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drorzel | September 10, 2013A couple of months back, TED put out a call for auditions for a chance to speak at one of their events. They asked for a one-minute video, and I said "What the hell, I can do that. I need an 'elevator pitch' version of the book-in-progress anyway." This is the result:
So, if you've got a couple of minutes to spare (one minute for the video, plus the better part of a minute for miscellaneous buffering/ network nonsense), check it out. That's as compact a statement of the core argument as I have.
And it was apparently pretty good, because now I get to put together a six-minute version to do…
sa smith | September 3, 2013Poor Arnie.
As much as Ive disliked writing my dissertation, hes disliked it more.
SO BORED.
So as I am trying to write, I either get Cute Bored Arnie:
Or Creepy Bored Arnie:
Ive been sitting at the kitchen table to write. If I look over my right shoulder, those glowing eyes are literally what I see looking back at me. For the past few months. :-/
He has been trying to do the best he can to entertain himself. Ive also been ignoring the laundry, so hes decided to build forts out of my dirty clothes:
But I am FINALLY pretty much done. Just some editing, making sure the page numbers are right…
drorzel | September 2, 2013It's Labor Day in the US, and due to a weird quirk of scheduling, for once I didn't have to spend it at work. This is also the traditional end of the summer season, so SteelyKid and I went over to the JCC pool for one last dip and a final ice cream cone from the snack bar:
Last ice cream of pool season.
She's gotten really good at swimming this summer, and in protest against the end of the season, she's wearing her swim goggles around the house. They're tinted blue, and she's declared that they're laser goggles, part of her superhero gear. She's now doing a complicated obstacle course…
drorzel | August 31, 2013We won a family pass to the Empire State Aerosciences Museum just across the river in Glenville, and since soccer was canceled for the holiday weekend, I took the kids over there this morning. They had a couple of their collection of decommissioned military aircraft open, including the Huey helicopter SteelyKid is thinking about co-piloting in the "featured image" up above, and this Chinese-made MiG:
I think you push this button to get it started...
I didn't want August to slip away without one last set of cute-kid pictures, so there you go.
drorzel | August 25, 2013Early last year, we began marking SteelyKid's height off on a door frame in the library. She occasionally demands a re-measurement, and Saturday was one of those days. Which made me notice that we now have a substantial number of heights recorded, and you know what that means: it's time for a graph.
The "featured image" above shows the results, and I've stuck in a zero-day point using her length at birth. The solid line in the graph is a linear fit to the data, because nothing could possibly be wrong with that. According to the fit, we can project that she'll reach a height of 3.0 meters a…
drorzel | August 18, 2013The "featured image" above shows SteelyKid and The Pip checking out a couple of books at The Open Door during our weekly trip to the Schenectady Greenmarket. As cute as this is, though, the image can't do justice to the full scenario.
We were in the toy section looking for a birthday present for SteelyKid's BFF, and after she found a couple of things, she announced her intention to look at books in the cheap paperback racks right next to the toys. The Pip, for his part, waddled off to poke around the store looking for books featuring Elmo, or things that look like Elmo, or just odd bits of…
drorzel | August 16, 2013SteelyKid: I din't eat all my lunch today, because I didn't have time.
Daddy: Uh-huh.
SK: It's true! I'm not even lying.
D: Oh, I believe you didn't eat all your lunch, don't worry about that.
SK: Ask Santa Claus if you think I'm lying.
D: Santa Claus?
SK: Yeah. Santa Claus actually can't see everyone all the time, but he's always watching.
D: OK.
SK: He has his house in... in... in the center of the world. But he has to move it around all the time. So he can watch everyone.
D: I guess that makes sense.
SK: And you know what? He used to live right here. In our house.
D: Really?
SK: Yeah.…
drorzel | August 8, 2013Long-time readers will remember that I used to do weekly kid-blogging, posting pictures of SteelyKid with a reference animal, Appa the sky-bison from the Avatar cartoon. I stopped a couple of years ago, because SteelyKid started being reluctant to pose for the pictures every week.
I got her to pose for a few yesterday, though, so we can see what a difference 260 weeks makes. Here's the first really good Appa-for-scale picture, one week after she was born:
SteelyKid and Appa at age one week, back in 2008.
And here they are on her fifth birthday (also the "featured image" for this post…
drorzel | August 7, 2013SteelyKid was born five years ago today. I'd try to be clever and schedule this for exactly five years to the minute of her time of birth, but I've mercifully forgotten exactly when the delivery was, only that it was early in the morning after a very, very long night. Here's what she looked like then:
SteelyKid, five years ago today.
Here's what she looks like now, with her little brother for scale (also the "featured image" for this post):
SteelyKid and The Pip.
Or, if you prefer something a little more active, here she is engaged in the study of optics.
SteelyKid investigating…
drorzel | August 3, 2013SteelyKid turns five next Wednesday (F/X: "FIVE! YEARS!" like an incredulous Jeremy Piven in Grosse Point Blank), but we're having her party today. This is a distinction we've worked hard to get across, and I expect to hear her explain to other kids and their parents about 39 times today ("It's not my birthday today, it's my birthday party today...").
We're expecting something like a dozen five-year-olds plus parents and assorted siblings at Chateau Steelypips. We've laid in a good deal of food and drink, and cake, balloons, and bouncy-bounce are on the way. But if you don't hear from me…
drorzel | July 31, 2013It's been a few days since I did a work-life balance whine, but it's not like I'm not thinking about it. The problem for the moment is the psychology of trying to be productive in limited time. Specifically, while I know intellectually that I need to be efficient in working, and make the most of even small blocks of free time, this runs hard up against my personal psychology, which is that I hate being interrupted.
The example that brought this to mind is from this morning. This summer, we've established a routine where I get up around 6:30 and take The Pip downstairs for drinking milk and…
drorzel | July 27, 2013A lot of heavy blogging this week, so here's a cute kid picture (as the featured image; click through if you're reading via RSS). This is SteelyKid and The Pip at play this morning, when they were back and forth across the yard a dozen times to pick up rocks from our gravel path and throw them into the pond (just behind them in this picture). They're such sad and solemn children.
SteelyKid seems to only get more social as time apsses-- at soccer this morning, her coach asked rhetorically why they stretch before playing, and got a five-minute spiel about getting hurt and being safe and this…
drorzel | July 22, 2013I'm starting to think that maybe I need to add "Work-life Balance" to the tagline of this blog, given all the recent posting about such things (but then, one of the benefits of having done this blogging thing for eleven years is that I know this is just a phase, and I'll drift on to the next obsession soon). Anyway, the genre of work-life blogging generally just picked up a new must-read post from Radhika Nagpal at Scientific American: The-Awesomest-7-Year-Postdoc or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-track-faculty-life:
I’ve enjoyed my seven years as junior faculty…
drorzel | July 19, 2013The kids and conferences issue, discussed here a while ago has continued to spark discussion, with a Tenure She Wrote piece on how to increase gender diversity among conference speakers and a Physics Focus blog post on a mother who wound up taking her toddler to a meeting. There are some good points in both, though the Tenure She Wrote poster seems to be in a field whose conferences run on a different model than that used for most meetings I go to.
The Physics Focus post was particularly interesting to me, though, because I spent last weekend as the portable conference day-care while Kate…
drorzel | July 16, 2013I forget who pointed me to the Tenure She Wrote piece on mentoring, but it's something I've been turning over for a couple of weeks now. Probably because I became aware of it right around the time my two summer students started work last week. It keeps colliding with other conversations as well, though, so I may as well get a thinking-out-loud post out of the whole thing.
I told my summer students even before they started, back when they were just writing proposals to do summer research with me, that I'm going to be very hands-off with the whole business. This is at least partly a matter of…
drorzel | July 11, 2013Yesterday's write-up of my Science paper ended with a vague promise to deal some inside information about the experiment. So, here are some anecdotes that you would need to have been at Yale in 1999-2000 to pick up. We'll stick with the Q&A format for this, because why not?
Why don't we start with some background? How did you get involved in this project, anyway? I finished my Ph.D. work at NIST in early 1999, graduating at the end of May. I needed something to do after that, so I started looking for a post-doc by the don't-try-this-at-home method of emailing a half-dozen people I knew…
drorzel | July 5, 2013The picture above shows the new sign on SteelyKid's door. She had to ask us how to spell the words-- she's not five for another month, yet-- but she is now the proud owner of a hand-lettered "DO NOT ENTER" sign for her bedroom. About half a dozen years earlier than I was hoping for...
I made good progress on the draft chapter of the moment this morning, which means that I'm allowed to blog today, per the terms of my agreement with myself. But this is kind of a lost day, anyway, so while I am going to write a post explaining some cool physics, I'll schedule it for Monday instead of posting it…
drorzel | July 4, 2013It's Independence Day here in the US, so here are some patriotic kid photos for you.
"Wait a minute," you say, "That featured image doesn't have any flags or fireworks or gilled meat products! How is that patriotic?"
"Ah," I reply,"It was taken at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC last weekend." Game. Set. Match.
Here are a couple of other pictures from that visit:
The Pip is impressed with skeletons of ancient megafauna.
SteelyKid racing a triceratops skeleton.
And since I've already had to bite back a couple of "Oh, go fuck yourself" responses to political tweets, I'm…
drorzel | July 2, 2013In my darker moods, I sometimes suspect that all academics, regardless of their specialty, are engaged in the same pursuit: searching out and exposing the systematic oppression of... whatever department or program the faculty member speaking at the moment happens to belong to. No matter what field of study they work in, faculty seem to cultivate and even cherish a sense of victimhood. Somebody else has a bigger office, or a newly renovated building, or more support from the administration for their pet projects. Faculty with big offices and renovated space complain about the location, and…