personal

As of November 1st, 2017, ScienceBlogs is shutting down, necessitating relocation of this blog. It's been over eight years and 1279 posts. It's been predatory open access publishers, April Fool's posts and multiple wars on science. A long and wonderful trip, career-transforming, network building and an awful lot of fun. Over that period of time, ScienceBlogs has gone from the 800 pound gorilla of science blogging to just another site with not enough traffic to keep the lights on, which I guess is the way of the world. Things change, life moves on. Thanks to everyone at ScienceBlogs for all…
It's been a couple of years since we lost the Queen of Niskayuna, and we've held off getting a dog until now because we were planning a big home renovation-- adding on to the mud room, creating a new bedroom on the second floor, and gutting and replacing the kitchen. This was quite the undertaking, and we would not have wanted to put a dog through that. It was bad enough putting us through that... Withe the renovation complete, we started looking for a dog a month or so back, and eventually ended up working with a local rescue group with the brilliantly unsubtle name Help Orphan Puppies. This…
I keep falling down on my duty to provide cute-kid content, here; I also keep forgetting to post something about a nerdy bit of our morning routine. So, let's maximize the bird-to-stone ratio, and do them at the same time. The Pip can be a Morning Dude at times, but SteelyKid is never very happy to get up. So on weekday mornings, we've developed a routine to ease the two of them into the day: SteelyKid has a radio alarm, and then I go in and gently shake her out of bed. I usually carry her downstairs to the couch, where she burrows into the cushions a bit; The Pip mostly comes downstairs…
Our big home renovation has added a level of chaos to everything that's gotten in the way of my doing more regular cute-kid updates. And even more routine tasks, like photographing the giant pile of kid art that we had to move out of the dining room. Clearing stuff up for the next big stage of the renovation-- cabinets arrive tomorrow-- led me to this stuff, though, so I finally took pictures of a whole bunch of good stuff. (On the spiffy new tile floor in the kitchen, because the light was good there...) The kids's school sends home portfolios of what they've done in art class for the year,…
So, when last I posted an update on kid stuff, we were about to embark for a week in Mexico with family. As you would expect, I have a huge pile of pictures from this, but most of the cute-kid shots feature the kids with their cousins from Illinois, and I try to avoid posting photos of other people's children. We had a good time, for the most part. The highlight for the kids was probably a "Swim with Dolphins" excursion. SteelyKid did one of these on last year's Disney cruise, but now The Pip is both old enough, and enjoys swimming. Technically, he wasn't tall enough (by maybe an inch) to do…
I've skipped a few weeks of cute-kid updates, largely because I was at DAMOP for a week, and then catching on stuff I missed while I was at DAMOP for a week. The principal activity during this stretch has been SteelyKid's softball, with a mad flurry of games at the end of the season to make up for all the rained-out games. This has been sort of stressful, but it also led to the greatest Google Photos animation ever, so... Anyway, softball was fun, providing the opportunity for me to take no end of photos with my telephoto lens, some of which are pretty good. SteelyKid was way into running the…
By the time you read this, I will have arrived at an undisclosed location somewhere in Europe. My 25th wedding anniversary is today, and to celebrate my wife and I planned a nearly two-week vacation flitting about Europe. I won't announce where exactly, given that I've irritated a couple of European cranks in recent months, but those of you who are Facebook friends or who follow me on Twitter will likely soon see mentions and/or photos of where we're vacationing. As this day approached, I contemplated what to do with the blog. I thought about just shutting it down for two weeks, but hesitated…
We took a rare long weekend to go to a family party for Memorial Day at my parents' (Kate and the kids always get the day off, but I usually have to teach; this year, I'm doing a team-taught class, and the other person was willing to cover my Monday spot), thus the lack of a weekly update post. The delay, however, allows for some quality nerd-parenting content, so it's a win all around... SteelyKid's third-grade class has been doing long-ish projects approximately monthly through the year, and the May project was to design and make a board game based on a book. SteelyKid picked the Bone…
The big development of this week is that construction started on the Great Chateau Steelypips Renovation of 2017. We're extending one part of the back of the house about ten feet to gain a bedroom on the second floor, and gut-renovating the kitchen, dining room, and mud room. This is a massive undertaking, with a massive price tag (more than we paid for the house in 2002), and is going to be massively disruptive later this summer. Right now, it's very exciting, because we have an excavator and giant piles of dirt in our back yard: The Pip looking at the excavator used to dig the foundation…
At SteelyKid's softball game today, the Pip provided an ideal cute-kid photo to use as a springboard to some SCIENCE! Or at least, a graph... Anyway, here's the Little Dude showing off how tall he's gotten: The Pip under Kate's coat. OK, really he's hiding under Kate's raincoat (after two beautiful sunny days in a row, we're back to dreary rain today), but as a side effect of that process he's demonstrating that he's pretty tall. But exactly how tall? We're having an addition put on the back of Chateau Steelypips, and our kitchen gutted and rebuilt, so we've been moving a lot of stuff…
For a long time now, I've had a Sunday routine with the kids, where we go to the Schenectady Greenmarket and then to the Open Door (which is right next to the outdoor market, and a couple blocks from the indoor location), then to lunch at Panera, and usually grocery shopping. We have a standing deal that they get one book per week free, but if they want toys or a second book, it comes out of their allowance. SteelyKid very consistently finds something to read, but The Pip was recently in a mode where he only wanted to read Pokemon books, and the Open Door doesn't carry those, so he would sulk…
One of the things parents of multiple kids often talk about is how they don't end up doing the same things with second children that they did with their first. For example, I carried the weekly Appa-for-scale photos on with SteelyKid for a couple of years, but didn't last anywhere near that long with The Pip. Another thing I did with SteelyKid was to report fairly regularly here on cute stories she told me, and that kind of thing, which I've largely been failing to do with The Pip. the fact that I've fallen out of doing any kind of kid-blogging at all doesn't really make this any better...…
[NOTE: As I mentioned yesterday, our power outage continues, and, thanks to having to decamp to a hotel last night, I didn't have time to produce new Insolence. So I thought I'd repost a "classic" from 11 years ago that I don't believe I've ever reposted before during vacation or otherwise. It represents a sort of blogging that I haven't done for years, just a personal story with nothing to do with my usual topics, such as pseudoscience, quackery, clinical trials, and basic science. This story is based on a real patient encounter from around 25 years ago, but details have been changed.] I don…
So, I tweeted about this yesterday, but I also spent the entire day feeling achy and feverish, so didn't have brains or time for a blog post with more details. I'm feeling healthier this morning, though time is still short, so I'll give a quick summary of the details: -- As you can see in the photo (taken with my phone at Starbucks just before I took these to the post office to mail them), I signed a contract for a new book. Four copies, because lawyers. -- The contract is with Oneworld Publications in the UK, who had a best-seller on that side of the pond with How to Teach Quantum Physics to…
As I've mentioned several times, I just finished a two-month sentence on a grand jury in Schenectady County (well, technically, I have to go back for one more day, because they didn't finish everything). I'm not allowed to talk about the details of the cases we heard, but I have some general thoughts about the process that I think are blog-safe. Several people I've talked to about this who also did grand jury service at one point reported finding the experience more interesting than annoying; sadly, I can't say the same. I have an extremely low tolerance for people inconsiderately wasting my…
Back before The Pip was born, our previous departmental administrative assistant used to bug me-- in a friendly way-- about how Kate and I ought to have another kid. (She had two kids of her own, about two years apart in age.) "When are you guys going to have another baby?" she would ask, and I always said "We're thinking about it." About a week passed between the last time we had that exchange and the day I came in and taped ultrasound photos of the prenatal Little Dude to my door. "You sonofabitch!," she said (again, in a friendly way), "You were expecting this whole time!" "Yeah," I said…
And now, the photo-a-day project straggles in to the finish line, with a final five photos dominated by the kids: 362/366: Kid Art I A set of figures drawn by The Pip at day care over the summer. 363/366: Kid Art II Awesome owl drawing by SteelyKid. One of the official end of summer activities is cleaning off the "art shelf" in the bookcase in the dining room, where we pile the various projects the kids bring home from school and day care. I sort these, and take photos of the best, for historical documentation purposes, and these are two of my favorites from the lot. The four round-…
Another day, another batch of photos from August. 353/366: Trail Blaze One lost sock next to the hiking path in the Reist bird sanctuary. This is actually a slight reversal of chronology, as the hike through Vischer's Ferry was the day after I went for a hike in the H. G. Reist Wildlife Sanctuary. The pictures from Vischer's Ferry were better though, as despite the name I didn't see much wildlife in the Reist Sanctuary. I did, however, find this bright pink child-size sock sitting next to the trail right after a fork. Presumably a way for some wandering toddler to find their way home...…
I've got a big backlog of photo-a-day pictures, but finding time to edit and post them is a major challenge. I've got nearly all the editing done, now, so I'll start putting blocks of stuff up when I have time (generally very early in the morning, as I'm awake before everyone else in Chateau Steelypips). Since we've long since stopped even pretending that these are date-specific, I'll just collect together groups by vague themes: Panorama-rama At some point this summer I started playing around with stitching together bunches of shots to make panoramic photos. Some of this involves playing…
It's been over a month since I did a photo-a-day post, largely because I haven't been taking many pictures for a variety of reasons. I do still mean to get a year's worth of good photos done, but the "daily" part has completely disintegrated at this point. As a way of getting somewhat back on track, I've edited up the best of the shots I took in the loooong break since the last batch I posted. This spans all the way up to the present, and a few are just cell-phone snaps, but it's better than nothing. since these aren't really associated with particular days, I'll group them thematically…