therapy

My therapist once commented that I spend quite a bit of time in therapy therapizing the men in my life. It’s not just men who are close to me, either – over the course of my life, I’ve had a number of men ask me for advice. Some have been friends where our interactions have been in person, face to face. Some have been friends here our interactions have been limited to a private message in IRC or Twitter. I hesitate to use the term “close” to describe any of them, since I’m slowly realizing that my definition of what constitutes friendship may not be in agreement with the person on the other end. That’s a discussion for another day.

Anyhow, I found this line interesting: “a smaller 1980 study published in the Journal of Counseling Psychology found that men were more likely to reveal things about themselves to strangers and acquaintances”

Hmm. So here’s a link dump, for anyone who needs it.

How to Find a Therapist for the First Time

How To Start Therapy

A Beginner’s Guide to Couples Therapy

Finally, you’ve put in the time and made the effort to develop a relationship with a therapist. You may have resolved whatever issue brought you to therapy in the first place. But don’t stop! Therapy Is Important, Even If You’re Happy

sticky stories

Stories I have read recently which are now stuck in my head:

Two great reads on vaping as a public health crisis: Who Thought Sucking on a Battery Was a Good Idea? and The Lucrative, Largely Unregulated, and Widely Misunderstood World of 
Vaping. The variability in temperatures of vaping devices can make even a known vaping liquid dangerous. Consider that and thinking of the combination of variables in vaping devices and vaping liquids – not to mention the number of people who are hacking devices and creating their own liquids – the rise of vaping was a disaster waiting to happen.

How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle Class: a brief history of consulting behemoths. I have had a number of friends from high school and college join the Booz Allen Hamiltons and Deloittes of the world, and at the time it seemed like a pretty steady, intellectually challenging gig. I don’t know if I just know better now, or if things have changed in the 20 years since my friends were joining the consulting corps, but I have a vastly different opinion about consulting firms now. If you’re looking for another story on how McKinsey is way too influential, check out McKinsey infiltrated the world of global public health.

“Irritability and constant criticism in a marriage”. “What if nothing is wrong with you and the problem is you’re married to an asshole?” This is an extreme example. Is this you? Is this me?

For Gen X Women, Changing Careers Is Complicated: I am definitely feeling this. I don’t think this is a Gen X thing so much as a women-in-their-40s-and-50s issue, but I am hopeful that this will be less of an issue for women in the future.

“Women 55 and over are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. workforce, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics projections. Yet career complacency and immobility can be the norm for middle-aged women. Job security—whether it’s the pay, a set schedule, work-from-home flexibility—becomes increasingly valuable as the reasons why women’s work shifts as they get older. Familial responsibilities, such as rearing children and caring for aging parents, traditionally fall on women more than men, meaning career prioritization comes second at best. If women who leave work to focus on family attempt to rejoin the workforce, a 2018 study from the Harvard Business Review found that stay-at-home parents are half as likely to land an interview as unemployed parents and only one-third as likely as employed parents.”

On a related note,  I know this comes up time and time again with RBG, but it’s important for everyone to hear: What Ruth Bader Ginsburg wants women to know about choosing a partner.

What We Lost In The Museum of Chinese in America Fire: I feel guilty for not being aware of this museum until the fire which essentially destroyed it. The author, who curated an exhibit at the museum, noted the challenges in finding print photographs or items to display at MOCA. Regarding the paucity of tangible artifacts: “When I asked my parents and their friends, I often heard the same answer: nothing seemed worth keeping. Perhaps, as I wrote in a piece last August, it was simply a part of the immigrant mentality. You might save soap by fusing together old bars, or sheath your remote control in plastic to protect it from dust and wear. But you view yourself as marginal, and self-archiving can feel like a waste of time, or a bit too hubristic.” Ouch.

The author’s comments on the changing of Chinatown and the city’s promise to improve nearby housing projects and parks, while also providing funding for finding a new, permanent home for the museum – in exchange for construction of a jail in Chinatown – brought to mind some of the paperwork my aunt had saved when Washington, DC’s Chinatown became the home of the sporting venue the MCI Center. As part of the DC’s Chinatown was never at the same scale as that of New York, but it was once distinctly a neighborhood of immigrants, Asian grocery stores, and restaurants. The modern day iteration of DC’s Chinatown is a Chinatown in name only.

Anyhow, it’s worth revisiting this piece, or at least listening to the snippets of songs interspersed throughout the story. The story of Chinese Jamaican music is another bit of history that I never knew about until last year.

Finally, I’m revisiting two pieces on being half Asian, half white: Asian Americans Are Skeptical of Biracial People’s Loyalties and The Biracial Bind Of Not Being Asian Enough.

on listening

cutting and pasting from this story to save it, but to also remind myself to check out the book

Talk Less. Listen More. Here’s How. by Kate Murphy

“We are encouraged to listen to our hearts, our inner voices and our guts, but rarely are we encouraged to listen carefully and purposefully to other people. Online and in person, it’s all about defining yourself, shaping the narrative and staying on message.”

“People had no trouble, however, telling me what it meant to be a bad listener, rattling off actions such as interrupting, looking at a phone, and responding in a narcissistic or confused way. The sad truth is that people have more experience being cut off, ignored and misunderstood than heard to their satisfaction.”

“Good listeners ask good questions. One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned as a journalist is that anyone can be interesting if you ask the right questions. That is, if you ask truly curious questions that don’t have the hidden agenda of fixing, saving, advising, convincing or correcting. The idea is to explore the other person’s point of view, not sway it.”

“beware of the tendency to take mental side trips when you should be listening. Smart people are particularly apt to get distracted by their own galloping thoughts. They are also more likely to assume they already know what the other person is going to say.”

“People with higher I.Q.s also tend to be more neurotic and self-conscious, which means that worry and anxiety are more likely to hijack their attention. If you fall in this category, it could be helpful to consider listening a kind of meditation, where you make yourself aware of and acknowledge distractions, then return to focusing. Rather than concentrating on your breathing or a mantra, return your attention to the speaker.”

identity crisis

I recently read a short story entitled “See It Slant”. It’s an interesting read, but I share it here simply for this paragraph:

K and I were the only Asians, in fact the only nonwhite students, in our year. We made up two of the four scholarships. It didn’t make us friendly, exactly, but it created between us an expectation like familiarity. We were bound in the department’s mind though I could tick off our differences: her smallness, my clumsiness; her exotic international family, my stodgy parents stuck for generations in the first place they’d found employment; her merit, my need; her long hair, my short.

I am half Asian and half white, and I’ve experienced this myself many times in my childhood. The “others” are always grouped together, as if a possibly shared racial background automatically necessitates a bond of friendship. For whatever reason, it’s assumed that we’ll have the same interests and a common language in the figurative sense, if not in the literal sense, simply because we have ancestors who are from the same continent. It’s a ridiculous idea, even without a deeper look at the numerous countries and cultures that are lumped together and identified as Asian.

Anyhow, “See It Slant” It brought American Born Chinese back into my thoughts. My copy is long gone, but since my son has been reading Dogman and Captain Underpants, I thought perhaps it was time. In terms of reading level, he’s not quite ready for American Born Chinese – he will be turning six this summer, and this is a book for a middle school reading level. But is he ready for the inevitable questions about his racial identity? And how do I prepare him for that?

While I like to think that he can self identify as he so chooses, it would be foolish for me to deny that there will be outside pressures influencing how he perceives himself. I think of my own identity crisis. I identify so strongly with my identity as a scientist, and my identity as it has been shaped growing up in the mid Atlantic region of the U.S., much more so than I identify with being white or Asian (or Taiwanese, or part Irish, or part German, or part Scottish, or whatever sliver of my background 23andme has highlighted for today). But no matter how many times I simply don’t think about my own racial identity, or I think of myself as being white (perhaps because I’m a “bad Asian” who only speaks English), I am told that I look Asian and therefore, I am Asian. There’s little room for nuance when society chooses to identify you by what makes you different, rather than all the ways you are alike. It’s particularly fraught for those of us who are half Asian and half white, as it seems that neither group wants to bring the hapa folks into their respective folds.

My son, being just one quarter Asian, will probably not have such identifiable Asian features. It’s likely that he will pass as entirely white. But he does seem to be thinking about his identity already on a very basic level…

“daddy is pink and mommy is yellow” pic.twitter.com/6GfDVme7dk

— Stephanie (@stephaniekays) September 10, 2019

 

it’s not really the new year until Manny Machado signs

I wrote with a bit more frequency in 2018, both for my own personal gratification and for work. We are almost three weeks into 2019, and I didn’t do a “best of 2018” post, even though my first THT piece for 2019 is up. I hope I can continue writing about “performance enhancement” and drugs and technology and bullshit supplements and pseudoscience, but I’m also trying not to be a one trick pony (and frankly, I think the public’s appetite for prohibited substances talk is satiated at this point).

So, here are a few things for your perusal that don’t require a FOIA:

Near and dear to my heart: as a woman in a STEM field, and as a woman on the fringes of baseball, I have a lot of thoughts about how baseball needs more diversity in the front office, and how MLB and individual organizations can make this happen. I was really looking forward to seeing how the first round of the MLB Diversity Fellowship Program would shape the second round, but I haven’t seen anything about a second round. But I will be optimistic, and I hope to hear success stories from the first group of fellows shortly.

We have spent so much time discussing the baseball over the last few years, but we haven’t considered what’s happening on the other side: wooden baseball bats have changed quite a bit over the years! And there’s a lot of potential for innovation. There is reason to think that modifications to the baseball bat could have an effect on performance, whether that’s humidity or the treatment of the wood or the finishing lacquer. If I were fabulously wealthy, I would start making baseball bats and paying to have them tested at the UMass Lowell Baseball Research Center or the Washington State Sports Science Laboratory. Baseball is a game of inches, and being able to propel the ball a few extra inches could mean the difference between a double and a home run. I sent many emails which were met with deafening silence (trade secrets are secrets for a reason), and the tour guide at the Louisville Slugger tour was circumspect.

I love organic chemistry, but I also love thinking about the other kind of chemistry: personal interdynamics. I think makeup and character play a huge role in clubhouse chemistry, but some teams are trying to cut corners by scaling back on the best way to assess personality. We can’t discount the effects of individual personalities on the team as a whole. Although it is impossible to measure overall clubhouse chemistry (and probably not worth the time and effort!), I do think you can apply some of the ideas and equations behind drug synergy to evaluate synergy, i.e., chemistry, between teammates. One thing I wish I had fleshed out a bit more: there’s a big difference between “chemistry” and synergy and being BFFs, and having complementary skill sets that work well together on the field.

And for something different, for Lady Science, I wrote about the role of gender in diagnosing and treating concussions: Impaired Judgement: Gender and Traumatic Brain Injury. It was a great way for me to mesh my interest in women’s health and science with sports.

 

tell a story in six words

The therapist said, “Florida is tricky.”

Passing drugs through passionate kisses?

This story is wild, and I can’t stop thinking about it:

“The case of the passionate-kissing sprinter is settled: An American Olympian’s novel defense is successful in an unusual doping dispute” https://t.co/xJ1YERL0bI

An athlete passionately kissed his girlfriend not long after she sprinkled probenecid on her tongue. He gave a urine sample three hours later, and tested positive for probenecid.

I have so many questions; some of which we can answer, but there are also areas that may be lacking in studies. What’s the urinary excretion profile for probenecid? Would it really show up in a urine test three hours after oral administration? What is the detection limit for probenecid and how sensitive is the testing lab’s analytical equipment? How much probenecid was transferred from her tongue to his mouth? Didn’t she drink a glass of water after emptying the capsule onto her tongue? How much probenecid would remain in her mouth after that? Just how, um, passionate of a kiss would lead to this??

What’s a STEM major? What’s an athlete?

I should start keeping a list of professional athletes with science/STEM degrees https://t.co/sp2NAu8YzS

— Stephanie (@stephaniekays) November 10, 2017

I’ve always had a soft spot for athletes who were science majors in college. It isn’t easy to balance the demands of a physical training regimen along with a full course load, particularly when said course load includes a number of lengthy laboratory classes, so I’m impressed when someone tackles both. I don’t know why I haven’t been keeping an actual list of scientist-turned-athletes (or vice versa), except that I don’t really have any purpose for doing so. But apparently I’m not the only one who has an interest in scientist-athletes, so I’ll take a first pass at starting a list.

We should probably set some parameters first. For our purposes, I’m happy to keep these as broad as possible.

What is a STEM major? As a start, I looked at the US Census Bureau’s graphic, Where do college graduates work? A Special Focus on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (thanks, Chemjobber!) Declaring a major or field of study is sufficient, no degree needs to be completed (although we could probably tack on a column to indicate a completed degree).

Who is considered an athlete? How do we define what constitutes a professional athlete? It’s easy to say that anyone who makes it to the majors counts. Independent leagues of various sports should be included, as should Olympians. If we’d like to include as many female athletes as possible, we should consider college athletes as well… but the list could grow unwieldy.

Thoughts?

synthetic alternatives to mud

I recently wrote about alternatives to baseball rubbing mud for increasing tackiness on baseballs. These might be spray-on products, or they might be impregnated onto the surface of the ball itself. One area of knowledge that I wish I had a better grasp of (no pun intended): the leather tanning process. Based on my very rudimentary understanding of the leather tanning process, the goal is to displace water trapped within the collagen fiber bundles of the animal skin. This is achieved by replacing water molecules using either a vegetable tanning process, which uses tannin-based compounds (yes, the same tannins that you find in wine) or a mineral, particularly something chromium-based. What if, instead of using a naturally occurring tannin, you replaced this with a modified tannin molecule that has a moiety which provides an enhanced grip?

In fact, the leather manufacturer responsible for producing the leather used in NFL footballs has their own “Tanned-in-Tack”. I suspect that Mizuno, who uses Deguchi Northern Kip leather in many of their products, uses a similar tactic in producing baseballs for NPB. Many of these leather tanning processes are trade secrets, but some companies have patented their own leather tanning and treatment processes. For example, Wilson Sporting Goods has U.S. Patent 5,069,935, for waterproofing leather for making footballs. There is also U.S. Patent 4,689,832, for creating a partially de-tackified leather containing nitrocellulose and silicone resins. It’s an interesting area of work, and I’d love to revisit the process of leather tanning someday. Based on my own reading, I suspect that the best way to achieve a baseball having a tackier feel and a better grip is to adsorb a substance having enhanced grip during the leather tanning process. Rather than replace the rubbing mud with a spray-on product, let’s look at changing the material of the baseball altogether.

link dump

Trump pick for NASA chief doesn’t understand science – Fortunately, there is bipartisan opposition, mostly because Marco Rubio realizes that NASA has a significant impact on his state. But Bridenstine’s name has been floated out there for a few months now.

“When discussing climate change, Bridenstine uses a tactic perfected by the tobacco industry; specifically, the sowing of doubt to obscure science. The tobacco industry internally adopted the slogan “doubt is our greatest ally” in its efforts to hide that its products were killing thousands, which it achieved through sloganeering and PR statements honed to suggest it was unclear if the science was conclusive about tobacco’s effects. In the same vein, Bridenstine once said that the climate “has always changed,” and noted “periods of time long before the internal combustion engine when the Earth was much warmer than it is today.”

The Salon story takes a broader look at the tactics Republicans have used to propagate their anti-science rhetoric. This type of logic is dissected in the book Not a Scientist: How Politicians Mistake, Misrepresent, and Utterly Mangle Science, which I highly recommend.

Citing The Bible, The EPA Just Changed Its Rules For Science Advisers – The headline is exactly as it sounds.

“Pruitt used a story from the Book of Joshua to help explain the new policy.

On the journey to the promised land, “Joshua says to the people of Israel: choose this day whom you are going to serve,” Pruitt said.

Meanwhile, head of the House Science Committee Rep. Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, says, “Today’s announcement shows that we have an administrator with common sense, commitment, and courage.”