Other media outlets refer to Simpson as an “MIT Student”, “MIT Sophomore”, “Woman”, “Teen”, “Student”, and “Art Student”. On her web page, Simpson describes herself as “an inventor, artist, engineer, and student”.

But, and I know this is a tad geeky of me, some of those libraries are stocking the book under the wrong Dewey Decimal number.

For example, the Newton, MA public library has it under 508.2, which is the classification for “Seasons.” What does our book have to do with seasons, other than featuring the wisdom of seasoned techies and nerds? The Millbrae, CA public library has it under just plain 508, which is “natural history.” Slightly better, but still odd.

But hurray for the Mechanics Institute Library here in San Francisco, which has the good sense to list the book under 509.2, which is the Dewey Decimal code for “scientists.” A perfectly sensible classification, if you ask me.

In the mid-1980s, Rutgers asked her to join the faculty. She told them she wouldn’t come aboard unless she could conduct research on women, who had been neglected in medical research. The university’s nursing school then offered her a laboratory to seal the deal.

Among her more recent areas of research: proving that women who’ve suffered spinal-cord injuries can still have orgasms, and that “non-genital orgasms” are real. In some cases, women’s own doctors had told them it was “impossible” for them to experience genital pleasure after a spinal-cord injury, but the vagus nerve still connected their genitals and their brains. Using MRIs and fMRIs, Whipple told Wired she discovered that:

some of the same brain areas are activated during orgasm in women with and without complete spinal cord injury, and also during orgasm from imagery alone, with no one touching their body, including the women themselves.

Whipple’s new book is The Science of Orgasm, cowritten with Barry Komisaruk and Carlos Beyer-Flores.

I was at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting over the weekend, and have much to follow up on with that. Blog you later!

It’s not that I’m against reading science fiction either. But my preferred genre has long since been literary fiction (and I know that some science fiction qualifies as this as well). This might make me less of a geek, except for the fact that I’m a huge Richard Powers fan.

Haven’t heard of him? Neither had most people in the U.S. until he won the National Book Award in November 2006 for his novel The Echo Maker. OK, so maybe that means most people in the U.S. still haven’t heard of him. But you, dear readers, are all geeks if you have found our page, and you might like to know about the fiction of this writer who often incorporates science and technology into his stories.

I’ll admit that The Echo Maker wasn’t my favorite book of his, because it didn’t have a love story like The Gold Bug Variations or Galatea 2.2. (So maybe I’m also into the romance genre, which is such a gender-appropriate thing for me to like. Underneath my unsentimental rational facade, I’m really just a woman who wants to be love and be loved.) It’s still a tremendous work, though, and I probably should read it again to get the parts that I missed the first time around.

But I’ve read all of Powers’s books, some multiple times (can’t get enough of Gold Bug! Makes me cry at the end out of the sheer beauty of it all every time!). And they all are crammed with ideas, learning, and connections between scientific and humanistic areas that you never even considered. I read a quote somewhere to the effect that Richard Powers novels are the reward for a good liberal arts education. Yes, indeed.

And so what I’d like to know is, why do the Germans get Powers while we don’t? Besides, of course, that their country is now run by a female geek—Angela Merkel earned a doctorate in physical chemistry—the Germans buy Powers novels like they’re going out of style:

RICHARD POWERS has no idea whether his fame spiked in America after he won the 2006 National Book Award for fiction last month. He didn’t stay in the country long enough to find out. Four days after the New York ceremony, the 49-year-old Illinois novelist jetted to Germany for a week of auditorium readings and TV interviews. It was a trip scheduled not because his ninth novel, “The Echo Maker,” had won the big award but because, he said from Frankfurt, “It’s like I’m a rock star here.”

Powers wasn’t boasting. His tone, as he spoke from his hotel the day after Thanksgiving, was one of grateful amazement. His 2003 novel “The Time of Our Singing,” a 650-page saga about race and classical music, sold 290,000 copies in Germany. In America, the gentle, erudite novelist has the critical status of a literary giant. (Novelist Margaret Atwood recently compared him to Herman Melville.) But his novels of ideas are seen as an esoteric taste here, and “Time of Our Singing” sold only 21,000 copies.

(From an article by Kevin Berger in the Los Angeles Times, Dec. 10, 2006)

It’s the next best illustration of cultural differences—oh, and on so many levels!—after this.

I’d like to add a few more suggestions:

Fun, molecularly-inspired jewelry and clothing can be found at Made With Molecules. What becomes a female geek better than a pair of estrogen earrings?

I’m neither an astronomer nor a biologist, but I can’t decide whether Bathsheba Grossman’s science crystal of the large scale model of the universe or DNA polymerase is cooler. If you can’t make up your mind yet, just buy a couple of DNA keychains as stocking stuffers and get a Julia set as a birthday present.

Since I’m actually more of a nerd than a geek (I tried to be a true geek, I really did, but I had to come out of the closet and admit that I actually prefer stories to physics equations), I really enjoy books that blend science with amazing stories and captivating artwork. One wonderful book that I’ve seen is A Gap in Nature: Discovering the World’s Extinct Animals, full of gorgeous illustrations and brief stories about animals that once roamed the earth but are no more. Not the cheeriest thought, of course, but are we not doomed to repeat the mistakes if we do not read the cautionary tales? On a cheerier note, though, the same author-illustrator team published another book of esoterica about the animal world that lives today: Astonishing Animals: Extraordinary Creatures and the Fascinating Worlds They Inhabit. I’ve not seen this book myself, but it sounds delightful, and even with a bit of of a challenge: they’ve made up one of the creatures, and try to guess which one!

That last topic reminds me of the monkey-picked tea that we gave as a gift once from a British purveyor of exotic foodstuffs called Edible. Gifts here would not be for the picky eater, unless she’s Wednesday Addams.

And for Christmas next July: SF Bay Area author Wendy Lichtman has written a story for children in which the female protagonist uses math to solve a mystery, Do the Math: Secrets, Lies, and Algebra. I’ve not read it myself, but my writing group instructor who is a protege of Lichtman says that she totally got into the story despite being math-phobic. Maybe this can be our way of roping girls into the female geek lifestyle….

The appeal of the sci fi system to the ordinary fan lies not just in its orderliness, but in its finiteness. You can watch every single episode of Star Trek and learn everything there is to know about it. You can contain an entire universe in lists and DVDs. The kind of universe that is knowable by heart is much less threatening than the real universe outside, off screen, full of unpredictability and disorder.

It is my contention that the reassurance offered by a system of order, internal coherence, completability and collectability – a universe that can be put in alphabetical order – is particularly appealing to men . . .
Whether by social conditioning or nature women seem better able to adjust in adulthood to the irksome imperfection of the universe . . . I can only speak for my own gender, and I can reveal that men are mostly dragged kicking and screaming into grown-upness. They never give up the secret hope that complexity will go away and leave them alone. They take refuge in trivia because facts, nice orderly facts, are psychological balm to the friction burns inflicted by contact with real life.

There’s the old chestnut that men hate being grown-ups, but somehow women don’t mind it. Then there’s the extreme misunderstanding of science fiction itself, a genre which is full of ambiguity, plotholes, infinite complexity, and disorder. What’s amusing is that this guy is really talking about world-building, a practice more often associated with fantasy than science fiction. And fantasy is a genre full of extremely successful female authors.

Why men love SF [via SciFi.UK.com]

• A subscription to New Moon magazine plus back issues (so there’s something to enjoy right away)
• “Shero” stories, such as Tamora Pierce’s series about girls who become knights, The Song of the Lioness and Protector of the Small. (I enjoy the books too.)
• A computer of her own for a niece whose brother had taken over the family computer
• Anything from Chinaberry
• The Creative Cosmetics Kit from Edmund Scientifics for the girly niece

Something I’ve considered but haven’t given is the Hary Potter Nimbus 2000 electronic broomstick, whose pulsing vibrations make it very popular with teenage girls but not with the anti-feminist group Concerned Women for America. Maybe when they’re older.

I’d welcome reader suggestions of other gifts to foster my nieces’ education and empowerment.