personal
pharyngula | August 15, 2006
Less than two weeks until classes begin again, and it's time to juggle syllabi, attend meetings and workshops, and scoot the kids off to school. I'm making another airport run tomorrow to pick up Skatje, whose vacation is ending. Next week, I get to deposit Connlann back in Madison (I didn't do the traditional knife fight last year, but I like Bérubé's idea of just booting him out the car door during a rolling stop—could I catch up on tradition if I then throw a bunch of knives after him?) This week I've got a division meeting, various campus-wide events, and next week it's the faculty…
terrasig | August 14, 2006She could've joined the lab of a Nobel laureate at Yale.
She picked me instead.
This is my thank you.
Regular readers may recall my post earlier last month about the tragic, heart-wrenching loss of the brother of my former student, Jen, a Morehead Scholar and sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Her brother Jon was a 23-year-old Carnegie-Mellon University graduate student and crew team coach. After completing the Chicago Marathon last fall, some nagging persistent pain in his femur turned out to be the bone cancer, osteosarcoma.
After months of hospitalization…
pharyngula | August 14, 2006
On this day 172 years ago, Richard Dana set sail. About 35 years ago, I discovered Two Years Before the Mast in my local library, and it turned me into a sea story junkie. I read Forester and Sabatini and Melville (of course!)—fortunately, Melville got me more interested in the biology of those creatures that lived in the sea, so I didn't stow away in the next brigantine that docked in the Seattle harbor.
Two Years Before the Mast is still a great read, but the romance of the sea is sure buried deep beneath the appalling misery and social injustice—the tales of flogging and sudden accidental…
drorzel | August 14, 2006As Kate and I set out to run errands the other day, the "Service Engine Soon" idiot light came on in my car (a 1999 Ford Taurus LX). This may or may not mean anything-- Kate got one of those in her Prius a while back and it was nothing-- but if it's actually an indicator of anything serious, I'll be in the market for a new car. I was already planning to unload this car in December, because the warranty on the rebuilt transmission runs out not long after that, but if I'm facing more than $1,500 in repairs, we'll bump that up.
So, my question for the bloggeratti is this: What kind of car should…
drorzel | August 13, 2006Well, it's as good a guess at a collective noun for "kerfuffle" as any other...
There have been three moderately heated bloggy controversies that I've been following over the past week, that I haven't commented on. Mostly because I don't really have that much to add to any of the arguments, or at least, not enough to merit a blog post.
I do want to note their existence, though, and maybe by combining them together, it won't feel so much like a pointless fluff post. So if you're dying to know my opinions on the crimes of fanfic, Oliver Stone's casting decisions, or Hooters, click on through to…
pharyngula | August 11, 2006
This is what living in the rural midwest is all about: the county fair! The place was packed yesterday with amazing numbers of people having a good time.
I've put a few photos below the fold.
Animal:
We've got barns full of beasts.
That horse wanted to eat my camera. Most of the animals cowed, or sheeplike, or swinishly lazy, but that guy was at least alert and interested enough to do something.
Vegetable:
These displays were even less active.
I will spare you the sheds full of 4H and FFA crafts.
Mineral:
Farmers have a fascination with huge hardware, I think.
The cannon in the…
tlambert | August 11, 2006Chad's put up a dog blogging post, so here's Silas in Centennial Park with a bunch of other dogs. (Silas is the one whose butt is closest to us.)
The pavilion in the background marks the site where the six colonies joined together and created the Commonwealth of Australia.
Just so you know that Sydney's winters aren't just tee shirt weather, here's a cold, rainy day at UNSW.
jstemwedel | August 10, 2006Let's say I was taking down a chalkboard and trying to mount a whiteboard in its place. (For the sake of argument, let's assume I was doing this someplace where I have complete freedom to do such things all by myself, with no work order or "cooling off" period or anything like that.) That would be a quick and easy operation, right?
Ha.
So, the instructions that came with the whiteboard were short, clear, and well-illustrated. They might even have been written in English rather than translated into English by way of four other languages. Basically, they called for:
deciding where you want…
jstemwedel | August 9, 2006Just this month, my department came into possession of five new faculty offices, owing to the fact that brand spanking new faculty offices were created in the old library building, and some of the faculty from other offices in this building are being moved into them.
Forget that our chair actually had to fight for these additional offices (armed with data on student-to-faculty ratios and such) with another department that still occupies much of this building. Forget that the offices we fought for are old, water-damaged, haven't been seriously cleaned in years, and are painted in such 1970s…
terrasig | August 8, 2006Everyone remembers something different about him. I remember his beautiful long hair.
He was a good ol' boy. A man's man. The goodest of the good ol' boys.
His was the pickup you wanted to see if you were broke down beside the road.
He could fix any damn thing.
But he also had beautiful long hair.
I remember this because sometime around last Christmas or New Year's, we each had a drastic change in hair styles. His above the collar for probably the first time in a decade. Several people thought I shaved my head out of empathy or in honor of a cancer patient. I hadn't. But perhaps I…
jstemwedel | August 8, 2006Tonight in the kitchen, I have cultures to attend to. Since I won't be on the road again for months, I brought out my jar of sourdough starter to revive with fresh water, flour, and some time at room temperature. And, I have some kefir culture from our friends in Santa Barbara that'll be wanting more milk. In my mental list this morning, I tracked these as "Don't forget to feed yeast and bacterium."
But, it turns out, even if I only fed one of these two, I'd be nourishing yeast and bacterium.
Let's start with the kefir, with which my acquaintance is more recent. The stuff you can buy in…
clock | August 8, 2006 Do you want to know more about my kids and how we are raising them? If so, this post from March 21, 2005 may be interesting to you.
I have two kids: an 11-year old son (Coturnix Jr.) and an 8-year old daughter (Coturnietta). They are really smart and cool kids and I love talking with them about all sorts of things: school, science, music, computers, video games, Boy Scouts, ...whatever they want to talk about (or the good old days when I was a kid and had to walk to school ten miles uphill both ways - to which they yawn and run away). But we never talk about politics or religion. Sure, when…
pharyngula | August 7, 2006
This is the week of the Stevens County Fair, right here in bucolic Morris, Minnesota. It starts on Wednesday, 9 August and runs through Sunday the 13th, so you all still have time to start heading out this way. It's your classic rural fair: there will be accordions, deep-fried anything on a stick, pig-judging, carnies, a demolition derby, country-western music, lawn mower races, 4H kids, and tractors, snowmobiles, and ice houses for sale. You have not lived until you have experience a midwestern county fair.
(Oh, and don't eat the food if you want to continue living. It's like jabbing your…
terrasig | August 3, 2006Thanks to all for coming over and sharing your MTV memories earlier this week. Our SciBling editor and cat-herder, Katherine, came across with a very vivid list of great memories and Orac was able to bitch about being ever so slightly older than me. Then, Karmen surprised me by intimating that cable TV actually existed in Colorado in 1981, at least at her Grandma's house.
I said I was going to tell you some of my general recollections of MTV, but I have very specific memories of this very week 25 years ago thanks to my personal archivist, number one fan, and all-around keeper of my life…
pharyngula | August 2, 2006This is a new low: if you read this post by a fellow atheist, you'll see a critical comment by "PZ Myers." Thing is, it wasn't me.
I guess we've got some cowardly kook wandering about, leaving comments with my name stuck on them, in an attempt to simultaneously annoy others and discredit me. Nice. If anyone else is getting what seem to be out-of-character comments from me, let me know…it would also be good if you had a way to let me know the IP address of the imposter.
In a related situation, read this story about a fake 'atheist' blog purporting to label the good, the bad, and the ugly…
terrasig | August 1, 2006While I'm procrastinating on a really important herbal medicine post and this other thing they call a 'day job,' I just learned via my bud at the New York Daily News, Michael Huff, that today is the 25th anniversary of the launch of MTV, the pioneering US music program on cable television.
There are few things other than their own work or general research discipline that I find scientists and docs discuss more passionately than music. Hence, I'd ask y'all to share with me your favorite MTV memories.
Pretty much everyone knows that the first video to air on 1 Aug 1981 was "Video Killed the…
pharyngula | August 1, 2006The daughter is flying away to lovely Paducah, Kentucky today (another drive to the airport for me, bleh), so I was thinking of suggesting that she visit Ken Ham's brand-new creationist museum for me, as a kind of mole…darn it, though, Paducah's almost as far out in the boonies as Morris, and it's nowhere near the 'museum,' which is up somewhere near Cincinnati, and still has a year to go before it opens…so no super-secret evilutionist missions for Skatje this time, other than to temporarily increase the average IQ of the state for a little while.
I do have to say that that article ends on a…
jstemwedel | July 31, 2006I'm blogging again from the lovely Vienna Cafe in West Lafayette, Indiana, at the end of Day 2 of the BCCE. I gave my own talk this afternoon as part of symposium session on incorporating ethics in the chemistry curriculum (along with 5 other very interesting talks). I think it went well, but I always enjoy conferences more when I've finished my presenting and can be an undistracted audience for the other presentations.
Below the fold, some of the things I learned in today's various talks and events:
People who do their research in chemical education are often marginalized or ignored by…
pharyngula | July 31, 2006A reader discovered this fascinating graffiti in downtown Minneapolis, near the transit center on Hennepin Avenue.
In Minneapolis! So far from the sea, but I'm not alone in pining for it.
I may have to look this up. This is a travel week for me, as I have to run around taking care of some essential pre-school year duties—I'm actually sitting in the St Cloud mall right now, watching the senior citizens do their laps, while waiting for our car to get some minor repairs and maintenance—and tomorrow I have to run in to the university to attend a meeting and to the airport to dispose of one of my…