, college gowns required (though not required for guests, thank goodness, since my college doesn't have a gown. They're amazing and ridiculous at the same time. Clare proudly calls hers her Bat Cape.), no standing up once you've sat down (i.e. NO bathroom trips during dinner- ?!), "no behaviours that encourage excessive drinking" (this is to outlaw a traditional game called "pennies", where your friends/enemies drop a penny in your wine glass and you have to chug the wine. Think binge drinking, with style.), and you have to respond to the closing prayer with "[insert something Latin that everyone else knew]". Yikes.
So the dinner really did open with a Latin prayer, as Clare had warned me, and the fellows really did sit at the high table and ignore us the whole dinner. One student drank too much and- gulp- stood up during dinner. He was escorted from the hall. I dutifully used the correct silverware and resisted the temptation to steal my paper napkins with "Selwyn College" printed on it. It was really fun, and eye-opening to see the real Cambridge as it's been for 800 years. It was also shocking to see 18-year-olds complain about their pepper steak and moan about the waiters and let their gowns hang open to show off their tiny and sort of indecent fancy dresses underneath. They all drank a lot and talked loudly. I very much played the part of a participant observer. Nothing like anthropology research over coffee and mints.
It was a great experience, and satisfied my desire for beauty and tradition. It also made me very glad to belong to a graduate college where formals are basically the same as everyday dinners with the lights lowered. Fellows and students sit wherever we want, everyone is polite and happy to be there, and we are wearing dressy clothes from every culture you can imagine, without any Bat Capes to make us all look the same. This would have been very inappropriate to the Cambridge Class of 1209, but I love it.


(Look at the height of that bonfire! OMG. It was so hot that it blurred all my photos... :) )

After this experience of the cultured English, I got to see a very different side the next night: Bonfire Night, aka Guy Fawkes Day. Guy Fawkes tried to blow up Parliament in London in the 16th century with kegs of gunpowder and got caught. So now every town in England builds an enormous bonfire and burns scarecrow-like effigies of Guy Fawkes. Whoa. Before the bonfire, according to my British friend, they do a hedgehog check to scare the poor beasts out of the giant pile of sticks. This fire is meant to burn a person, not animals, apparently. After the Guy (usually clothes sewn with straw inside) goes up in flames, traditionally kids toast marshmallows on the bonfire.
I'd seen Guy Fawkes Day before in London, but somehow it didn't strike me as so incongruous with English culture. But for a country obsessed with Health and Safety guidelines and preventative healthcare and taking care of the environment, a huge bonfire in every town surrounded by cheering crowds sounds unthinkable. Yet Cambridge's event had thousands of people in the crowd and a bonfire seriously about 20 feet high (which my friend poo-pooed as being far too small for a proper Guy Fawkes bonfire). We also had fireworks, which were shockingly low to the ground and I'm sure a few people lost eyebrows to flying sparks. How could people who shun each other for stirring their soup the wrong direction (you MUST go clockwise... I think?) burn a fake person on an enormous bonfire? with glee?

Maybe these two traditions (formality and fire) just go to show us how much the English respect and value tradition. Why else would they preserve crazy habits that don't make sense, like table manners and bonfire building? Even if they are crazy traditions, though, it sure is fun to be part of them as an outsider. Even though I'm making fun of them, it's a thrill to learn about things that are utterly foreign in a place where I feel more and more at home. I'm glad there will always be things that are mysterious! Just think of all the crazy shit Americans do that I haven't even realized is crazy... yet. :)

Obamania- UK Style

Advertisement for The London Times, the main newspaper... but somehow there's no picture of prime minister Gordon Brown!


Scariest Halloween mask ever.


This random British student said he spent 3 hours carving this!

There are several bars in London and Cambridge having election watch parties all night. I'm not sure if these are meant to calm people's fears by bringing them together or to encourage the MASS RIOTING that will ensue if Obama doesn't win...
Europe's behind you, Barack!!

Field trips in grad school?! AWESOME.

My department has a weekly seminar called the Cabinet of Natural History (cabinet as in the case where naturalists put their specimens... like a museum cabinet full of cool stuff!). It has been meeting since the 1980s, and they publish papers and write books and the presentations are just generally fascinating. One week a researcher presented on a military testing site on the east coast of England called Orford Ness, and then the next day we went there! It's a long skinny gravel island, really a sandbar, and completely flat and barren and COLD and deserted, and dotted with deissued military bunkers. It's owned by the government, so it's open to tourists but no one goes there because it's scary and also still secretive and largely unknown, even by the people who live nearby! The UK did secret military testing here from the 1920s until 1996. Radar was invented here, as was the trigger system for the WWII atomic bomb and later atomic bombs during the Cold War. They actually had an atomic bomb on display! Because they did so much bomb testing here, you are urged not to leave the designated pathways. SERIOUSLY.

(ordnance = BOMBS)

This week the Cabinet went on their annual Fungus Hunt. One of the professors is an expert mycologist (fungi scientist!), so this trip is really designed to add to his fungus collection. The idea is that we all run around and bring him mushrooms and he identifies them and gets excited if they're poisonous or rare, and REALLY excited if they're edible! Here's a photo of his mushroom-full "trug" (special fungi basket made only in Suffolk- very scientific?).


I spent a whole summer collecting fungi for the Field Museum and I was not super excited about doing it again (fungus-collecting is one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities that you should only have to do once in a lifetime...) so instead I had a great time watching the distinguished HPS (history and philosophy of science) scholars and students get excited about fungi. And then, just at the height of my participant-observation, I found a fossil. It's a little brachiopod shell, stuck in a chunk of rock that I happened to spot. Clearly my mind was not on mushrooms... My supervisor thought that was hilarious because my first essay is about paleontology and I've been living/breathing/reading fossils for a month. While other people were vying for "Most Deadly Fungus" or "Most Colorful Fungus" or "Most Rotten Fungus", I got the distinguished title of "First Fossil Found on a Fungus Hunt". :)
I love out-of-classroom science learning!

What global warming?

Quickly, a few snapshot moments from last night and today:

1. We had a hailstorm yesterday. I was "trapped" in a coffee shop, and had to have a scone to kill the time. Then it "brightened up" (in British that means "became less cloudy but was still pretty cloudy"), just in time for me to make it to a meeting across town. AWESOME.
2. I broke ice off my bike seat this morning. Ice. Then I rode my bike. Welcome to Cambridge.
3. As I pedaled down an incredibly beautiful street beneath an archway of trees full of enormous bright yellow leaves, a rogue leaf broke free just in time to SMACK ME IN THE FACE. I screamed a little and then had to pull over and laugh. It was just such a huge leaf (face-sized, really) and so yellow and so unexpected... my fellow bike commuters looked sympathetically shocked.

And it's only going to get better, right? Bring it on, winter! :)

England is a great place to be sick

Illness is highly respected here. It is a legit excuse for getting out of anything, and people are genuinely concerned for you when you're sick. At first I took offense that people were constantly asking me "Are you all right?"- what, do I look that bad? But I realize now that being tired or sick or generally "out of sorts" is a big deal here. I'm used to the Univ of Chicago culture of ALWAYS being tired and being slightly sick from November to May (ah, the joys of frequent all-nighters and ever-present dormitory contagions). So health issues are not an excuse in Chicago- deadlines are deadlines and commitments are commitments.
But here, if you admit to being tired or not feeling well, you are instantly encouraged to "go rest", "go have some tea", "go home", "nick out early", etc. It's shockingly easy. Generally people justify this approach because it will shorten your time of sickness if you take care of yourself early on. Maybe the British focus on preventative healthcare because they have national health insurance? They can go to the doctor whenever they want, so why would they mess around feeling crappy if they could just go home and get drugs from the doc? for free? with the blessing of their boss? Amazing country, this.
So yeah, I've finally succumbed to "Freshers' Flu" ("fresher" = freshman/first year), that mysterious disease that everyone gets when they go back to school. I am incurably cold, and someone in class yesterday actually commented on my goosebumps. (How embarrassing!) My nose is running like Paula Radcliffe (i.e. very fast for a long time), and my head is pounding. But still, I am showered with sympathy by everyone I know, and I'm urged to stay in bed. Sweet. :)
I was a little delirious when I stumbled into the pharmacy yesterday desperate for drugs and the store was about to close, so I grabbed (the cheapest) two boxes that said "Cold and flu relief", assuming they were Nyquil equivalents. But they turned out to be little packets of powder that you dissolve in hot water and drink. I was ticked, like maybe they were just Vitamin C powder or something. But no, they are drugs and they are THE BEST. The British really do think tea can solve every problem, so they even make their cold medicine imitate tea! I got blackcurrant flavor (the British don't do grape-flavored anything, go figure.) and it's like drinking hot Kool-Aid and it's DELICIOUS. And somehow there are miracle drugs inside the special powder, so you actually feel so much better afterwards. Why do we stupid Americans put up with disgusting grape Dimetapp, and force our kids to choke down cherry DayQuil?
That said, it's the weekend, and I'm in England, and I feel so crappy that plugging in my computer is a challenge. DAMN. So to make myself feel better (emotionally), I'm having a good "whinge" (whine) on the Internet. Can you guys beat the English with your outpouring of sympathy?? :)
P.S. If anyone is stumped on what to get me for Christmas (or Halloween?), you can sponsor me for a flu "jab" (a scarier and more violent word for "shot")... :)

New knowledge...

My friends and I were walking home from a dance club like an hour ago- pretty late, deserted street, beautiful night- and a little creature sort of waddled out of a bush and wandered around the sidewalk a bit and then turned around and ran away when we got closer.
I was convinced it was a rat, though it didn't have a tail and was moving pretty slowly. Everyone else was completely calm and said that it was just a hedgehog.
A HEDGEHOG? REALLY?!?!
I somehow didn't think that hedgehogs were real... didn't Beatrix Potter make them up as a cute friend to bunnies and field mice? Go figure, but apparently they're totally common in England and in Germany. COOL.
I also learn new things in class... but not very often. :)


(courtesy of Google image! My hedgehog was cuter.)

Triumph and beauty

Cambridge is a place of triumph- the discovery of DNA structure happened here (it was discussed over pints at the Eagle, which is also my department's local pub. Here I'm pointing at James Watson's signature! Notice that somehow this photo has caught me with books on the table and not beer...)


They also built incredible Gothic buildings in the time before cranes and bulldozers. This is the door to the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, believe it or not. The Physical Chemistry letters were just too beautiful to change, I guess.

A more personal triumph- today I rose above the enormous grocery store line, the electric "hob" (stove) with two ON switches, the limited cookware in my college's kitchen, and my own aversion to scary things like foreign stoves... and I made dinner (and only a small mess). Now I am ready for my masters degree! :)

This is the dinner I made... JUST KIDDING. This lunch I shared with my friend Nicola at a local apple orchard- tea and scones and triangle sandwiches! For real! Some stereotypes are just not made up.

This is a field across the river from Kings College, one of the oldest and most famous colleges. Stories vary, but I heard that when Kings bought this land in 1772 the city stipulated that it had to be used for grazing at least 4 cows- some sort of early zoning requirement, I guess. The Kings website says that the cows are there to mow the lawn. Either way, it's hilarious to see these 4 cows munching away with the most beautiful view in the world.

Reclaiming my mother tongue

Today was a day of firsts.

I heard someone swear for the first time since I've been here. So... I immediately lifted my unconsciously-self-imposed swearing ban. And it felt GREAT.
I hadn't realize how carefully I've been talking, but honestly everyone speaks such beautiful British (even the European international students!) that I've been trying really hard to sound like them. So yeah, I've been saying "knackered" for "tired" and "skip" for dumpster and "loads" for "lots of" and "SOR-ry" with that inescapable British intonation, and I was pretty psyched about it. When in Rome, right?
Wrong. I sound like a moron and a fake, and though my cussing at dinner today raised some eyebrows it sure liberated my speech. I am proud of my swearing skill and my ability to speak slang with the best of American high-school students, and I've had enough of this uber-polite Pride-and-Prejudice language bullshit. I'm American and I'm going to talk like it! What a relief... though I will try to reserve my swearing for the proper occasions...

Another first- I talked in class! We had a fantastic lecture about the evolution of wonder as an emotion, and there were questions afterward, and after seriously about 10 minutes of sweating and shaking and racing heartbeats, I asked my question about whether wonder is contagious, so can it be a social phenomenon like fear or anxiety. It wasn't very articulate, but people talked after I did so that seemed like a good sign. Unfortunately, my body was too busy being in fight-or-flight mode for me to hear what they said... sigh. Maybe next week.

Another first- a professor said something HILARIOUS during another class. Sure, that happens all the time, especially in the History & Philosophy of Science when we're studying things like the historical significance of ancient collections of pickled alligator feet or whatever. But this time no one laughed and I don't think it was meant to be a joke, but I almost died of half-suppressed giggling...
So the prof was talking about the change in medical education during the French Revolution, from doctors studying Latin and reading books about medicine to actually doing dissections and practicing clinical treatments. He said that the motto of this reform was "Read little, see much, do much." To clarify this complex motto, he said "It's like the opposite of what you'll be doing this year."
?!?!?!?!
Is a professor supposed to admit that? that we'll be "seeing little and doing little"?! What a downer!
And how can he say it with a straight face? and how can NO ONE laugh? They just accepted this sentencing to a year's hard labor in the library! Time for a revolution, I say. :)

Wishing you a day of firsts and pride in your mother tongue!!

I am a library snob. Thank you, Univ of Chicago.

The Cambridge University Library (the UL) has a copy of every book published in the UK. Ever. That's pretty impressive, right?

Except for a few minor problems:

1. The UL has A copy of every book ever published in the UK. One. There are 21 people in my program, and we all need the same book for the same class. Huh. (Too bad I checked it out first... great way to make friends, right?)
2. The UL has wireless internet... in about 3 of its uncountable reading rooms. No more choosing a sunny spot and settling in with your laptop like at a certain beloved university research library in Chicago. Here you have to fight for a spot elbow-to-elbow with the next computer-toting scholar.
3. The UL does not allow you to bring in bags. So that scholar next to you is literally toting her computer, plus her papers, books, pens, wallet... but DEFINITELY not her water bottle (forbidden) or White-Out (SUPER forbidden). You basically juggle expensive, breakable things as you maneuver through a crowded space where any noise gets you glared at.
4. The UL does not allow undergrads to check out books. ?!?!
5. The UL DOES have an online catalogue... except for books published in years 1800-1977. ?!?!?!?!?!?!?!? For that time span you have to sort through the card catalogue- handwritten in years 1800-1977.
6. The UL uses its own unique catalogue system. The millions of books in the UL are arranged primarily according to subject... and size. Yes, the small books about the history of paleontology in England are quite far away from the big books about the history of paleontology in England.

I'm struggling to adapt to the lack of academic luxury provided to me by the University of Chicago. Students are not customers here like we are in the U.S. (everyone in the UK and EU has the right to go to university for very little cost.) So it makes sense that Cambridge doesn't pour money into things that would make our lives easier and not necessarily more academically successful, like wireless or backpacks in the library.
That is true for a lot of things here, in that things move just a big slower and there's not the convenience and instant satisfaction that we Americans are so used to. The grocery "queue" (line!) is never shorter than 10 minutes and often as long as 30, and self-checkout lines are unheard of. I've been on a waiting list for 2 weeks to buy a bike. Tea takes at least 2 minutes to steep, and people laugh at you if you drink it 5 seconds after you dunk the tea bag (personal experience).
So being here is a good follow-up to my summer goal of Chilling The F*** Out. While U of C did treat me to library luxury and general efficiency of living, it also made me super uptight and incapable of waiting. After a summer of relatively relaxed jobs and a lot of strolling around Chicago doing nothing, I'm now able to relax and smile at the people next to me in the grocery queue instead of grinding my teeth at the delay.
That said, this is an ongoing process and I will probably continue to drink unsteeped tea rather than stare at it for 2 minutes.
Who said I was in Cambridge to learn the history of science?! :)

Home sweet home

I live in Clare Hall, a very modern, very not-Hogwarts-ish college. It was founded in 1966 and houses only graduate students and "fellows" (professors and visiting scholars). That means 1) no drunken 17-year-olds 2) tons of fellows' families and kids live in the college with us 3) everyone is really excited about their specific fields and there's not too much metaphysical who-am-I-and-what-is-my-academic-calling crap. It's great!
Clare Hall is also unusual in that it makes no distinctions between faculty and students. So instead of having the traditional High Table to separate professors from the lowly students, we all sit together at college functions and meals. That means that when I got into a polite argument with someone at dinner about the death of the traditional antisocial, family-less, monastic lifestyle of scholars (he supported that lifestyle, I did not), it just so happened that he turned out to be President of the college. Gulp. Luckily, that kind of open discussion is encouraged here, unlike at the more traditional and old-fashioned colleges.
This is my favorite sign in Cambridge, posted on the front door of my dorm. Translations, please? :)

I'm embarrassed to have this blog but here's my justification...

I'm here to learn to be a historian of science. What is a historian but a story-teller? The easiest stories to tell are the ones we know the best, which are most likely about OURSELVES. So... this blog is meant to teach me to tell my own stories in the hope that then I'll improve at telling other people's stories, a.k.a. "history"!

I hope blogging doesn't degenerate from noble story-telling practice into an ego-stroke as I post junk about my life on the internet. But if it does... let me know!! There's a reason this is a BLOG and not a BOOK- it's editable! Audience participation encouraged!!
Also, this is my link to you across an ocean. Don't be selfish and only read it without writing to me!! Please!

Here goes an academic adventure... starting with my first punt down the River Cam. (This is academic in the physics-of-water-and-boat-and-pole sense...) Note: I had just steered us both into and out of that willow behind us in the photo. Practice makes perfect, right? :)