Morts sans sépulture - The Victors (Döda utan gravar)

Dead without graves as I think it would be called in English (although, it is called The Victors or Men without shadows) , maybe one of my favorite plays and also by Jean-Paul Sartre. I miss it. I have a copy on the other side of the ocean… not here. But at least I found a small part, the important part where they tell Jean he has to be quiet or they will kill him, just before Henry kills the young boy, the brother (forgot his name now), who will talk when the come to interrogate him. And the sister is torn between the love for Jean, turning into contempt when everyone else is braver than he is – or are they? He is their leader and yet he is the one that tries to be stay moral…

Jean: Les mains libres? Vous m'avez garrotté. Si je dis un mot, si je fais un geste: "Et les copains?" Vous m'avez exclu, vous avez décidé de ma vie comme de ma mort: froidement. Ne venez pas dire à présent que je suis votre complice, ce serait trop commode. Votre témoin, c'est tout. Et je témoigne que vous êtes des assassins. (Un temps.) Tu l'as tué par orgueil.

Henri: Tu mens.

Jean: Par orgueil! Ils t'ont fait crier, hein? Et tu as honte. Tu veux les éblouir, pour te racheter; tu veux t'offrir une belle mort? Ce n'est pas vrai? Tu veux gagner, tu nous l'a dit. Tu nous as dit que tu voulais gagner.

...not in my family...

Sometimes the headlines are too visible to ignore. New York Times has at least two of them today...

Not in my family, or rather "only poor people beat their wives", got yet another counter evidence for that statement
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Professors-Wife-Slain.html

It is still a tradgedy of course, I am still surprised about that violence when divorce comes up. It is clearly a reaction of control or rather the lack thereof, in my opinion anyway. Makes me a little hesitant at times, and yes especially now…

And the next note of how to fight that fat. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/08/health/08obesity.html?_r=1&ref=us&oref=login

I am not entirely sure that a note with your BMI on it to give to your parents is the right way to go… but maybe actually reintroduce physical education (PE) every day at school. At this time I really doubt if we have to have ‘real’ PE including running and playing ball every day. Maybe an hour walk would give these kids a more healthy way of looking at life? I know it worked at my last job where we were allowed two hour long walks a week within our work hours… that was nice, especially during winter months when light is a scares commodity in northern Europe.

Ah well, back to work. Need to process that data and try to analyze it so I understand what it really means. I have tried for a good afternoon and it still looks strange…

...nose bleed...

Funny how yucky it feels when all of a sudden, in the stillness in front of the computer, something wet and sticky starts its way down your face. The faces of my co-workers when I more or less moved quickly towards the paper towels in the common room (the bathrooms are way down the hall...) while holding a couple of fingers on the bridge of my nose, pausing for a second while the pain from the still slightly swollen cartilage (can cartilage really be swollen?) made my eyes fill with water (aka tear fluid) and finally I reached the wondrous paper to help stop the blood from being everywhere in my face….

Combined with the knowledge that my jar of Advil is almost empty, the memory of when I last had spontaneous nose bleeds makes me think a little more. Again, I can see why hiding is tempting, but still - it is going to be like Jack Torrence ‘Come out, come out where ever you are’ or Roy Batty ‘Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.’ - which makes the hiding quite irrelevant.

And as always, the rational cynic man (Gaff) sums it up: It's too bad she won't live! But then again, who does?

[quotes from The Shining and Blade Runner. I still wonder how it would have been to act against Jack Nicholson when his character is also called Jack. How could you distinguish them apart, when trying to explain “are you like that. No I am like Jack… Jack who?” Redrum indeed.]

Reality `a la feminist?

Thinking about reality and that, with one exception, the [female] post docs in my institute all are single or have a spouse that is a senior post doc [they are juniors]. The male post docs are either single or have a spouse that is a junior post doc, research technician or a stay at home mother.

The situation in the field back home, as I have seen it, was female researchers often happened to be in the spouses’ lab, i.e. the spouse was the professor or senior PI. Or the females were research technicians in lab of their spouse.

All this is generalization, of course. Not reality. And even if it was some kind of reality surely this is mostly due to the research environment, rather than society as much?! Or if it is in society, it is probably most natural and nothing to go against… who am I to preach about something like that?!?

Looking at the relationships that my friends have… All in all I could say there is a slight bigger diversity – although there is only one woman who finished her degree and got a job before her husband, and they met during the same education in uni. Other than that, it is indeed a somewhat bleak picture. Or maybe it is just life.

I would like to know, for real though, if it is due to the women (wanting men to be ‘more’ than themselves so they can learn) or the men (wanting to not threatened by the woman they love)?

Love is indeed something that makes us vulnerable so maybe in order to open up and be a real man, you have to be with someone who you can beat, in education, salary or something… Because she can always be the better mother, emotional icon for your children and social hub as for your friends and families… (All this according to the truth as known by the 50ies…)

Maybe I should just conform and find my place in all this; because boy, am I in the wrong end of the spectra at the moment!

Kant and Hume

They might be the two people I thought most about today - apart from a little trip into the lands of freedom as seen by Nozick and Rawls. (I still find it very inspirational that both of them worked at the same university, Harvard, and kept so different views of society! That is my sense of academia, needless to say it is not as much that feeling today for me...)

Kant apparently said Hume woke him up from his sleep... and Hume was a scientist as well as a historian and a philosopher. With Kant, there are some things I like. "Maxims should be made as they could be hold an universal law" [could be off a little with the translation] as well as "not be treated as an ends to an mean" and the autonomy of a person. Rawls make it all a little more "modern" in his A theory of Justice and Nozick writes his reply in the book Anarchy, State and Utopia. (Night watch state as a minimal state with less rights than the individual etc.)

Hume on the other hand handles causality and empirism interestingly and as a scientist I do like some of the more complex thoughts he presented. He worked from Locke, a large influence, and improved some of the more "old" empirists and also showed that some things are deductable, rather then experimental - touching rationalism just a little.

I guess that is some of what I truly like, a little bit of rationalism and deduction mixed with empirism and true dogmas (like the 'universal law'). This is also one of the reasons I detest stupid people who try to make all issues simple, easy and think the discussion is unnecessary unless you agree with eachother from the beginning. Really, an easy and worthless argument of never having a discussion and never increase your own view of the world. Of course, it is easy to say if you do not agree with me, you are dead stupid.

I prefer to say, if you can not even argue your own stand point or admit the complexity of the world, then you are truly stupid... and your place in science is, as far as I am concerned, questionable.