One of my Christmas gifts this year was an external flash unit for my DSLR, replacing one that broke a while back. Given that the camera has a built-in flash, you might wonder why I need this extra bulky gadget, so to answer that question, here's a composite of five pictures I took today: Composite image showing various flash settings. The top is the intentionally underexposed case with no flash. Top left is the direct flash, bottom left direct flash with the diffuser. Top right is indirect flash at a 45 degree angle, bottom right is indirect flash straight up. I put the camera in full…

One of our Christmas presents for the kids was a slackline kit, which they wanted set up pretty much the instant I got home. So I put it up over the weekend, and on consecutive days got these pictures: The slackline strung between two trees in the back yard. SteelyKid's feet bouncing above the slackline. (I of course also have a bunch of photos where you can see the kids' entire bodies, but for the umpteenth time, I'm trying not to have this be the Cute Kid Photo of the Day...) Those two seem like they go together, and that catches us up through Sunday. I will try to get back to regular…

After the trip to my parents' for Christmas, I flew down to Charleston, SC to attend the Renaissance Weekend (though none of it fell on an actual weekend day...). This provided some much-needed stress relief, but was not great in photo-a-day terms, as it's a strictly off the record event, so I couldn't exactly photograph sessions I was in or anything like that. But it does provide another nice set of breakpoints to define a collection of catching-up photos, including one bonus shot to make up for the missing day in the previous set. 117/366: The traditional thing to do when on the road is to…

I'm back after the traditional family holiday and a less traditional trip to Charleston, SC for the Renaissance Weekend meeting. Which means things will start to return to what passes for normal around here, and that means it's time to get caught up on photo-a-day pictures... What with one thing and another, there was one day in December when I didn't take a single picture, not even a crappy cell-phone snapshot. Not sure how that happened. I'll fill it in at some point with an extra from a day when I got multiple good images, but this catch-up post will be one short of the actual calendar…

Normally, I save a .jpg of our holiday card and post it here. This year, I forgot, but fortunately my parents have one, so you get a photo of a photo card: The Chateau Steelypips photo card, 2015. Merry Christmas if you celebrate it, have a lovely Friday otherwise.

It's been a couple of weeks since my last photo-a-day post, for a variety of reasons. First we were in Florida, then Emmy died, then I had some disk space issues that kept me from getting photos off my camera. That's all sorted at last, just in time for me to leave town again... In an effort to catch up a bit, I'm going to dump several photos at a time into a couple of posts. This one will be a total of eight days' worth of pictures, covering our trip and a few days after. I've got several gigabytes of trip pictures, but almost all of those include the kids, and again, I'm trying not to have…

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk at TEDxAlbany on how quantum physics manifests in everyday life. I posted the approximate text back then, but TEDx has now put up the video: So, if you've been wondering what it sounded like live, well, now you can see...

SteelyKid's second-grade teacher sent home a couple of books about kids dealing with the loss of beloved pets-- one of which, The Tenth Good Thing About Barney is surprisingly atheistic. We read them at bedtime the other night, which was a little rough. After we finished, and moved her to her bed (when it's my turn to read to her, we do it in the master bedroom, because her bed is really uncomfortable for me), she said, sadly and quietly, "I miss Emmy." "I do, too, honey," I said, in a less than perfectly steady voice. "She was the best." That got a smile, and she said "I remember you saying…

We lost the Queen of Niskayuna tonight. Emmy had been having some health issues for a while, and while we were in Florida this past weekend she wasn't eating for the pet-sitter. We tried yet another new version of the new diet food today, with only limited success. And this afternoon, she fell going up the stairs, then again on the deck. Our regular vet was near closing time, so they recommended going to a different veterinary hospital in the area, where they could do x-rays and ultrasounds as needed. And those revealed a large mass in her abdomen, from tumors in her liver and gall bladder.…

The topic of sports injuries is unavoidable these days-- the sports radio shows I listen to in the car probably spend an hour a week bemoaning the toll playing football takes on kids. Never a publication to shy away from topics that bring easy clicks, Vox weighs in with The Most Dangerous High School Sports in One Chart. You can go over there to look at their specific chart, which is drawn from a medical study of cheerleading; I don't find the general ordering of things all that surprising. There was, however, one aspect of this that I found sort of surprising, namely the difference between…

As noted a couple of days ago, this was a big martial arts week at Chateau Steelypips, with The Pip's first-ever belt test on Monday, and SteelyKid testing for her brown belt tonight. Unfortunately, tonight was also a first, namely the first belt test she's failed. This was, sadly, entirely predictable, as her teacher has really tightened the requirements for tests of late, and said a while back that they would be required to do not only the form for the belt they were testing for, but the previous belt, as well. And I've been trying for three days to get her to run through the red-belt form…

When we had our vetinary adventure back on Saturday, they drew blood for some tests. These showed that Emmy's kidney function is somewhat impaired, leading to yet more tests, and as of last night an extensive regimen of new stuff: Emmy's new medication. That's some new kidney-friendly food (in both dry and canned varieties), a drug for her kidneys, an antibiotic in case she has a bladder infection (something she's been prone to; those test results are yet to come back), and a bunch of different vitamins. This on top of the antacid pills we were told to start giving her a couple days ago.…

It's a big week in Chateau Steelypips for martial arts and cute-kid photos. On the heels of SteelyKid's first competition this past weekend, we have the Pip's first belt test tonight (and SteelyKid is testing for her brown belt Wednesday, so you should probably expect one more kid-martial-arts photo before all's said and done...). Tonight's test was for the "Little Dragons" class for 3-4-5-year olds, and was kind of hilarious. There was a lot of enthusiasm, but also a good deal of fuzziness on the difference between "right" and "left," and their interpretation of push-ups was simply…

SteelyKid's taekwondo competition was the most time-consuming event of yesterday, but not the most stressful. Before we went down to Duanesburg for the tournament, Emmy gave us a bit of a scare. Emmy is not by any stretch a young dog-- she was a year old when we got her in 2003, so she's 13-- but she's pretty spry. Over the last few weeks, though, she slowed down very dramatically. Initially, I didn't think much of it-- she was unenthusiastic about eating her kibble, but that happens a lot when we get near the end of a bag, and she kept eating treats. And she was moving slowly and stiffly on…

I feel a little bad that I'm doing two photo-of-the-day posts in a row that are just pictures of SteelyKid, but my day today was dominated by a taekwondo tournament down in Duanesburg, SteelyKid's first actual competition. And she got second place: SteelyKid with her silver medal from today's taekwondo tournament. This is somewhat less impressive than you might think, because she was in a division of three. She actually lost her one bout fairly badly, but did slightly better than the third girl in the field, thus getting the silver medal. But again, it was her first time competing, and on…

Both SteelyKid's elementary school and her after-school day care had "book fairs" this week. These include a bunch of display cases full of books at various reading levels, and also a couple of tables of plastic toy crap. One of the marginally less crappy plastic toys was a marker with ink that fluoresces in UV light but is otherwise inevitable, and SteelyKid kept bugging me to get one of those. I eventually caved, because it required only loaning her one dollar to supplement her allowance, and it was worth a buck to me not to have to listen to the complaints that would've ensued otherwise.…

So, yesterday was my big TEDxAlbany talk. I was the first speaker scheduled, probably because I gave them the title "The Exotic Physics of an Ordinary Morning," so it seemed appropriate to have me talking while people were still eating breakfast... The abstract I wrote when I did the proposal mentions both quantum physics and relativity, but when I actually wrote the talk, that made for a really awkward transition, so it's all quantum, all the time. I cover quite a bit of ground-- the no-animation-effects version of the slides is 42 slides and Word has it as just over 2500 words written out…

For obvious reasons, I don't have a photo of myself speaking at TEDxAlbany, but since that was my only real activity on Thursday, I need something to document it, so here's the stage before the show got started: The stage for TEDxAlbany. You can see the stage and the podium a bit, but I went with this shot because it includes the funky space room in the background. The event was held at Overit in Albany, where they do some shooting of commercials and so on. The big white thing in the back of this shot is a kind of curved half-box that's used for a sort of green-screen kind of effect--…

The Internet was really flaky at Chateau Steelypips for the last couple of days, and I was kind of busy yesterday, so I've got a bit of a backlog of photo-of-the-day posts. This is another document-my-activities post, from a day full of talk preparation. As a change of pace from just reading the text out loud in an empty room, I decided to try writing it out again from memory, at least in outline form. These three pages of illegible scribble are the result (artfully blurred in the photo so you can't see how bad my handwriting is...). Outline of my TEDxAlbany talk, as part of the preparation…

A longer-than-usual gap between recap posts, but thanks to some kid illnesses and the Thanksgiving holiday, not all that many new physics posts over at Forbes: -- Football Physics: Checking The Odds On Wild Bounces: A backyard experiment to see how often a bouncing football takes a big hop. Follows from this rant and prompted this post on rotation. -- Physics Demands Many Kinds Of Literacy: Some musings about the many different ways physicists process information, prompted by graphs generated for the previous item. -- Football Physics: How Would Changing The Laws Of Physics Change Football?:…