When I was wee, I often visited the Mid America Science Museum, which introduced me to theremins and tectonics. I was especially fascinated by the movie Powers of Ten, which played on a continuous loop in a dark alcove of a theatre. In its own seventies-tastic way that movie helped me get a sense of the universe’s scale.

I’d never seen anything like it until recently.

This movie is both awesome and awe-inspiring. Every time I watch it raptly I remember what it was to be six again and only starting to discover how wondrous our universe is.

We’re having a snow day here in Northern Alabama, which means drivers panicking and people buying up all of the bread and toilet paper while people from, say, Boston just shake their heads and laugh. In honor of the snow day, here’s my first ever experience with a snowdrift ten years ago.

—

When I woke up this morning, someone had replaced my world with a white one.

As a rule, Southerners don’t have much experience with snow. We tend to look at snowstorms bemusedly. They’re like your eccentric uncle who only stops by every once in a while, causing an uproar while he’s here, delighting the kids and bothering the adults, then leaving a day or two later. His visits are so infrequent that each one is an event to be remembered and talked about, preferably in capitalized words. “I remember the Snowstorm of Eighty-Three.”

When I was growing up in Arkansas, it only snowed about every three or four years, and then only a few inches. Our schools never planned for snow days — why plan for something which happens once or twice a decade? Still, I loved snow. As soon as it would start falling, I’d drag out my cold weather clothes. Mom would always make sure Andrew and I had layers and layers of clothes on before letting us out into the arctic wasteland of Arkadelphia, Arkansas. She was undoubtedly afraid we’d lose our way in the half-inch upon half-inch of snow. Our visits outdoors involved more checklists than a Shuttle flight. Boots with fuzzy lining? Check. Toboggan cap with “Cheerios” printed across it? Check. Long underwear? Check. Big fluffy coat? Check. Warm gloves that make your hands about as maneuverable as a Radio Shack Armatron? Check. Water-proof ski pants? (I never did get to go skiing, but I had the pants.) Check.

And then it was out into the newly-white world, where Andrew and I would toss snowballs, make snow angels, and chase each other through the snow. When my dad could, he’d stay home and join in the chasing and the throwing and the making of snow angels. If only we’d had enough snow to make a really good snowman, we’d have been set.

I’d never seen large amounts of snow, except in pictures and the occasional James Bond movie. When we went to Alaska I saw cars with power cords, so that owners could plug in their cars at night and keep the engine from freezing up or the engine block from cracking. Huh, I thought. Imagine it being that cold. Imagine having that much snow.

Several years back I moved to North Carolina. North Carolina gets more snow than Arkansas, which is like saying, “We get more rain than the Sahara.” The first winter I was here we had a minor ice storm which shut things down for a day or so.

Then this year we had a system of winter storms move across the state. Last week ice and snow shut down schools and some businesses for about a day. On Sunday more ice closed churches. Local TV channels covered the weather with the seriousness and focus such media outlets reserve for forces of nature. They dubbed the event “Winter Storm 2000.”

They should have saved that caption.

The phone call came early this morning from my friend. Have you looked outside? There’s snow. I guess we won’t be going into work today.

I knew it had snowed overnight — it had begun snowing by the time I drove home last night. But I didn’t realize how much had fallen.

I had to go outside. I just had to. I pulled on several layers of clothes, including the aforementioned ski pants, which I still have. Mom would be so proud. Properly attired for the weather, I proceeded to open the door.

It wouldn’t open.

I shoved harder. The door slowly gave ground. I stuck my head outside.

The snow on our porch was so deep it was blocking the door.

(Let me pause for a moment. I realize that, for many of you, this is not a big deal. Well, pooh on you. I’ve never been anywhere when more than about three or four inches of snow had fallen.)

I stepped outside into a timeless world. The wind was blowing gently, pushing small flakes of snow to the south. The snow came up past my shins. I closed the door and fairly bounded down the stairs to the street below. In my head I heard Snow! Snow! Snow! Snow! with each crunchy step I took.

My car. Someone had taken my car and replaced it with a big mound of snow. I scraped my glove along it, revealing a stretch of blue paint like ice at the heart of a glacier.

There was a snowdrift between our car and my downstairs neighbor’s car. I’d never seen a snowdrift before. There was enough snow for the wind to sculpt into mounds.

I wandered out into the middle of my street and turned my back to the wind. The little flakes of snow drifted past me, turning and tumbling. There was one set of tire tracks in the street. Someone with a truck and a greater sense of urgency than I had driven somewhere. Where the tires had passed a thin ribbon of ice was left.

It was quieter than I’d ever heard Durham be before. I live near downtown, so I can always hear cars passing. Now all I heard was the hiss of falling snow and the cling-ling-ling of the windchimes back at my apartment.

I tromped down my street to the next one. Behind me were the deep depressions of my footprints. I paused to look at my tracks. Everywhere I stepped I was leaving a slurry of ice and trampled snow.

When I looked up, I noticed that a tree had fallen over, torn down by the weight of the snow. There was probably a chance I’d lose power.

I ignored the problem and caught several snowflakes on my tongue.

As I went tramping back towards home and heat, I saw someone else tramping along their street. She was bundled up like me, with a fuzzy blue stocking cap and a bright coat. We waved. Neither of us felt like shouting to each other.

Misty’s in Atlanta on a business trip. She’s supposed to come home tonight. I wonder if she’ll be able to make it, or if RDU airport is now just a large white field with a big sign sticking up out of it which reads, “PLANES GO HOME.”

I fall down in the snow and try to make a snow angel. The snow swallows my head. When I get up, the wind dusts me off. I’m beginning to dream of hot chocolate.

I should be more serious. The snow is causing all kinds of problems. One of my co-workers hoped to get a large chunk of his thesis data today. Misty is no doubt stranded in Atlanta. The power could go off any second, robbing me of light and heat.

I’m sure it’s just the cold wind keeping me smiling like this.

Hey, looks like I’ll be doing more science talks at Dragon*Con later this year. If you’ve got topic ideas, throw ’em my way. And, yes, Mike, I’m mulling a talk on metamaterials and invisibility cloaks.

We survived the wilds of Arkansas and have returned, busier than ever! We’ll have more to say later, including the thrilling story of The Return of Liza’s Poor Sleeping Habits (thankfully a one-night-only limited engagement) and Now Liza Opens Her Door in the Morning and Goes Roaming. While you wait, enjoy Peter Watt’s awesome fanfic of a certain John Carpenter movie.

We are off the Internets for 2009. Have a great holiday season, and we’ll see you in 2010.

That poor, poor Jeep Grand Cherokee.

As you know, Bob, I’m mildly obsessed with how to display data visually. Displaying data well is tough, especially when you’re talking about complex data. When I have to design a chart for some crazy-ass set of data, I often look at how others have done the same thing, and I keep tabs on blogs that cover chart-making in detail. I also like to collect examples of how to do it badly.

Thankfully, as I’ve mentioned before, the DoD is a great source of bad charts.

Look at that thing! Click on it and behold it in its full splendor! Some of the data is color-coded, but there are multiple secondary labels per color. Those secondary labels are on top of the chart, partially obscuring words and the connecting lines. The light green is unreadable, and the light blue isn’t much better. Most of the nodes in this graph are blocks of text, except when they’re not. I know this is a working draft, and I know the chart’s designers are trying to convey a lot of information, but good grief this is bad.

(via TPM)

If I linked to every incident of an author being crazy on the Internet over a bad review, I’d be here all day, but this one is a perfect shining diamond of such crazy. It’s the platonic ideal of an author going insane over a bad review, and will be studied by future cockroach scholars as they comb through our lost civilization trying to understand why we spent so much time on the Internet being stupid.

At Amazon, L.B. Taylor gave a bad review of “Electra Galaxy’s Mr. Intersellar Feller”, an SF romance by Candace Sams. The first comment, by “Niteflyr One”, accuses Taylor of hating the author. Niteflyr One, of course, is the author Candace Sams.

What’s that? A sock puppet right out of the gate? That’s a classic move, the Queen’s Gambit of authors responding to bad reviews. But it gets better! She claims her response was just a social experiment! (“Here’s a run-through of the events of this experiment, for that’s what all this was ‘really’ about.”) The lurkers support her in email! (“For some time now, I’ve been getting messages from more equitable reviewers, agents and editors that this person (Taylor) was ‘known’ in the industry for having some very angry, almost hateful opinions…”) Godwin’s law in action! (“I’d liken their collective attitude to Gestapo tactics, but I don’t think anyone who left comments on the list on behalf of Taylor would know what I was talking about, let alone be able to spell it.”) I don’t actually mind the bad review! (“For those of you who don’t know…I was a police officer for almost ten years. I’ve been called things in languages from all over the world. Taylor and her webspinners hardly bother me.”) All of you people responding negatively are in on it and are out to get me! (“She responded just as I thought one of these nasty little reviewers would…she ran, hid and called out her little army of nothing-better-to-do malcontents.”)

And that’s only one comment! She ran through the whole Kubler-Rossian spectrum of wankery in one sitting.

What’s icing on the cake is her awesome claims. Thrill! to her claim that editors are responsible for the bad books, not authors. (I blame Joss Whedon fans for this defense.) Exclaim! when you realize that she points to Harriet Klausner as a model reviewer, the same Harriet Klausner whose reviews are typically nothing more than plot summaries that may or may not get the plot points right. Marvel! that she thinks that people who post bad reviews on Amazon then buy it in ebook format to sell illegally. Swoon! as she sneers how a sneer is the weapon of the weak.

But none of that can hold a candle to her calling in the Internet FBI. Seriously!

Candace Sams gives up around page 18, but who knows? Maybe she’ll be back!

James Chartrand is a well-known blogger in certain circles through his articles for Copyblogger and his web design and copyrighting company, Men With Pens. Yesterday James admitted on Copyblogger that he’s really a she. She’d adopted a male pen name to make it easier to land freelancing jobs.

You know the punchline, of course: it worked.

There was no haggling. There were compliments, there was respect. Clients hired me quickly, and when they received their work, they liked it just as quickly. There were fewer requests for revisions — often none at all.

Customer satisfaction shot through the roof. So did my pay rate.

This shouldn’t surprise you. Sexism, both overt and subtle, is still rampant. Women make less money than men for the same jobs. One recent study showed that having blind auditions for orchestras, where the reviewers didn’t see the candidate and did not know the candidate’s name, increased womens’ chances in the first round by 50%. For the final rounds? 300%.

Many women writers have used a male name or obscured their gender by using their initials. It’s especially widespread in science fiction and fantasy, where Andre Norton, C.L. Moore, C.J. Cherryh, James Tiptree, Jr., and J. K. Rowling all used a variant on their name so no one would know they were women.

James has taken a lot of heat for this. Not all of it has been from people who want to deny the sexism her experience highlights. Jessica Wakeman, writing at The Frisky, rails against James deciding to “pass” and calling her an Uncle Tom for not fighting the sexism directly, and in doing so shows that she and the point of Chartrand’s experience aren’t even in the same zip code. Wakeman deliberately co-opts racial terms to make her point, which is troubling to begin with, but her point makes no sense. “Chartrand just contributed to the stereotype that male copywriters are more talented than women copywriters,” she writes, which is the exact opposite of what Chartrand has done. Like James Tiptree, Jr., Chartrand ‘fessing up to being female shows that females are indeed as talented as male ones. Like the blind audition study, Chartrand has shown the unspoken gender bias that’s going on every day.

If you’re going to be down on James Chartrand, be down on the persona she created. She not only used a masculine name, she went out of her way to sound as super-manly as possible. As Amanda Hess pointed out, Chartrand’s company is named “Men With Pens”. Chartrand described her lone female employee, Taylor Lindstrom, as “the team’s rogue woman who wowed us until our desire for her talents exceeded our desire for a good ol’ boys club.” She illustrated her blog posts with pictures of naked ladies, and chided mommy bloggers to give more weight to male voices. It’s as if every morning before writing she tied a red bandanna around her head, nodded sagely to her poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and downed her usual breakfast of whiskey and cigars. She responded to the sexism she was experiencing by creating a sexist persona.

That’s the real problem with James Chartrand’s story. It’s both a good anecdote about the sexism women experience and a cautionary tale about a woman who decided she had to be a man’s man to get ahead. I’m not disappointed that James Chartrand chose not to fight the sexism she experienced. I’m disappointed she decided to perpetuate it herself.

I think a lot about other people’s artistic styles–about how I wished I’d thought of what they’ve created. Or maybe I wish my stuff were as cool as I perceive theirs to be. Maybe my work is cool and maybe it isn’t. I’m not writing this down to garner praises or sneers for what I do. At this particular minute, I’m not even sure what it means for my stuff to be cool.

As with different kinds of style, it seems that craft work can be a bit faddish. Things look nifty and everybody wants to jump on the bandwagon. Looking at artist’s magazines really emphasizes this. I love them and look forward to my monthly trip to B&N to sit and troll the mags while Liza plays with the trains. I even buy one occasionally. What I’ve discovered from looking those over for the past year and cruising 100+ blogs a day is that there a whole lot of people doing very similar things. I’m not saying that what they are working on is bad, I’m just saying I’m starting to see the cycle. And oh boy, does the internet feed that beast.

Here’s the thing: when I look at what’s swirling around out there, I realize that my stuff doesn’t look like that.

A few weeks ago I found a set of videos of a well known artist journaler explaining her process step by step. (Incidentally this is the same blog where I first found out about artist journaling.) I was really excited to see how Teesha made her own notebooks out of sheets of watercolor paper. That bit of info solved a problem about my own journal that I’d been working on for a while.

I immediately got a sheet of watercolor paper and, just for kicks, decided to follow her process. Wow, was that hard! Staying inside of her lines was nearly impossible for me. And what I ended up with only bears a passing resemblance to what she does. As a copy of her work it stinks. But what a learning experience it was for me! And hard! So much harder for me than my own process. So I came away armed with a solution to a problem and also a bit of security in what I do on my own.

So my angst comes down to this: I want to grow as an artist. I want to find my own style and be more comfortable with it, be willing and able to claim that style. I want to proclaim, “I am an artist!” And I never feel as if I’m quite ready to do that. How can I call myself an artist when I don’t have a body of work? I can’t stay focused on one thing. I want to try every little thing that catches my eye. (Maybe that’s where my contribution to the fad kicks in.) One week, I’m all about ATCs. The next week, I’m all about artist journaling. I make notebooks and cross-stitch. I want to try traditional bookmaking and printmaking. I want to do better graphic design. I want to start drawing again like I did in college. I want to figure out how to combine some of this stuff and cook up something awesome. I’ve got so many irons in the fire, I don’t know which one is hot.

After the holidays, I’m gonna sit down and come up with a plan. Christmas has depleted my Etsy store stock. I’ve been making custom-order notebooks for a couple of people for Christmas and also making a few personal gifts. I want to get my store up and running ASAP after the first of the year, and then carve out some time to start working on all this other stuff.

Maybe all of this is just part of what an artist experiences. The desire to figure our our artistic selves. The search for the idea that opens up our life’s work. The time spent working on every little thing until the big thing grabs our attention and doesn’t let go. Maybe I’m more of an artist than I’ve ever given myself credit for before.