drorzel | September 12, 2015SteelyKid 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 orbit.
In this shot, he's leaped with great force onto the rubber bulb of the launcher, sending the rocket up over his head. Kate is playing the Mission Control role.
This is cropped from a wider shot, part of a series of rapid-shutter images of the launch, zoomed out to get the whole flight. I…
drorzel | September 12, 2015A 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 it was bound to be a huge topic of discussion among the faculty, so I might as well read it before I felt obliged to. (I haven't fully internalized being on sabbatical yet...)
This turns out a story that is not particularly well served by that headline, and especially not that subhed. While those…
drorzel | September 11, 2015Another 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, if you want to do that sort of thing:
Yeah, it's still me.
Of course, this is kind of a silly use of an expensive DSLR camera. Also suboptimal, because the camera's pretty heavy, and it's hard to hold it steady in the necessary position. But it can be done...
And that's all I've got today.…
drorzel | September 10, 2015I 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 taekwondo coach.
The Elite Team class is all sparring, all the time, and we established today that she's the youngest kid who goes to those classes. By about two months. Of course, the gap between second- and third-youngest is two years... (The second-youngest kid is the younger brother of one of…
drorzel | September 9, 2015Over 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 evening sky when SteelyKid and the Pip are squabbling over whose turn it is to pick what they watch on TV.
But I get a lot of opportunity at the other end of the day, since for a good chunk of the year it's still dark when I get up to walk Emmy. So today's photo of the day is an inverse Scalzi--…
drorzel | September 8, 2015I'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 maintain.
The cool thing about it is that it has a really large aperture, so you can get an extremely narrow depth of field, which makes for some cool focus effects. The lack of zoom capability is a bit of a challenge, in that if you want to frame a shot a particular way, you need to physically walk…
drorzel | September 7, 2015Having 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 last day of the outdoor pool at the JCC for this year. So that's pretty much all you get.
drorzel | September 6, 2015Today'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 was an innkeeper who ran a mail drop, and people inevitably got sick of addressing things to "Whitney's Inn at Patterson's Point," so the name got condensed.
There's a dam on the Otselic now (for values of "now" dating back to before WWII-- it was started as a New Deal labor project), and my parents…
drorzel | September 5, 2015Today 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 random, namely the weather station my dad has in the bac yard.
The weather station my father has in the back yard.
Why? I dunno. I find the shape kind of interesting, and I liked the way the drops of dew on it caught the light. And, you know, this sort of exercise is about finding interesting…
drorzel | September 4, 2015It'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 "Kids these days," but if I'm totally honest, I would have to admit that getting to watch WPIX was a highlight of visits to my grandmother on Long Island back when I was their age...)
Anyway, a lot of the pictures I end up taking look basically like this: quick snapshots of the kids doing whatever.…
drorzel | September 3, 2015Last weekend, while the kids were at my parents', Kate and I decided to go over to Williamstown and look at some art. We originally intended to go to the Clark Art Institute, but it was mobbed, so we drove on to MassMoCA instead.
I told several different people about that, all of whom said "Oh, did you go to the Van Gogh show?" Which made me want to see the Van Gogh show, and since I'm on sabbatical and not teaching, I drove over there and actually went to the Clark this time. (Which was still mobbed, but I got there early enough to get in...)
The Van Gogh exhibit was, in fact, very…
drorzel | September 2, 2015I spent a while this morning typing on my laptop on the deck, and brought the new camera out with me for occasional procrastination. The shady spot at that hour has a nice view of the bird feeder, and I snapped a few shots of these guys feeding (using a telephoto lens):
Two birds on our backyard feeder; not sure of the species.
(I cropped and scaled this, and did the auto-level color correction in GIMP.)
The one on the left is a house sparrow, I believe, and we have dozens of them around. I don't think I've ever seen the one on the right before, though, and have no idea what species it is…
drorzel | September 2, 2015Slate's been doing a series about college classes everyone should take, and one of the most heavily promoted of these has been a piece by Dan Check urging students to take something they're terrible at. This is built around an amusing anecdote about an acting class he took back in the day, but as much as this appeals to my liberal-arts-school background, I think it has some serious problems, which are pretty clearly displayed early on:
At four-year colleges, there is enough time and space to do something much more interesting: take at least one course in a subject in which you are untalented…
drorzel | September 1, 2015Today, I officially stopped being department chair, and started my sabbatical leave. I also acquired a new toy:
My new camera, taken with the old camera.
My old DSLR camera, a Canon Rebel XSi that I got mumble years ago, has been very good for over 20,000 pictures, but a few things about it were getting kind of flaky-- it's been bad at reading light levels for a while now, meaning I'm constantly having to monkey with the ISO setting manually, then forgetting to change it back when I move to a brighter location and taking a bunch of pictures where everything is all blown out. It also…
drorzel | August 30, 2015So, the Hugo awards were handed out a little while ago, with half of the prose fiction categories going to "No Award" and the other half to works I voted below "No Award." Whee. I'm not really interested in rehashing the controversy, though I will note that Abigail Nussbaum's take is probably the one I most agree with.
With the release of the nominating stats, a number of people released "what might've been" ballots, stripping out the slate nominees-- Tobias Buckell's was the first I saw, so I'll link that. I saw a lot of people exclaiming over how awesome that would've been, and found myself…
drorzel | August 28, 2015SteelyKid starts second grade next week, and her summer project was to read Julius, the Baby of the World and make a poster with baby pictures of herself. This, of course, led to looking at a lot of old photos of SteelyKid, including many of the Baby Blogging shots I took back in the day with Appa for scale.
And now, of course, both kids are way bigger than Appa, so they wanted some up-to-date scale photos. Which, of course, I had to share with the Internet. So, behold, the attack of the giant children:
SteelyKid and the Pip are HUGE!
Standing photo so you can see Appa for proper scaling…
drorzel | August 28, 2015I seem to be settling into a groove of doing about two posts a week at Forbes, which isn't quite enough to justify a weekly wrap-up, but works well bi-weekly. (I'm pretty sure that's the one that means "every two weeks" not "twice a week," but I always struggle with that one...) Over the last couple of weeks, I've hit a wide range of stuff:
-- Planning To Study Science In College? Here's Some Advice Pretty much what it says on the label. I saw a bunch of "advice to new students" posts, and said "Oh, I should do one of those..." so I did.
-- The Physics of Star Trek: Teleportation Versus…
drorzel | August 25, 2015A couple of articles came across my feeds in the last day or two that highlight the truly important cultural divide in academia. Not the gap between sciences and "humanities," but the much greater divide between faculty and administration. This morning, we have an Inside Higher Ed essay from Kellie Bean on the experience of moving into administration:
When I moved into administration after being a professor, a colleague who had made the same move years before told me to brace for the loss of my faculty friends.
Impossible, I argued -- we attended regular Friday cocktail hours, had fought and…
drorzel | August 14, 2015I forgot to do this last week, because I was busy preparing for SteelyPalooza on Saturday, but here are links to my recent physics posts over at Forbes:
-- What 'Ant-Man' Gets Wrong About The Real Quantum Realm: On the way home from the Schrödinger Sessions, I had some time to kill so I stopped to watch a summer blockbuster. The movie was enjoyable enough, thanks to charming performances from the key players, but the premise is dippy even for a comic-book movie. It does, however, provide a hook to talk about quantum physics, so...
-- Great Books For Non-Physicists Who Want To Understand…
drorzel | August 12, 2015Over in Tumblr-land, Ben Lillie has an interesting post on all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes of a science talk. It's an intimidatingly long list of stuff, in quite a range of different areas. But this is a solved problem in other performance fields:
And that raises and interesting question, since aside from the science section (and not even all of that), all of these apply to any other performance or production. So how do those people master all of those things? The short answer is that they don’t. Almost any production that requires a long, and more importantly disparate, set of…