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pharyngula | January 10, 2010That amazing fact should go right on my résumé. Although I was challenged to stand outside in nothing but my light jacket for 20 minutes to get the true Winnipeg experience, and I demurred — I'll save that for my next visit, when I'm ready for the advanced class.
Anyway, I had a grand time at a talk hosted by the Humanist Association of Manitoba. People around here asked a lot of good questions, it was a lively evening, and they even had one brave creationist ask me a question ("How do I explain molecules to morality?"*). Then we stayed up until 1am working through some Canadian beer. If you'…
revere | January 9, 2010The decades roll on but we still have wonderful friends from long ago who've kept at it, who grew up to be true and courageous and with a joyful heart. One of them celebrates her birthday today. She stays for me, Forever Young.
Bon anniversaire, Muffin, from me and Mrs. R.
pharyngula | January 9, 2010I was a bit skimpy on the details before, but now you can find a list of all the specific times and places you'll be able to find me when I make the grand rounds of central California.
drorzel | January 7, 2010SteelyKid is seventeen months old today, and how does she celebrate? By scrubbing the floors in the mud room:
Honest to God, she does this all on here own. I think it's driven by the same impulse as the tissue relay-- she'll grab a tissue or a paper towel, run into the mud room, and energetically mop up the bits of slush that Emmy and I track in after our walks. She'll do this happily, for an astonishingly long time.
God only knows where she gets this from. It's not from me or Kate, that's for sure-- neither of us has ever happily scrubbed a floor...
The traditional Appa shot below the fold…
pharyngula | January 6, 2010Travel season begins again for me. I've already mentioned that I'm off to Winnipeg this weekend; the weekend after that is the Science Online conference. And then the whirlwind begins: I'm invading California, singlehandedly. Here's my schedule:
W, 1/20: UC Santa Barbara
Th, 1/21: UC Davis
F, 1/22: Berkeley
Sa, 1/23: UC Santa Cruz
Su, 1/24: De Anza College (Cupertino)
M: 1/25: CSU Chico
T: 1/26 Sacramento City College
W: 1/27: Stanford
Th: 1/28: Sierra College
That's insane. I may regret this when I stagger away from that grueling series. At least I'm giving the same talk at all of them, on…
drorzel | January 3, 2010OK, they're not that tiny. Here's your cute baby video for the weekend: Kate blowing bubbles for SteelyKid and Emmy:
I really don't need to say any more than that, do I?
pharyngula | January 2, 2010Next Saturday, 9 January, I'll be driving up to Winnipeg to talk with the local humanists. You can come, too! There's a bit of a warning there, though:
Myers will speak at 7 p.m. at the CanadInns Club Regent Casino Hotel in Ambassador Room B.
Admission is free but because seating is limited, attendees are being asked to register. Email to ham_librarian@yahoo.ca or phone 792-0931.
Reserve a seat today!
terrasig | January 1, 2010To launch our 2010 blogging, here's a cultural take on our core theme of folk medicines and prescription drugs derived from natural sources (plants, fungi, marine creatures, and microorganisms terrestrial and aquatic).
I've lived in the southern United States for a combined 15 years but it was only when I married into a southern family that I was assimilated into the tradition of eating collard greens and black-eyed peas to kick off the New Year.
I'm told that the custom is a mashup of African American tradition adapted by southern whites that sustained all through the Civil War and the…
laelaps | January 1, 2010Ever since my first book, Written in Stone, found a home at Bellevue Literary Press I have had a number of people ask me how to publish their own books. How does a book go from being an idea to a real, dead-tree product? I will be discussing some of the details of this process (especially using online resources to write and promote books) with Rebecca Skloot and Tom Levenson in a few weeks at ScienceOnline2010, but I thought I would cover some of the basics here.
The first and most crucial step of the process is coming up with a book to write! This is not as easy as it might sound.…
revere | January 1, 2010I doubt many of our regular readers will be surprised to hear that at least one of The Reveres was sort of geeky while young (now, of course, he's just sort of geeky while old). I thought about this objectively (geeks don't think we are really geeky; we just think the things we do that others call geeky are "interesting") when I ran across (via Slashdot: warning sign #1) a link to The Technologizer (warning sign #2) picking the Ten Most Tarnished Brands in Tech. This isn't about scandals. It's about once proud brandnames that nobody cares about any more, like Netscape or Commodore. And on the…
jstemwedel | December 31, 2009If I were not involved in preparing food for Casa Free-Ride's New Year's Eve celebration (after which, I will be joining my family members to celebrate and/or test our endurance in the face of fatigue -- I'll let you know afterward which of those it ends up being), I would totally be writing you a nice ethics-y and/or science-y post.
Since I'm not, and since you appear to have a moment to be reading this, let's make it a party. Use the comments to share:
What you're doing (or have done) to ring in 2010
What you're eating and/or drinking as part of your celebration
Your hopes, fears, goals,…
drorzel | December 31, 2009SteelyKid says "You know what? Forget Appa-- take a picture of me next to Mommy:"
"I'm half Mommy's height already!"
And, if you think about it, that's a pretty good accomplishment for 2009. Happy New Year, everybody.
edyong | December 31, 2009This has been A Good Year TM. I won an award, had fun reporting on the eye-opening World Conference of Science Journalists, finally joined Twitter, spoke at Science Online London and was promoted at work.
On top of that, this blog has gone from strength to strength thanks to the promotional efforts of the folks here at ScienceBlogs and the word-spreading antics of you readers. This last month, the blog has seen the largest amount of traffic it has ever seen, about four times the level of the same time last year.
So thank you to everyone for continuing to read what I churn out. It means a lot…
laelaps | December 31, 2009With a few hours left in 2009, now seems as good a time as any to take stock of what I have accomplished during past year.
The year got off to a pretty good start. After participating in the ScienceOnline09 conference I decided to get serious about science writing, both on blogs and "dead tree media." Among my first formal efforts to be published outside the blogohedron were an article about spotted hyenas for Antennae and a review of A History of Paleontology Illustration for Palaeontologia Electronica.
What I did not expect, however, was the appearance of "Ida." I won't recapitulate the…
jdupuis | December 31, 2009I did this last year and the year before and it seemed like an interesting and maybe even useful thing to continue this year.
Trends in my reading this year? An increase in books on social media and a bit down in terms of science and fantastic fiction. A lot of that has to do with working on the My Job in 10 Years book and the reading I've been doing for that. A lot of it also has to do with the reading I did for the Sunburst Award. I was on the jury for the 2009 award (winners!) and so I did a ton of reading for that in the first half of the year. That didn't leave me that much time for…
jstemwedel | December 30, 2009In the last few days, I've gotten a bunch of emails reminding me that the window for tax-deductible charitable giving for the year is closing. So, as 2009 winds down, I want to make an appeal to those readers lucky enough to have a bit of money for discretionary spending. Last year I wrote:
[T]o the extent that we can, we can shake our tiny checkbooks and try to bring a bit more light to the darkness.
Especially since doing it before the last minute of 2008 (at least in the U.S.) may give you a tax-deduction on your 2008 taxes.
(Minor sidebar here: As the tax code stands in the U.S., rich…
jstemwedel | December 28, 2009While the sprogs were hanging out at the aquarium with the Grandparents Who Lurk But Seldom Comment, my better half and I went to see a 3-D IMAX screening of Avatar. My big concerns going in were that all the 3-D IMAX goodness would make me motion-sick, and that if that didn't get me, then the story by James Cameron might make me lose my lunch.
I am happy to report that neither of these outcomes came to pass. Not that the plot here is especially sophisticated, nor the characters terribly complex, but they weren't as dreadful as I had feared from the Twitterati and the Facebookers.
The main…
drorzel | December 27, 2009We're back in Niskayuna after a fun visit with my parents. I'll have more to say about How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in the near future (including number crunching on the sales rank tracker), but I'm running a little slow at the moment thanks to what was either food poisoning, or some short-duration intestinal bug (either way, if you visit the Corning Museum cafe, avoid the mac and cheese). Thus, we will ease back into blogging with some cute-baby video:
This is SteelyKid in the newly refinished basement at my parents' house, playing her new game: she takes a tissue out of the box, mimes…
jstemwedel | December 26, 2009... once my fingertips holler "Uncle!" and tell me to take a break from my new ukulele.
To help you pass the time, some uke players who are way better than the n00b that I am on day 2 of my musical odyssey:
pharyngula | December 26, 2009I'm a fan of the comic strip Lio — the one with the weird little kid with the pet squid and whose antics clearly make him a descendant of the Addams Family. The strip for Christmas eve was a little different, though.
It hit home for me because the day after Christmas is my day of melancholy. It was the day after Christmas, 1993, that I got a phone call from my mother to let me know that Dad had died, unexpectedly, suddenly, quietly. It's a memory that colors my holiday season every year, and it's a strange thing — the grief and sadness never go away. One of the lies we always tell ourselves…