personal
drorzel | July 30, 2009It's really getting difficult to get good Baby Blogging pictures, now that SteelyKid is mobile. We've had to resort to trying to sneak Appa into the background when she pauses to regroup by chewing on an outgrown outfit:
That's not the best Appa-for-scale picture, I know, but it's tough. This one is better, but you can't see her face:
Of course, you can see Kate, which makes up for a lot...
pharyngula | July 26, 2009I have been abandoned. My wife has left me. The kids have all moved out. I'm stuck home alone with nothing to do but work and take care of the annoying cats for a whole week, and I may just go insane.
The Trophy Wife has gone to summer camp! She's working for a week as a camp counselor at Minnesota's Camp Quest, the secular place for smart kids to be. I'm thinking I should probably demand, as a price for forcing me to bach it for all this time, some kind of direct report from her at the end of the week that I could post here and get everyone excited about sending their kids (or spouses) away…
jdupuis | July 24, 2009Yes, it's here. My annual summer blogging break. A time to recharge my blogging batteries.
Time to pack up my virtual bags, hop on my ePlane and take a posting holiday. As usual, I'll be offline for the next four weeks or so, probably back the week of August 24th. I have scheduled some posts for my absence, however: four Friday Fun posts as well as four items I'm reposting from the old blog.
As for the summer reading poll, I guess it's now time to declare the two winners:
Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick with 44% of the vote.
The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth…
drorzel | July 23, 2009It's been a really busy week, so I'm too fried to do anything but a really basic Baby Blogging picture. So here's SteelyKid with Appa and some of her many other toys:
The biggest recent milestone is that she's started eating actual food-- pieces of cereal, little dried banana puffs, and that sort of thing. It gives me hope that someday we will be done with stinky formula...
edyong | July 21, 2009A short announcement.
Last Tuesday, this blog received its millionth page view (according to Sitemeter).
Today, I've also recruited my thousandth follower on Twitter (despite mercilessly pruning for spammers).
I am celebrating by having a day where I don't write anything.
Except this.
CURSES!
jstemwedel | July 21, 2009The other day, it occurred to me that I have a goodly number of friends who have been in Ph.D. programs (and may still be "in" the program in some more or less official way), and who have more or less finished their graduate research, but who haven't managed to get their dissertations written. (I'm not going to name names; you know who you are.)
In this post, I want to offer these friends (and others in this situation) encouragement to get that dissertation written!
Yes, I know, you have your reasons for not finishing. Yes, I know writing a dissertation can feel like the hardest thing ever…
j7uy5 | July 21, 2009
href="http://annarbor.com/2009/07/didnt-get-enough-of-the-art-fairs-last-week-check-out-this-time-lapse-video.html">AnnArbor.com
(HT:
href="http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2009/07/soft-launch-day-16.html">Edward
Vielmetti) has a youtube time-lapse video at the
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Arbor_Art_Fairs">Ann Arbor Art
Fairs. Get the whole thing, compressed into 177 seconds:
This probably is the very best way to experience it.
I still remember going to the first one, at age 6. It seemed
overwhelming then. Strangely, the Art Fairs have grown at exactly
the…
drorzel | July 17, 2009After a long service outage, our home Internet is back, and I can post Baby Blogging pictures. Of course, it's not as easy to get those as it used to be, because SteelyKid is always on the move these days:
You pretty much have to hold her in place to keep her in the frame:
(This picture also shows off her "Snugglesaurus: Ferociously Cute" dinosaur outfit. Which I think was technically in the boys' clothes section, but we're all about subverting paradigms, here at Chateau Steelypips. Especially ones involving frilly pink ribbons.)
Of course, there are also times when she just goes fwump:…
pharyngula | July 17, 2009Two things about my daughter: she's always been a finicky eater, particularly hating seafood, and she is currently living far from home, in Arizona. I just about fell off my chair, therefore, when I read that Skatje is actually trying sushi. And she likes it! Well, sort of, and only some of it, but it's a step forward.
Darn kids. They keep growing up and changing on me.
goodmath | July 17, 2009 We've been having some load trouble with the ScienceBlogs server, and the
400+ comment over on the high school reunion thread seem to be resulting in a lot of timeouts. In an attempt to reduce the number of errors, I'm closing the thread on that post, and asking folks to post any new comments here.
pharyngula | July 16, 2009One nice thing about being the most evil blogger on the interwebs is that I can occasionally trick my kids into thinking I might be just a little bit cool. My son Connlann introduced me to the black humor of Mr Wiggles (my kids have inherited a weird sense of humor!), and the author, Neil Swaab, offered me a copy of his latest compilation, Rehabilitating Mr Wiggles. I mentioned that it was my boy who led me to Mr Wiggles, and so Neil generously sent me a second copy, autographed for Connlann. See the effect?
If you don't know Mr Wiggles, you're probably going to spend the next few hours…
goodmath | July 16, 2009 This comment thread has gotten long enough to start causing some server
load problems. As a result, I'm closing the comments here, and I've added a new
post where discussions of this past can continue.
If you're not interested in completely off-topic personal rambling, stop reading now. This is very off-topic. But I wanted to say this once, and I wanted to do it in a way where I had some control over the publicly viewable responses. I will not be following my usual commenting guidelines here - anything which I consider to be abusive will be deleted, with no warning.
I graduated from high…
laelaps | July 15, 2009
If it were not for my wife, Tracey, this blog would probably not exist.
What you see here every day are the end-products of my efforts. What you do not see are the hours of research and writing that go into producing that material, and I could not do it without Tracey. She usually hears my ideas first, be it about an exciting new discovery or some scientific statement that has ruffled my feathers, and I truly cherish the fact that we can "speak geek" to one another. She also gives me the space to write and has not tried to discourage me from turning our apartment into a small library.
More…
jdupuis | July 13, 2009Between the fact that I'm still not completely recovered from my epically awful day last Friday and the blogging lethargy that always comes as my summer blogging break approaches, all the blogging-related brain cells I have left are completely fried.
Fortunately, Chad comes to the rescue with a great idea!
I'll run this more or less the same way he's doing it:
Ask me any relatively straight forward question here in the comments and I'll answer it either in the comments or in it's own post.
Think questions that I could answer in a paragraph or so.
No topic restrictions -- library stuff, pop…
j7uy5 | July 12, 2009Went for a Sunday drive. Saw this:
White Sands National Monument
Drove a little farther, saw this:
Odocoileus hemionus
You might have guessed, I did not take the first picture. It is a
view
from Earth orbit. The second picture, I did take; it is a
view through my windshiled. The two locations are about thirty
miles apart.
oracknows | July 10, 2009While I'm away communing with fellow skeptics at TAM7, I'm reposting some classic insolence from the month of July in years past. For today, there was really no other choice for what bit of Classic Insolence to repost, except that, today, there's no insolence whatsoever. The reason is that today is a very sad day. It is the one year anniversary of the death of our beloved dog Echo. In 2008, about about three weeks before the day for which this is the one year anniversary, we noticed that Echo was favoring her hind leg. When I looked her over, I noticed a lump, which, thanks to the power of…
drorzel | July 9, 2009This is an action shot, but you can't really tell.
An instant after this was taken, SteelyKid succeeded in getting Appa off the couch, and thumped down hard on her butt.
This is also "Late-Wednesday Baby Blogging," as Kate and SteelyKid left for Readercon early this morning (well, Kate is bound for Readercon. SteelyKid is spending the weekend with her grandmother). It's awfully quiet in Chateau Steelypips right now. Almost... too quiet...
No, wait, Emmy's barking at a dog outside. Not too quiet after all. That's a relief.
pharyngula | July 8, 2009An anonymous contributor, signing himself "An Opinionated Englishman", took umbrage at some passing mention of Lipton tea that I made a while back, and sent me a couple of boxes of genuine English tea from some place called Whittard of Chelsea.
Whoa. There really is a huge difference.
This is terrible. I can never go back to drinking the domestic stuff now, and am going to have to go looking for a local source of imported teas. Darned snooty Englishmen, waking me up to reality. How dare they?
jstemwedel | July 8, 2009In case you're interested, Paw-talk, a website aimed at humans with pets, invited me over to chat about philosophy, ethics, science, and the use of animals in research. You can find that interview here.
It's also worth noting that the site features a number of interviews with science bloggers you may recognize ... perhaps because the Paw-talk team has a hunch that people surfing the web for pet-related information may also have a latent curiosity about matters scientific. Good on Paw-talk for feeding that curiosity!
jstemwedel | July 8, 2009Ed Yong and DrugMonkey have dusted off the invitation (seen here last summer) for readers to take a moment to introduce themselves in the comments.
It seems like a good idea to me, so I'm going to play along:
Who are you? (Scientist, philosopher, other? Student, parent, working stiff, blissful retiree? Given that personal identity is a matter of deep philosophical import, I'm going to let you decide the right way to deal with this question.)
Have we met in real life? Before or after you first read the blog? (Are you now regretful of our real-life meeting?)
What brings you to this blog?…