Today is the first International Fanworks Day!! Created by the Organization for Transformative Works (the folks who brought us AO3), it's a day to celebrate the creativity that abounds in fandom. Both The Mary Sue and AO3 have great suggestions for how to celebrate it, so pour yourself a glass of wine, pat yourself on the back, and enjoy!

Little known fact: Stephen Colbert has been a Star Wars fan two weeks longer than anyone else. That and his encyclopedic knowledge of Tolkien are only two of the reasons I love him. Also, he can explain why the new light-saber design won't cause you to lose a hand :)


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So yay, I finally have time to write about the Pop Culture Association conference, which as I said the other day was brilliant. I think I'll break it up and do one post for each day, since there's so much to say about it.

So first, the background: I've wanted to go to this conference for ages, ever since my brother told me about it when he first presented there six years ago (his field is horror movies) and I looked at the program. This year not only was my brother presenting again, my boss at work was also presenting, plus it was in Chicago (easily accessible via Amtrak, plus I could do a side trip to see my mom, stepdad and grandmother). So this seemed the ideal time. I was not disappointed!

On the spectrum that runs from rabid fans on the one end to Spock-like academics on the other, this conference is tilted about 15 degrees toward the rabid fan side. This is both good and bad: on the one hand it makes for a different tenor than other professional conferences I've been too, very lively and kaleidoscopic; on the other hand the number of presenter no-shows and "lightweight" presentations was higher. It's also by far the biggest conference I've ever been to in terms of number of presenters -- the full program is over four hundred pages! -- and every session involved two or three people. This also was both good and bad: the sheer number of interesting topics was fantastic, but I was left wanting more in-depth information on just about everything, since regardless of how scholarly the paper, there was only time for a very surface overview.

Wednesday we arrived around 3pm so I only was able to hit one session. I chose one on Monsters and the Supernatural, which had three papers: "Which 'Witch' Is A Witch?: Negative and Inaccurate Portrayals of So-Called 'Witches' In Horror" (Charmed, Buffy, etc.), "Rooting for the Monster: 21st Century Creature Features and the Devaluation of the Human" (about how we now cheer for the monster in the movies instead of the humans, e.g. King Kong, Godzilla), and "Monsters and Men: Guillermo Del Toro and the Subaltern" (Pan's Labyrinth, The Devil's Backbone, etc.). I was tempted by another session, "Star Trek as a Mirror of American Culture," but that one seemed relatively obvious so I opted for the other one. "Rooting for the Monster" was particularly interesting, proposing that increased awareness of environmental issues may be part of why we now root for the "monster" -- that is, we don't automatically see man as the hero because we acknowledge the damage that homo sapiens has done to the planet. Instead of seeing Godzilla's or King Kong's death as this great victory, we recognize the tragedy inherent in the death of a unique creature.

Wednesday night we had an awesome time at the "Welcome to Our Nightmare" movie sponsored by all the different horror focus areas: Trilogy of Terror (eeeeeeeek!!!) They had a trivia contest before the show and gave away all kinds of cool stuff: movies, books, t-shirts, etc. The questions were ridiculously detailed (Q: Who played Jonathan Harker in the 1931 version of Dracula? A: No one, the Harker character wasn't in that version!) and of course sooo many people knew the answers, because FANS. (I got a Lon Chaney question almost right but not quite, drat the luck.) The movie itself was hugely entertaining, three tales based on stories by Richard Matheson. The first one was seriously unnerving, though perhaps not for quite the reasons the filmmakers intended (sexual predators being so much more in the news these days). The second was predictable, and the last was just utterly silly: a creepy little African statue comes to life and hunts a woman through her apartment, gnashing its tiny little teeth and waving its tiny little spear, like some kind of humanoid gremlin. It survives stabbing, drowning and being stuffed into the oven. I won't spoil it by telling you the closing scene, you really need to see it for yourself XD All in all it was a prime example of cheesy 1970s horror and the audience shouted things at the screen and laughed and so on, but it was all done with great affection (because, again, FANS!).

OK, enough for today. Tomorrow: Stephen King, "You've got more problems than lesbians in your sauna!", crossover fics, Star Wars and the monomyth, and who called the fandom police??

The chart that proves just how lacking Middle Earth is in women

Examples of how the Victorians made even their microscope slides look like steampunk masterpieces

A very fun (and painlessly educational!) video about hexaflexagons (don't worry if you don't know what they are -- you will when she's done)

And last but not least, Tim Burton's original poem, "The Nightmare Before Christmas," which eventually became the movie, read by the epically awesome Christopher Lee

You're welcome :)

A woman hasn’t run a presidential debate in twenty years.

This boggles my mind. With all the women in business, journalism, politics, etc., NOT ONE has been named to moderate a presidential debate??? Other adjectives I can think of besides "surprising" include annoying, vexing, inappropriate, strange, or even (if I were of the paranoid persuasion) Highly Suspicious.

Well, three teenage girls from New Jersey apparently agree. Rather than spending their summer listening to Justin Bieber or hanging out at the pool, they amassed an astonishing 170,000 signatures on a petition to have one of the upcoming 2012 debates moderated by a woman. They then took their packet of signatures to the office of the Commission on Presidential Debates (the Commission will be selecting the moderators in the next couple of weeks)...

...and they were turned away, and told that they would not be permitted to leave the packages of signatures in case they contained dangerous substances.

WTF? Epic governmental fail.

Emma Axelrod, Sammi Siegel and Elena Tsemberis were interviewed about their experience on NPR today, where they spoke like mature, thoughtful, engaged young citizens about their disappointment with the way they were treated. (I applaud their self-control; I believe I might have thrown something large and heavy...)

Rather than give up, however, (quoting from themarysue.com): "[w]orking with Change.org, the girls have put together two petitions asking for female moderators–one targeted at the commission, and one targeting the Obama and Romney campaigns, who can also have a sizable influence over who is chosen to moderate the political showdowns. The former has 116,000 signatures, the latter 53,000."

These girls rock. If you agree, you can sign their petition and add your support. You go, girls!!!

Math is one of the most predictable and yet surprising things anywhere ever. Oh, some might cite the sentient mattresses of Sqornshellous Zeta, and there may yet be a very surprising fungus on Algol IX that excretes solid gold, but for my money I'll take math every time. Nothing is as entertaining and endlessly surprising as the fact that multiples of nine always add up to nine, or that given a right triangle a²+b² will always always always = c², or that the Fibonacci sequence turns up in sunflowers and pinecones. Why??? I don't know, but it still surprises me.

The joy of mathematics is inventing mathematical objects, and then noticing that the mathematical objects that you just created have all sorts of wonderful properties that you never intentionally built into them. It is like building a toaster and then realizing that your invention also, for some unexplained reason, acts as a rocket jetpack and MP3 player. (LessWrong.com)

Did you know that every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes? Really. Go try it. (Well OK, it's technically just a conjecture, but nobody has disproved it yet.)

When I took geometry in 7th grade and discovered that you could start with maybe three or four premises and make them prove all kinds of other things, I was astounded and excited and wowed and mindblown (uh-huh, I'm a Nerd Girl). I'm still gleefully surprised when I do something all mathy and complicated and it works every time. How cool is that??

Did you know that the apparently completely abstract binomial formula (a + b)² = a² + 2ab + b² can be represented by an incredibly simple picture that you've probably doodled yourself at some point in your life? Go here and play with it if you don't believe me. And the even more abstract and scary-looking formula (a + b)³ = a³ + 3a²b + 3ab² + b³ is actually a really simple set of blocks that every Montessori preschooler can do?

Even what look like simple patterns turn out, if you dig down, to have patterns within patterns within patterns. Math makes some of the most beautiful patterns in the world. This page includes a bunch of interactive patterns, including Eratosthenes' sieve!

Perhaps most surprising of all, one single number can be used to predict a city's wealth, crime rate, walking speed and many other characteristics. What's that number? Its population. Check out the TED talk on this topic (the TED talks alone could furnish me with at least half of my 100 surprises!).

So yay for the surprises you find when you dig into numbers!!

I'm not sure I've ranted about my love for The Big Bang Theory in this venue, so let me take a moment to say how very cool I think this show is and how much I love it. (In so very many ways, I am Dr. Sheldon Cooper.) That none of the jokes are bathroom humor (the occasional mention of Leonard's lactose intolerance aside) would alone elevate it above 90% of the sitcoms out there. Add to that the fact that the science is accurate, that it makes geeks look fun and cool, that (yes!) there are smart science-y CHICKS on it, and that the discussion topics and jokes (Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, Battlestar Galactica, arcade games, etc.) are terrifyingly similar to those that I and my nerd friends have always loved, and you have a recipe for fabulous that has rarely been equaled. And the minute the local pub dumps trivia night for counter-factual night, I am SO there.

But today I found out something that elevates it to the truly amazing. Mayim Bialik, she of Blossom, who plays Dr. Sheldon Cooper's girl-slash-friend Amy Farrah Fowler, actually really truly in real life has a PhD in neuroscience.

Wow.

How freaking cool is that???

A friend of mine pointed me to this post which I must share with you, my fellow Nerd Girls. On her list of nerd qualifications, I'm eight of nine and working on the last one in my spare time (of which, due to being a nerd and therefore a person of wide-ranging and varied interests, I of course have never enough). Herewith, an excerpt:

[W]hen I think of nerds, I think of smart people who are willing to be different, interested in learning pretty much all the time, and good at looking at the world in a highly detailed, specific, and informed way. I think of people who are willing to be weird. Who wear the wrong clothes, not because the wrong clothes are suddenly the right clothes, but because they either can’t quite remember what the trend is now, or they don’t care at all, or they are comfortable with what they happen to be wearing. I think of people who become inspired by a tiny topic that no one else cares about and set out to discover everything they can about it. People who constantly ask the world questions, who challenge all the premises that other people take for granted, but who do it without being mean. Who do it because they’re curious and because they like to push their own minds. And nerd girls are the best.

Read the whole wonderful article here. It's almost enough to make me forget that as of this week, I am halfway to age 90. La la la, birthday, I can't hear you...