personal
jstemwedel | July 6, 2007I'll be offline until Sunday evening (California time). This means comments you submit between now in then will dangle in the aether until I'm back online, but please don't let that put you off from commenting if you have something to say.
Hope your weekend is a good one!
pharyngula | July 6, 2007Here are our goals for today:
We're going to spend the morning screwing around downtown, and are going to be at the Seattle Center International Fountain around noon.
Skatje wants to go to the zoo, so we'll do that in the afternoon. Then around sixish we'll be peckish and I tried to find a place not far from Woodland Park, and could not resist the idea of the Jolly Roger Taproom in Ballard. So that's where we'll try to be.
Keep in mind we'll be stumbling about in an unfamiliar city and struggling to find parking, so timeliness is unlikely to be one of our virtues.
Oh, no…of all the…
clock | July 5, 2007...Frisco.
The flights were smooth and uneventful.
I went straight to PLoS, met some people I knew from before and others I knew only over e-mail, did the requisite paperwork, got familiarized with my computer and the beginning of getting familiarized with the 'behind the scenes' of the software used by PLoS journals.
My apartment is gorgeous - the owner must be an artist of some kind (probably pottery, as she is spending this month in North Carolina at Pendletonn school) as the place is so artistically and tastefully furnished and decorated.
SF is a very hilly place - I will get fit and…
pharyngula | July 5, 2007We're scatter-brained touristas on vacation, so pinning us down to specific times and places is hard. However, we are going to be puttering about in downtown Seattle on Friday, and I think we can commit to one thing: lunch! We're going to pop into the Food Court at Seattle Center House around noon, and since it promises to be a gorgeous sunny day, we'll then hang out around the International Fountain, where I will practice calling spirits from the vasty deep.
I still have to get the family to agree to evening plans, and some of my party absolutely refuse to have anything to do with heaping…
sheril | July 4, 2007
Although the act lasts only a minute or two at most, lions mate up to 100 times a day during the breeding season. That's a serious undertaking - once every 15 min or so.
[More photos from the tracking expedition after the jump]
Setting out at sunrise on a cold winter morning
Tracking cats using telemetry
A spectacular pair
Cheetah brothers
clock | July 4, 2007I am about to go offline now, early to bed, early to rise...travelling to San Fran tomorrow at dawn. Hopefully I'll be able to get back online by tomorrow afternoon.
I have scheduled a lot of reruns of the old posts (twice a day) and new quotes (once per night), but I will post new stuff as well whenever I find time: the first day at PLoS, pictures from various blogger meetups (excluding the pictures of pseudonymous bloggers), pictures of my strange meal at Incanto...and on Monday morning something you'll probably find interesting but it is a secret right now.
pharyngula | July 4, 2007Whoa…there were a lot of people at Drinking Liberally last night, and I was rather overwhelmed with all of the introductions. How about if attendees use this thread to tell everyone and remind me of who you are—pass along links to your Seattle blog, too, or give us links to pictures.
It was a great evening, and the only blemish is that there are now about 50 more people who know that I'm not ten feet tall and that I don't breathe fire.
You're all going to be jealous as you learn who I met last night — the accounts (and photos) are trickling in. Other people at DL were:
John McKay
Raven…
oracknows | July 4, 2007Happy 4th of July to all my American readers!
For more serious ruminations about the 4th by yours truly, check out posts I've done on the topic before:
Fourth of July thoughts
One last fourth of July thought
In the meantime, I'll be rounding on my partners' patients all morning, as I drew the 4th of July as one of the holidays that I have to cover on call. I'll also be dreading tonight's fireworks display. Now don't get me wrong; I like a good fireworks display as much as the next guy. The problem is that our town's display is close enough to our house that the explosions reduce our…
pharyngula | July 3, 2007We made a visit to my boyhood home, the small town of Kent, Washington. It's changed — it's been commercialized and yuppified and embiggened beyond all recognition — but I thought everyone would appreciate seeing the shrines erected in my hometown to me.
Here's my boyhood home on 2nd and Titus, where I lived for several years. As you can see, it's now a nicely landscaped parking lot. For Holy Spirit Catholic Church.
I hope they had it exorcised before they invited the faithful to park there.
I also lived on the corner of Willis and Railroad Avenue, and this was where my grandmother (…
jstemwedel | July 3, 2007A bunch of my SiBlings have been considering which science gets the rawest deal from makers of science fiction movies (and writers of science fiction stories).
I've been reflecting about it a bit, and I think maybe my needs when it comes to science fiction are pretty simple.
When I consume science fiction, I'm not looking for an entertainment that will blow my mind with the weirdness of its technology, or of its flora and fauna. For that, I can find what I need by looking at what actual technologies are being created, and what flora and fauna are being discovered either in remote bits of our…
pharyngula | July 3, 2007Here's your next chance to intercept me: I'll be at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally, at the Montlake Ale House tonight at 8:00. Last chance until Friday!
By the way, if you're wondering which one is me, I'll be wearing this t-shirt.
pharyngula | July 1, 2007We made it safe and sound to Sea-Tac late last night, and bright and early this morning we made a quick trip to the local grocery store to stock up on breakfast supplies, and we discovered that we really are in Seattle.
The grocery carts had cup-holders.
And of course there was a Starbucks inside the grocery store.
pharyngula | June 30, 2007
Yes, I am away for this week — I'm off wearing flannel, listening to grunge, and drinking coffee as I chop down trees in the rain (did I miss any stereotypes?). Updates to Pharyngula will still happen, though, so don't abandon me completely. They will be more sporadic, but when they do happen, they will be pungent with the tang of Puget Sound, soaring like the majestic Cascades, and as affectionate and cuddly as the banana slug. Or not. Check below to see if anything new trickles in.
And if the content sucks, tough. I'm having fun!
jstemwedel | June 29, 2007Another episode in the continuing saga, "Janet is a tremendous Luddite."
Back when I was "between Ph.D.s" one of the things I did so I could pay rent was work as an SAT-prep tutor. The company I worked for didn't do classroom presentations to a group of students, but rather sent us out on "house calls" to the students' homes for the tutoring. This meant I had clients in many different towns in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, from San Carlos to Fremont to Los Gatos. And I had to figure out, from an address, how to get to each of them.
Of course, this was back in 1994, well before Google…
jstemwedel | June 28, 2007Last night my better half and I had dinner with JM -- at a restaurant with both excellent sushi and excellent service! Figures JM finds it right before she's about to flee the state to start her Ph.D. program.
Because my posts are often (as she put it) "long-winded, but in a good way," she has recommended a coffee mug rating system at the top of each post. You know, to indicate how many mug of coffee you should expect to need to get all the way to the end of the post. Should I pester our developer for this functionality?
Then, today another ScienceBlogger and I had a top-secret meeting:…
clock | June 27, 2007I'll be leaving in one week and staying in San Francisco for one month. I'll be busy, to say the least. What should I do with the blog in the meantime? After all, it is the middle of the summer when everyone is travelling or enjoying the great outdoors and the online traffic is pitiful - my traffic is about half of what I had in April and May. So, I doubt I'll be penning long thoughtful essays (unless I get really inspired once or twice).
I think I'll sit down one of these days before I leave and schedule for automatic posting a Clock Quote to appear every day around 4am for the next…
terrasig | June 27, 2007I just learned from Orac and Bora that the father of blogger Lindsay Beyerstein (Majikthise) has passed away. Dr Barry L Beyerstein was a member of the executive council of the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) and a biopsychologist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. He was only 60 years old.
Unaware of the connection to Lindsay, I have been using an essay by Dr Beyerstein in my alternative medicine lectures for almost 10 years. Why Bogus Therapies Often Seem To Work was posted at Quackwatch.com a couple of years ago…
pharyngula | June 27, 2007Lots of people want to say hello on my trip to Seattle next week, so I thought I'd better let you all know the public parts of my itinerary. This is mainly a trip to relax, eat seafood, meet family and old friends, so there's a problem of priorities. Most of my time will be spent a bit further south than the Big City—my family lives in Auburn, and I grew up in Kent—so these are tentative times and places where I'll be available in metropolitan Seattle. I might have to revise my schedule if family events come up—if I do, though, I'll mention it on the blog.
Sunday, 1 July, 3:00-8:00: I'll be…
clock | June 27, 2007My friend (and the driving force behind all bloggy events in the Triangle area) Anton Zuiker has a new job! And not just any job - but a perfect job:
In August, I will take a new job at Duke University Health System as manager of internal communications. This will be a chance for me to mold a communications strategy that uses traditional tools (magazines, newsletters, posters) with new media tools (blogs, videocasts, wikis). I'm looking forward to the opportunities and challenges.
They really, really need Anton. Finding information online about anything that has to do with Duke University…
clock | June 27, 2007My friend, neighbor, blogger, frequent commenter on this blog, and fellow Edwards supporter, Robert Peterson just became a father again! Congratulations!