personal

Four years ago today, The Pip was born. That's hard to believe, in both directions at different times. There are days when it seems like just yesterday that he was a tiny helpless thing, and other days when he seems to have been a hyper Little Dude for aeons. I took a bunch of pictures of him today, but it's sort of hard to choose one for the photo of the day. I went with this one as the "featured image" above: The Pip with his big new book of superhero stories. because it's a good clear picture of him, and a fairly characteristic facial expression. Also, he's holding a big collection of…

I've known this for a while now, but they just announced it officially: I'll be speaking at TEDxAlbany this year, on "The Exotic Physics of an Ordinary Morning": You might think that the bizarre predictions of quantum mechanics and relativity– particles that are also waves, cats that are both alive and dead, clocks that run at different rates depending on how you’re moving– and only come into play in physics laboratories or near black holes. In fact, though, even the strangest features of modern physics are essential for everything around us. The mundane process of getting up and getting…

Another busy day, so you get another kind of lazy shot. But, hey, everybody wants to know how the kids did trick-or-treating, right? So here's The Pip's share of the Halloween haul: The Pip's Halloween candy. I weighed both his plastic pumpkin full of candy and the Tupperware container that SteelyKid's stuff is in, and they each came out between 1.1 and 1.2 kg. So, a bit over 1kg each (after taking out the weight of the containers)-- not bad for an hour's work. The funny part is that The Pip has turned into an exceptionally picky eater, and won't eat... any of this, really. He was super…

I took some shots of nature stuff on this morning's dog walk, and a few good action shots at the last soccer game of the season. But honestly, the only thing anybody wants to see today is Halloween costumes, so here are the kids: The Pip as Batman, SteelyKid as a ninja. Cleverly, they both selected costumes that are predominantly black; we augmented these with glow-stick bracelets and flashlights while actually trick-or-treating, for improved visibility. Putting these together required a good deal more GIMP work than I anticipated, because the raw shots for the two are at slightly…

I've been slacking in my obligation to use this blog for self-promotion, but every now and then I remember, so here are two recent things where I was interviewed by other people: -- I spoke on the phone to a reporter from Popular Mechanics who was writing a story about "radionics" and "wishing boxes," a particular variety of pseudoscience sometimes justified with references to quantum mechanics. The resulting story is now up, and quotes me: It is hard to investigate the ethereal thinking around radionics, but physics is something that can be parsed. So I got in touch with Chad Orzel, a…

SteelyKid's second-grade class is doing a "Zoom Time" thing where the kids make short presentations to the class about one of their interests. It's basically an expanded show-and-tell, with fifteen minutes for talking, and five for "questions and compliments." She, of course, decided to talk about taekwondo, so I brought her sparring gear in and she suited up: SteelyKid in sparring gear for her "Zoom Time" presentation. Daddy included for scale. The highlight of the presentation was when she let the whole class come up and take turns punching her in the chest to demonstrate the…

As noted yesterday, I'm visiting my sister for a few days, since I was on the West Coast anyway. Being here in Southern California, it seems appropriate to jack Kevin Drum's style and do some cat-blogging, and luckily enough, my sister is the Cat Person in the family. So, here they are: My sister's cats. Clockwise from top left: Tate, Topher, Mona, Calliope, Oberon, Molly. SteelyKid was really into the idea that we should get a cat for a while, though she's kind of cooled on that, but she'll probably like this photo a lot. Emmy... not so much. I'm flying home tomorrow, leaving at an…

As you can all imagine, I'm quite pleased to see the backside of the Harper government on their way out the door. Of course, the Liberals have promised a lot but only time will tell how serious they are about fixing the science-related stuff that they've promised to fix. I'll definitely be watching that and keeping track here on the blog somehow somewhere. That being said, I was quite gratified that my various pro-science advocacy efforts in general and my war on science chronology post in particular were quite popular and widely used during the election campaign. Obviously all the things…

Every Sunday, I take the kids down to the Schenectady Greenmarket, which from May-October is held outdoors, on the streets around City Hall. This puts it right next to our local independent bookstore, The Open Door, which is kind of popular with the kids: SteelyKid and The Pip running into our local independent bookstore. We have a standing agreement that they can each get one book every week, and SteelyKid can use her allowance to buy a toy if she chooses. We're amassing quite the collection of picture books, and The Pip will buy absolutely anything with superhero branding-- this week, he…

One side effect of this photo-a-day business that I probably should've anticipated is that I spend a lot of time now looking at stuff and saying "That's make a good photo..." Which is annoying when I'm out and don't have the camera with me, so I've started throwing it in the car when I go out to run errands. This paid off this morning, when I took The Pip to day care, and was greeted by this: Rainbow over the entrance to the JCC this morning. That's his day care sitting right at the end of a rainbow. Which is a lovely metaphor for either the value of having access to excellent pre-school,…

Rhett is off at some sort of football game, but don't worry, I'll step up to make sure the Internet has pictures of kids playing soccer: SteelyKid in action at rec soccer. I'm assistant coaching the team (and the only coach for every other game), which makes it hard to get photos of SteelyKid, but I brought the camera to yesterday's game, and managed a few good shots. I try to avoid posting photos of other people's kids on the Internet, though, and this being second-grade soccer, it's not easy to get any photos near the ball where the frame isn't kind of crowded. So this cropped shot of…

Friday was yet another heavy kid-wrangling day, as the Pip had a minor surgical procedure in the early morning, which required general anaesthesia. This was done before 9am, but we had to keep him home from school for the day to watch for ill effects. Of which there were none, so he and I went out to the local science museum for a bit, to break up the cartoon-watching that was the other primary activity of the day. I've posted a bunch of cute-kid photos already, though, so here's one that's just science museum stuff: Smoke tornado at MiSci. That's the artificial tornado exhibit-- a…

AHHH!!! 2011-- FreeOK, I give a talk vaccines, including a bit on herd immunity, and why it is important for everyone, including those of us who are not immunocompromised. 2013-- Started a new job! Had a ton of bloodwork done to get baseline readings, just in case I get exposed to another pathogen. 2014-- Go to Africa, need to make sure my vaccines are all up to date. I have two vaccine cards (a lovely 1970s avocado/lemon/lime green, they should probably be in a museum)-- Physician: "*twists face* This one card says you got one MMR, and this card says you got one too, and I think the dates…

Saturdays are the busiest days around Chateau Steelypips, with both SteelyKid and The Pip having soccer in the morning (in two different places), then lunch, then some sort of activity for the afternoon. Yesterday, this was a party for one of SteelyKid's friends. And last night, there was a Movie Night at SteelyKid's BFF's house, where the kids all watched a cartoon and the adults hung around reveling in adult conversation. All of which means that I managed to go the entire day without taking any photos. Not even a cell-phone snapshot (I'm assistant coaching SteelyKid's soccer team, but the…

The JCC day care was closed again today, so I spent the day out and about with The Pip while SteelyKid was at school. While I did take the DSLR along, none of the pictures I got were all that great, so you get a cell-phone snapshot that's mostly interesting because of the subject matter: The Pip playing air hockey. One of the two stops on our big outing of the day was the bouncy-bounce place in a local mall, which also has a bunch of awful game machines. And a kid-height air hockey table, which The Pip and I made heavy use of for a while. It's all physics, after all... Day care re-opens…

The images from my new camera are huge-- 6000x4000 pixels-- so when I post them here, I need to re-scale them (in theory WordPress can do that automatically, but it's never worked right on the rare occasions that I've tried). Since I'm opening the pictures in GIMP anyway, I generally do a little cropping and color-correcting. When I'm taking photos of the kids, it's often hard to get them framed really well for the initial shot (they insist on moving and doing cute stuff...), so the cropping is sometimes very significant. One of the rules for composing photos that even a doofus like me knows…

The JCC day care is closed today and tomorrow for the start of Sukkot, so as a result, I spent most of the day home with The Pip (SteelyKid went off to school as usual). Which means I got a whole bunch of photos of him playing at home and at a couple of local parks. The best for photo-of-the-day purposes was this one of him looking out from behind a wooden bench at one of the parks: The Pip grinning from behind a bench. I like the way the bench and the concrete pavers behind it are basically monochrome, making his face and hair really stand out. Probably would be even more striking with…

Really, was there any question at all what the subject of today's photo would be? I mean, I'm a geek, I have a fancy camera-- of course I was taking pictures of the lunar eclipse. But more importantly, I was sharing it with SteelyKid: SteelyKid looking at the eclipse through her telescope. That's SteelyKid looking through her telescope at the early stages of the eclipse. The light is from the lamp in our front yard, which would be no good at all for trying to see anything actually faint, but isn't really an issue when you're looking at the full moon. The telescope-- a Celestron FirstScope…

Weekends around here tend to be ridiculously busy, so you get a cell-phone photo again. But with a twist-- over in Twitter-land, Frank Noschese mentioned a smartphone app called Motion Shot that takes short video clips and processes them to provide multiple images of some moving object. This is, of course, basically irresistible for a physicist. SteelyKid was invited to a classmate's birthday party today, held at a trampoline park, and I shot some video of SteelyKid bouncing around. Which Motion Shot turned into this image: Multiple images of SteelyKid bouncing at the trampoline park.…

SteelyKid's elementary school had their annual open house tonight, and they tried something different with it this year. Rather than having prepared presentations in the classrooms, they had the kids lead a "tour" for their parents-- she got a map and a "bingo" card, and then led us to her classroom, the cafeteria, the library, and various other spots to say hi to the various teachers. It was very cute, though maybe not all that informative. Her second-grade class did a thing where each kid colored an owl and wrote three clues on it. The whole collection of owls were left out on a table, and…