Behold, lasses, an Irish Harp. Not just any Irish harp, but one in the Guinness Brewery and Museum, to which this jumpin’ party returns.

Off to Ireland for a week. Expect bloodcurdling tales of Guinness and Jameson on my return. Feel free to keep up over at the ever-entertaining donnybrook that is Twitter in the meantime.

I belong to a professional geophysical society whose executive committee has proposed the formation of a women’s network. Similar networks are American Association of Petroleum Geologists’ PROWESS committee and Society of Professional Engineers’ Women’s Network.

Why bother? Who’s going to fulfill your energy requirements, for starters? Consider it a staffing problem.

A large hurdle for geoscience is the growing inability to attract and retain excellent scientists, in general, but women, in particular. If the requirements and perception of women scientists are not acknowledge and acted upon soon, we stand to lose valuable professionals to other more attractive but perhaps not as fulfilling professions. The continuing double standards for women with family and the identifiers used to describe women scientists need addressing, especially in the male-dominated field of geophysics. Women can use mathematics and physics to address the world’s energy needs just as well as men can (some even more so) but refer to us as “sympathetic and nurturing team players” as if that’s a bad thing or “on the mommy track” and see how far that gets us. More critically, how does it grow the profession?

You don’t believe that this happens today? Forget the men (and women) who think women who wish to raise families while working have no place in the workplace and check this: Just a couple of days ago, I had to dispatch a guy who joked that the name of our proposed professional society should include a “snarky reference to Mother Earth, periods and emotionalism” and continued with “Gaian Cretaceous chocolate-bingers.” Why are menstruation, our feelings and pink sparkles the first things to come to professional male minds about professional women, when the known reality is that we, too, are … hold on … professionals who do not operate on these terms when at work?

This is the overt bullshit we’re up against, along with the stealthy and unspoken kind.

Many young female geoscientists have already benefited from the sense of community created by women in the sciences, both through professional and online networks. As they move beyond school and into the workforce, they hope to keep those ties strong. Furthermore, women currently in the geophysical workforce can continue to provide support and growth opportunities to one another.

So, this is my query. In the year 2010, armed with the learnings of various women’s societies to date, research into women’s issues and online tools such as Twitter, Facebook [insert obligatory “Yuk!”] and forums, what would the must-haves of your science-focused women’s professional network be?

Here are some suggestions that have come in so far:

• Include networking strategies explicitly to identify and support mentoring connections.
• Partner with an established network.
• Encourage the mingling of academics and industry professionals.
• (This one’s mine.) Encourage social media less for recruiting and more for actual conversation like in the geoblogtwitosphere. It’s so much more organic and honest, i.e. what we really need, when it isn’t formal and enforced.

What else? I’m all ears. Oh, and don’t say the network needs women. It’s been done to death and many of the folks proposing the group are actually men. There are male feminists, remember?

Suggested Reading:

• Highly Allochthonous | Diversity in the geosciences and the impact of Social Media
• Science Progress | Women and Diversity in Science
• Futurity | Reference Letters Cost Women Jobs?

I don’t know what it is with Folse’s and my fascination with crows. Or theirs with us.

Reading his latest, I recalled my grandmother feeding me as a small child, especially during the festival of Pongal, with the words, “Kaka pudi, kanu pudi.” A little morsel of whatever I ate would first be set aside on the plate for the crow. I’ve learned since then that it is inauspicious for a Hindu not to feed a crow before eating himself.

That dreaded “inauspicious” word again. I swear it’s been holding orthodox religious folks back for millennia, however brilliant and capable they are without all this nonsense.

But, crows have followed me all over the world, even where they are commonly not found (like my backyard in Out In The Sticks, Ohio) and one can’t help but feel there is something to that. I believe D will kill me if I begin to feed them given that they already take turns sitting on our roof and no other, tapping on it with their beaks. It’s like they’re trying to Morse-code a message to us, a language I don’t understand, unfortunately. Or there are some really tasty bugs living in our eaves.

Crazy, smart, beautiful, misunderstood birds. No wonder Shani rides a crow. Shani, not Yama who rides a water buffalo. There’s a difference.

Crow realized there were two Gods-
One of them much bigger than the other
Loving his enemies
And having all the weapons.

— Crow’s Theology by Ted Hughes

Called my father-in-law, the loving old coot of a Korean war veteran, today and thanked him for his service. He always gets a kick out of that.

Growing up, November 11th was Armistice Day. Say that here and folks will look at you like you’re sprouting a second head. Like a certain person I will not name other than to hint that he is my husband.

Ahem. From the United States Department of Veterans Affairs:

In November 1919, President Wilson proclaimed November 11 as the first commemoration of Armistice Day.

… An Act (52 Stat. 351; 5 U. S. Code, Sec. 87a) approved May 13, 1938, made the 11th of November in each year a legal holiday”a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated and known as “Armistice Day” … the 83rd Congress, at the urging of the veterans service organizations, amended the Act of 1938 by striking out the word “Armistice” and inserting in its place the word “Veterans.” With the approval of this legislation (Public Law 380) on June 1, 1954, November 11th became a day to honor American veterans of all wars.

Apparently, America knew what an armistice and Armistice Day meant for a GOOD SOLID 35 YEARS. Ahem, I say!

This morning, I listened to Bob Edwards interview some military personnel about the Dignified Transfer that takes place in Dover, Delaware, the port of American re-entry for our slain soldiers. As we now know, all coverage of these events is conducted only by military photographers and videographers, and the media is not allowed anywhere near the place. Edwards notes the relative visual impact.

The imagery of the event heavily influenced public opinion during the Vietnam War, but public concern over the war in Afghanistan is comparatively low.

And then I read this over at Editor B’s:

[Bradford J. Kelley] begins by noting the lack of attention paid to our current military engagements in the recent election cycle, but notes that politicians can’t really be blamed for failing to focus on a topic people don’t really seem to care about: “The apathy in American society regarding these wars is appalling.”

You will never truly understand what you do not allow yourself to see.

Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg and a veteran himself, recently recommended Derick Leebaert’s The Delusions of American Foreign Policy From Korea to Afghanistan to me. From the WaPo book review:

The magical thinking of Leebaert’s title is the recurring American self-deception that we have what it takes to persuade the peoples of foreign lands whose histories, cultures and traditions have little in common with ours to see and do things our way.

… So you won’t agree with Leebaert about everything — no matter. If you can’t disprove his large thesis, then you confront this painful conclusion: We have squandered tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars on foolish attempts to remake a world we simply cannot guide. And we’re still doing it.

I am prepared to fight and die actually defending the values of this country but not the fiscal comfort and missing spines of a bunch of jackbooted thugs in government who abuse my willingness to serve in misbegotten wars to the point of my serious injury, mental illness and death, care nothing for me and my health after I return and spit on my service to the nation on a day meant to honor me.

For, to paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, I am tired of old men who have never been to war dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

Honor is not a parade. It’s everything after.