thinky ancd competency realisations

Was sewing lycra covering on bikini whilst watching Lost last night (I catch up on my tv to make space on my computer for more tv - one of these days I'll get around to actually watching the new season of Numb3rs, but at the mo, no great desire to do so. And yes, mightily pissed about Kitchen Confidential.) when something hit me.

It occured to me that when cutting out the bits of the bikini, I hadn't even thought about it. Just pinned the original to the cloth and then cut out the parts, not having to think about where or how it connected, or how much to leave for hemming/overlap. I do this now. Someone says 'need to make this' and I go 'oh, no problem, that'll take _insert time here_'. I'm competent. I know I'm competent at clothes making. I'm just wondering when I became competent. At what stage did I pass from complete beginner, because I remember learning and being shite, to the stage of unruffled competency? When did the crossover happen?

This happens in all trades. Bet everyone remembers vaguely learning how to do things like the basics of cookery, but don't remember when you didn't even think about making dinner, just grabbed the ingredients and started chopping and mixing.

The other thinky is er... forgotten now.

Thinkies on race

Or rather, the perception of it. I work on a multitude of biological and medical journals. Different articles on everything under the sun coming through the system, all of which I skim for formatting errors. However, what's interesting? Occasionally we get articles that have to do with race (tied up in money or living conditions) with statistics attached. Or they're genetics-based. That kind of thing. We have journals on every aspect of medicine and biology under the sun here, coming in from every corner of the globe. From bioinformatics to geriatrics to cancer to environmental health and harm reduction (that one's about drugs, though we'll often get articles about AIDS in there) and equity in health. So we'll get statistics on black vs white vs asian, or inuit fishing village pregnancies vs Norwegian fishing village pregnancies to compare diet and living conditions or stress.

However, we get a lot of articles in from the US. Which is the only place I've seen that has the label 'hispanic' applied as a marker of race/genetic difference. Seriously. is there really that much genetic difference between the spanish speakers and those of italian descent? What does the whole hispanic label mean, anyway? Is what the US calls hispanic actually Latin American, which is a mix of black, european and native american? The whole concept that you can distinguish between 'white' (ie northern) european descent and spanish descent is completely ridiculous in Europe itself. We don't have the label of hispanic. You might get Meditteranean, which is more a geographical label, more applied to cookery and holidays, which involves spain, portugal, malta, morocco, italy, greece and cyprus, with turkey at a pinch. The idea that you could label any of them as a genetically distinct tribe from, say, the french or finns would get you laughed out of most places.

So can someone explain the distinction between white and hispanic?