Cambridge rush hour...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA_Crc67SAM

The road on the left leads to my department!
Even with the sped-up video, this gives a really good impression of what it's like to try to get around Cambridge alive.
Watch those cyclists weave!!

A very productive day

I got so much done on Friday and was feeling very accomplished, until I realized that people in the real world don't know what a "productive" day means for a student. Lots of non-students seem to have the general question of "what do students DO all day?" That's a hard one to answer, actually, because we do so many different things and without a set schedule that it can be challenging to explain how these seemingly random tasks fit together... we students also don't move very much while we're "working", so maybe it's harder to see what we do as "productive"? And - duh - there's no physical product... at least until you publish a book.
So I made a list of what I did that made me feel so productive on Friday. Think of it as practice for filling out a time sheet? in the hope that I'll have a job someday??

Friday Jan 22
(not in chronological order because I can't remember WHEN I did all this stuff...)

• Washed laundry and dishes, took a shower, had two meals and a tea break
• Submitted two abstracts for conference talks - I'd been working on them all week but finally finished!
• Read two articles, emailed their authors with questions (that's not typical! But thanks to the incredibly small world of the history of science, I happened to know the authors.)
• Got two copyright licenses approved! One for photos of a Whipple Museum object for my next "publication" - a blurb in a history society newsletter about the history of this calculator toy decorated with a monkey (Again, thanks to the small world of HPS - my friend is the newsletter editor and asked me to write for it!), and one license to submit photos of a Whipple Library book ("Nature Teaching on the Blackboard", which was the subject of my masters thesis) for a journal article that I hope to write someday... on the next productive day, maybe??
• Googled "Nature Teaching on the Blackboard" and found one volume of it FOR SALE for £20?! Bought it. Jumped around my room a little in excitement.
• Scheduled a speaker for the Evolution Reading Group, which I coordinate with two other people in my department. He's a zoologist and he'll speak about how creationism has morphed into "intelligent design" since the 1980s. Awesome.
• Sorted a mistake in this month's rent bill from my college... they "forgot" that I'd paid last month's bill! Yikes. Did they really think a historian's math skills would be that bad?
• napped (oops)
• Made it to the department just before it closed to grab my notes and stuff for the weekend. Got made fun of by the receptionist, who said something like "isn't it nice to show up for work at 5PM?" Grrr, if only she knew I'd been working since 8am! See the assumptions Real Worlders make about us students?! Just because I got a nap and she didn't...
• Went to hear Ben Goldacre give a talk on Risk, Science, and the Media. He's a super amazing science journalist (and practicing physician) who writes in a major London newspaper exposing crackpot "science" news stories. (His favorite is the made-up MMR link to autism.) His speech was AWESOME - full of swear words and dirty jokes and very powerful statements about science and medicine, and how the media portrays science stories in ways that are attractive and good headlines rather than necessarily accurate information. He also writes a blog: http://www.badscience.net/
• Raced home (Goldacre's speech ran 15 min late! Doesn't he know we academics have places to be?!) to throw on my formalwear and then raced through the pouring rain and puddles (good thing my dress was black... the mudstains blended right in) to Clare College, to celebrate Burns' Night with some HPS friends. Burns' Night is a Scottish holiday in honor of poet Robert Burns (think Auld Lang Syne), and the traditional things to do include eating haggis (don't ask), drinking whiskey, reading a poem in honor of haggis, and a man "toasting the lassies" and a woman "toasting the lads"! It's just a great cultural moment, and of course a few guys had kilts and daggers and the rest of the Scottish formalwear outfit. AND - the best part - after dinner there was a ceilidh!! That's traditional English/Scottish dancing (a lot like American square dancing), which involves lots of running and spinning. The University Ceilidh Band (of which I am a proud member) played a fabulous set and we dancers spun and laughed and dripped sweat and regretted the whiskey. Wonderful!

May all of our time sheets look like this.

"Dear Ms. Wylie..."

"... Your manuscript entitled "Setting a Standard for a "Silent" Disease: Defining Osteoporosis in the 1980s and 1990s" has been successfully submitted online and is presently being given full consideration for publication in the Social History of Medicine."

Woohoo!! My first journal article - submitted! Phew, I wrote it a YEAR ago and have been editing/ignoring it ever since. And then it took me three days to figure out how to work the online submission website - seriously! Maybe you need a PhD to be smart enough to get everything to upload right?

Now I just have to wait six months for my first rejection letter. Woohoo.

Welcome, winter.

This is the UK as seen from a satellite five days ago. Notice anything?
Probably not, because there's nothing to see but SNOW!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8447023.stm

Travel by plane, train, and automobile is a mess. Travel by bike is terrifying. The country ran out of salt (or "grit" in British) and have stopped "gritting" the roads (they never grit the sidewalks...). A visitor at the British Society for the History of Science Postgraduate Conference at my department last week fell on the ice and broke his arm! (He said the emergency room was full of people with broken limbs... like a bad cartoon.)

However...
Cambridge is incredibly beautiful. The river literally sparkled this morning as we rowed along. The birds are quiet and the city's cows have all been moved indoors. Walking through the snow-filled but peopleless streets feels like being the first human to explore the Arctic. Everyone is holing up but inviting others over to break the cabin fever. Indoor parties abound, and I've drunk my weight in herbal tea in the week I've been back.
I LOVE THIS. May it snow forever.