personal
terrasig | January 1, 2009I don't know about you folks but I am just spent. I did tons of background reading for a couple of upcoming blog posts but I just couldn't put fingers to keyboard today.
So let me just wish each and every one of you all the best for a happy and healthy New Year.
Professionally, I wish you get the paper / grant / degree / position / sanity / equality / respect that you so richly deserve.
Personally, I simply wish you happiness - whatever that means to you in your situation, no matter where you are in the world.
Well, despite the enjoyment of a number of glasses of champagne and other…
drorzel | January 1, 20092008 was a rotten year for a lot of people, I know, but I'll always have a soft spot for it, because it marked the beginning of the SteelyKid Era. There was plenty that sucked about 2008, but not nearly enough to outweigh that.
(There will be Baby Blogging later today, but the Empress of Eastern New York would not deign to pose this morning, so you'll have to wait a bit for a cute photo.)
2009 has been dubbed the International Year of Astronomy. Well, it's probably been dubbed the International Year of a lot of things, but the relevant one for ScienceBlogs is Astronomy. It comes a little too…
clock | December 31, 2008An ongoing meme [From, via] - list of cities/towns in which I have spent at least one night during 2008 (asterisk for places where I slept on non-consecutive nights):
New York City, NY*
Destin, FL
London, UK
Cambridge, UK*
Watford, UK
Cromer, UK
Trieste, Italy
Belgrade, Serbia
Berlin, Germany
A very Euro-focused year, compared with 2007 which was all over the USA, e.g., San Francisco (twice), New York City (twice), Boston, Milwaukee, Greensboro, Mountain View....
jstemwedel | December 31, 2008A colleague of Super Sally's forwarded her this*:
It's funny because it's true, and the pain isn't just from laughing so hard.
This seems like a very scary time to be near retirement age, since the value of so many retirement funds (invested in the stock market) has dropped so significantly. On the other hand, to the extent that the market mess leads to a decrease in jobs, it's not such a red-hot time to be years away from retirement age, either.
We can shake our tiny fists at all this. Or, to the extent that we can, we can shake our tiny checkbooks and try to bring a bit more light to…
drorzel | December 31, 2008This is going around again (I think Kottke is Patient Zero), so here's a list of places where I spent at least one night in 2008 (other than Niskayuna, where we live):
Albany, NY (I spent four nights in a smoking room-- I get to count it on the list)
Boston, MA
Lewisburg, PA
State College, PA
Tewksbury, MA
Waterloo, Ontario
Whitney Point, NY
Williamstown, MA
I feel like I must be forgetting something, but I can't think what. We really did cut back on travelling this year, because of SteelyKid showing up in August.
Where did you go this year?
sheril | December 31, 2008
New Year 2009 faces a troubled economy, international unrest, and a changing planet, but also ushers in the new presidential administration with opportunities to set better policies that may yet alter the path we're on...
What are readers' greatest hopes for 2009?
jstemwedel | December 30, 2008If memory serves, today is the day that the meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association draws to a close. That meeting, always conveniently scheduled to fall in the interstices between Christmas and New Year's, and more often than not located in some East Coast city with nasty winter weather (this year, Philadelphia), is traditionally where philosophy departments from U.S. colleges and universities (as well as a few from elsewhere) conduct preliminary job interviews.
Except this year, apparently, a great many job searches have been frozen or canceled, owing to…
pharyngula | December 29, 2008Checking my mail today, I discovered one curiosity, one holiday card, and one piece of Very Official Stationery from the University that employs me.
The curiosity: I actually got a reprint request. Those are very strange — it used to be that you'd always get a flurry of these after publishing something, and you'd be sure to order lots of extra copies of your paper so you could send them out, but nowadays they are going the way of the dodo. It's so much easier to download the paper from the journal's electronic archives, and even when I get a request because of limited access, I can just email…
edyong | December 29, 2008On the fifth day of this year, I found myself sitting in the living room of the legendary Sir David Attenborough, drinking coffee and talking to him about wildlife, filmmaking and his career for the better part of an hour. It was a truly memorable experience, not just for his eloquence and storytelling skills, but because Sir David has been a hero of mine since I first popped Life on Earth into my VCR at the wee age of 8. His clarity and passion have inspired me to become a better communicator of science and it was a privilege to speak to the man in person.
He was no less of a superb…
terrasig | December 28, 2008Blame Isis:
Figure 1: New Balance 908 trail shoes with my Polar S1 footpod (to go with my four-year-old Polar RS200).
And don't give me grief about my Smartwool Light Hiking Socks - best trail running sock on the planet.
pharyngula | December 28, 2008This is sad news. Greg Cahill, an old acquaintance who had been a fellow graduate student with me at the Institute of Neuroscience at the University of Oregon, has died suddenly. I did not know him well, but I remember him as a fine fellow among my small cohort of fellow students, and it's sad to hear of this unfortunate loss.
jstemwedel | December 27, 2008Dr. Isis expresses reservations about signing on for Twisty Faster's revolution.
ScienceWoman offers a sketch of what her revolution might look like.
Me? I'm pretty exhausted from today's outing with my offspring, what with it being Winter Break, otherwise known as 24/7 parenting. But I have a few brief ideas of what I'd like to see on the post-revolutionary landscape.
It would be a joyous thing for us to create a world -- professional, civic, social, familial -- where each individual human being is regarded as fully human, rather than as part of some special category not deserving of our…
pharyngula | December 26, 2008
No, I haven't forgotten how to blog all of a sudden — I've been distracted. I wrenched an ankle wrestling with a snow blower the other day, and woke up this morning with my foot all swoll up like a lumpy ol' potato with five little toes wiggling at one end. It's not good.
Joints are such a fragile point of failure. I'm finding the little lower torso replacement illustrated above extremely enticing right now.
edyong | December 25, 2008As we communally slide ever further into drunkeness and obesity, I wish you all a very merry Christmas or a superlatively happy holiday, whichever you prefer. Best wishes to all of you and your families, friends and loved ones.
Over the next few days, I'll stick up write-ups of a few cool studies that I missed out on when I was in Australia, a review of my favourite stuff of the year, a very special repost. And then on New Year's Eve, it's back on the road with new news with lots of punishment, hyperparasites, and genetic transfer.
jstemwedel | December 24, 2008Blogging has been light for a while owing to the fact that the Free-Ride family was in transit to the wilds of New Jersey in order to celebrate Uncle Fishy and RMD getting hitched.
Amazingly, not only did we arrive in time, but the various airlines seemed to deliver all the other guests without mishap, too.
There was a good bit of snow on the ground, which the Free-Ride offspring loved. The grown-ups ... well, we were more concerned with the hazards it introduced as far as driving and walking. (By our count, in our party there were five falls on the ice. Only a couple required medical…
edyong | December 21, 2008Some of you may remember that earlier this month, I recorded a chat with fellow ScienceBlogger Abbie Smith, in which we discussed science journalism, blogging, vampires and various other such topics du jour. Well, among those who watched the chat was one George Johnson, a journalist who took umbrage with what was said. George has described the chat as "exasperatingly ignorant" and describes us as "interlopers". This man is not a happy bunny.
Abbie's had a more verbose take on George's criticisms, but I'm going to keep it brief (and I've posted this reply on Abbie's thread and the…
pharyngula | December 21, 2008
Even though we couldn't be there in the flesh, we did watch the ceremony over the web…and there's our boy, receiving his diploma. Yay!
pharyngula | December 20, 2008It was not an auspicious start to the day. Before we could even leave for my son's commencement at UW Madison, we had to clear the 6"-8" of snow that had fallen overnight from our driveway. Then we had to flounder through unplowed roads to the highway. Then we discovered near-blizzard conditions of blowing snow on the road, but we persevered. We told ourselves that it would get better the farther east we went — Minneapolis always has wimpier weather than we do.
Then we got to the freeway…and it got worse. The roads were icy and slick, everyone was limping along at half the speed limit (except…