June 6, 2016
Once again, I've let a very long time pass without posting photos. It's been a crazy stretch for us, starting with SteelyKid getting yet another case of strep throat, then DAMOP, then a trip to my parents' for Memorial Day weekend, then trying to recover from the previous. As with the last few, I'l…
May 22, 2016
I've had this piece by Rick Borchelt on "science literacy" and this one by Paige Brown Jarreau on "echo chambers" open in tabs for... months. I keep them around because I have thoughts on the general subject, but I keep not writing them up because I suspect that what I want to say won't be read…
May 21, 2016
A whole bunch of physics posts over at Forbes so far this month:
--Recent Physics Books: Gravitational Waves and Brief Lessons: Short reviews of Janna Levin's Black Hole Blues and Carlo Rovelli's Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.
--The Real Reasons Quantum Entanglement Doesn't Allow Faster-Than-Light…
May 19, 2016
Noted grouchy person John Horgan has found a new way to get people mad at him on the Internet, via a speech-turned-blog-post taking organized Skeptic groups to task for mostly going after "soft targets". This has generated lots of angry blog posts in response, and a far greater number of people…
May 17, 2016
It's one of those days where none of the stuff I probably ought to be writing seems even slightly appealing, so instead I'm going to do something frivolous and morale-boosting, namely think out loud about an imaginary course. Despite being on sabbatical, I do still check my work email, and have…
May 15, 2016
Getting caught up to today, a bunch of pictures from the past week (250/366 was the photo of Emmy's memorial shrub):
251/366: Wagons Ho!
SteelyKid and The Pip taking turns pulling each other in their wagon.
Last weekend we had gorgeous spring weather, so the kids were playing outside a bunch.…
May 13, 2016
As promised/threatened in the previous post, here's a big collection of shots from our cruise vacation featuring the sillyheads.
243/366: Bunk Beds:
SteelyKid and The Pip like the bunk beds in the stateroom.
The sleeping arrangements in the stateroom were pretty slick. We had a double bed that…
May 11, 2016
Since I've given up on the strict daily arrangement, I'm going to somewhat arbitrarily assign photos from the cruise numbers corresponding to the days of the last two weeks. I'll do this in two big photo dump posts, grouped by whether or not SteelyKid and The Pip are in the shots. And since this is…
May 8, 2016
There's a discontinuous jump here, if you're paying attention to photo-a-day numbering, but I'm skipping ahead of the cruise-centered backlog to write a more difficult entry.
Back in December, when we lost the Queen of Niskayuna, I had her cremated, and said I'd do something nice as a memorial,…
May 8, 2016
The week leading up to our cruise was crazy busy for me, with a bunch of travel for work. Which means you get a collection of cell-phone snapshots from that week, since I didn't bring the good camera with me on all those trips.
229/366: Man the Barricades
SteelyKid and the Pip behind a wall of…
May 2, 2016
As mentioned in passing a little while ago, we spent last week on a Disney cruise in the Caribbean, with the kids and my parents. We had sort of wondered for a while what those trips are like, and since the first reaction of most parents I've mentioned it to has been "Oh, we've thought about that…
April 19, 2016
It's been a while since I last rounded up physics posts from Forbes, so there's a good bunch of stuff on this list:
-- How Do Physicists Know What Electrons Are Doing Inside Matter?: An explanation of Angle-Resolved Photo-Electron Spectroscopy (ARPES), one of the major experimental techniques in…
April 17, 2016
As promised in the last catch-up post, a set of pictures less devoted to cute-kid shots.
213/366: Zone Defense
The superhero-themed "zones" of our house, as defined by the Pip.
The Pip has been making one of his preschool teachers draw superheroes for him. At some point, he cut these out with…
April 14, 2016
A bunch of stuff happened that knocked me out of the habit of editing and posting photos-- computer issues, travel, catching up on work missed because of travel, and a couple of bouts with a stomach bug the kids brought home. I have been taking pictures, though, and will make an attempt to catch up…
March 20, 2016
I didn't take the DSLR to March Meeting with me, but I did throw a point-and-shoot in my bag. A few of these are still just cell-phone snapshots, because I didn't have the bag with me all the time.
193/366: Stadium View
When I checked into the hotel, they told me I had a "stadium view" room on the…
March 20, 2016
I was at the APS March Meeting last week, because I needed tp give a talk reporting on the Schrödinger Sessions. But as long as I was going to be there anyway, I figured I should check out the huge range of talks on areas of physics that aren't my normal thing-- in fact, I deliberately avoided…
March 13, 2016
One of the surest signs of the imminent arrival of spring is the appearance of these little purple flowers in our back yard in large bunches. I have no idea what they are, but they're kind of photogenic, so...
Little purple flowers.
Having spent much too long on the Internet, I can just about…
March 12, 2016
Really not a lot to say about this one. Pretty nice crescent moon last night, still had the telephoto lens on the camera, so: this shot.
The crescent moon dropping behind the trees across the street.
March 10, 2016
Having done a thematic set of animal photos, it makes sense to complete the catching-up process by pulling together a couple of shots of man-made things.
189/366: Tower
The broadcast tower from the local CBS affiliate.
This is also from my trip to the post office the other day. The tall tower is…
March 10, 2016
Sunday and Monday were wrecked by SteelyKid getting sick. She was actually only really ill on Sunday, but that was highly miserable. Monday, she had to stay home from school, and we spent the day watching the original Star Wars trilogy (which she had refused to watch on two previous occasions...).…
March 10, 2016
I seem to have fallen into a thing where I take pictures more frequently than I edit and post them. I blame the kids-- SteelyKid got sick on Sunday (her third bout with strep in the last five months), and The Pip has decided to get a jump on Daylight Savings by waking up an hour early every day…
March 7, 2016
I'm going to be at the March Meeting of the American Physical Society in Baltimore next week. This is the largest physics meeting of the year, with an emphasis on condensed matter physics (which is actually the largest single area of study within physics, though media overemphasis on particle…
March 6, 2016
Thursday was a travel day, the less said about which the better. So, while I do have a couple of cell-phone snaps from the day, I'm just going to ignore it, and give you two better photos from Friday and Saturday. These go nicely together, as you can see in the composite that's the "featured image…
March 6, 2016
There's a sort of Internet tradition of posting photos of hotel-room views when traveling, so here's a very slightly artsy version of same:
View from my hotel room in Urbana, IL.
The first time I looked out the window, there was a big-ass truck parked directly in front of it. I like this version…
March 2, 2016
I spent Tuesday flying to Champaign, Illinois, which was probably a big mistake. I should've booked a Southwest flight to Midway Airport in Chicago, and rented a car to drive down to Champaign, but I decided that might be annoying on the way home, so opted to fly the whole way. Which meant a United…
March 2, 2016
Sunday was a beautiful day in Niskayuna, so after going to campus to deal with some paperwork, I went off to a park to take some pictures. There's a town park down on River Road that sits on a high and scenic bluff above the Mohawk, so I figured I'd give that a look. And, indeed, the view of the…
March 2, 2016
I'm going to stop posting pictures of the Nott Memorial, really I am. But I got the idea a week or two ago of trying to see if there's an angle where the observatory dome and the Nott dome look the same size, so I keep poking at that.
And, in fact, there is such an angle from the conference room in…
March 1, 2016
As you probably already know, last year we ran a workshop at the Joint Quantum Institute for science-fiction writers who would like to learn more about quantum physics. The workshop was a lot of fun from the speaker/oragnizer side, and very well received by last year's writers, so we're doing it…
March 1, 2016
A few weeks ago, I traveled down to Jefferson Lab in southern Virginia to give a talk for their Science Series of public lectures. They recorded the talk, and have done a very nice job of editing together the video, which you can see at that link, or right here:
It's a bit under an hour, which…
February 28, 2016
I've included at least two photos of the Nott Memorial in this series, so I'm a little hesitant to do another. But here's an angle on it that doesn't show up as much:
SteelyKid and The Pip looking down from the third floor railing inside the Nott Memorial,
We went over to campus yesterday…
