Injustices on Mars: 200 Years Of Backwards Thinking
Injustices on Mars: 200 years of Backwards Thinking
Several young women have expressed to me in the past week their frustrations with improper treatment and I would like to speak here regarding the attitudes that are unfortunately still present in the universe.
A student looking who dreams of designing hospitals and other places of healing that have a more positive affect on the mentalities of their inhabitants.
A mechanical engineering student pursuing her education far from her family, looking to improve the world she lives in, whether that be her home country or America.
A freshman nursing student, who came looking to obtain a top tear education, that would ultimately provide a pathway to help those who need it most.
Three intelligent young women who are both capable of and motivated to change the world for the better. All of them have overcome obstacles to ultimately leave their homes and families far behind to come study on Mars. These young women, are students deserving of our highest respects and yet I am anguished to hear of the unkindly and demeaning way in which they have been treated in this particular community.
Our first student in seeing a freshman struggling, became somewhat of a mentor for this student. She shared with him advice she had learned on the subject he struggled with, and surviving school in general. He in turn treated her as something to be obtained, and saw it fit to text her with questions that... did not pertain to studies.
Our second student, living in a whirlwind of learning about both engineering and other cultures and yet smiling through it all. I think we all have much to learn from her. This young woman came to me to discuss engineering. She wears a ring on her left hand, worn as a way to deter young men. She expressed that someone was speaking to her that “wanted to be more than friends” and was not deterred by her expressed lack of interest. So, having learned that a ring worn on the left ring finger is an American indication of being committed, she began wearing one.
She is committed. Committed to her studies and herself. She is clever and I hope her promise ring keeps its promise of deterring those who don’t listen to her. That said, this is an approach I have seen used before in this community and elsewhere with mixed effectiveness. The unfortunate nature of this approach is that it only deters those who have enough sense not push unwanted attention on those who are committed to someone. The issue here is not that people are expressing romantic interest, but that they are not respectfully heading requests to discontinue certain behaviors. Another unfortunate drawback to this method is that it deters people whom one might actually be interested in getting to know.
Our third student, excited in the days approaching college, started talking via social media to another student. They talked almost every day and she was excited to have a friend at school who had been nothing but kind and respectful. Her ‘friend’ began to express interest in taking her to a school event. She hoped that her ‘friend’ would meet her in the library so they could talk. This is when he expressed that he didn’t have enough time to bother for a conversation and made implications that suggest he was only kind to her at first in hopes he would get to be with her for what many do after this particular school event. She has found other accompaniment for the school event.
These young women have shown exceptional strength in not allowing idiots to affect their studies, but they shouldn’t have to. This kind of thing happens everywhere and time and time again these young women will have to show strength in the presence of the universe’s worst, but these attitudes are not consistent with the direction the world is headed. I have omitted from this writing things that were said that I feel more specific than needed in this context. I find this behavior particularly ridiculous as the organization approaches 200 years, pledging pretty words of honor, respect and dignity, while preserving ideas that should have died in the last 200 years.
Additional Statement:
Other events have also elapsed in the past week that lead to me writing this particular piece. The female representing figure was removed from a gender neutral single stall restroom, leaving women to have to find an alternate restroom on the other side of said building and leaving few options for those who do not fit the binary genders. Meanwhile an individual originally dismissed for predatory behaviors was allowed to return.
I would also like to point out that these occurrences do not only happen to women. In this sometimes stiflingly traditional culture, I have seen objectification and mistreatment of a great diversity of people in a diverse number of forms. I would like to suggest this is not the kind of diversity that we should encourage.
I would like to formally conclude with a request. Students, Mentors, Creators, Be Respectful to the best of your ability, and when the best of your ability isn’t good enough, Get Better. Most of all it is important to Try.
Please Don’t Be Ashholes. And don’t say things worthy of Vogon poetry.
More Posts from Arthurwatney and Others
“Life Sucks... Then You Die”
It’s been a rough couple weeks. Mum used to play this. It feels fitting tonight on Mars.
“The College Experience” On Being the Sober Friend
Many people seem to think that the Sober Friend, the one who doesn’t party, but will come get you and fix you up misses out on some fundamental aspects of the college experience. And yet in looking back I believe I got to experience some of the highlights of being drunk and/or high without the expense of the traditional substances. Then again, there were still the health services fees and engineering textbooks cost more than boose so...?
1. Master of Vomiting.
Yep...Noro. I can vomit while practically laying down on the toilet. The trick is to strangle the piping. I’m also quite skilled at running while nauseated and, knock on wood, haven’t missed the toilet yet.
2. Waking up on the floor + awkward interactions with someone I barely know.
Whatever you do, don’t take a shower when you’re severely dehydrated.
3. Inability to walk a line
Albuterol after I had the flu
4. Memory Loss
Severe sleep deprivation will do that.
5. Bloodshot eyes
Sleep is for people who don’t have a major statics project and circuits and a thermo exam due the same day.
6. Anti-skunk smell procedures
The people across from me didn’t have to wash their laundry but I wasn’t about to get suspended for their lack of caution and found myself freebreeze-ing my room with the best of em’.
7. The munchies
No excuse for this one. Three weeks four boxes of marshmallow fruit loops.
A Damn Good Friend
These days, life is stressful. Everyone needs a Damn Good Friend.
Weeks ago, this friend of mine brought me flowers partially pressed in a notebook. Upon receiving them they were pressed in textbooks. I turned to my textbook in search of clarity, thinking I would find myself a diagram. I found a different more beautiful kind of clarity.
To a Damn Good Friend, Thank You (:
Censorship of Suicide Prevention?
The other night our dorms held a “Trick or Treat in the Halls” event for the children in our Martian settlement. Prior to this event there were prepatory events, pumpkin carving, door decorating and removal of posters and signs deemed inappropriate for youth.
Some of these things made sense to remove. But among the things that were mentioned as necessary to cover, I wonder about two.
First of which is a cartoon ghost wearing a bra on a sign explaining the risks of breast cancer. Maybe it’s bad maybe it’s not. But doesn’t breast cancer awareness include the children? Don’t they see the advertisements on television? I’m not one to advocate for something being okay just because it’s been seen or said before, but I’m unsure that this needs censorship?
I am against the censorship of the suicide prevention sign. To censor this implies that the children won’t be affected by mental health issues before they are too old for the trick or treat event. This event includes children up to 12 yrs old. I was 9 the first time I recall mental health related struggles affecting those around me, but in all honesty I may have been somewhat aware of it even before then. I wouldn’t be introduced to suicide prevention till six years later. I don’t think this is unusual. When I mentioned this at one of the events, the others around me in a similar age group, the same ones who’d been planning to cover the sign recalled similar occurrences. They noted that they’d definitely known about these things to some degree by 5th grade. We can’t prevent these from being things that our youth have to deal with and giving them inadequate resources makes them things that they have to deal with alone.
In my experience, the deliberate censorship of mental health made it harder to speak about it because it seemed “bad”. Censoring it in the same way that drugs, alcohol, sex and excessive violence were made it seem like something that I “wasn’t spost’ to be aware of yet”.
It’s just a couple signs and in all honesty I don’t think their removal matters in the grand scheme, but I do have to ask: Does it make sense?
Conclusion: I should not consume caffeine based pain killers
Sometimes I'm "that" person. I take to statics with fond memories of vectors from my trouble causing multivariate days and my appreciated too late linear days, allong with a bystanders view of euclidean geometry. This is to say: I draw a mean triangle and think I know more than I actually do.
So when the problem is posed in such a way that it forces one to make one of two conflicting assumptions, I cant help myself.
And when I find that the solution most people will be bringing in makes both of those conflicting assumptions.... something in me can't resist.
I'm 2 pages in on a 4 page detail of why said assumptions break the problem, steadily on my way to the conclusion that the problem statement is ill posed, when I realize what I've done. Ive taken caffeine based pain killers, at night, my resting heart rate shoots up to a conservative 100 beats per minute and my hands are too shakey to write clearly.
I am forced to succumb to a different conclusion: I should not consume caffeine.
That said...I have an explanation. I just hope its correct and not a caffeine + exhaustion based misinterpretation of the problem.
Healthy Life Choices:
My mother insists I eat more protein as my post-flu diet has been poor.
My doctor insists I increase my iron intake as my Martian diet lacks meats.
I think... I have found a solution:
An Exercise in Unpacking & Havin' More Fun:
Imagine this:
Your shuttle, a lovely blue craft old enough to vote, returns you to mars late enough in the sol that it is already dark and you can feel the cold of the atmosphere in spite of your insulative layers.
Alone, you must unpack your craft and the extensive resupply materials it contains. Because you are alone you cannot leave the craft docked in front of the mass housing unit and since nearby docks are taken you must dock up hill from the housing unit.
How then do you get the supplies into your personal chamber???
Well, if you're me...
While wearing full insulative equipment you drag one of the carts up the hill, load it with the supplies, increasing its mass significantly. Then you push it and a rolling desk chair toward the hill, hop into the rolling desk chair and hold on.
I may be many things, but I'm certain I had the most fun in unpacking.
Welcome to life on Mars
We are curvature.
If one thinks of life as a series of moments with good and bad wrapped into them, then is would life be worth living if the net sum of the good - bad was bad?
My initial gut feeling was yes, but as in mathematics we cannot just say things are so because of a gut feeling. After all, one could argue that my intuition says so, because the net sum of my moments has been positive.
Consider net happiness as being approximated by the riemann sum of the given good or bad of a set of adjacent short periods of time. Now take the limit of this as the change in time approaches 0. In short, I invite you to consider happiness as the integral of some curve. Where the curve is defined by f(t)=lifes instantaneous happy levels (positive or negative) and the area underneath which is net good/bad.
This is similar to how the integral of position with respect to time is displacement aka net change in position.
Now determining if life is worth living should be a nice integral of a function (which for most would be continuous) and a simple little apple of the fundamental theorem of calculus.
But consider this:
1. We dont know the bounds, so unless a nice little trick or assumption comes in we cant apply FTC. Also of one factors in considerations of life after life on Mars then this becomes an improper integral from 0 to infinity. If you believe that you are reborn then the bounds become negative infinity to infinity. Both very improper.
2. We don't know the function, so we cant integrate it.
3. Even if we could integrate it, we couldn't solve for C, so integrating f(t) as an indefinite integral would be pointless.
So what do we know?
We aren't very good judges of if things are getting better or worse at any given moment so we only have a very rough guess at the rate of change.
We aren't very observant, so we can only notice a few things at a time.
We really only know the moment that we are in, and not where we are going, and what's more I'd like to purpose that our lives are affected by more than one thing.
I purpose that we experience at any given moment the second derivative of the function of life, which is not simply f(t) but rather, a function of infinite (as many as necessary) variables. We know not where we are or where we are going, we dont know how the future will change us. We simply know where we are and have an idea of whether allong a particular direction we are concave up or down.
Life is a n'th dimensional hyperspace and we experience it as the curvature allong whatever path we trace allong whatever level surface we happen to have focused in on.
Aka, we experience life as the curvature (k, second partial derivative) of one level surface of it's n'th dimensional hyperspace.
So we don't know, but just the mere thought of riding allong this hyperspace brings a certain kind of satisfaction, and a unique quest for knowledge.
This blog is the synthesis of my love of science fiction and my day to day experiences traversing the universe. Welcome to life on Mars.
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