Not only is Veronica Mars on a bit of a slide this year, but apparently its portrayal of laboratory procedures in last week’s episode sucked, according to Jenny F. Scientist. She lists a number of things the episode got wrong, including:

• Nobody stores their monkeys in the lab. This is what animal facilities are FOR.
• Because to work with primates, or even be in a room with them, you need clearance, training, and a TB test. And then you have to swipe in….
• Also, the chick next door? Nobody covers their entire lab space with experimental plants and grow lights. They make greenhouses for that. Really.
• And while tea does live in lab, not so much next to the sink. Safety gets upset.
• Nobody wears their lab coat all the time.
• Much less into the school cafeteria.
• And they didn’t have anything in their pockets. And the coats were all clean. Come on.

More at the link.

…’cause I hope it will come back buttered! I seem to remember Ma Ingalls saying this in the Little House on the Prairie books (yes, I read the whole series during my pre-geek years).

So, I have a couple of questions to ask on behalf of a close friend from graduate school, a female scientist (and therefore that’s why it’s relevant to this blog), who lives in the heart of Silicon Valley. She has an 8-month-old daughter, and now that she’s beginning to emerge from a serious bout of postpartum depression, she is now facing some other issues.

1. My friend feels like she doesn’t fit in with the other mothers who (it sounds like) are buying into the whole “If I don’t make every split second a learning moment my kid is going to wind up on the street” hyperparenting mindset. It’s making her nervous and anxious, and it is totally not what she needs right now. Does anyone know of a group of parents in Silicon Valley who are more chilled out?
2. And does anyone know how to tell a Taiwanese mother (my friend is Taiwanese-American) that although her advice is appreciated, one has decided upon a different course of action and therefore no further discussion is necessary? (I’ve already suggested saying things like, “Hey, so are you gonna root for the Bears or the Colts in the Super Bowl?” but my friend doesn’t think that will work, since her mom doesn’t follow football, or most mainstream American culture, for that matter.) Apparently my friend’s mother’s response to my friend disagreeing with her is to repeat the original unsolicited advice again. How do we control-C this?

If anyone has any suggestions, my friend will surely appreciate them! Thank you!

People are still responding to last September’s Shalala report on Women in the academic sciences. The National Institutes of Health just appointed a new working group on Women in Biomedical Careers to help redress the gender imbalance in the sciences. NIH Director Elias Zerhouni “and Dr. Vivian Pinn, Associate Director for Research on Women’s Health and Director of the Office of Research on Women’s Health, will co-chair the Working Group, which will carefully consider the recommendations in the National Academies report.”

Meanwhile, one article suggests, more women technologists are getting involved with mentoring younger girls. “Many industry leaders and experts believe the long-term solution to the gender imbalance in IT lies in women technologists going back to school — way back, to high schools and even elementary schools to mentor young girls, who too often give up on math and science at an early age.” The article cites programs sponsored by IBM and Cisco, among others.

The low representation of women in IT isn’t just a women’s problem, it’s everyone’s problem, suggests another piece by the same author, Carmen Nobel at InfoWorld. “More than a matter of stemming the tide of the ongoing skills shortage, encouraging women to get involved in technology is fast becoming an imperative for establishing the kinds of adaptive, collaborative, and versatile enterprises that will thrive in a fast-paced global economy,” she writes. That last part only holds true if you believe that women are naturally more “adaptive” and “collaborative” than men, of course…