Focusing on schoolwork

I am taking the next two days to focus on schoolwork. Enjoy the break! 

Personality differences

I am currently in the middle of some statistics reading.

A significant part of my capstone project is going to be crunching the numbers on the learners' experience going through my learning module. My hope is that reading these books now will give me some inspiration about what to look at and what measurements would be helpful.

Right now I am halfway through the third of five books; there will obviously be a later post about the project overall.

The best so far has been The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century by David Salsburg.

(Published in 2001, and maybe not incredibly popular, it may take a little extra looking but I think is worth the effort.) 

It may be the most helpful for my goal; even the title refers to a question that arose over how something could be proved... how to test, how many times to test, etc. Then, it goes over other developments and the situations that inspired them.

There are some great stories with some interesting characters, some of whom were known for their generosity as mentors and others who could be quite frustrating. 

One of the notable frustrating ones was Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher. Some of his students went on to do great work, so he probably could be inspiring, but he could also really hold a grudge and then use that grudge to discount a person's work, no matter how correct or significant that work was.

(It is perhaps not a surprise that he got pretty passionate about eugenics.)

Here is an interesting thing about Fisher: he had remarkably poor eyesight (that may make his interests in eugenics not well-thought out). His math instruction needed to adapt to that, using different methods not relying on him being able to read or see. This helped him develop a way of viewing things in more geometric terms. That probably was a critical factor in his ability to not only conceive of concepts differently -- coming up with innovative solutions -- but also part of why others had difficulty understanding his work and why Fisher could be so dismissive of other people's completely reasonable solutions to various issues.

There are a couple of things that I find interesting here.

One is that the other mathematics branches that came up the most in the reading were algebra and calculus. Having noticed in school that most people either struggled with algebra or geometry (but were usually okay with the other one), I have to assume that there are different mental processes with the two. That particular difference would affect perspective.

At the same time, the more geometric perspective isn't necessarily superior to the algebraic one, at least not overall. There might be times when the geometric perspective would work better and other times when the algebraic one would.

That's why it was so interesting that a lot of the history referred to collaborations. Some of the collaborators struggled, coming out with different results, but persistence allowed them to learn new things that they would not have gotten on their own.

Perhaps even more interesting is that sometimes older reasoning that had been retired would become helpful again for certain situations.

I have been thinking about that more due to examples of people being unpleasantly certain (and sometimes certainly wrong). 

If we really want to find answers I believe it will take respecting each other.

Related posts:

https://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2026/06/perspective-check.html  

Books about daughters

One of my shorter reading lists (though it is connected to many other lists) was "daughters".

It didn't start out as its own list. When planning reading, I kept confusing The Heretic's Daughter and Galileo's Daughter. Yes, Galileo was tried for heresy and forced to recant, but that wasn't in the title; The Heretic's Daughter refers to a witchcraft trial. 

I noticed a title pattern, and there were six with no other connection. Mostly, I had read reviews or something about them that made me think they were interesting so I added them on Goodreads.

Well, I do love a theme.

The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent

The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter by Theodora Goss

Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution by Randal Keynes

Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love by Dava Sobel

The Memory-Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards 

Fire-Keeper's Daughter by Angeline Boulley

In that configuration they connect to reading lists relating to complicated relationships between Asian parents and children, trauma, and adoption. Poised between the losses of both parents, I have been trying to catch up on them, but this was the first of those sections that I actually completed reading.

I recently completed the sub-section on Asian parents, which I mentioned, but I know there will be at least one other post later. For now, this seemed like a good topic leading up to Father's Day. 

Some of them have come up before. 

The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter and The Heretic's Daughter were read fairly close together for Spooky Season and got written then. The Strange Case and its series got a second post because of how incredibly annoying I found it, but The Heretic's Daughter was pretty gripping. I actually just adjusted my Goodreads' ratings for each in retrospect.

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/03/spooky-season-witches.html  

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/03/spooky-season-series.html 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-sheer-unmitigated-gall.html 

One of the books will come up later. Fire-Keeper's Daughter was about family issues, but it may relate more to The Seed Keeper, which then relates to Braiding Sweetgrass which has some other parallels. At some point, when I am ready to write about my Native American Heritage reading, there's going to be a lot. 

To be fair, Fire-Keeper's Daughter was added later than the other five. It was published in 2021, and I know from other posts I had this list at least in 2022. Still, the title format seemed to fit. 

(It did get a mention in the music post: https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2026/01/songs-for-native-american-heritage-month.html) 

I have not written about Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution and Galileo's Daughter exactly, but I wrote about some science reading last year. Reading those two books cast everything in a new light, especially the chapters on Galileo. 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/06/science-reading-list.html 

Learning more about Darwin, at least from the Keynes book, was mainly an interesting look at how all of these famous names were connected. This happens in other times and places too, but is always kind of fascinating. Also, chronic digestive problems.

The review that interested me did not sound like the book I read, so that may be part of my ambivalence. 

I also found a children's book when I was looking for it, though Etty is a different daughter than Annie, the focus of the adult book.  

Etty Darwin and the Four Pebble Problem by Lauren Soloy. It's okay.

Galileo's Daughter resonated with me much more. I think it was better-written, but maybe it was more the sense of connection. There were places I had been and places I wanted to go and I felt a kinship. Shortly after finishing it we went to the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. There was a statue out front... well, there were three, but there was one that I knew right away was him and it was like finding an old friend.

https://sporktogo.blogspot.com/2026/01/los-angeles-griffith-observatory.html 

Finally, I did not love the people in The Memory-Keeper's Daughter or their choices, but as I am working on a module about mental health treatment for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, I keep thinking back to a scene where a nurse looks around an institution and cannot leave the newborn baby girl there. It's easy to forget now how common it was then, but there are still effects, and it isn't completely done.

There is other media that comes back too; I know I will write more about that.

Have these books shed any light on my own relationships with my parents? It's probably too early to say. There are still other books to read.

I can see how all of it enriches each other, and that insights don't always come the way you expect them, or when you might expect them. I don't see my reading methods changing any time soon.

That's a lot of links already, but here's one more:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2022/11/deciding.html 

Who's on top?

At times you will see it said about various groups that they are not a monolith ; of course that is true. They are made up of individuals and those individuals have differences.

Some groups do seem to be more united than others. 

One factor in this can be the resistance faced for dissent. Sometimes the price for speaking out is high enough that it discourages people from complaining, even people who are very discouraged. That can be a reason for holding some optimism that some groups may not be as bad as they seem, but it may just signal a problem with cowardice and inertia.

It is also possible that people outside the group don't care about the distinctions. That may be convenience; if you want to believe that the other side is wrong and bad, noticing details about individuals will probably only get in the way. Latching onto the most reprehensible aspect of the fringe and deciding that's how they all are can work pretty well.

That factionalism is one aspect of dominator culture, but there is something else that is relevant, which is a tendency to take shortcuts along previously existing vectors of prejudice. This works because they are already embedded into a structure where some positions are viewed as inferior and superior and the structure tends to be accepted subconsciously. 

There is usually more than one system in play and the interactions can sometimes skew things. Add in different people with different levels of connection and -- while things aren't exact -- patterns emerge.

Consider the earlier posts this week.

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2026/06/this-will-seem-like-diversion-but.html 

I suspected that part of Dan's annoyance with me was because I wasn't even an attractive girl. 

There are people who doubt the existence of "pretty privilege"; I believe in it, but know it has its limits. 

If a gorgeous girl knew more songs than him, I think he still would have been annoyed. Misogyny (which sometimes might be more helpfully called male supremacy) would probably still be stronger. However, a pretty girl doing well (but not quite as well as him) or agreeing with him would be more impressive.

I acknowledge this is somewhat speculative, but I have seen some things.

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2026/06/dominator-culture-all-around.html  

This was so unnecessary. If you must talk, talk about the match or your opponent or so many other options. If that moment is about demonstrating that the white men are back in charge and there is nothing you can do about it, I guess insulting a Black woman makes sense.

(Of course, then acknowledging that makes someone being transgender an insult, which I don't want to do, but it was clearly intended as an insult and is also not true, which is why I refer to it that way. Terrible people lead to a lot of frustration.)

Anyway, it becomes quite normal under these circumstances that you might see people promoting incompetent, almost demented white men, even when there would be a lot of good reasons for them not to. 

It doesn't mean they only do that or that they all do it in the same way -- not a monolith -- but there are patterns they are following, consciously or not. 

This will seem like a diversion, but...

I'm going to write a little about this guy I used to know.

His name was Dan. To relieve any suspicions or concerns, let me specify that I never went to school with him and he is not married to any of my friends or fellow coworkers.

This is really about one specific night, where we were playing a game.

Dan was really good at games. He knew a lot of parlor games like call and response games and variations on Fruit Bowl.

This particular night, we were playing a game where a word was chosen and the two teams took turns singing bits of song lyrics with that word in it. You needed to know at least four words including that one. For example, let's say the word was "dance" and you wanted to use "Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)".. singing "Everybody dance now," would not be enough. Do you know that the next word is "yeah"?

That game sticks in my mind for two reasons. Perhaps they both relate to how competition can bring out our ugly sides.

One word used was "Shenandoah." Ruth used "Oh Shenandoah", the obvious choice. I responded with a phrase from "Take Me Home, Country Roads"... "Shenandoah River. Life is old there..."

Ruth insisted that they were different words, because she was ending it on Shenan-DOH, not pronouncing the last syllable. I thought that was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard, but she could not be convinced.

To be fair to her, earlier versions of the song were sometimes referring to an Oneida chief, which is how we get from the wide Missouri to West Virginia, Mountain Mama.

It's still the same word.

That annoyed me, but I remember the game more clearly because of my sense that I was annoying Dan.

Please understand, with my memory and my love of music and specifically my deep memory for music, this is exactly my type of game.

Something I understand better now is that it makes sense that a guy who specializes in games that no one else has played or even heard of before is going to like winning. I get that.

However, I am also very sensitive to being annoying, having a deep fear that being annoying is my basic nature.

I kept sensing that I was annoying him, especially when we were on the word "rose".

So many songs mention roses.

You need to know at least four words, but sometimes memory can't bring up just those four; you need more. I remember that for "The Rose", where that word only comes up once at the very end. I needed to start at "Just remember".

When we were almost out of rose songs I remembered one more that I had to work out; I had only heard it once in a movie.

In Emma, Gwyneth Paltrow in the title role sings "Did You Not Hear My Lady". It has a line, "shaming the rose and the lily, for she is twice as fair."

This is how I know this happened in 1996.

You might think that maybe he was really annoyed at Gwyneth Paltrow, but she was not generally seen as annoying yet. I think that started sometime between her marrying and consciously uncoupling from Chris Martin.

No, I think it was me. I kind of blamed it on my having to take a minute to come up with the words... that thinking out loud process. 

Now I think it was partly annoyance that anyone at all knew more songs than  him, but especially that it was a girl, and not even a good-looking one.

That is partly from my having had more opportunities to observe that specific irritation that comes to men when they can't get a woman to admit she is wrong (especially because she isn't). The other part is that Dan was kind of shallow. 

He was generally regarded as good-looking: tall, pronounced cheekbones, and impressively (but not obviously carefully) styled hair.

At the time, I knew a lot less about sexism, but I was fully aware that I was not considered attractive, that it mattered more for girls, and that no one was asking me out. Given those disadvantages, isn't it only fair that I at least have a good memory and know lots of songs? Is that asking too much?

If you put it that way, it sounds silly, but I suspect the irritation doesn't go away.

The big problem is that people don't think about. 

Generally, they just stay irritated and feel fully justified in that.

Dominator culture all around

There is plenty of material to explore all of the ways in which there are horrible people braying loudly all the time now. I'm sure I will spend more time on that. 

Currently I am most aware of how exhausting it is; the UFC thing is part of that.

Well, that has several parts as well, including it being one more corrupt cash grab that would have been in poor taste anyway, but more specifically I was thinking about the ignorant slander against a former first lady.

The Obamas themselves do not seem to be responding to it, which I suppose is the only dignified thing to do.

I saw one post that I want to share, from Jay Jurden:

https://x.com/JayJurden/status/2066538960864592341 

This Michelle Obama moment should teach every straight Black man, ESPECIALLY THOSE IN STANDUP COMEDY, that whenever you let transphobia slide the first cis women who get attacked are Black women. Transphobia leads directly to misogynoir in America & being transphobic = antiBlack 

This is true. There is a long, ugly history, but it's a thing.  

There are specific aspects to this truth, in that misogynoir -- the combination of anti-Blackness and misogyny -- tends to alternate between over-sexualizing and de-sexualizing Black women. That relates to taking away femininity, with only white women being worthy of it (different but similar dehumanization happens to Asian and Latina women) as well as commodifying their bodies and declaring them more animal-like, though that does happen to Black men too, just differently.

(Of course we remember the ape pictures.)

Some of it is that there is still great resentment against the Obamas for inhabiting the White House as Black people. We can see the great respect that such people have for the White House by how they react to tacky gilding and demolition, but the presidency, getting votes, not having a bunch of scandals and a general level of excellence that conservatives will not allow themselves to admit to... there is a real racist hatred out there.

(For an example of delusional hatred against the former president, see some of the replies to this post by Tomos Doran: https://x.com/portraitinflesh/status/2065333829305290881 )

While there is a specific resentment, there is also simply that --  in dominator culture -- people pick the easiest targets, homing in on a perceived "downward". 

It can lead to being grossly ignorant publicly, but it can also mean damaging a Hmong woman's fruit stand while telling her to go back to Mexico.

It's not likely to ever be intelligent and well-considered; then it might stop being hateful. 

 

Quotes for Women's History Month (March)

This is embarrassing, but I did not realize that I had collected this and never posted it. When I was looking at the May quotes, I found it.

This is even more appropriate for the week when I skipped two days do to being busy and tired. 

That sort of goes along with how this year has been going. I try and do a lot, and actually I am doing a lot, but it's never quite as polished and perfect as I want and sometimes forgotten things jump out at me.

However, if this is true of lots of people, it's probably still more true of women, of which I am one.

Here's to me!

There are repeats, which I usually try to avoid. There were quotes I didn't want to lose by Fannie Lou Hamer and Marie Curie.

Here's to them! 

3/1 "Service is the rent that you pay for room on this earth." -- Shirley Chisholm

3/2 "One of the lessons that I grew up with was to always stay true to yourself and never let what somebody else says distract you from your goals. And so when I hear about negative and false attacks, I really don't invest any energy in them, because I know who I am." -- Michelle Obama

3/3 "People have said over the years that the reason I did not give up my seat was because I was tired. I did not think of being physically tired. My feet were not hurting. I was tired in a different way. I was tired of seeing so many men treated as boys and not called by their proper names or titles. I was tired of seeing children and women mistreated and disrespected because of the color of their skin. I was tired of Jim Crow laws, of legally enforced racial segregation." -- Rosa Parks

3/4 "You cannot find peace by avoiding life." -- Virginia Woolf

3/5 “One must dare to be happy.” ― Gertrude Stein

3/6 “Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female — whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.” ― Simone de Beauvoir

3/7 “Aging is not 'lost youth' but a new stage of opportunity and strength.” ― Betty Friedan

3/8 "Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God: But only he who sees takes off his shoes." -- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

3/9 "Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it." -- Emily Dickinson

3/10 "It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought-that is to be educated." -- Edith Hamilton

3/11 "Sometimes it seem like to tell the truth today is to run the risk of being killed. But if I fall, I'll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom. I'm not backing off." -- Fannie Lou Hamer

3/12 "Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained." -- Marie Curie

3/13 "Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again." -- Adrienne Rich

3/14 "It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences." -- Audre Lorde

3/15 "When we choose to love, we choose to move against fear, against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect, to find ourselves in the other." -- bell hooks

3/16 "A woman who writes has power, and a woman with power is feared." -- Gloria E. Anzaldúa

3/17 “Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated.”  -- Rosalind Franklin

3/18 "Gorillas are almost altruistic in nature. There's very little if any 'me-itis.' When I get back to civilization I'm always appalled by 'me, me, me.'" -- Dian Fossey

3/19 "I've put up with too much, too long, and now I'm just too intelligent, too powerful, too beautiful, too sure of who I am finally to deserve anything less." -- Sandra Cisneros

3/20 "There is no separation. We are all from the same place. As long as there is respect and acknowledgement of connections, things continue working. When that stops we all die." -- Joy Harjo

3/21 "Above all we must realize that each of us makes a difference with our life. Each of us impacts the world around us every single day. We have a choice to use the gift of our life to make the world a better place - or not to bother." -- Jane Goodall

3/22 "The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them." -- Ida B. Wells

3/23 "I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity." – Eleanor Roosevelt

3/24 "No one is born with skill. It is developed through exercise, through repetition, through a blend of learning and reflection that's both painstaking and rewarding. And it takes time." -- Twyla Tharp

3/25  "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less." -- Marie Curie

3/26 "There are years that ask questions and years that answer." -- Zora Neale Hurston

3/27 "The first act of insight is throw away the labels." -- Eudora Welty

3/28 "I did what my conscience told me to do, and you can't fail if you do that." -- Anita Hill

3/29 "You can pray until you faint, but unless you get up and try to do something, God is not going to put it in your lap." -- Fannie Lou Hamer

3/30 "The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation, because in the degradation of women, the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source." -- Lucretia Mott

3/31 "When feminism does not explicitly oppose racism, and when antiracism does not incorporate opposition to patriarchy, race and gender politics often end up being antagonistic to each other and both interests lose." -- Kimberle Williams Crenshaw