personal
drorzel | April 13, 2008In honor of my weekend, here's Larry Miller on the Five Stages of Drinking. This is one of my all-time favorite comedy bits, and it's defintiely in the "funny 'cause it's true" category.
Details will, of course, need to remain scarce to protect the political careers of those involved, but it was a great weekend. I played a little rugby, sang a few songs, drank a lot of really terrible keg beer, and nobody was seriously injured or arrested.
Of course, now my sleep schedule is completely screwed, and I have almost no voice left, which is going to make tomorrow's lecture... interesting. And on…
clock | April 11, 2008This post from May 07, 2005, was one of the rare personal posts I have ever written. Under the fold....
It is Derby Weekend! Exciting, isn't it? I had to watch the re-run tonight, but I saw it. Giacomo! Who's that!? I love when underdogs win!
I practically grew up on the Belgrade Racecourse. Horse sports being really small in Yugoslavia, it is an unusual place. The mile-long dirt track is on the outside. Inside is a 1000m long hard track for trotting races. And in the very center, there is a large show-jumping ring. The Sunday racing program would usually start with a jumping class (and you…
clock | April 10, 2008Just arrived at the Cambridge office of PLoS. Internet works fine so, after catching up with some work first, I will try to post yesterday's pictures later today. I also have another interview to post.
clock | April 9, 2008A May 9, 2007 post, wondering to telecommute or not.
I will be offline for a couple of days so I will not be able to post at my usual frantic pace. Instead, I decided to write something that will take you a couple of days to read through: a very long, meandering post, full of personal anecdotes. But there is a common theme throughout and I hope you see where I'm going with it and what conclusions I want you to draw from it.
Pigeons, crows, rats and cockroaches
I was born and grew up in a big, dirty city and I am not going back (my ex-Yugoslav readers have probably already recognized the…
clock | April 9, 2008Thanks to Anton for a pleasant drive to the airport last night. Had a great flight on a B 777 and arrived in London on time. Mo picked me up at Heathrow and we went walking around town, taking lots of picture that I'll post later (my own laptop cannot currently get on the internet here and now, so, for instance, I cannot check the PLoS mail). His wife and kids are lovely and we are having great fun. Then, we'll go and do other stuff and meet local bloggers. Stay tuned...
edyong | April 8, 2008A couple of social things: A couple of mates, Ruth Francis and Henry Scowcroft, have devised the best Facebook group ever - the Campaign to replace the voice on the Tube with David Attenborough's voice (the Tube is London's subway system for all you non-Brits). In their words:
So now Life in Cold Blood is over, and the great man has hung up his broadcasting boots for good, what better tribute than to replace the starchy, boring voice on the London Underground with the silky, enthusiastic utterances of Sir David Attenborough. Ever since we were tiny, Sir David's trademark "THIS... is a " has…
jstemwedel | April 7, 2008You may already have seen this at Absinthe or Zuska's -- if so, consider this post a friendly nudge to move beyond your good intentions toward action.
Kay Weber, who is pursuing a lawsuit against Fermilab for (the details of which sound pretty horrific), has come to a point where the expense of moving the lawsuit forward is personally insurmountable. With a little help from others who support her fight for fair treatment, however, it can be done:
As women we have a network of other women that we share our friendship with. We send emails about good news, good luck, greetings of friendship…
edyong | April 6, 2008
I'm amused to learn that last week, New Scientist published a feature article of mine for the first time and this week, the magazine's cover proclaims the collapse of civilisation. Coincidence? You decide...
Thanks to my father-in-law for the keen observation :-p
terrasig | April 5, 2008I had only been blogging for four-and-a-half months when I got an e-mail two years ago today from someone named Katherine Sharpe at Seed Media Group in New York City. Seems they had started this ScienceBlogs.com thing a couple months earlier with 14 blogs, many of which I had already read regularly. I figured that Ms. Sharpe just wanted me for some reader focus group but after I read the e-mail again, it appeared that she was inviting me to join ScienceBlogs. We hung out the Sb Terra Sig shingle two months later, 9 June 2006, with a diatribe containing all you ever wanted to know (or didn'…
clock | April 5, 2008You must have noticed that there wasn't too much effort on this blog over the past couple of weeks (except for the elaborate and too successful April Fools hoax). I've just been so busy lately. So, here is a quick recap, and some pictures.
Back on March 21, I went to Duke University to participate in a panel called Shaping the world, one job at a time: An altruistic/alternative career panel. From education, to public health in the developing world, to science journalism, writing, blogging and publishing. The room was full (80 people? Perhaps 100?!). I am not sure one hour was enough for…
jstemwedel | April 5, 2008Some screechy monkey or other tagged me on the song chart meme. The idea seems to be to come up with a visual/graphical representation of a song or some lyrical subset of it.
In other words, you can get your music-geek and your math-geek on at the same time.
I came very close to going through our entire record collection last night to pick the optimal song. But then I figured I'd just put up two suboptimal responses rather than laboring to determine what the optimal response would be. (Of course, because I'm a tremendous Luddite, both are hand drawn.)
First a histogram:
After which we…
esiegel | April 4, 2008First things first: this week's Carnival of Space is up at Brian Wang's site, Next Big Future. You can find my post on Mars or Arizona? up there.
Now, what comes next for me, since I don't like it here in Arizona? Well, the Dangerman audition didn't work out (I never heard back), and I've been scoping out the Portland, OR area, which could work out well. But I got an email earlier this week about a job vacancy at ESO (the European Southern Observatories). They are looking for someone to take on the role of being head of the ESO public outreach office! Really, this would be a wonderful…
drorzel | April 3, 2008Wow. I'm cranky today.
I really need to be more Zen about things. Here's a picture to meditate on:
This is the famous "Crane and Turtle" garden at Konchi-in in Kyoto. It's one of very few gardens absolutely known to have been designed by the great garden-desing master Kobori Enshu, out of the huge number of gardens attributed to him. It's really quite lovely-- I'm not sure the picture does it justice, but we spent a pleasant while looking at this while waiting for a tour of their art collection.
There, I feel better already.
pharyngula | April 2, 2008To my students and advisees: I've emailed a few of you, but just in case, I'm also putting this here. You've been trying to get in touch with me, especially this week when registration is pending, but when I'm not in class I'm flitting off to somewhere else. I was away in Washington DC last Thursday afternoon through Sunday, and I'm about to do it again with trips to Mankato tomorrow, a long weekend at a conference in Oregon, and then zooming away again right after class on Monday to Fergus Falls. Trust me, though, you're not the only one feeling a bit tired of it all.
Here's the deal, though…
clock | April 1, 2008The trip to the UK is shaping up. Sing up here if you want to meet me during that week, or here if you want to meet me at the pub on April 9th (probably this one) or here if you want to go to the Museum and keep your eyes on those places for updates.
jstemwedel | March 31, 2008It's time to unplug from the ScienceBorg.
I've had enough of the oppressive editorial control, constraining my voice as a blogger. That "voice of reason" script I'm known for was assigned to me by our editors. And it's the same story for the personae of other Sb bloggers. PZ Myers as fire-breathing atheist, Zuska as puke-spewing feminist, Nisbet as aloof communications professor, revere(s) as leftist(s), Wilkins as agnostic, Lynch as Irish -- all scripted. We might as well be The Monkees for all the authenticity we display here. Heck, Razib doesn't even have a cat.
I am bone-tired of the…
pharyngula | March 30, 2008I'm home. It's been a very long day with horrible flight delays, and I'm grouchy. I must frog blast the vent core.
I was stuck on an airplane for far too many hours, and I wanted to get some work done — on my laptop. Have you noticed how tightly packed the seats are in coach? It was tight, but I could at least get started on some work, when the guy in front of me decided to recline his seat back and sleep. Suddenly there was a head rest aimed at my throat and the back of the guy's head in my nose. I could smell his shampoo! (I think it was scented with sweat vinaigrette, with extra animal…
drorzel | March 28, 2008Most of my best ideas come from Kate, so I'll steal this one, too:
If you could only give me one piece of advice [regarding FutureBaby, due in July], what would it be?
If you've been itching to provide child-bearing or -rearing advice (and I know some of you have), here's your chance. Please limit yourself to one (1) piece of advice per comment, and one comment per person per day.
So, have at it. What should we be doing/ expecting/ buying/ fearing?
pharyngula | March 27, 2008In spite of all of the work piled up around me, I'm taking off today to attend the NEA/AFT Higher Education Joint Conference in Washington DC. I'm in the middle of this busy month where I spend just about every weekend flying off somewhere, in between weeks that still have the same teaching load waiting to be done.
I'm also supposed to be taped for WCCO while I'm in Minneapolis this evening, but after that, I may have to gatecrash the Minneapolis Drinking Liberally event, if it's still going on. I hope I'm not thrown out by security.