My Possible Career Choices: Cloud Flower

MBTI is not:

An excuse to not work on improvement of personal weaknesses. 

A theory with any valid connection to astrology. 

A reason not to befriend someone of a different type. 

An excuse for any action whatsoever. 

A set of rules/stereotypes that limits your career options. 

A personality test based on four letters. 

 MBTI is: 

A method of understanding personal strengths and weaknesses. 

A tool to help understand and get along with others of different personalities. 

Based on cognitive functions, not the four letters alone. 

Something some of us have a lot of fun doing.

A group of researchers have trained pigeons to identify malignant breast tissue in exchange for pigeon pellets. Here’s the real, not made up study.

This doesn’t mean hospitals will start employing pigeons. But it does suggest that studying pigeons could help us teach doctors how to process medical images. From the study:

Pigeons (Columba livia)—which share many visual system properties with humans—can serve as promising surrogate observers of medical images, a capability not previously documented. 

… The birds’ successes and difficulties suggest that pigeons are well-suited to help us better understand human medical image perception, and may also prove useful in performance assessment and development of medical imaging hardware, image processing, and image analysis tools.

Image credit: Levenson et. al.

Once you start thinking of ‘poet’ as identity, once you start thinking that being a poet is just like being anything else that you are, as being something else that you were born, then you can go about doing the things that poets do, and you can go about that more comfortably. Or at least I think so. Or at least it gives you a rationale for why you’re doing what poets do. Like, ‘Why are you still in the dark, trying to read, at two o’clock in the morning?’ ‘Oh, because I’m a poet.’ ‘Why are you pulling your car over to write a line down and you’re already late to where you’re going?’ ‘Because I’m a poet.’

Jericho Brown, interviewed by Elisa Gonzalez for Washington Square Review (via bostonpoetryslam)

These “mammatus clouds” were photographed above Hastings, Nebraska, after a destructive thunderstorm in May 2005. Although their formation is not completely understood, these rare clouds usually develop at the base of a thunderstorm, and appear lumpy because of instabilities and temperature differences between sinking and rising air.

Astronauts returning home from the ISS aboard a not so spacious Soyuz capsule

via reddit

Hundreds of you sent in questions for my live conversation with three astronauts and NASA’s chief scientist on Tuesday. Thanks! The most common question was: “What happens when you get your period in space?”

I didn’t end up asking this question because

a) the question itself has a lot of historical baggage b) the answer is pretty boring

But because people seemed genuinely curious, I decided to answer it here.

First, a bit of history…

In the early days of space flight, menstruation was part of the argument that women shouldn’t become astronauts.

Some claimed (1) that menstruation would effect a woman’s ability, and blamed several plane crashes on menstruating women. Studies in the 1940s (2,3) showed this was not the case. Female pilots weren’t impaired by their periods. But the idea wouldn’t die. In 1964, researchers from the Women in Space Program (4) still suggested (without evidence) that putting “a temperamental psychophysiologic human” (i.e. a hormonal woman) together with a “complicated machine” was a bad idea.

Others raised concerns about hypothetical health risks. They feared that microgravity might increase the incidence of “retrograde menstruation.” Blood might flow up the fallopian tubes into the abdomen, causing pain and other health problems. No one actually did any experiments to see if this really would be a problem, so there wasn’t any data to support or refute these fears.

Advocates for women in space argued that there had been a lot of unknowns when humans first went to space, but they sent men up anyway. Rhea Seddon, one of the first six women astronauts at NASA, recalled during an interview:

We said, “How about we just consider it a non-problem until it becomes a problem? If anybody gets sick in space you can bring us home. Then we’ll deal with it as a problem, but let’s consider it a non-problem.”

Just to give you a sense of the culture surrounding female astronauts back then, here’s an excerpt of a 1971 NASA report about potential psychological problems in space. Researchers Nick Kanas and William Fedderson suggest there might be a place for women in space:

The question of direct sexual release on a long-duration space mission must be considered. Practical considerations (such as weight and expense) preclude men taking their wives on the first space flights. It is possible that a woman, qualified from a scientific viewpoint, might be persuaded to donate her time and energies for the sake of improving crew morale; however, such a situation might create interpersonal tensions far more dynamic than the sexual tensions it would release.

Kanas, now an emeritus professor of psychology at UCSF, told me this was tongue-in-cheek — part of a larger discussion about the problem of sexual desire in space (5). Still, it’s surprising this language was included in an official NASA memorandum. Even advocates for women in space were caught up in this kind of talk. In a 1975 report for the RAND corporation, Glenda Callanen argues that women have the strength and intelligence to become astronauts. But here’s how she begins the report’s conclusion:

It seems inevitable that women are to be essential participants in space flight. Even if they were only to take on the less scientific parts of the space mission, or if they wished only to help “colonize” distant planets, their basic skills must still prepare them to perform countless new tasks.

In a culture where these statements were unremarkable, it’s easy to imagine that questions about menstruation weren’t purely motivated by scientific curiosity.

In 1983, 22 years after Alan Shepard became the first American to go to space, Sally Ride left earth’s atmosphere. She told an interviewer:

I remember the engineers trying to decide how many tampons should fly on a one-week flight; they asked, “Is 100 the right number?” “No. That would not be the right number.”

So what DOES happen when you get your period in space?

The same thing that happens on Earth! In the last three decades of female space flight, periods in space have been normal — no menstrual problems in microgravity.

Notes:

RE Whitehead, MD. “Notes from the Department of Commerce: Women Pilots.” The Journal of Aviation Medicine 5 (Mar-Dec 1934):48.

RS Holtz, MD. “Should Women Fly During the Menstrual Period?” The Journal of Aviation Medicine 12 (Sept 1941):302.

J Cochrane. “Final Report on Women Pilot Program.” 38.

JR Betson and RR Secrest. “Prospective women astronauts selection program.” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 88 (1964): 421–423.

Kanas and Fedderson’s 1971 report went on to conclude: “Information regarding women during periods of stress is scanty. This lack, plus previously mentioned problems, will make it difficult for a woman to be a member of the first long-duration space missions. However, it is just as unlikely to think that women cannot adapt to space. Initial exploration parties are historically composed of men, for various cultural and social reasons. Once space exploration by men has been successfully accomplished, then women will follow. In preparation for this, more information should be compiled regarding the physiology and psychology of women under stressful situations.”

There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world.

Nikolai Lobachevsky (via curiosamathematica)

Slap it. Shoot it. Kaboot it.

Gandhi (via nezua)

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (via yesdarlingido)