personal
terrasig | September 4, 2008Today is the second anniversary of the passing of Steve Blackwell, a Midwestern transplant who came to the Sunshine State as a high school English teacher and became a fixture in the Florida folk music scene. My path crossed with Mr Blackwell in the months before his untimely departure from melanoma at age 58.
I detailed my connection with Mr Blackwell in this repost of my thoughts from the day of his memorial service. Mr Blackwell's daughter and other former bandmates continue performing as Still Friends. Steve's memory was also honored musically this past March with SteveFest '08 in Port…
jstemwedel | September 3, 2008
The sprogs were beside themselves with excitement yesterday on the eve of the first day of a new school year. Will this excitement persist? Will the first homework assignments deflate it? It remains to be seen.
The "Yay! We get to go to school tomorrow!" mood extended to our divvying up of the "requested voluntary donations" yesterday afternoon. In our school district, "requested voluntary donations" are required school supplies that the classroom budget does not cover; it's tempting to send in a note to the teachers explaining that "voluntary" does not mean what they seem to think it…
pharyngula | September 2, 2008I've squeezed one more talk into my fall schedule, but that's it — if you want me to come talk to your university or organization, it'll have to be in January or later — I'm not accepting any more invitations. Here's my complete and final long distance travel schedule for the next few months.
Friday, 12-14 Sep:
Denver, CO
Friday, 19-21 Sep:
Madison, WI
Thursday, 25-28 Sep:
Long Beach, CA
Friday, 10-12 October:
Springfield, MO
Friday, 31 Oct-2 Nov:
Toronto, ON
Thursday, 13-15 Nov:
Kearney, NE
Wednesday, 19-22 Nov:
Philadelphia, PA
early December:
Central Florida (pending)
I…
oracknows | September 2, 2008Hanging out last night, the final night of a three day holiday weekend, I was momentarily at a loss for what to write. For one thing, having spent a good chunk of the last three days unpacking the remaining stuff we've had in our basement in boxes for the last six or seven months, my wife and I had a pretty good sense of accomplishment but not a lot of energy left. So much for one of my analyses of a study or a medical issue.
I was also half-tempted to go back and listen again to the Science Friday last week because the antivaccinationist named Chantal who called in at the end was a perfect…
pharyngula | September 1, 2008We have a date and time — Thursday, 18 September at 7pm. We have a rough location — somewhere in the Minneapolis/St Paul area. And most importantly, we have the will to party to celebrate the one millionth comment on scienceblogs.
We also have an excess of specific venue suggestions. Now we could do a gigantic pub crawl, but that would be unseemly…besides, that's already scheduled for 18 October, when it's time for the Zombie Pub Crawl 4: Spawn of Death. But I digress. We need you to vote to narrow down the choices. Greg has the list, read it and vote! It's going to be the very best geek…
pharyngula | September 1, 2008There's something wicked about being surrounded by bright red arcs of lightning — I may have to go with this look from now on.
(This is the flyer for my talk in Denver. I guess I'd better be a little bit ferocious.)
revere | August 30, 2008The daycare where my daughter's 15 month old is a scholar-in-residence is closed this week so grandma (Mrs. R.) and grandpa (yours truly) have been filling in with the newborn and the older sib. It's been a while and there were a lot of things we'd forgotten about. Like the fact that babies like to "spit up," a euphemism for puking on you. Since I am famous in the family for wearing my dinner on my clothes (absent-minded professor style), my daughter thought I would appreciate the latest in wearable body fluid fashion, T-shirts decorated with realistic looking baby emesis patterns:
From the…
sciencewoman | August 29, 2008This post is for Scientiae's call to share what we did on our summer vacation. I've been fairly silent about my personal life the last few months, But I was hugely encouraged by all the wonderful comments that so many of you made in the getting to know you post a few weeks back, when you said that you were sticking around because you were interested in my story and want to hear how everything turns out for me. So I am feeling brave enough (or foolish enough) to let you have a bit of peek into what's going on in my life outside of the professional sphere.
I'm not really sure how to right this…
edyong | August 28, 2008Hey folks,
To those of you who are going to the London Science Blogging conference on Saturday, I'll see you there. I'll be at the morning sessions and the lunch break but will probably have to leave early so if you want to say hi, catch me then.
I look like the photo on the left.
E
terrasig | August 26, 2008[Sort of a repost from the last two years, updated appropriately - APB]
Six years ago at 11:24 am EDT (1624 GMT), your humble blogger was handed the keys to a whole new vocabulary of love.
The gift came in the form of a 7 lb. 13 oz. (3,544 gm), 20.5 inch (52 cm) bundle of drooling, peeing, meconium-pooping bundle of baby girl, yanked from an incision in PharmGirl's abdomen.
The lessons of compassion and unconditional love I have been taught by these two women have comprised the most formative experiences of my life.
In return, PharmGirl has suffered tremendous indignancies on my behalf: the…
pharyngula | August 25, 2008The first day of classes is on Wednesday.
<insert long despairing wail here>
I have to get ready now, so life is going to be a bit frantic for a few days. This term I'll be teaching Developmental Biology, a fun class and not a problem right now, and I'll also be teaching our intro course, Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development. That's going to be a bit more work; it was taught for the first time last year, and it still needs some fine-tuning.
Then, just because my semester isn't crazy enough, there are travel plans. I'm losing a lot of weekends this term. Here's the rough…
revere | August 25, 2008Both of our children and all three of our grandchildren were with us yesterday afternoon, which set me thinking about the Nebraska "safe haven" law. If you haven't heard about it, Nebraska has just joined the other 49 states by enacting LB 157, a law that allows a parent to abandon an unwanted child at a hospital, no questions asked. These kinds of laws are promoted by child welfare advocates as safeguards for newborns who might otherwise be left to die of exposure or deposited in the trash somewhere. It happens.
But Nebraska went all the way. Instead of a law like California's, which limits…
edyong | August 24, 2008Folks,
I'm toying with the idea of publishing a book that compiles the best of Not Exactly Rocket Science from the last year. I'll select about 60 or so of my favourite pieces from 2008 and transfer them from code and pixels to ink and paper. The plan is to launch the book in early November in time for the Christmas market.
So the big question is: would you buy it? And related questions: would you buy it as a gift for anyone? Would you recommend it to people? Is this a good idea or a silly one? Do any of you have contacts who could help to market something like this?
-E
pharyngula | August 24, 2008We just moved the last of Skatje's stuff out of our house and into her dorm room. No more kids at home! We've come full circle now to 1983, back when we were a couple living in a studio apartment, living on Mac&Cheez and free government cheese food, scraping by on minimal grad student stipends. Now we're in a big old empty house that we got because it was a perfect family home, but otherwise, we're still getting by on the cheap, since we still have two kids off at college.
Oh, and we're also left holding the bag on two cats.
pharyngula | August 21, 2008I'm still yucky icky sick and oozing slime and fluids like a mollusc, but I did go see the doctor, and she assured me that my death was not imminent but probably at some distant time years hence. I interpret that to mean that my agony will be long and interminably enduring.
We also scheduled a colonoscopy. This is probably not a good day to annoy me.
pharyngula | August 21, 2008Here follows a brief account of my sojourn in the Galápagos Islands, just to give you all a rough idea of what I was up to all this time. I've tossed in just a few pictures to illustrate what we experienced; I'm planning to dole out the rest a little bit at a time, each week. I took a lot of pictures, and I was a real piker compared to a few other people on the trip — I'm thinking that if I use mine and some of the other photographs people took, if I post one a week, I'll be able to keep the blog going for about 3800 years.
This cruise was organized by the James Randi Educational Foundation,…
edyong | August 20, 2008I like anniversaries and it's a good month for them.
Last Wednesday marked two years since I started Not Exactly Rocket Science at its humble Wordpress beginnings.
Next Monday marks six months of blogging at ScienceBlogs.
And that last article on face recognition is the 300th post I've written for this blog!
A massive thanks to everyone who reads this blog, links to it and comments on it; to Ginny, Erin and the rest of the team at ScienceBlogs and SEED; to my fellow Sciblings for support and encouragement; and to Mike and Dennis for their SuperReaders skillz.
Writing here is one of the…
pharyngula | August 19, 2008Somebody shoot me. Yesterday was a full 24 hours of travel with nothing but intermittent naps, and of course I wake up this morning at my usual time of 6am after only 3 hours of sleep. And I seem to have acquired a chest cold. Or pneumonia. Or Ecuadorian Lung Rot, or something. I'm hoping that at some imminent time point, after I've taken care of a few chores, my physiology will allow me to get some sleep.
Until then, let's look back in time, to a morning a whole week ago, when I would regularly awaken to a whole grand morning feast of exotic tropical fruits, and I'd feel like eating them all…