Imposter mommy

As I've written before and commented about here, I don't really feel like an imposter as a scientist. But now that I think about it, I do feel like an imposter when I walk around with BlueEyes. For some reason I always assume that people must think that I'm the nanny and not his mom. I think this happens in part because BlueEyes goes to a relatively expensive daycare that we are only able to afford thanks to a scholarship, so most of the other parents are 5 to 10 years older than we are. They come into the daycare professionally dressed for their 'real' jobs, whereas I walk in my flip flops and jeans to go to the lab.
The imposter feeling has faded a bit now that BlueEyes is getting older and I feel more like a mom (yes that took a bit of time to sink in). But I still occasionally wonder whether people think I'm the nanny...

Turning lead into gold and coffee into words

Back in the days before there was chemistry, alchemists were trying to turn lead into gold.

Nowadays scientists turn coffee into words, money into data, and data into papers.

image source

On eReaders

I still read old fashioned books, and it sometimes seems that I’m one of the few people left on this planet who don’t own an eReader of some kind. (It seems like Word doesn’t know what an eReader is yet. It wants me to change it into ‘eraser’.) Until two years ago I said that I would never get a smart phone because I didn’t want to check my email everywhere I went, but since I then succumbed to my iPhone that has been attached to me from the day I got it, I’m not going to say that I will never buy an eReader.

But I like regular books; because you can have the pages flip through your hands, and see how far you are towards the end. I like how people have thought about the cover, the font and what kind of paper it was printed on. I like to look at my bookcase and see what books I have read. I especially like my collection of Lonely Planets that show where I have been and that sometimes even have beach sand or tickets and receipts falling out of them when you open them. Along that line; I like to see what kinds of books people have in their bookcases when I visit them. I think that when you only have ebooks, you should at least get a projector and project a bookcase with all the ebooks that you have on your eReader on the wall for people to see when they come to your house. Also, I like browsing through second hand book stores (or I should say Dr. BrownEyes loves browsing through second hand book stores and I’ve come to like it over the years). How is that going to work when everyone only reads ebooks on their eReader? And I like to see what people read on the train; I like to know whether they read a book that I really like or if they read some crappy news paper, and when they have an eReader I cannot see that (similar to the book case-projector, people should announce what they are reading on the back of their eReader I think).

But ask me again in two years and I’ll probably own an eReader too…