personal
drorzel | August 27, 2010Many apologies for posting this week's cute toddler picture twelve hours late, but we had a little bit of a meltdown last night, thwarting my plans to get a cute picture after SteelyKid had her bath. She's cutting some new molars (I swear, she's part shark, with all the teeth she's getting), and it's hard work being a toddler on the go.
She woke up cheerful this morning, though:
This is her taking a break from her new favorite pastime, watching old Sesame Street and Muppet Show videos on my computer, to mug for the camera. YouTube is a wonderful thing, by the way.
pharyngula | August 27, 2010I see that the don't-be-a-dick tone debate is still going on — I've been totally unimpressed with the arguments from the side of nice, not because I disagree with the idea that positive approaches work, but because they ignore the complexity of the problem and don't offer any solutions but only complaints (what are they going to do, break the fingers and gag anyone they judge as 'harming the cause'?) I side with Richard Dawkins' comment on the issue. We don't need to be trivially abusive, but on subjects we care about deeply, we should express ourselves with passion.
You know I've had this…
sa smith | August 25, 2010Ive gotten some fun nicknames from people on the internet.
You all have heard the 'PZs pitbull' one.
But my favorite nickname EVER I got on the SciBlogs back-channel: 'PZs epigone'
It was meant as an insult, but I really like 'epigone'. I pronounce it 'eh-pee-go-nay' in my head, like I pronounce 'paradigm' 'pair-uh-dig-um' or 'autophagy' 'auto-fay-gee'. So I read these words and laugh really hard. I also laugh really hard when I hear these words used in real life, because no matter how someone pronounces it, my brain screams 'PAIR-UH-DIG-UM-AAAAHAHAHAHAHA!' I barely made it though a…
pharyngula | August 25, 2010Here's my status right now, for those who have been wondering.
First of all, I'm not dead yet. Let's get that out of the way.
Yesterday morning was the big event here in hospital-land: I was to get an angiogram, this procedure where they thread wires up your femoral artery to you heart and start poking around with dyes and things to figure out what's going on. You're conscious, mostly, through the procedure, so thought I'd live-blog it, if I could, but it turns out they don't want you monkeying around with anything while the doctors are examining you from the inside out, and there were going…
pharyngula | August 24, 2010I'm in big trouble. My wife is sending me pictures of cute puppy dogs to make me feel better.
Where's the slime? The chitin? The tentacles? How is this supposed to cheer me up?
Anyway, I've been trapped in the hospital overnight, and this morning they promise to finally give me the really good drugs and turn me into a vegetable for a few hours while they stick knives in my heart, which will be a welcome relief from the excruciating boredom. Then I get to wake up to the pain, which won't be fun at all. At any rate, this is the scary morning, and the rest is recuperation — I'll let you all…
drorzel | August 19, 2010Many of SteelyKid's first words have been transportation-related ("Truck! Vroom Vroom!"), which makes the four-level wooden parking garage she got from her Aunt Erin even more awesome. And it's pretty awesome:
As you can see, she grasped the idea almost immediately. That's from last night, after we got it put together. Below the fold, you can see her demonstrating how to work the elevator for Appa:
Being both larger than the garage and capable of flight, Appa's not terribly interested. SteelyKid loves it, though, and that's the important thing.
pharyngula | August 16, 2010Now that it is over, I can say what happened — sometimes people freak out over this kind of thing, and there were no real worries here.
On Friday, as I do every day, I went out for a walk for about an hour — I strolled down to the Stevens County Fair, on an unpleasantly muggy early afternoon, and then walked back home…and I was almost there when I felt a peculiar tightness in my chest. That's odd, I thought, I wasn't exerting myself that much. And then I felt a slow ache building in my left arm.
If you have any familiarity with physiology and medicine at all, you know that is a very bad sign…
drorzel | August 16, 2010A couple of "kids these days are bad at math" stories crossed my feed reader last week, first a New York Times blog post about remedial math, then a Cocktail Party Physics post on confusion about equals signs. The first was brought to my attention via a locked LiveJournal post taking the obligatory "Who cares if kids know how to factor polynomials, anyway?" tack, which was obvious bait for me, given that I have in the past held forth on the importance of algebra for science students (both of these are, at some level, about algebra).
Of course, these articles aren't about science students, so…
drorzel | August 12, 2010Now that she's officially two years old, SteelyKid gets to sit in the big chairs:
She also insisted on the forced-perspective thing to make her look even bigger compared to Appa. And the string cheese. She's all about the string cheese.
sa smith | August 10, 2010The worst part of visiting my parents is driving home.
Yes, I will miss Moms cooking/baking. Yes, I will miss having real food (weird how the totally not organic food we get from local farmers is still good). Yes, Focus on the Family and AFA make a long drive longer (today they passive-aggressively ignored the Prop8 ruling, and instead focused on only talking about traditional marriage and gender roles. did you know that treating men and women as equals is why we have the homo gay in the first place? also, Obama is a secret Muslim, pronounced moo-slim.)
The worst part is breaking up Arnie…
drorzel | August 10, 2010SteelyKid had her two-year checkup this morning, which means we got new weight and length measurements for her. It's been a while since I did anything really dorky with her data, so here are a couple of graphs tracking her growth:
(Yes, they're in English units, not SI. Deal with it.)
Using the rule of thumb somebody mentioned a while back that a person's final height is double their height at age 2, this projects her to be a bit over 5'9", so that's a prediction we'll be able to test in another fifteen years or so. There's some fairly large uncertainty in these, though, especially today's…
drorzel | August 9, 2010As seen in yesterday's post, SteelyKid got a grill this weekend:
This led to one of the cutest toddler anecdotes to date, which I'll put below the fold for the sake of those heartless souls who don't like cute kids.
SteelyKid was running around with an ice cube in a paper cup, because ice is pretty neat, and Kate's mom asked what she had. SteelyKid sumped it out into her hands, and Kate's mom said "Oh, that's cold."
SteelyKid replied "I warm it up," took the ice cube back, put it in the paper cup, put the cup on her toy grill, closed the lid for a few seconds, then brought it back. "Warm it…
drorzel | August 8, 2010SteelyKid was down in Boston at her grandmother's for a few days, which was a nice break, but it's always good to get home to Chateau SteelyKid:
Notice the spiffy new grill in the right corner of the patio, Of course, when you're out of town for a few days, all sorts of work piles up in your absence:
The mower was also a birthday gift. It blows bubbles, sort of, but the bubble stuff leaked out and hadn't been replaced yet. The nice part of life in the suburbs is that when you're done mowing your lawn, you can grill up a tasty burger:
I love the look of intense concentration as she…
pharyngula | August 8, 2010I'll be whipping out another talk at the Critical Thinking Club in St Paul this morning, and another in Stillwater on Monday. Just in case some of you locals want to stop by.
drorzel | August 7, 2010
Happy second birthday, SteelyKid! That wasn't taken on her birthday, but it's one of my favorite early pictures of her. Now, of course, she looks like this:
That is, when she'll hold still long enough to be photographed...
pharyngula | August 6, 2010I got cornered by Carin Bondar in Vancouver, and the conclusion of her interview is that I'm the nerdiest non-believer of them all. First teddy bear, now nerd — someday I want an interview to end with the idea that I'm fierce, heroic, and manly.
Not going to happen, I know.
Oh, and I got the dreaded dinner guest question, and I picked Lenin (architect of the Russian Revolution), Darwin (you know him), and Charles XII of Sweden (probably the most impulsive and ferocious leader ever), because they're all interesting fellows, and the battle at the dinner table would be epic. Charles XII would…
pharyngula | August 6, 2010Skatje is revealing all of the family secrets! I'm going to have to track her down in far-off Madison and superglue her fingers together…right after I track down all the disgusting boys who are calling her "hot" and thump 'em up a bit.
drorzel | August 5, 2010I meant to take a picture of SteelyKid yesterday, before she left for Grammy's, so we would have a Toddler Blogging shot for the week. Alas, I am a dope, so you will have to make do with this out-take from last week's shots, in which SteelyKid shares her opinion of her father's dodgy memory:
She's down in Boston at the moment, where we'll be heading tomorrow for her second birthday on Saturday. At last report, she was having so much fun, she didn't want to sleep, so, you know, whee!
pharyngula | August 5, 2010I was interviewed by Connie Barlow and Michael Dowd for their Inspiring Naturalism podcast. Dowd is the fellow who wrote Thank God for Evolution!, which I reviewed a while back. It was a slightly askew interview, but that made it fun.
tlambert | August 4, 2010I guess if the wind is going to blow the big tree in my back yard down, I should be grateful that it fell in the direction that minimized the damage -- only the fence and our clothesline were crushed.