personal
jstemwedel | April 22, 2009Mike Dunford initiates a meme for Earth Day 2009:
I'd like you to take a minute or two to come up with three things that you can do to be more environmentally friendly. The first should be something that's small, and easy to do. The second should be more ambitious - something you'll try to do, but might not manage to pull off. The third should be something you can do to improve something you're already doing.
I love this meme! No matter what habits you've already cultivated (and we've cultivated a few), there's always room to optimize them. So here are my Earth Day 2009 resolutions:…
terrasig | April 20, 2009I never will forget the look on the faces
Of the men and women that awful day,
When we stood around to preach their funerals,
And lay the corpses of the dead away.
We told the Colorado Governor to call the President,
Tell him to call off his National Guard,
But the National Guard belonged to the Governor,
So he didn't try so very hard.
- Woody Guthrie, Ludlow Massacre (1944)
I've written variations on this post a few times, for both Labor Day and the anniversary of a major turning point in US labor relations that was kept alive by historian Howard Zinn and others. I had planned to…
laelaps | April 19, 2009A few photos from yesterday afternoon;
A raccoon skull I found on a hike yesterday. It is now a part of my bone collection.
A white-tailed deer leg found on the same hike. It was a little gooey still so I decided to leave it alone.
Hayley, an Australian cattle dog belonging to my in-laws.
I do not know what kind they were, but there was an explosion of these flowers along the trail.
Three new foster kittens. Caption this one as you like.
drorzel | April 18, 2009SteelyKid is fascinated by the John Archibald Wheeler tribute issue of Physics Today:
"I find his popular writings much more digestible than the Big Book of Gravity," she says. "Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler is much too big to put in my mouth."
jstemwedel | April 17, 2009I've been noticing a little spike in traffic from search engine searches on "Luk Van Parijs" (about whom I have blogged here and here and here and here).
So of course, I wonder: why the sudden spike in interest? Has there been a new development since the Office of Research Integrity "final action" on Van Parijs's research misconduct? Is he applying for jobs and getting Googled? What's the story?
drorzel | April 16, 2009SteelyKid says, "Being sick is exhausting... Zzzzzzzzzz":
She's been running a fever for the last couple of days, which happened to coincide with the closing of the JCC day care center for Passover. This has wreaked a certain amount of havoc on plans for the adults in the house, but it could've been much worse.
She's much improved today. Still, running a fever is pretty tiring, so after half of her dinnertime bottle, she decided to rack out for a while. And we snuck in the Baby Blogging picture while she was dozing.
clock | April 10, 2009Well, this was a busy week for sure (and not just yesterday's telecom outage that affected PLoS all day!). There was cleaning, and shopping, and cooking, and gathering/borrowing extra tables, chairs, plates and silverware, for that One Big Night of the year at our house - the Passover dinner.
Last year, I was in Belgrade at the time of Passover, but that was an exception - every year for the past dozen years or so we have been hosting friends for dinner on this day. I wrote about the way we usually do it two years ago and this year was similar. The differences: first, we always invite a…
drorzel | April 9, 2009Why is this night different from other nights?
Because day care at the Jewish Community Center was closed for Passover, and SteelyKid spent the day at work with Kate, of course. And after a long day of baby lawyering, it's good to relax with a drink:
SteelyKid here shows off that she can hold her own bottle, thank you very much. It's not the best Appa-for-scale picture, but new abilities are more important than strict perspective.
jstemwedel | April 9, 2009Frequent commenter, sibling, and bon vivant Uncle Fishy recently set up a backyard beehive, but lately he's been worried about the bees. This came up in a recent online chat:
Dr. Free-Ride: So, what's worrisome about your bees?
Uncle Fishy: i dont know if they'll make it
Dr. Free-Ride: :-(
Uncle Fishy: there were fewer coming out to sting me last night
Uncle Fishy: maybe it was just past their bedtime
Dr. Free-Ride: Maybe they had better things to do than sting you again
Uncle Fishy: well, I may be attriting more of them that I need
Uncle Fishy: I may not yet have a queen
Dr. Free-Ride: Uh…
pharyngula | April 9, 2009Get ready, West coast: in two weeks I'll be in Ashland, Oregon, speaking in the Meese Room, Hannon Library, at Southern Oregon University, at 7:00pm on 23 April. If you aren't a student, you'll have to pay a whole $10 to hear me — that's more than I'd pay to see a Michael Bay movie, and I won't have any car chases or explosions! This is a talk sponsored by The Jefferson Center, and you should check them out if you want to know more. There may be other events around that date — I know I'm doing a radio program one morning, and I'll be there for a few days.
The subject of the talk is the legacy…
laelaps | April 7, 2009Ever since it was made available last month I have been anxiously awaiting the first formal reviews of the new edition of The Open Laboratory: The best science writing on blogs 2008. Today the first appeared over at the New Scientist, but much of it had little to do with The Open Laboratory itself. Although I was happy to see that my contribution about what Joseph Hooker's kids did to Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species manuscript merited a mention, the rest of the review left me somewhat perplexed.
According to the author, Michael Le Page, the review was heavily influenced by the…
sciencewoman | April 7, 2009After staying with us for about a month, ScienceGrandma is now on the plane flight back to her home. Last night was our first night without her. Below the fold, a few reflections on living with three generations under one roof.
I am happy to be returning to the master bedroom and bath, which we had given up because of accessibility issues. For the duration of her visit, we'd moved a guest bed into my home office and I'd cleared off some bookshelves for clothes. Two adults and a toddler in a single tiny bathroom gets a bit crowded, especially because of needing to keep everything out of a…
drorzel | April 7, 2009SteelyKid is eight months old today, and to celebrate... Kate went down to the City for an oral argument. So, SteelyKid and I had our first night at home without Mommy. Fortunately, there was a basketball game last night, and she slept peacefully on my lap through the whole game.
I did cop out a bit when it came time for bed, though. I'm a heavy sleeper as it is, and some of the allergy meds I take make me sleepy at the best of times, so I was worried that I wouldn't hear her in the middle of the night. So, I brought her into our room, and she slept on Kate's part of the big bed.
We've been…
drorzel | April 3, 2009My friend Paul, this blog's Official Middle East Correspondent, and his wife, Helen, just had a baby, which they (well, he) announced to the world via the new tradition of changing his Facebook status message. Paul, Helen, and baby Ray are all healthy and unironically happy, so congratulations to the whole family.
And on that note, I'm declaring this a Happy News Open Thread. Leave a comment saying something positive.
(Yeah, I know, this is lazy blogging. But really, every other topic-of-the-moment just makes me grumpy, and there's no real reason why I should be in a bad mood, let alone…
drorzel | April 3, 2009Shhhh! Stop reading so loudly! You'll wake the baby:
It's been a while since we had a sleeping baby picture of the week, and conveniently enough, SteelyKid slept late this morning. So there you go.
jstemwedel | April 1, 2009I've gotten word that another blogger who has been tracking IP addresses associated with comments (on his own blog and on the blogs of others) is preparing to blow the whistle on what he is inclined to view as sock-puppetry. I'm not sure how complete this blogger's information is, nor whether it is consistent with other conclusions besides the ones he is drawing.
But at this point, it might not matter that much. So I'm just going to go ahead and tell you what I know.
I am PhysioProf. The PhysioProf persona has its genesis in my mother's pained request that I drop perfectly good words…
pharyngula | March 30, 2009While I was in Michigan last week, CFI kept me dancing with multiple talks and a couple of interviews. You can download one of them right now: the Brayton interview (mp3).
jstemwedel | March 29, 2009It would appear that our rainy season is really over until next winter (which is not to say that it won't rain at all between now and then, just that things will be more dry than wet). So, it seemed like a good time to document some recent developments in the Free-Ride garden.
Today, I'm presenting six photos from the garden for you to identify:
Common name is fine -- no need to provide the Linnaean binomial unless you really feel like it.
No, I'm not asking you to identify these plants because I've forgotten what I've planted. (Not this time, anyway.)
Your identifications will germinate (…
oracknows | March 28, 2009It's Saturday and therefore time for some lazy non-science blogging, especially since after I finish this post I'm going to bury myself in grant writing. Multiple grant deadlines are approaching, and, given that most of my grant support expires towards the middle of next year, I have to go full tilt to keep my lab funded and keep my people employed. Such is how it will be throughout most of 2009 until I obtain some more funding.
As I mentioned nearly weeks ago, we have a new six month old puppy named Bailey. He's definitely changed our life in a lot of good ways. One thing that I've noticed…
sa smith | March 27, 2009Dangit!
The big OK Separation of Church and State event tomorrow has had to be postponed because we are currently in the middle of a freak snowstorm. By freak snowstorm, I mean it is currently 27 degrees, pouring rain that is going to turn into snow overnight...
... Yet the high on Sunday is going to be 60 degrees. HA!
Also bad news: Carl Zimmer is going to be giving the John Wesley Powell Memorial Lecture on Sunday. Hes flying in... tomorrow. DAMMIT! While Im happy and comfortable in Oklahoma, I have this irrational fear of pro-science people being killed while they are visiting my…