drorzel | June 6, 2016Once 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 group these into themed collections, this one devoted to the kids and my parents' dog. We'll do this in order from oldest to youngest, so:
Bodie
257/366: Two Sticks
Bodie is a good dog. He has TWO sticks.
Fun fact: my parents' yellow lab, Bodie, was born within a day of SteelyKid. I think he's…
drorzel | May 22, 2016I'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 much, and I find it frustrating to put a lot of work into a blog post only to be greeted by crickets chirping.
But, now I find myself in a position where I sort of need to have a more thought-out version of the general argument. So I'm going to do a kind of slapdash blog post working this out as I type…
drorzel | May 21, 2016A 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 Communication: Expanding on and correcting some stuff I didn't like about Ethan "Starts With A Bang" Siegel's take on entanglement as a communications tool.
-- Why Does The Rising sun Change Color?: I watched a bunch of sunrises on the cruise, which led to me scribbling equations, and then a blog…
drorzel | May 19, 2016Noted 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 sighing heavily and saying "There Horgan goes again..."
If you want to read only one counter to Horgan's piece to get caught up, you could do a lot worse than reading Daniel Loxton's calm and measured response. Loxton correctly notes that Horgan's comments are nothing especially unique, just a variant…
drorzel | May 17, 2016It'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 caught the edges of a new round of arguments about whether we're providing enough "Gen Ed" science courses pitched at non-majors. The hardest part of this is always meeting the "science with lab" component, because those courses are pretty resource-instensive, and we have a limited set of them that we…
drorzel | May 15, 2016Getting 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. They ended up getting out the wooden wagon SteelyKid got for her birthday some years back, and giving each other rides. This inevitably resulted in me being asked to tow them around the neighborhood, but they did return the favor...
SteelyKid and The Pip pulling me on a wagon.
(Photo by Kate.) They…
drorzel | May 13, 2016As 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 was there all the time, and during the day a sitting area with a couch. While we were at dinner, the housekeeping staff came in and flipped the couch over to become a bed, then lowered a top bunk from a hatch in the ceiling. The kids have never slept in bunk beds before, so this was considered highly…
drorzel | May 11, 2016Since 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 a little cheesy, I'll throw in some extra bonus photos as well...
236/366: Ships
The Disney Magic, from the dock at Castaway Cay.
It seems appropriate to start with a picture of our ship, the Disney Magic. This is out of chronological order, as it was taken the last day of the trip, but this was…
drorzel | May 8, 2016There'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, once the weather got nicer. We got one reasonably nice day in between bouts of rain yesterday, so I finished the memorial for Emmy:
The Queen Emmy Memorial Shrub.
This is in the weird little cul-de-sac side yard of our house, next to the dining room. For a while I was trying to grow herbs in…
drorzel | May 8, 2016The 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 sticks.
There are some paths running into the woods near the kids' day care, and the older kids decided to wall one of these off by wedging sticks between trees on either side. Because kids. It's an impressive bit of work, until somebody huffs and puffs and blows it all down.
230/366: Quad
The…
drorzel | May 2, 2016As 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-- let us know how it is," I figure it's worth a blog post to say a bit about the trip, which the kids enjoyed just a little bit:
SteelyKid swimming with a dolphin, The Pip on a waterslide.
The ship we were on was the Disney Magic, which is the smallest of the Disney ships, and had something like…
drorzel | April 19, 2016It'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 condensed matter. I'm trying to figure out a way to list "got 1,800 people to read a blog post about ARPES" as one of my professional accomplishments on my CV.
-- The Optics Of Superman's X-Ray Vision: Spinning off a post of Rhett's, a look at why humanoid eyes just aren't set up to work with x-rays…
drorzel | April 17, 2016As 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 scissors (or possibly made Kate cut them out), and hung them up in different rooms. So the living room is now the Captain America Zone, the kitchen is the Flash Zone, and the library is the Spider-Man Zone. I'm not sure what exactly that means, but it's a thing.
214/366: Red In Tooth And Claw
A hawk…
drorzel | April 14, 2016A 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. Given the huge delay, though, I'm going to drop the pretense of doing one photo a day, and do the right number, but grouped more thematically.
This span included Easter, which meant a lot of family time, which means photos of the kids doing stuff. So here's a big group of those.
The Sillyheads…
drorzel | March 20, 2016I 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 sixth floor. I was in a hurry to get to a social event, so I didn't really look that night, but they were right:
Football and baseball stadiums in downtown Baltimore, from my hotel room.
194/366: Convention hall
The primary purpose of the trip was, of course, to attend the March Meeting, and that…
drorzel | March 20, 2016I 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 going to DAMOP-sponsored sessions.
This also affected my blogging, so the last few weeks' worth of posts at Forbes have mostly been on March Meeting-related areas:
-- How Cold Atoms Might Help Physicists Understand Superconductors: A post about the connection between ultra-cold atomic physics and…
drorzel | March 13, 2016One 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 convince myself that this is really a photograph of gargantuan sculptures of flowers run through a tilt-shift filter. This probably indicates that I need to get out more. Fortunately, I'm off for a week at the March Meeting; whether that counts as "getting out more" in the usual sense of the phrase is…
drorzel | March 12, 2016Really 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.
drorzel | March 10, 2016Having 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 a broadcast antenna of some sort from the CBS station, which is actually not in the foreground building here, but one behind it that you can't see. The giant flag is associated with a stockbroker. America, f*&k yeah.
190/366: Ghost Plane
A slightly fuzzy plane through a tree.
I like the way…
drorzel | March 10, 2016Sunday 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...). So, there weren't a lot of pictures taken on those days...
Since I'm pulling a couple of photos from other days to compensate, I'll just do a thematic group of shots of wildlife. I slapped the telephoto lens on the camera the other day, and took advantage of the sudden onset of summer weather to get…