jstemwedel

Here are the rest of the recipes for dishes that I'm making for Thanksgiving this year (with the exception of pumpkin pie -- I'm still shopping for a pumpkin pie recipe). I'll mention here (and should have mentioned in the previous post that all the measurements here are U.S. quantities (cups,…

Having posted what I'm making for Thanksgiving, I am happy to accede to your requests for the recipes. Of course, I encourage you to violate the recipes at well (since that's how I was taught to cook). I'm posting these in two batches, so if you don't see the recipe you were looking for here, it…

Another "Ask a ScienceBlogger" question has been posed: What do you see as science fiction's role in promoting science, if any? For an answer to the question as asked, what Isis said. Also, what Scicurious said about a bunch of related questions. Myself, I think science fiction could do more than…

Back when I was a college student, Thanksgiving meant getting myself home to Northern New Jersey from metropolitan Boston. Before my parents entrusted me with the fire engine red '77 Chevy Impala station wagon my junior year, this involved inviting another student who hailed from the West Coast…

Zuska tagged me; I am helpless to resist it. 5 Things I Was Doing 10 Years Ago: Suspecting I was pregnant (I was) Drafting thesis chapters Walking 5-10 miles a day Taking dance classes (Argentine tango and big band swing) Playing Snood 5 Things On My To-Do List Today: Get the Free-Ride offspring…

Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean Carroll gets us an imaginary audience with Les Moonves (President and CEO of CBS) to pitch a new TV show about science: You have thirty seconds -- which, as this blog is still a text-based medium, we'll approximate as strictly 100 words or less -- to pitch your idea…

This summer, I had the pleasure of having coffee in Palo Alto with Eva. She had been to the Exploratorium the day before, where, in the gift shop, she picked up a couple cool science books for the sprogs. "Of course, you'll have to blog them!" she said. Of course! Today, we look at one of those…

In the event that your horoscope in this morning's paper was not sufficiently informative, there is a website that will take the URL of your blog and return an analysis of your personality type. Is it accurate? Well, here's what Typealyzer makes of me: ISTP - The Mechanics The independent and…

In a comment on another post, Alex gently reminds me that what counts as a leak from the science/technology/engineering/math pipeline depends on your point of view: I don't think of you as a "leak." But I'm in an undergraduate physics department, so unlike the people in the Ph.D.-granting…

... and the university, in turn, fires the professor. You've probably already seen this story. Loye Young, an adjunct professor at Texas A&M International University in Laredo, warned his students (as we all do) against plagiarism. Indeed, as reported by Inside Higher Ed, he included this…

There are some newspaper stories that must be pretty easy to write at this point because it seems like they're essentially the same year in and year out. California is having another budget crisis, and the Californians who are going to take it in the teeth are students -- especially students in…

So, at the end of the PSA I was so sick that I took to my overpriced hotel bed, forgoing interesting papers and the prospect of catching up with geographically dispersed friends in my field who I can only count on seeing every two years at the PSA. I managed to get myself back home and then needed…

I'm still trying to get out from under the monstrous head cold given to me by the younger Free-Ride offsrping just in time for last week's trip to Pittsburgh. The sprogs have actually given me wide berth this week, as if they expect me to mutate the germs and give them back. How well they know me…

It turns out that the session on electronic scholarship I mentioned didn't really get into the defining characteristics of electronic scholarship, nor how it might differ from "digital media". (Part of this had to do with trying to fit spiels from nine speakers into a 75 minute session while still…

This is not an exhaustive account of my experiences at the PSA so far, but rather what's at the top of my Day-Quil-addled head: I am not the only academic whose tastes run to hand-drawn slides. However, it is possible that I am the youngest academic whose tastes run to hand-drawn slides.…

A conversation last Thursday, amid rain and wind, as we watched the elder Free-Ride offspring's soccer game: Dr. Free-Ride: How are you doing? Younger offspring: Brrr! Dr. Free-Ride: Well, why don't you zip up both your warm layer and your raincoat? Younger offspring: OK. Why does zipping them up…

Holy smokes, an airport where the WiFi is actually free! (If only San Jose International were more mass-transit friendly...) I'm going to be offline for much of the day since I'll be in transit on my way to PSA 2008. I'm hoping Pittsburgh's weather will not destroy me. (The temperature ranges…

... and, if that philosopher is Brian Weatherson, you'll get a detailed consideration of cost, benefits, and rational strategies like this one: Voting is a lot like playing an n-player Prisoners Dilemma with the other people who (loosely speaking) share the values that underlie your vote. I'm…

I've been thinking about the Electoral College, that mechanism by which voters in the U.S. indirectly elect their president. More precisely, I've been wondering whether small modifications in the system might make a significant difference. When the polls close on Tuesday night and the votes are…

BikeMonkey tagged me ten days ago, but Casa Free-Ride has adopted the just-in-time model of jack-o-lantern production. Here are the rules: Carve a pumpkin. Light'er up. Snap a foto. Post it. Tag some bloggers. Here are the photos: Owing to the fact that this is Hallowe'en already, I'm tagging…

I don't know why I never thought of making Hallowe'en cookies like this: They look like gingerbread, but actually the cookies are made of chocolate cookie dough. Any cookie dough you can roll out and cut with cookie cutters would work. A dark cookie makes the white icing jump out, but you could…

This is the last day of Blogger Challenge 2008. You have mere hours left to give to our challenges and get in on Seed's prize drawing (which includes that spiffy iPod Touch). Don't forget that individual ScienceBloggers are offering a variety of incentives of their own to help persuade you to…

Earlier this week, I cooked up about a pound of the bush beans from our garden. There was a mix of yellow, green, and purple beans (although, as expected, steaming transformed the purple beans to a dark green color). I dressed the cooked beans as usual and served them with dinner. As I was…

Elder offspring: I read about a house where the 17th stair on the staircase creaks because a man who was shot died on that stair. Dr. Free-Ride: Oh, really? Younger offspring: Why did it creak? Elder offspring: Because the house is haunted. Dr. Free-Ride: Hmm. Younger offspring: By the man who was…

Sadly, the Houston Chronicle brings us another story about an academic caught plagiarizing. The academic in question is Rambis M. Chu, a tenured associate professor of physics at Texas Southern University, who is currently under investigation for plagiarism in a grant proposal he submitted to the…

Earlier this month, I wrote a post on California's Researcher Protection Act of 2008, which Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law on September 28. There, I noted that some opponents of the law expressed concerns that the real intent (and effect) of the law was not to protect those who do…

Reader Patrick made a generous donation to my challenge, and wrote: I want to thank you for the posts on Ethics. It is a subject that I feel is mostly neglected during a scientist's formal education. We end up learning by example (not always good), but it should be a required course for everyone…

Regular reader Duke (who this blogger knows as "Dad") made a generous contribution to my challenge and requested sprog art and a limerick on the subject of chemistry. (Like my mom, he indicated that this donation was to go to the "NO TATTOO" fundraising total.) A lad from the Periodic Table took…

The other day, my better half and I were discussing scratching. Predictably, in the course of the discussion, I became aware of every itchy square millimeter of skin I might possibly possess. I wondered whether scratching actually works -- that is, whether scratching ever acts to make an itch go…

Regular commenter Super Sally (who this blogger knows as "Mom") made a generous contribution to my challenge and requested sprog art and a limerick on the subject of astronomy. (She also indicated that this donation was to go to the "NO TATTOO" fundraising total.) If only I had a fancy overhead…