personal
drorzel | June 23, 2012I had hoped to get the next Ten Years Before the Blog post queued up for today, but what with one thing and another, that didn't happen. It probably won't happen before Monday, either, as the weekend will be full of family-type activities-- taking SteelyKid to soccer this morning, and her summer camp orientation tomorrow, and so on.
So, here's some cute-kid material in honor of that. The featured image above (not visible in the RSS feed, alas) is me with the two kids, The Pip sporting the Yankees outfit his Aunt Mary sent him (Uncle Dick would've been proud), and SteelyKid in her spiffy new…
drorzel | June 22, 2012In which we review yet another good year of blogging, including the establishment of some ongoing series. And also a useful reality check.
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This great blog re-read project has been useful for a couple of reasons. First, it's reminded me that there have been long stretches of time when I produced a lot of good stuff for the blog. When I initially considered this, I was a little afraid that the whole thing would be depressing, and I wouldn't have anything good to point to. If anything, though, I've had the opposite problem-- cutting things down to a manageable length (assuming these…
sa smith | June 21, 2012Last week:
And I dont have a problem with LeBron. From what I understand, he did some charity event for Durant, asked Durant to play some exhibition games during the lockout, and frankly, if OKCers are going to ‘hate’ a player, we ‘hate’ Metta World Peace.
This week:
"I thought you liked LeBron?"
I HATE LEBRON!!!!!!!!!
*wipesawaysnotandtears*
Wait till next year.
drorzel | June 20, 2012In which the great blog recap rolls on to probably the most important event of the last ten years: the arrival of SteelyKid. And a bunch of other bloggy stuff.
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There's really no question what should be the featured image for this recap post: Clearly, it needs to be an early photo of SteelyKid, who arrived not quite four years ago, and soon made friends with Appa the stuffed sky-bison. Sadly, we haven't been very good about doing regular pictures of The Pip, mostly because it's so exhausting to keep up with the two of them.
Of course, regular blogging continued as well. This seems…
drorzel | June 18, 2012So, anyway, as of today, I'm apparently the same age as the Reverend D. Wayne Love in 1998 or thereabouts.
And the sound makes its way outta the window
Minglin' with the traffic noises outside, you know and
All of a sudden I'm overcome by a feelin' of brief mortality
'Cause I'm gettin' on in the world
Comin' up on forty-one years
Forty-one stony gray steps towards the grave
You know the box, awaits its grisly load
Now, I'm gonna be food for worms
(I'm not really that depressed about this birthday, but it's such a random age to be mentioned in a song, and it sticks in my head. And it's a…
drorzel | June 13, 2012I just realized that I forgot to do the annual congratulatory post for our graduates this year. I plead jet lag-- my flight back from DAMOP didn't get in until after midnight, and graduation was first thing Sunday morning. I didn't march in the procession for only the third time-- instead, I snuck around back to stand with the faculty and congratulate the graduates as they went by.
This has been a long and incredibly stressful year for reasons that I can't really go into, so I'm not that sorry to see it end. This is no reflection on this year's graduating physics majors and minor, though, to…
sa smith | June 12, 2012In case you havent heard, the OKC Thunder is playing the Miami Heat for the NBA championship this week (until however long the series goes).
And the entire state of Oklahoma is FREAKING OUT.
EVERYTHING is blue/orange/navy. If it aint, were painting it.
This is the building my boxing gym is in.
hehehehe "Durantula".
But I cant make fun of anyone, Im freaking out too. Hey, Im enjoying the fun while I can-- this might be the only time I live in Oklahoma while it is a Blue state:
I hope other folks are rooting for the Thunder, as opposed to against LeBron. Thunder are good kids, and theyre…
sa smith | June 6, 2012One of my favorite books of all time-- 'The Martian Chronicles'.
It doesnt matter how many times I read it... The same stories, the same lines cause me to sob uncontrollably, from awe of humanitys potential, from mourning humanitys lost potential, from thinking about the great things we have achieved, from thinking about The End and how we will End It All...
Ray Bradbury has died.
*sigh*
One of my favorite lines, from anything, book/movie/song, anything:
“Garrett?” called Stendahl softly. Garrett silenced himself. “Garrett,” said Stendahl, “do you know why I’ve done this to you? Because you…
drorzel | June 3, 2012In which we look at the very latest in amphibian science.
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The embedded video shows one Prof. S. Kid describing her latest observations in detail. It's a very comprehensive study.
drorzel | May 30, 2012In which I get a little ranty about basketball.
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Over at Slate, Matt Yglesias has a column about why everybody ignores the Spurs.:
America—at least in its own imagination—stands for certain things. For the idea that hard work and sound judgment bring success, and that success deserves celebration. That winners should be celebrated as long as they play by the rules. That teamwork, leadership, loyalty, and excellence all count for something. And that’s why the San Antonio Spurs, currently riding a stupendous run of 19 straight victories, are America’s favorite professional basketball…
kbonham | May 27, 2012The kinks continue to get ironed out one by one after our massive migration. Most of the major problems are happening on the backend, and are likely invisible to you guys (except for the fact that some typically prolific posters have slowed down a bit), but there are a couple of things that I've noticed that probably will affect you.
The biggest one is the RSS feeds, and specifically the "select" feed. If you usually use RSS to keep up to date on the blogs here, your old links are probably broken (at least, all of the one I had were). If you look at the right sidebar, there's a link to a new…
jdupuis | May 25, 2012I've been posting quite a bit recently on the disastrous record of the current Conservative government here in Canada, especially in regards to how they treat information, science and the environment. Sadly, I have way too many posts in the works along these lines.
The other day a post I saw on the Deciphering Science blog that really blew me away. It perfectly captures every important detail about the Harper government and their total contempt for science and disregard for the environment.
And with the author's kind permission I'm reposting it here, from May 18, 2012: An Open Letter to the…
drorzel | May 15, 2012Tell me a story. Tell me the story about the three hippopotamuses.
Ummm... OK.
Once upon a time, there were three hipopotamuses. And they lived in Africa, in a river.
Right, it was a great big long river, that had so much salt in it that they could float!
Well, salt does help things float, but rivers are usually fresh water. Anyway, hippos are pretty fat, so they can float in fresh water.
OK
And one day... What happened then?
One day, a nice giraffe came to the river and said "Please can I drink a little bit of your water."
And the hippos said "OK." Then the giraffe drank a little bit of…
drorzel | May 2, 2012I've gotten really bad about posting pictures of the kids, but we got the official school picture proofs today, featuring a smiling SteelyKid and an insouciant Pip:
Both pictures pretty accurately reflect them at this stage, which is kind of nice. SteelyKid's kind of camera-averse at the moment, and it apparently took some doing to get her to agree to sit for this, so I'm surprised it came out this well. The Pip doesn't have as much ability to fuss about having his picture taken, so I've got some shots of him in his play gym:
He's a happy and active little dude, and when he figures out how…
drorzel | April 29, 2012SteelyKid: Daddy, would you like to go to visit Jake and the Never Land Pirates?
Me:: In principle, sure. But it's a cartoon. We can't go there, it's not a real place.
SteelyKid: Yes it is. Never Land is real, we can go there.
Me: Well, look, if you find some pixies dust that we can use to make us fly, we can try to fly to Never Land. Let me know if you find any.
SteelyKid: No, Daddy, we don't need to find pixie dust. We just need to go to the store and buy some pixie dust.
Me: I'm pretty sure they don't have pixie dust at the stores around here. Though, there are persistent rumors that they'…
drorzel | April 24, 2012The schedule called for this to appear last Friday, but as I was just back from a funeral, yeah, not so much. I had already gone through and bookmarked a whole slew of old posts, though, so here's a recap of the 2003-2004 blogademic year (starting and ending in late June).
This year saw a few milestones, though not quite as many as the previous year. I got a grant, passed my third-year reappointment review (the first big hurdle on the way to tenure), and we had a visiting speaker from Yale one week who mentioned in passing an idea that became central to my research program.
Probably the most…
drorzel | April 20, 2012Reading Ethan Zuckerman's recap of the awful things people said to Xeni Jardin during a recent "twttier bomb" fiasco, it would be very easy to slide into "People suck" mode. Particularly since a large part of my day yesterday was spent in New York traffic. So here's a quick antidote, also from yesterday:
When I got back here yesterday evening, after driving 500-ish miles in the last two days, and not getting a whole lot of sleep, I was pretty fried. So much so that on the way to pick the kids up from day care, I lost my phone. Apparently, I put it on top of the car when I got in, and it fell…
drorzel | April 20, 2012Yesterday was the funeral for my great-aunt Mildred, known within the family as "Auntie" (first syllable "ont" not "ant"), who fell and bumped her head last Friday, and just never woke up. On the one hand, she was 97, so this shouldn't be too surprising, but a few years ago she moved out of a retirement community, because she preferred to be on her own. We always assumed she'd outlive us all, through sheer orneriness, so this was a nasty shock.
She had a really interesting life. Born a month before WWI, as a teenager during the Depression she got a job for the telephone company and moved out…
kbonham | April 17, 2012My birthday was last week, which means I get a whole new chance to set some New Year's resolutions. My regular readers (all 3 of you) might have noticed a serious dearth of posting lately. I have many excuses:
1) I'm (hopefully) coming up on my last year as a PhD student, and I'm in serious data-generation mode.
2) I've been spending more time on climbing, photography, and other things that are not science-related in order to give my brain some down time.
A photo I took of 2 friends on the side of Mt Cannon in New Hampshire
3) The current back-end of Scienceblogs is truly awful. While…