personal
j7uy5 | November 16, 2006Yet Another Book Meme. I found this one at Yet Another Ann
Arbor Blog, named Bloug.
href="http://louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/000506.html">Nov
16, 2006: Fie on Louisa May Alcott, Roald Dahl, Cormac McCarthy, and
all their ilk...
Now that's a weird list! These are authors of books that, according to
href="http://www.librarything.com/">LibraryThing's
new "UnSuggester"
service, are least like Information Architecture for the World Wide
Web. UnSuggester looks at co-occurrence (or, in
this case, lack thereof) in LibraryThing
members' collections; sadly, Green Eggs and Ham…
jstemwedel | November 15, 2006I don't usually blog about baseball, but today I'm riled. I'm not a hard core baseball fan, but I'm not an enemy of the game either. Beside watching my brothers play little league (and even acting as scorekeeper for their games on multiple occasions), I quite enjoyed the handful of Major League baseball games I've attended over the years -- even the Red Sox game I went to with my Organometallic Chemistry seminar my junior year, where the skies opened up and soaked us at the top of the seventh inning.
Assuredly, I have mostly paid attention to MLB in order to track the fortunes of the Cubs (…
pharyngula | November 15, 2006For a little context, you need to know that we had a foreign exchange student from Italy living with us for a year. If you've been reading this blog for long, you may also know that I have somewhat strong feelings about religion—OK, I'm one of those surly evil atheists your momma warned you to avoid.
So now go read this story of a Polish foreign exchange student who came to the US…and found his host parents were Christian fundamentalists. Keep in mind that foreign exchange programs are often stressful, and sometimes the students and host families experience a little culture shock, but still…
jstemwedel | November 13, 2006Yeah, I'm grading. (Maybe you would be too if you weren't reading the blogs, hmm?) But I wanted to check in.
I pulled my back loading the car for the last soccer game of the season. What's the proper inference to draw from that (besides the obvious: that I'm getting old and all this grading is doing nothing for my muscle tone)?
How is it that if I make assignments at school they often are left undone, whereas if I make assignments on my blog, people do the work and turn it in? (Are we now awarding ScienceBlogs course credit?)
As much as I hate feeding capitalism (seriously, ask these…
oracknows | November 12, 2006Lots of other bloggers seem to be taking this one; so what the heck? It's surprisingly accurate for a silly Internet quiz.
And, yes, it is pop, not soda. No matter how long I'm stranded here on the East Coast, it will always be pop!
What American accent do you have?
Your Result: The Inland North
You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
The Midland
The Northeast…
drorzel | November 12, 2006(I bet this will get me all sorts of incredibly useful search engine traffic...)
Some time back, I asked for car-buying advice, and got a wealth of it in comments. Yesterday, Kate and I did a little car shopping, and visited a handful of local dealers to look at various cars. As with the last time I did this (circa 1997), just sitting in cars was enough to narrow the choice dramatically.
We tried pretty much everything in the big car/ small SUV line at the Honda dealership, and there wasn't a vehicle there where I didn't bang my knee into the steering column while switching from the gas to…
j7uy5 | November 11, 2006I am not having such a good day, but it is a good day for Michigan.
The Wolverines won in Bloomington, paving the way for for a
big showdown with Ohio State.
More importantly, the jack-o-lantern is off the deer.
This deer has been making headlines for days. Everyone has
been worried about it. Now it will be OK. We think.
href="http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/11/11/deer.pumpkin.ap/index.html">Deer
breaks free of plastic jack-o'-lantern
POSTED: 3:41 p.m. EST, November 11, 2006
CASCADE TOWNSHIP, Michigan (AP) -- A deer whose head was stuck in a
plastic Halloween jack-o'-lantern for…
oracknows | November 11, 2006In the U.S., today is Veterans' Day; elsewhere it's Armistice Day or Remembrance Day, marking 88 years since the truce that ended World War I.
Whatever you're doing, please take a moment to reflect on the sacrifices our men and women in arms have made throughout history to protect our nation. Regardless of your views on the war, remember the sacrifices our troops are making now in Iraq.
I happened to come across this video on YouTube; It's one man's tribute to his parents' service during World War II, and I think including it here is appropriate:
And, finally, a poem that encapsulates the…
pharyngula | November 10, 2006Oh, no! I've been assimilated!
What American accent do you have?
Your Result: North Central
Â
"North Central" is what professional linguists call the Minnesota accent. If you saw "Fargo" you probably didn't think the characters sounded very out of the ordinary. Outsiders probably mistake you for a Canadian a lot.
Boston
Â
The West
Â
The Midland
Â
Philadelphia
Â
The Inland North
Â
The Northeast
Â
The South
Â
What American accent do you have?Take More Quizzes
I suppose that since my mother's side of the family were a bunch of…
pharyngula | November 10, 2006So this is a sorta random music list, but not quite. The new version of iTunes has this "iMix" feature where it will generate a web-based collection from any playlist, so I selected the first 10 from my randomized library, threw it into a new playlist, selected iMix, and…discovered it only builds a list from music it can find in the iTunes collection. Only 3 made it. So then I threw the next ten in—seven or so made the cut. A dozen more…suddenly it spits up 16. Bleh, I wasn't going to fuss with it to get exactly ten.
So here it is, the subset of a random subset of my iTunes library that Apple…
drorzel | November 10, 2006This isn't actually another political post, though Allen conceding to Webb is certainly happy news, and something to be thankful for.
No, this post is about the holiday of Thanksgiving. Specifically, the fact that Kate and I will be hosting Thanksgiving at our house for both sets of parents, plus my sister, my grandmother, and one of my great-aunts. We're looking at nine for dinner, with turkey and all the trimmings, as they say.
Of course, while we have actually hosted more than nine people on several occasions, most of those involved students or other faculty, who are less demanding about…
jstemwedel | November 7, 2006Actually, after filling out all four sides of my absentee ballot last night (stupid California legislation-by-ballot-measure!), it was really no problem to drop off the ballot at a polling place this morning -- there was one in the library of our elementary school, so I swung by after dropping off the kids. There were many occupied voting stations but there was no line to speak of at 7:35 A.M.
The pollworkers at the table checked to make sure I had signed the return envelope as was required, then they put my absentee ballot in the box. As I was turning to go, one of them said, "Hey, do you…
jstemwedel | November 6, 2006Something quite unexpected happened to me: I managed to pay off a student loan nearly a year before I go up for tenure! Who'd have thunk it?
Here's the letter they sent me, with a bit of reading between the lines:
Dear Janet,
On behalf of [the school where I got the student loan], I wish to thank you for repaying your student loan and not being a deadbeat. I commend you for fulfilling this very important financial obligation instead of treating it like an obligation to one of those magazine CD clubs. The student loan programs are revolving funds, so your repayment will be used to make new…
jstemwedel | November 6, 2006
ScienceBloggers meet in the three-dimensional world: (from left) Janet Stemwedel, John Lynch, Prof. Steve Steve, John Wilkins, David Ng, Ben Cohen.
I managed to get back home last night from the PSA meeting in Vancouver, although just barely. My co-symposiasts got a rental car and headed off to see mountains, an expedition I'd have joined were it not for my plane-missing paranoia. ("You realize that flying home from Vancouver is essentially a domestic flight, so you probably don't need to check in until about 90 minutes before flight time," the field trip organizer assured me. But I…
j7uy5 | November 5, 2006Finally, a product to bring much-deserved recognition to an
out-of-the-way place: Intel has announced their "enthusiast"
motherboard for high-performance computing: the
href="http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/d975xbx/index.htm">D975XBX,
nicknamed the
"Bad Axe."
Just get a load a'the
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_sink">heat
sinks on that baby! Granted, it's not the
most pragmatic piece of hardware on the planet, but it'll make your
lan-party buddies green with envy.
The product's namesake is a little town in Michigan's thumb.
Hardly anybodies been there,…
jstemwedel | November 4, 2006Guest Blogger: Prof. Steve Steve
My adventures with John Wilkins at the PSA meeting in Vancouver continue. Last evening, Wilkins brought me to a reception where I had the pleasure of mingling with a great many philosophers who have made philosophical studies of various aspects of evolutionary biology. Strangely, these minglings were punctuated with camera flashes. Here I am trying to have a word with Robert Brandon as the paparazzi close in on us.
Here I am trying to catch up with Roberta Millstein (who blogged at the much-missed Philosophy of Biology) about her recent move to UC Davis…
pharyngula | November 4, 2006So...I'm on this chat room thingie. Anyone else want to join in?
Is it more interesting if I say Mary and Skatje are there, too?
I'm out of that madhouse now…time to go to the theater. We'll have to try it again sometime, but I suspect we're going to have to move to IRC to cope with the volume.
pharyngula | November 3, 2006This easy chat room I tried out a while back is still idling along. It's mostly rather quiet, but now and then conversations get going.
Anyway, just as another experiment, I'll be online tomorrow (Saturday) evening at 5pm Central time (that is, right around an hour ago, if you're reading this right around the time I posted it). I wonder if it would be an added attraction if I tried to convince Skatje or my wife Mary to be online at the same time—should I try?
Also, I know that IRC would be much better, and that there is a #pharyngula channel on DALnet. That would be better in the long run,…
jstemwedel | November 3, 2006Guest Blogger: Prof. Steve Steve
My esteemed Panda's Thumb colleague John Wilkins invited me to attend the PSA meeting in Vancouver. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so I agreed.
Last evening started pleasantly enough. I met Wilkins, John Lynch, Ben Cohen and David Ng, and Janet Stemwedel (from whose blog I am writing to you now) for refreshments. Yes, there was a bit of confusion when it turned out that the hotel didn't have an ice machine on every floor. As well, there was the puzzle of how properly to utilize the fresh limes for beverages in the absence of a knife. (The…