Sometimes you have amazing new experiences in the course of gender transition. Today, I was driving a somewhat longer distance and as happens felt a need to use the restroom and so I stopped at a highway rest stop. Obviously, I for one can talk at length about the issues with how we set up restrooms and the gendering thing, but nonetheless, I need to pee and since I’m a woman and also I am about $6000 into electrolysis and have been sticking a needle in myself every week to inject estrogen, I use the women’s side.
So I go in and do the usual things and wash my hands (standing next to a woman washing her hands and paying no attention to me whatsoever—why would she?—and I’m just saying having had a lot of experiences being a very noticeable guy in the men’s room, sometimes even when I thought I was in boy mode, it’s really nice to attract no attention whatsoever) and then it’s time to dry my hands. So I turn to the hot-air hand dryers, which, since this is a highway rest area and not exactly all brand new, are the good old World Dryer from Berkeley, Illinois. The white box on the wall with the chrome air nozzle and the big chrome button to turn it on, and the metal tag with the brand name and the amps and volts and the operation instructions (you press the big chrome button to turn it on). And they were completely unvandalized!!! My entire life, every one of these I’ve ever seen has had the metal tag all scratched up! Back in the old days, they wrote the instructions out in English: 1. Push button 2. Rub hands under warm air 3. Stops automatically. Every single one had some of the letters scratched off to read Push butt/rub hands under arm/stop auto. Newer ones have the diagram of button pushing and hand rubbing, so instead of that specific pattern, one or another message, of some kind, is scratched into the tag. One way or another, scratching the metal nameplate on the hand dryer is clearly a culturally important ritual!
Or, it is on the one side. Over on the other side, apparently women just don’t feel the need to vandalize them! In fact, not only were they unvandalized, they were in beautiful condition, just hints of a bit of normal wear and tear after probably decades hanging on the wall of a public toilet on the side of the highway, but apparently used by people who just wanted to dry their hands and didn’t abuse or damage them in any way! (I am laughing so hard, every time I think of this I laugh, this is such a bizarre thing!)
I’ve got a lifetime of harm from gender stereotypes, so I want to be careful what I say here, but, guys, dudes, fellows: Did you know that you can just not vandalize those things? It’s true! I’ve seen it!
Like a lot of things I’ve experienced in transition, this isn’t exactly a surprise, I’ve talked about the hand dryer vandalism with cis women over the years and all of them expressed surprise, they’ve never seen them vandalized. But, you know, actually seeing it is still a thing!
So I was watching this video on youtube from a light bulb collector, “unboxing” a bunch of old fluorescent light bulbs and exclaiming things like “vintage Westinghouse! Made in the USA!”
When I was a kid I sort-of understood the way that a “rare” “collectable” worked is that decades ago it was just a worn-out piece of junk that most people threw away, but somebody kept one in a box for some reason, and now that’s like the last one left and it’s a “collectable,” but now that I am An Old, it’s even weirder, remembering like 1984 and trying to imagine having a shitty light fixture with a shitty bulb that’s fucked up, and getting a new bulb, and instead of throwing the old one away because what the fuck else would you do, instead wrapping it up in newspaper (remember newspaper?) and putting it in a box and keeping it so as to sell it to some “light bulb collector” in forty years who would then video record “unboxing it” in order to “upload” a file like a hundred-thousand-times larger than you can imagine downloading with your Hayes Smartmodem (in four decades that will be nothing!) so other light bulb collectors can admire the burned-out bulb!
This is still on one floor of one stairwell at work and I keep assuming that sometime over the years I must have taken photos of it, but if I did I never named them and they are lost in the hundreds of thousands of files. So, here’s a set!
Last night was cloudy before the thunderstorms moved in, no view of the sky. But at 3AM I woke up to pee and looked at my watch which gets weather via bluetooth from the phone, and it was reporting clear, and I thought maybe I’d go out and see if there was anything to see. Glad I did!
I’m over fifty, many times over the decades there have been predictions of aurora visible far into the south, but I’ve never seen anything at all. Here at 43° north its certainly not visible often. I had no real idea what it really looks like. You see photos but time exposures of dim things in the dark are not really representative of the real experience. There’s lots of things that look a lot more spectacular in person than in a photo, but you can see a photo and have a pretty good idea of what it’s going to look like. This, not so much.
I put on a night dress and slipped on shoes and went out to the back/side yard. The sky was cloudless. Looking around I saw what looked like a few scattered high thin clouds, stars visible through them. When you live in a city you are used to clouds at night being lit up. But they’d fade, and suddenly appear, and move in a way quite different from the steady drift in the wind of clouds. That’s the thing! I put a coat on and spent a good long time out past three in the morning looking up.
Sometimes scattered splotches of light, sometimes many, sometimes suddenly popping into appearance. Often a vertical striped appearance. For an interval it really picked up, I was craning my neck to look up to the zenith, rays of light radiating down suddenly appearing and fading, lower the shimmering flickering effects in the sheets of light. Aurora from zenith to just above tree/house level maybe a third of the way around the circle of the horizon. It looked white to my eyes except for an interval when a segment out of the expanse was in very clear purple.
I was holding my hand up to shield my eyes from the lights on the building, looking up above the streetlights, in a city where we take for granted nighttime clouds are lit up. What this would look like in a dark place!
Hey Beige, I hear you say, now that you are scanning stuff with your fancy sheet-feeder scanner, don’t you have some other weird old documents to share?
Yeah, I’ve got this Cray Y-MP Functional Description Manual that I actually ordered from Cray Research back in, according to the packing list, February, 1991, 33 years ago. I, like, mailed in a check or something, I don’t remember exactly, of course. They didn’t just have a PDF on their web page, in 1990! I guess, you know, I really have always been like this…
Anyway, I scanned it. Here’s the 191 megabyte PDF:
Did I feel like I needed a scanner with a sheet-feeder? Not really, but now that I have one you betcha I pulled my copy of the “operating instruction manual for superconducting magnet system” from Cryomagnetics out of the 3-ring binder and fed it through. If you’re the kind of nerd who wants a copy it’s only 29 megabytes. I put a pdf up on a backblaze b2 bucket:
We got our laser (one of the lasers…) replaced in the Bruker timsTOF fleX MALDI 2 (I looked up the official weird capitalization just for you) on Friday. The laser, which costs something like as much as a nice car, looks like a gray metal box with a bunch of random cable connectors plus a flat metal plate that I guess must get Real Hot because a heat pipe and fan thingie gets bolted to it. Which is what real lasers normally look like. But back in the day we had this DNA sequencer that used an argon ion laser to excite the fluorescent dyes used in the sequencing chemistry, and that laser, holy crap, that laser was a shiny black metal cylinder with a bigger cylinder on one end and a gigantic power cable, and it looked exactly like a movie prop laser. Like it seriously looked exactly like a prop from Star Wars or Trek or whatever. The most laser prop looking real laser ever.
At work I use mass spectrometers to acquire lots of spectra and then use software, which tends to have a very science-software style of user interface, to analyze it. There’s lots of graphs! With lots of peaks! Which can be interpreted to tell us stuff about molecules.
Apparently, I have a new hobby of acquiring gamma spectra of items in my collection of radioactive things (of course I have a collection of radioactive things) and using very science-software type software to plot it and then try to assign peaks in order to see stuff about nuclei in the samples. You know, to get away from work things, relax, unwind. Apparently, I’m just really into assigning peaks. At work the only property of the nuclei I care about is their masses, playing to the strength of a mass spectrometer. It’s only stable ones we want to deal with. (There is an extremely low level of enthusiasm for radioactively contaminating a mass spectrometer, but we can label samples with stable isotopes and then use the mass spectrometer to resolve them.) Decay chains are a whole new thing to me. Plus when you’ve got nuclei decaying and gamma rays shooting around a bunch of physics things happen producing an exciting array of artifacts in the data to consider.
This is the analytical instrumentation version of the computer-toucher thing where you all spend your days locked in struggle with Kubernetes and then come home to relax by reconfiguring your NixOS or whatever.
I’ve been looking through my old photographic slides, so far those from the late 90s, and it fun to look through them. There are a few of my mom in there from when she was roughly the age I am now. It’s funny, the way I would take photos thinking of what was interesting at the time. I visited the old house to do some work up on the roof and have photos of the roof, because how often do you climb on the roof? That’s an interesting subject for photos! I didn’t take any of mom, because mom’s just around all the time, right? Twenty-five years later…I wish I’d taken a couple of mom while I was there, you know?
