Passing thoughts
jstemwedel | November 24, 2008Back 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 and who had a car on campus to spend the holiday with my family. Once I was in possession of the station wagon, it was an occasion for me to provide a ride home to another denizen of Northern New Jersey who was car-less at school. But once I was home, it was the typical holiday meal with parents…
jstemwedel | November 23, 2008Zuska 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 to swimming lessons.
Reprovision (toilet paper and groceries).
Process winter squash on hand (to make pumpkin puree, butternut puree and a delicata squash dish for Thanksgiving)
Make a persimmon semifreddo for Thanksgiving.
Dehydrate most of the Fuyu persimmon that doesn't go into the semifreddo.…
jstemwedel | November 20, 2008In 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 problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generelly prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.
The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent…
jstemwedel | November 7, 2008This 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.
Apparently, using Powerpoint marks me as nearly as tremendous a Luddite as using actual overheads. Keynote is where it's at. (But I may be unwilling to actually invest the time necessary to make the transition, especially seeing as how I like hand-drawn slides.)
A "coffee breaks" in the conference schedule…
jstemwedel | November 5, 2008Holy 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 predicted as of yesterday don't seem too frightening, but California can do things to a person.)
My symposium session is in the first time slot on Thursday. Between now and then, I need to condense my talk to 15 minutes (eep!) and construct a correspondingly concise Powerpoint presentation, since…
jstemwedel | October 31, 2008BikeMonkey 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 you if you want to be tagged. Otherwise, you're off the hook.
jstemwedel | October 31, 2008I 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 use dark icing on a light cookie, too.
But let's talk about the anatomical details. I'm pretty sure most humanoids don't have coiled ribcages like this. Sure, the icing flows efficiently that way ... but I can't help but wondering if these guys bounce more than other skeletons. Maybe this kind of…
jstemwedel | October 28, 2008The 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 away, or even to reduce it.
"Of course it does," my better half opined. "Why else would we do it?"
"Because we're poorly adapted?" I ventured.
So, here's the question*:
Is there any good research to demonstrate whether scratching alleviates itching? Is there any evidence (beyond your mom's say-so…
jstemwedel | October 20, 2008Drawing on the Guardian article on the sorts of interview questions being deployed by Oxford and Cambridge to "identify intellectual potential" in prospective undergraduates:
How do you organise a successful revolution? And, given the present political climate, why don't we let the managers of Ikea run the country instead of the politicians?
As a university professor (and one paid by the people of the State of California), I'm pretty sure if I answer the first question my name will go on some list that will make me an unattractive prospect for palling around, at least for those who aspire…
jstemwedel | October 19, 2008My better half was clearing plates from the kitchen table as I was cooking something.
Dr. Free-Ride's better half: Hey, I thought our kids like zucchini bread.
Dr. Free-Ride: They do. That piece was [the kid across the street's] -- always gladly accepts a snack, never has more than a few bites.
Dr. Free-Ride's better half: Huh.
Dr. Free-Ride: I think that's why when our kids are over there, there are so many snacks. If you have a kid who only eats a little at a time, you have to feed continuously.
Dr. Free-Ride's better half: Why don't our kids eat like birds?
Dr. Free-Ride: I'm going to…
jstemwedel | October 17, 2008Nearly three months after we sowed the seeds in our raised garden beds, it feels like we're on the edge of a change of seasons. The days are still quite warm (with temperatures in the mid-eighties for most of the past week), but the days are definitely cooler, and the hours or sunlight grow shorter every day.
In the garden, this means that we're starting to look pensively at the slow-growing root vegetables (notably the carrots and the onions).
"Are you gonna be done soon?"
The rainbow chard and mustard greens are still overproducing what we can eat. Our strategies for keeping up…
jstemwedel | October 15, 2008Dear Sarah Gardner and Marketplace producers,
I listened with interest to your story on today's show about the current prospects for the solar energy sector. While the story was engaging, I have a nit to pick.
In the course of listing the elemental components of photovoltaic solar panels, you referred to them as part of "that periodic table you were supposed to have memorized" in high school chemistry.
As I've mentioned before, it is not standard practice to memorize the periodic table (or to make students memorize it). They hang it there in the classroom, for goodness sake! Why waste the…
jstemwedel | September 30, 2008As promised, we had a party on Friday night.
Some highlights:
The venue, Tonic, is a lovely bar, very clean, full of comfy seating and open space, and adorned with three flatscreen TVs to add visual interest. Seeing as how this is now a Bleiman bar, the screens were utilized to show Blue Planet. After the eerily beautiful sea creatures, the next movie in the background was Gidget. Sadly, Gidget did not do battle with a giant squid.
But the point of the party wasn't video viewing, nor expertly muddled mojitos. It was hanging out in the three dimensional world, which we did.
I got to…
jstemwedel | September 25, 2008One of the big things philosopher-types like to do with their students is work on extracting arguments from a piece of text and reconstructing them. This can be useful in locating sources of disagreement, whether they be specific premises or inferences.
But some chunks of text that seem like they ought to have arguments that can be extracted and reconstructed end up being ... opaque.
For example, this question and answer between Katie Couric and Sarah Palin (transcript by way of Shakesville):
Couric [on tape]: Why isn't it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class…
jstemwedel | September 25, 2008Just a quick reminder that the San Francisco party to celebrate one million comments on ScienceBlogs is tomorrow, Friday, September 26, starting at 9:00 PM at Tonic, 2360 Polk Street (at the corner of Union). I'll be there, as will the brothers Bleiman, Craig McClain, Josh Rosenau, and Razib. If you show up, you'll be there, too!
Also, don't forget that until the end of September you can still enter the drawing for a fabulous trip to New York City, including a dinner with your favorite ScienceBlogger.
jstemwedel | September 23, 2008Actually, this might just be a question about my typing habits.
So, I'm typing along and I notice that I've hit a bad key at the beginning of a longish word (maybe even a longish word that's a few words before the word I'm in the middle of typing).
Having seen the typo, I want to fix it before I go on. So, I hit the delete key until I'm all the way back to the typo, then I retype it all correctly.
Now, it strikes me that this is a pretty inefficient way to correct the typo. Surely I would be better off moving the cursor and fixing the one faulty keystroke rather than doing all that deleting…
jstemwedel | September 22, 2008Another installment of the ongoing saga of the raised garden beds I planted back in July, in which we get to start enjoying the fruits (and vegetables) of our labors.
Those are soybean pods. In theory, if it looks like we'll have a big enough harvest, we might take a crack at making our own tofu. If not, we'll eat some as edamame and try to dry some for use later.
The purple beans are the first of the bush beans to maturity (although some yellow wax beans are on their way). Tragically, when cooked, these deep purple beans turn to a dark green color. (I'm tempted to try barely cooking…
jstemwedel | September 10, 2008
Since it's been a while, I thought it was time for another update on the plant denizens of our raised garden beds which we planted back in July.
The first thing to note is that, to a first approximation, the automatic drip irrigation system we set up to water the beds works reasonably well. There are a few patches that don't get quite enough water without some hand-watering every couple days, but the important thing is that the seedlings made it through our week-long trip to Wisconsin last month.
The second thing to note is that we've been having rather more hot spells this summer than is (…
jstemwedel | September 9, 2008Sean assesses his familiarity with the Omnivore's Hundred. I thought about playing along, but it's pretty meaty, while my diet is not so much. However, Sean was kind enough to post a link to the Vegetarian's Hundred, a list of one hundred vegetarian food items everyone should try at least once. (Unless you're vegan, at which point maybe you need to propose your own hundred.)
If you want to play along, here's how you do it: copy the list, including my instructions, and bold any items you have eaten and strike out any you would never eat, and then post it to your blog.
I'm going to add the…
jstemwedel | September 9, 2008If you make your way to this blog by way of the ScienceBlogs homepage, you may have noticed the "Comments" ticker clicking ever closer to 1,000,000. Our benevolent overlords at Seed Media Group have decided that crossing the millionth comment mark is cause for celebration, and they would like to offer you ScienceBlogs readers (whether you comment or merely lurk) a piece of the action.
First, you can enter the drawing for a fabulous trip to New York City:
One lucky reader will win an all-out science adventure -- a trip for two to New York City and exclusive science adventures only…