Val Henson invited a group of women to listen to Dr. Louann Brizendine, the author of The Female Brain, at a Commonwealth Club presentation in San Jose. I'd never been to a Commonwealth Club talk live, nor to the San Jose State Martin Luther King Library, nor to a non-SHDH event with Val, nor a doctor's talk about anything remotely female, and all of these firsts sounded interesting so I rsvp'd positively. We went last night.

On the way down to the talk, Val and I chatted about the upcoming lecture, what we were hoping to learn from the lecture. I was interested in learning about how the female brain differs from the male brain in structural ways, and how (or if) that influences what are generally considered "female traits" of more socialable and able to multitask. I was also curious about how the differences may be attributed to social influences and early development, rather than the actual gender differences.

We should have read the book.

The talk wasn't about the brain in particular, but more of personality and trait differences between the genders. The best part of the talk was the description of the hormonal development of the human brain, but that particular part of the talk was much too short, and the seemingly only scientific part (I preferring the science part to the non-science parts).

Val was a little miffed, also. One of the studies the author quoted had results drawn from not only from a data set much too small to be conclusive, but with only a subset of the data set skewed to the result the author wanted. As Val said, "If you analyze the data the way he did, every data set will reach the same conclusion!"

Worse, that study had an entire book based on it, influencing other researchers in potenially culturally damaging ways.

The hormonal development of the human brain was the best part of the lecture. All human brains start out structurally neutral, which is to say female, for the first eight or so weeks. Around eight weeks, the male embryo starts pumping male hormones (most notably testosterone), which influences the brain development. Turns out, from birth until around age two, brains of both genders pump out the same amount (wasn't sure if the same amount means equivalent for body size, or same gross amount, Brizendine wasn't clear) of hormones as the (young) adult body (like twenties). From two until puberty, there's a lull in the estrogen and testosterone, during which the levels are low and steady. Everyone knows the surge in puberty.

That's about the extent of interestingness of the lecture. The rest seemed to be talks about how women tend to be more depressed, have more of this illness or that, blah blah blah. I guess Brizendine tailored the talk to the audience (there were a lot of mommy and children questions at the end of the talk), but I was still hoping for more of the juicy science facts and less of the, yeah, women are women, and what do you know, blah blah blah this research "supports" some culturally biased notions of women as second class citizens.

Someone should mention that "different" doesn't mean "inferior."

On the ride over to the lecture, Val commented that, in developing countries without any gender bias for science and technology professions, over half (not half, not close to half, but over half) of the students are female.

U.S. culture is way too heavily influenced by gender generalization and gender sterotypes.

If you're a boy, stop reading.

Actually, if you're a girl, you may want to stop, too.

Last year, I was introduced to liquid iron supplements by my nutritionist. At some appointment, I expressed concern to her about a drop in my fitness for which I couldn't find a cause. She looked at the insides of my lower eye lid, and commented the color was very pale, implying a lack of iron. She then asked if I had menstruated recently. When I answered yes, she explained the drop in fitness was probably due to low levels of iron, and suggested I purchase a liquid iron supplement that I could get at Whole Foods or an organic nutritional store. I found the product, Floradix, and started taking it.

The improvement was dramatic. Within a week, I was back to my feelings of previous fitness levels; I had more energy. More importantly, I was able to run run run again, without feelings of cobwebs in my legs (a feeling which takes approximately 17 points in ultimate to clear).

So, I continued taking the iron supplement, even after my immediate lack was fixed. When I stopped, I felt my fitness level dropped, so, for a year I didn't stop: except for missing a day or two here and there, I continued taking the iron supplement.

Fast forward to earlier this year, when I mentioned to my nutritionist that I was continuing to take the iron supplement, but couldn't figure out where the iron was going. She immediately became very concerned: except during menstruation, most women do not lack iron, so the continual supplemental use could lead to essentially iron poisoning as the iron (potentially) built up in my body. Great, I thought, something that helps me in a natural way to perform better might just be awful for me. Figures.

I had several blood tests done to check the levels of free iron in my system, as well as general iron absorption. Both were normal, so my nutritionist said, sure, continue the supplements, but maybe let up a little bit: no more than once a day for the supplement (which was the most I was doing anyway), or even skip every other day.

But even with the go-ahead to continue the supplements, there was still the little nagging concern: where had all that iron gone?

I found out today just where all that iron had gone.

I did tell you to stop reading, didn't I?

Yeah, thought so.

The only thing I could think of looking at the mess, was, well, look at that: insides as black as night.

It's all official now.

Mike and Kate are moving to the mountains. All of the financing and paperwork and rain dances and house ghoul banishments have been completed, and they are now the proud owners of a new home somewhere in the mountains south of Skyline and 9.

As always, I'm very excited for my friends. They're moving into a bigger house, with space for the kids, a built-in greenhouse, decks, three car garage, a playroom, lots of land and tighter-knit community; how could I not be thrilled for them? The house they're in now works well for two people, even two plus another little one, but not so well for two adults and two growing kids. It's the same size house as Kris' and mine: works for us, not so much for them.

The new place is fantastic and, as near as I can tell, perfect for them. The commute may be long, but that's more my suspicion than an opinion from either of them.

As happy as I am for them, I know I'm going to be sad when they move. Sad as I was when Ben and Lisa moved, though in a different way.

I like when Liza visits me unexpectedly. It's a nice warm feeling having this little person come over to talk, or to play, or to give me a drawing she made for me. I had hoped to make cookies with Liza as my Mom and I used to do with Andrea and Stephanie Gudis at Christmas time (though, Christmas in Arizona was never much different than any other December desert day).

I like when Mike just walks right into the house when he visits. It reminds me of walking over to the Klein's house when I was younger and just walking into the house. It's a feeling of comfort with certain friends that they know if the door is unlocked, they are welcome to walk right in, no knocking needed. Friends other than Mike seem to need my help opening the door, or express permission to walk in.

I'm going to miss them, in a selfish way of close friends becoming less conveniently close. Of losing the convenience of being able to borrow the shovel or sawz-all by walking four doors down the street, or catching a ride into work in the morning, or walking the dogs at night. It's losing the neighbors like my mom always seems to have when I was growing up: the ones that become good friends for a lifetime. I know they'll stay friends, but many close friendships stay close because of proximity.

I wonder if the the Bauers felt this way when we moved away when I was seven.

"Heh. I approve. Can I blog about it?"

"No, no, you can't. You've blogged about it enough. Farting is, like, its own category now."

"Is that really so bad?"

I made some comment to Kris recently about how I wish I had more formal computer science training. I took all of two programming classes in college, and learned the rest on my own. I believe I do okay, since programming is essentially solving one big logic problem, but every so often I solve a problem with brute force instead of creating an elegant solution.

Kris offered to help me out with the formal computer science education, and suggested we go through his Algorithms book. I agreed, figuring it would happen not before next year, given all of my copious free time.

When I was at Hackday yesterday, Kris pinged me and asked if PHP could handle recursion, which cracked me up (the answer being, uh, yes, of course). When I said yes, he asked me if I could write a recursive function that printed out a series of numbers, from one to the single function argument N. The two keys to this problem were recursion and single parameter.

Counting down from N to 1 was easy. I figure both are easy, but counting down is clearly the easier:

function kris($n = 1) {
  print "$n ";
  if ($n > 1) {
    kris($n - 1);
  }
}

Oddly enough, counting up was harder for me. I told Kris he couldn't offer any hints, and eventually I figured out a convoluted solution using a static variable. My solution clearly showed me my lack of CS education. Kris' solution was much simpler:

function kitt($n=1) { 
  if ($n>1) { 
    kitt($n-1);
  }
  print "$n ";
}

As Kris commented, people forget you can do the recursion first, and the action second, when writing recursive functions.

A candidate at Kris' work was unable to solve the problem, and he wanted to see if I could, especially since I was commenting on the CS education I didn't have. I did solve it, but not correctly.

Next time, I'll have the trick. This time? I felt like an idiot.