Pictures
drorzel | May 29, 2007A commenter in the "Bunnies Made of Cheese" thread points out a graphic that's too good not to put on the front page (click for the original large image):
Nobody tell the dog, ok?
drorzel | May 14, 2007Here's a picture of some pretty flowers:
These are from the ornatmental cherry tree in our front yard. Like all the other similar trees in the neighborhood, it's absolutely exploded over the past week.
Also, I rode my bike a bunch this weekend:
Saturday, I rode down to Lock 8, stopping for a few minutes to talk to another faculty member who was out with a group of students and community volunteers cleaning up one of the preserved locks of the original Erie Canal.
Total Distance: 17.41
Average Speed: 14.53
Maximum Speed: 24.62
Sunday, I went in the other direction on the bike path, and a…
drorzel | April 29, 2007
You bet your sweet ass I am.
Yeah, there are about six people on the Interweb who will get that joke...
This little guy lives in our back yard somewhere. He's damnably elusive, though, and never stays in one clearly visible place long enough for me to find the camera and get a picture. He was sitting out on one of the pine trees today, chirping away loudly, though, and I managed to get a few decent shots, despite not having the right sort of camera for this kind of thing.
This is probably the best for showing the red color (he was almost directly overhead the whole time, making it difficult…
drorzel | April 25, 2007The other day, I was talking to our neighbor in the back, and she said "Your flowers are coming in really nicely."
"Um, thanks," I said, "but I sort of think those might technically be weeds..."
They are pretty, though:
Close-up below the fold:
Of course, even if they are weeds, I can't really complain, because the adjacent area of the yard looks like this:
One of these days, I'll probably end up paying somebody a great deal of money to make grass grow here. For the moment, though, scattering seed underneath the gigantic oak tree whose trunk is seen in that picture is my annual quixotic…
drorzel | March 27, 2007Here's a project from a couple of weeks ago, that I forgot to post:
"Big deal," you say, "It's an ugly box."
Ah, but what's under the box?
This is the exhaust fan in our kitchen, which goes directly out through the back wall of the house. There's a little pull chain that turns the fan on and off, and also opens and closes a panel on the back of the house. It's pretty effective at clearing the kitchen of smoke on those occasions when I burn something, but really ugly, and drafty, too.
So, a few weeks back, I went to Lowe's and bought a bunch of pieces of wood, some weather stripping, and a…
drorzel | February 27, 2007
This looks like it's most likely a robin, though it was kind of big for a robin, and the color is a little weird. Maybe it's molting, or some such. Anyway, it was perched right outside the window, and Her Majesty found it absolutely fascinating. So I took a picture.
drorzel | February 22, 2007Fade In: The dining room of Chateau Steelypips, at dinner time.
"Can I have a piece of chicken?"
"No."
"But I really like chicken."
"That's nice. The answer is still no."
"But I really like chicken. Pleeeease?"
"For the last time, no."
"OK." Pause "Can I have a cookie? Pleeeease?"
Fade out
Of course, I shouldn't really complain-- I could have Kate's view of this whole exchange:
drorzel | February 14, 2007
This is our cast aluminum patio table, which always looks really cool when snow piles up on the lattice-work pattern of the top. Click the image above for a slightly larger picture.
We've gotten more than a foot of very powdery snow thus far, and it's still coming down hard. I taught my class, gave some instructions to my thesis student, and came home, where I plan to spend the afternoon in a warm and cozy house with Kate and Emmy, heading outside only to re-shovel the driveway and maybe throw some toys for the dog. If you're in the snow zone yourself, stay safe and warm.
drorzel | February 7, 2007Between trip planning and thinking about Boskone, I've been thinking a fair bit about Japan recently. I took a whole bunch of pictures when I was there, with a camera borrowed from my parents, and looking at them now, my first thought is "Boy, I could make these look really good in GIMP..."
Of course, save for a few that I scanned in (the picture at left is a cut-down version of one of those), these are all on paper, not in electronic format, and scanning them in doesn't produce the best quality, as you can see even in the small version.
This got me wondering, though: is there an efficient…
drorzel | February 6, 2007We were away for the weekend, so I'm a day behind in reading the Sunday Times. This week's magazine section has a story about the controversy over "hybrid" dogs:
Bob Vetere, president of the American Pet Product Manufacturers Association, told me, "You're going to have a real battle here" between hybrid dog breeders and "the purists who say this is all 25th-century voodoo science." The rift seems to epitomize a peculiarly American tension: between tradition and improvisation, institutions and fads. The American Canine Hybrid Club, one of a growing number of hybrid dog registries, will soon…
drorzel | January 5, 2007A Christmas gift from my sister:
Yes, that's an origami Discworld. A big turtle, four elephants, and a flat world inhabited by silly people. All folded out of paper (well, the map was printed and cut out, but the elephants and turtle are origmai).
From a different angle:
The map got badly overexposed from the flash, but you can see the elephants a little more clearly in this one.
drorzel | December 25, 2006
I can't really come up with any scientific significance for this one, but it amuses Kate to no end to have an elephant angel on the tree. And why not? It's supposed to be a season of miracles, and what could be more miraculous than an elephant with butterfly wings shooting stars out of its trunk?
Merry Christmas to everyone who won't be offended by being wished a Merry Christmas.
drorzel | December 15, 2006We might as well close out the week on a high note, so here's tonight's ornament. Actually, there are two of them:
Obviously, this is another reference to astronomy-- it's little guys looking through telescopes, after all. The larger of the two is even gazing upon a glassy celestial sphere, perhaps on the verge of discovering heliocentrism.
Their piratical outfits are, of course, something for the Pastafarians among us. We try to be inclusive, here in Chateau Steelypips.
drorzel | December 14, 2006Tonight's Science on the Tree ornament is a little more obscure:
Given the conical sort of shape, I suspect it's meant to be a Christmas tree, but it's abstract enough that it could really be some sort of Calabi-Yau thingy, so we'll let this stand as a symbol for string theory and other abstract mathematical areas of science: It's intricately patterned, follows elegant mathematical symmetry, and nobody's entirely sure what it's really supposed to be.
Also, it's made of straw. That may have some symbolic meaning, but I'm not sure what.
drorzel | December 13, 2006A long day today, so we'll go with an obvious one:
Obviously, this stands in for biology. This brightly colored ceramic fish evolved over millions of years, descended from a long line of increasingly more evolved ceramic fish. Or, possibly, it was bought at an aquarium somewhere. I don't remember which.
drorzel | December 12, 2006Here's the second of a series of holiday photo-blog posts showing some of the ornaments we have, and providing explanations for how they're really all about the science. It starts to get a little harder here:
"Dude," you say, "that's a teapot. What does that have to do with science?"
Thermodynamics, of course. The making of tea is all about boiling water, and what is that, but applied thermodynamics? Heat transfer, the latent heat of vaporization, phase transitions-- it's all there, symbolized by this little teapot. There's a tea cup, too, which isn't in this picture because it doesn't…
drorzel | December 11, 2006I remarked to Kate the other night that it's a shame we don't have any science-themed ornaments for the Christmas tree. She responded that I just wasn't thinking hard enough about what we do have, and she's right-- with a bit of effort, it's not hard to come up with scientific symbolism for the ornaments we've got.
So, this is the first of a series of holiday photo-blog posts (how many there end up being will depend on how long it takes me to become bored with this), showing some of the ornaments we have, and providing explanations for how they're really all about the science. We'll start…
drorzel | December 9, 2006
One of the problems with the logarithmic response of our eyes is that it's always kind of hard to use a camera to really capture the effect of things that light up. If there's enough light to see the background, the lights don't jump out as much as they do in person, but if you make the background darker, the lights end up oversaturated.
I kind of like the effect here, though (this is using the "Night Snapshot" setting on our Canon digital camera, with the flash turned off, followed by a bit of GIMPing to bring the levels up a bit). This does also loudly proclaim our Neville Chamberlain…
drorzel | November 22, 2006The flip side of the pretty colors I posted about yesterday is that all those nicely colored leaves fall down. Which isn't a big deal with the little ornamental maple in the front yard, but when the fifty-foot oak tree in the back drops its leaves, it kind of makes a mess.
We deal with this in the traditional manner: we pay the next-door neighbors' teenage son to rake the leaves up, and drag them out in front of the house. I didn't get a picture of the whole pile, but it was close to three feet high, and stretched the full length of the front yard. Most of the houses in the neighborhood had…
drorzel | November 21, 2006
Not much commentary required here. This is the ornamental maple in front of our house, taken a couple of weeks ago. It's also a reminder of why fall in New England is one of my favorite seasons, at least when it's not miserably cold and raining...