September 29, 2015
The JCC day care was closed again today, so I spent the day out and about with The Pip while SteelyKid was at school. While I did take the DSLR along, none of the pictures I got were all that great, so you get a cell-phone snapshot that's mostly interesting because of the subject matter:
The Pip…
September 29, 2015
The images from my new camera are huge-- 6000x4000 pixels-- so when I post them here, I need to re-scale them (in theory WordPress can do that automatically, but it's never worked right on the rare occasions that I've tried). Since I'm opening the pictures in GIMP anyway, I generally do a little…
September 28, 2015
The JCC day care is closed today and tomorrow for the start of Sukkot, so as a result, I spent most of the day home with The Pip (SteelyKid went off to school as usual). Which means I got a whole bunch of photos of him playing at home and at a couple of local parks.
The best for photo-of-the-day…
September 27, 2015
Really, was there any question at all what the subject of today's photo would be? I mean, I'm a geek, I have a fancy camera-- of course I was taking pictures of the lunar eclipse. But more importantly, I was sharing it with SteelyKid:
SteelyKid looking at the eclipse through her telescope.
That'…
September 26, 2015
The image here of a pancake cooking isn't particularly interesting in its own right, other than as documentation of our weekend ritual at Chateau Steelypips. Saturday and sunday mornings, Kate sleeps in while the kids watch cartoons and I cook pancakes for them. SteelyKid absolutely drowns hers in…
September 25, 2015
I spent a while today shooting video of myself on the back porch. Which technically qualifies for the photo-a-day project, because I used the video feature of my new camera. So, here's a still frame.
Still frame from video shot for a physics thing.
What am I doing here, and why? You'll have to…
September 25, 2015
Another collection of posts over at my blog for Forbes:
-- Wormholes, Monopoles, And Weyl Fermions: Making Exotic Physics Inside Ordinary Matter: A sort of deep background look at what makes condensed matter cool. Drawing heavily on Jimmy Williams's talk at the Schrodinger Sessions.
-- Why Does My…
September 24, 2015
While I have a bunch of stuff in progress, it's been a hectic week already, so I blew off the middle park of the day to go to Thacher State Park and take a hike with my camera. I got a whole bunch of photos from this, and later on, I'll sort them all and put the good ones in an album on G+. for now…
September 23, 2015
This afternoon, I drove over to Vermont to give a talk on "What to Tell Your Dog About Einstein" for the Green Mountain Academy of Lifelong Learning. This was held at the Burr and Burton Academy in Manchester, VT, which sure is pretty:
Playing field and mountains at the Burr and Burton Academy in…
September 22, 2015
Over the last few years, I've developed a routine of working at Starbucks in the early morning, between the bus picking SteelyKid up (at 7:30-ish, ugh) and when I need to be on campus. Now that I'm on sabbatical and don't need to go to campus every day, I'm still going to Starbucks, just extending…
September 22, 2015
I took this yesterday morning while walking the dog, and said "Yep, there's the photo of the day." Which morphed into "I already posted the photo of the day" at some point, so it wasn't until this morning that I realized I hadn't.
Sunrise 9/21/15
Anyway: sunrise. It's pretty, it's damn early. I…
September 20, 2015
I got a little bit of time today to play with the new lens, which included a couple of nice shots of the kids. I'm trying not to have this be "photo of the kids of the day," though, so here's a different shot making use of the limited depth of field of the f/2.8 lens:
Scratch paper with…
September 19, 2015
Weekends around here tend to be ridiculously busy, so you get a cell-phone photo again. But with a twist-- over in Twitter-land, Frank Noschese mentioned a smartphone app called Motion Shot that takes short video clips and processes them to provide multiple images of some moving object. This is, of…
September 18, 2015
There's only one obvious choice for today's photo of the day, namely the brand new lens that just arrived:
On the right, the f/1.8 50mm lens I've had for a while. On the left, the f/2.8 24mm lens that arrived today.
This is a really compact 24mm f/2.8 lens, which isn't quite as fast as the f/1.8…
September 17, 2015
SteelyKid's elementary school had their annual open house tonight, and they tried something different with it this year. Rather than having prepared presentations in the classrooms, they had the kids lead a "tour" for their parents-- she got a map and a "bingo" card, and then led us to her…
September 16, 2015
I've been doing a lot of opining on my blogs of late, and much less science-ing that I would like. So I thought I'd try bringing a little science to the photo-a-day project, by playing around with f-numbers.
I put the camera on the tripod, with my fastest lens (a 50mm f/1.8 prime) and set up an…
September 15, 2015
I don't want to turn this into "Photo of the Kids of the Day," but I spent most of today with The Pip, because his day care was closed for Rosh Hashanah. And while I took a bunch of artsy shots of trees and stuff, I really like the way this one came out:
The Pip climbing up a twisty slide.
He's…
September 14, 2015
Today was Rosh Hashanah-- happy new year to those who celebrate it-- meaning that both SteelyKid's school and The Pip's day care were closed. In an effort to maintain my sanity while keeping them entertained, I took them to the local science museum to rampage through hands-on exhibits. We also…
September 14, 2015
I have once again fallen down on the job, or at least the part of it that involves letting ScienceBlogs readers know what I've been posting at Forbes. I blame the Labor Day holiday and the start of school.
Anyway, it's been a bit over two weeks since the last round-up, so a bunch of new posts:
--…
September 13, 2015
Elite Northeastern private college tuition and fees (1989-1993): ~$80,000
Gold class ring from elite Northeastern private college: ~$500
Colorful Rainbow Loom bracelet from your seven-year-old daughter: Priceless.
My right hand.
SteelyKid made this bracelet the other day at her after-school day…
September 12, 2015
SteelyKid spent a good chunk of the afternoon playing at a friend's house, so most of the photographic activity of the day involved The Pip energetically playing with various toys. This included a good while spent in the back yard with a Stomp Rocket:
The Pip attempts to send a Stomp Rocket into…
September 12, 2015
A day or so ago, an essay came across my social media feeds with the title: "Greek Like Me: Confessions of a Florida Fraternity Brother." I clicked through, and saw the subhed: "The frat code held us together—until it kept us from saving a life," and started reading with a resigned sigh, figuring…
September 11, 2015
Another crazy-busy day, with a really exhausting pick-up basketball game at lunchtime, but I did have a little time to try out two features of the new camera: the "Live" shooting mode, and the display screen on the back that flips out. These combine to allow you to take a really expensive selfie,…
September 10, 2015
I said when I started this that there would inevitably be a few cell-phone snapshots, on days when I'm too busy to get fancy with the DSLR. This was one such, so here's a quick shot of SteelyKid at tonight's Elite Team taekwondo practice, talking to her coach.
SteelyKid, in sparring gear, with her…
September 9, 2015
Over at whatever, John Scalzi posts a lot of sunset photos. I don't get a lot of those, because for most of the year I need to be dealing with the kids-- wrangling them home from day care, making dinner, getting them to bed-- during the time when the sunset looks pretty. It's hard to appreciate the…
September 8, 2015
I'm playing around with the various camera lenses I own, which include a rarely-used fixed 50mm focal length. This is "rarely used" because a good deal of what I use the camera for is taking pictures of the kids, and the separation needed to get them in frame with this lens is really difficult to…
September 7, 2015
Having made a passing mention of the lake in my home town yesterday, it seems appropriate to post a photo of the lake itself. So, here you go.
Whitney Point Lake, from the dam.
It's been a very long, hot day, coming back to Chateau Steeypips from the weekend away, and then taking the kids to the…
September 6, 2015
Today's photo-of-the-day is of the point that gives my home town of Whitney Point its name- the Tioughnioga (left) and Otselic (right) rivers come together here, providing as good a reason as any to locate a town here back in the late 1700's. This was originally named "Patterson's Point"; Whitney…
September 5, 2015
Today was a busy day-- the kids played around my parents' house for a while, then we went to the Field Days in Johnson City to ride carnival rides for a bit. I have some decent pictures and a bit of video from all that. For the official photo-a-day picture, though, we'll go with something kind of…
September 4, 2015
It's Labor Day weekend here in the US, so we've come down to my parents' for an end-of-summer weekend. The kids are, of course, thrilled to be visiting Grandma and Grandpa's house where they can bask in the warmth of... Transformers cartoons on Grandma and Grandpa's Netflix subscription.
(I'd say "…
