Vivat Libertas

As foretold, I have been on a bit of a hiatus due to school and, more importantly, our impending House Music - which we're going to flop, but at least Part Song will be fun. Anyway, we had a chapel service as per usual. In the chapel service two drama students performed a "play" (read: thinly veiled piece of religious propaganda). Now, I've performed thinly veiled pieces of religious propaganda before. It's strangely fun if you throw yourself into the part and ham it up. However, my piece was actually well-written (poor drama students, you are lovely people and you're only doing the best you could with such an awfully written script), and, more to the point, it didn't make my blood boil with its assertion of Christian misconception about what atheism actually means. I realise I've probably pissed off a lot of theists with my misconceptions about what theism actually means. I'm not proud of that. I do genuinely want to communicate...it just gets...

I have a rather awesome Biology teacher. She's genuinely, almost ridiculously passionate about her subject, and about science in general. She did quite well for herself at uni and was going to continue on to a PhD...so not the kind of person whom one would expect to be a teacher, given the "if you can't do it, teach it" attitude. She openly told our class that she teaches because she genuinely likes it - she gets to talk about the subject she loves all day long, for a start, which has to be a plus in any career. Cue me telling her that more people need to talk like that - to which she said that she does give talks to people doing PGCEs. Following on from other random stuff I and many, many other people came up with , it's not good enough just  to be essentially preaching to the choir. We desperately need inspirational teachers - and to get more of them, teachers should speak to students from, say, Year 9 upwards about the benefits of becoming a teacher. I don...

I don't really talk about this much. I probably should do, since it's quite interesting. I came across this tweet from Alom Shaha , talking about how having female role models doesn't make a difference to girls' appreciation of physics. Now, this is a massive problem - the ratio of men to women in physics is still quite skewed, but I'm getting off topic. He asked for thoughts, and since I have a big mouth and fairly good typing skills here's what I came up with . It sparked off a little bit of commenting, particularly when I mentioned the role of the media in telling girls to "shut up & look nice" . Two women, @RedRubia and @Queen_Claire , told me that nobody had ever told them they couldn't do maths and that they were very proud of being presentable lady geeks who had never thought that they should shut up, in which case, more power to them. @Original_Cindy  then claimed I was wrong (but hasn't actually put any evidence forth for th...

Not all Americans are idiots. Not all Chinese are evil and/or communists. Not all Germans are Nazis. Not all Greeks are lazy. Not all Israelis are fascists. Not all Italians are cads like Berlusconi. Not all Poles want to take your jobs. Not all Russians are communists/corrupt/evil/criminals. I think I've got most of the stereotypes down, but the point I want to make is that you can't generalise about entire nations . In every country there are the cruel, the lazy, the stupid and the greedy, that's true, but there are also the kind, the hard-working, the clever and the generous. That's just the way of people. If you spent time around them, you'd change your ways. Why am I preaching to you about this? Because I hate it. It makes me feel physically sick to see people talked about like that. You do not get an entire country full of fascists. You do not get an entire country full of saints. You have the good and the evil (if there are indeed such things) and ...

I should actually be doing homework now, so this will be quick. For the 96846th time, yes, I am a flaming liberal. I am a pinko and proud of it. I'm also willing to sacrifice my principles to reason. There is "fat acceptance movement" and there is "telling people that they might do serious damage to themselves is fattist". Do I believe in health at any size? I don't necessarily support the movement - I don't know enough about it - but yes, I do believe it is possible to be overweight and healthy, just as it is possible to be unhealthy and have a normal BMI. I would aim for health first and looks later, having learnt unhappy lessons about what happens when you get your priorities wrong. The above is my position on being fat. Below is some ranting. I understand that obesity can have genetic causes. I understand that once weight is put on it can be very, very difficult to lose it without invasive surgery in the worst-case scenario. I still think tha...

Fuck the kyriarchy . That's all I can say. I'm shocked and outraged and I can barely talk. Maybe I shouldn't be this way. Maybe I should have expected something like this. But no matter how rampant it is, no matter how widespread the attitudes are, I get angry. I'm not particularly easy on the eyes and I'm probably slightly overweight. Fine. I do the best I can with what I have and these days I try to keep reasonably fit. Going to the gym (instead of being forced to participate in sports I despise) probably helps. Two stunningly beautiful girls in my year, one of whom models, want plastic surgery for...well...basically everything. A nose job, a boob job, a tummy tuck here and a facelift there. Now, these girls can do whatever they want. Their private lives aren't my business. If they want to spend money on permanently changing their appearance, that's their decision and not mine. What is  my business, however, and what disgusts me, is the attitude whic...

So...something with a rather academic title from me this time. Guess all these papers I've been reading have had an effect and somehow managed to make me even more geeky. Anyway, a lot  of people extol the power of positive thinking. A lot . Some go so far as to say that positive thinking can alter reality itself (with, of course, the odd nod to quantum mechanics - which I doubt they understand). Others stick to more conventional grounds, such as optimism being linked to better health. I'm not going to argue with what the evidence says. I am, however, going to argue that there is a very dangerous current in "positive thinking": namely, it blames victims for their own plight . Victims by definition  are largely or completely blameless for the bad things that happen to them - but I'm getting ahead of myself. How does positive thinking blame victims? Well, it doesn't outright turn round and say "It's your  damn fault if bad stuff happens to you...

...So Islamophobia really has passed the dinner-table test after all. Otherwise liberal, open-minded people universally denounce Islam as evil, out to corrupt Europe, inferior to the West, a terrorist organisation, paedophilic...you name it, they probably have an accusation out there. Even a recent campaign designed to get people to think "hey, maybe Islam isn't  uniformly evil" instead met with accusations of Islamophilia and indignant comments about how morally wrong  and hypocritical  it is that Muslims should dare  to ask for the respect we accord to other cultures. The thing is, the Muslims they're denouncing - the ones who beat women and fly planes into buildings - are the extreme ones, not the moderates or the mild ones. This is not news. As anyone with even an iota of religious education knows, not all Muslims are sexist or uneducated. A great majority are not trying to take over Europe. How do I infer this? Because it's pretty idiotic, logically speakin...

I am a teenager; I am a teenager under sixteen, to be slightly more precise and to give you some insight into my life. According to my elders and my supposed betters, this means that I am hormonal, boy-crazy and reckless. I am supposedly incapable of not being dramatic; any unhappiness I may feel is me making a mountain out of a molehill, ruled by my hormones and in need of a big, strong adult to show the whiny bitch her place. Anything I'm passionate about is just a passing phase, unworthy of discussion. I have nothing resembling logic, and even if I did, how could it compare to the long years of experience that wore my parents down from fired-up people into passive consumers? In short, if I don't follow my parents' advice to the letter (and perhaps even if I do), I'm going to do something stupid, because a bint like me simply isn't capable of justified emotion, actually caring about something, or doing smart things. I used to get really offended by this line o...

So...the Royal Institute of Great Britain has held its first ever unconference , and I was there. According to the article linked, I'm apparently one of "the UK's top science students". Fat chance, but who passes up free compliments? Anyway, it was absolutely amazing - in a very geeky kind of way, of course! Speakers were pretty good - first half was a bit slow, though - and breakout sessions were OK. We ended up having to condense it down to about 12 points, though, so I didn't really get all the details. Reading through the #riunconference  tweets I gathered that while my talk (I was the spokesperson for the science and education breakout session) was well received by Alom Shaha (and certainly by whoever told me to run for president - I thank you, but I don't think I'll do it), other people were complaining that either 1) something was wrong with the proposals or 2) I wasn't saying anything they told me to say. Without getting huffy about this, bec...