Passing thoughts
jstemwedel | July 29, 2007Friday, my better half was preparing to cross the international dateline for a week-long business trip and my parents were getting ready to board a plane for a week-long visit at Casa Free-Ride. As I contemplated the prospect of digging out our guest room (known in these parts as "the place clean clothes go to wrinkle") it became clear to me that the chances of my finishing writing (and preparing overheads for) the two presentations I will be giving at the conference that starts the day after my parents depart before my parents' arrival were nil. Of course, this means that I will not be…
jstemwedel | July 24, 2007Let's say you're looking at a wide-open fall semester, and you are asked to be a participant on a panel at a conference. Since your semester is wide open, you agree.
Months later, you're asked to be a participant on another panel at another conference. Except for the conference you already committed to, your semester is still wide open.
What do you suppose the chances are that the two conferences overlap in time? And meet in different cities? Was this predictable, or am I just lucky?
(It looks like the two panels will meet on different days. Assuming no plane-grounding weather events, it…
jstemwedel | July 21, 2007It's John Lynch's fault. And honestly, how can you be aware of the existence of a quiz that will determine which LOLcat you are without acting on that information to determine which LOLcat you are?
Your Score
: Lion Warning Cat
55% Affectionate, 54% Excitable, 31% Hungry
You are the good Samaritan of the lolcat world. Protecting others from danger by shouting observations and guidance in cases of imminent threat, you believe in the well-being of everyone.
To see all possible results, checka dis.
Link: The Which Lolcat Are You? Test written by GumOtaku on OkCupid Free…
jstemwedel | July 16, 2007Apparently Blake Stacey is pitching a movie about the Dover trial and featuring, as central characters, some luminaries from ScienceBlogs. There's sort of a Star Trek: The Original Series meets Star Trek: The Next Generation meets other iconic exemplars of science fiction and action genres vibe in the plot outline and casting ideas. At least, so far.
Me, I figured a ScienceBlogs movie might run more along the lines of All the President's Men meets This is Spinal Tap. Although there would definitely be stuff blowing up.
On the off chance that a studio exec is reading, this is your chance…
jstemwedel | July 13, 2007So, there's some amount of Harry Potter mania out there in the world this weekend, what with a new movie and the last book in the series being released. (To show you how disconnected I am from the mania, I could not tell you without recourse to the internet whether The Order of the Phoenix is the new movie or the new book.) I haven't read any of the Harry Potter books (yet), but my eldest child recently finished the first Harry Potter book and quite liked it. However, as we were discussing it this morning, we encountered one of my pet peeves:
We drive past the road where our elementary…
jstemwedel | July 9, 2007David Ng at the World's Fair has some questions:
1. What's your current scientific specialty?
2. Were you originally pursuing a different academic course? If so, what was it?
3. Do you happen to wish you were involved in another scientific field? If so, what one?
I'll play:
1. Currently I'm not a scientist but rather a philosopher of science and an ethics teacher for future scientists. However, when I last was a practicing scientist, I was a physical chemist whose broad focus was the dynamics and thermodynamics of far-from-equilibrium systems.
Here's a narrower description of my work: I…
jstemwedel | July 3, 2007A bunch of my SiBlings have been considering which science gets the rawest deal from makers of science fiction movies (and writers of science fiction stories).
I've been reflecting about it a bit, and I think maybe my needs when it comes to science fiction are pretty simple.
When I consume science fiction, I'm not looking for an entertainment that will blow my mind with the weirdness of its technology, or of its flora and fauna. For that, I can find what I need by looking at what actual technologies are being created, and what flora and fauna are being discovered either in remote bits of our…
jstemwedel | June 29, 2007Another episode in the continuing saga, "Janet is a tremendous Luddite."
Back when I was "between Ph.D.s" one of the things I did so I could pay rent was work as an SAT-prep tutor. The company I worked for didn't do classroom presentations to a group of students, but rather sent us out on "house calls" to the students' homes for the tutoring. This meant I had clients in many different towns in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, from San Carlos to Fremont to Los Gatos. And I had to figure out, from an address, how to get to each of them.
Of course, this was back in 1994, well before Google…
jstemwedel | June 28, 2007Last night my better half and I had dinner with JM -- at a restaurant with both excellent sushi and excellent service! Figures JM finds it right before she's about to flee the state to start her Ph.D. program.
Because my posts are often (as she put it) "long-winded, but in a good way," she has recommended a coffee mug rating system at the top of each post. You know, to indicate how many mug of coffee you should expect to need to get all the way to the end of the post. Should I pester our developer for this functionality?
Then, today another ScienceBlogger and I had a top-secret meeting:…
jstemwedel | June 26, 200745%
In case you were worried, in case of zombies my chances are almost 50-50.
Via
jstemwedel | June 26, 2007Do you touch-type, or (like me) do you kind of know where the keys are but "freestyle" type, looking at the keyboard on a semi-regular basis?*
Are any of the letters wearing off on your keys?**
In answer to #2, I've completely lost L and N, and A and S are fading fast. Which, given my answer to #1, suggests that there will come a point where I'll be in real trouble.
(OK, you caught me with more than the pair of questions promised in the post title.)
*If you touch-type, do you have now or have you had recently a typing-related repetitive stress injury? (I tell myself that I avoid learning to…
jstemwedel | June 22, 2007If you had to give this blog a movie rating, what would it be and why?
Apparently, I earned that rating due to the occurrence of the word "death" and the B-word.
I'd have guessed that the "adult themes" (of bad actors in academic and scientific communities) would be more of a worry as far as what kiddies should be exposed to, but hey, I don't rate movies, I just watch 'em.
jstemwedel | June 16, 2007I was reading the comments on Dr. B's brief query on ethical lines in response to a horrific story about the feeding of a live puppy to a large snake for the "entertainment" of teenagers, and I could not help but recall a conversation I had with my children a couple years ago about the feasibility of a pet snake.
While visiting friends in Santa Barbara, we went to a farmers market, where we encountered a guy with a backpack full of snakes. He handed one of those snakes (a cute little gartery guy) to the younger Free-Ride offspring. Apparently, the guy worked with the local snake rescue…
jstemwedel | June 9, 2007
Quoth the younger Free-Ride offspring, "The rabbits are mating because they want to have bunnies."
While I would not presume to know the volitional states of rabbits, whether real or plastic, I agree with the child's assessment of the activity in which the rabbits are engaged.
jstemwedel | June 8, 2007One of the Free-Ride offspring (which one? who can tell; it was last week) brought home a plant grown from seed as part of a school project.
"We planted the seeds in yogurt containers," said whichever child it was, "except they didn't have yogurt in them anymore, just dirt."
"Well, that's good," one of the Free-Ride parental units said (which one? who can tell; see above). "The seeds wouldn't have germinated in yogurt."
Of course, that got us thinking ...
How would you have to tweak a plant's genome to get it to produce seeds that would germinate in yogurt?
What kind of selection pressures…
jstemwedel | June 7, 2007Because I know some of you are better acquainted with late 20th century science fiction movies than I am, I'm asking for your input on this.
Today, I find myself possessed of a serious hankering to track down and watch Flash Gordon -- not the Buster Crabbe version from 1936 (which I watched on public television when I was a kid), but the 1980 motion picture.
Netflix doesn't have it. Possibly this means it hasn't made it to DVD yet. In the back of my mind, I'm wondering if there could be a good reason for that.
And yet, the cast is so promising. Max von Sydow as Ming the Merciless. Brian…
jstemwedel | June 6, 2007My better half dropped a comic strip conspiracy theory on me last night. Usually I don't lend any credence to such theories, but this one has the ring of truth to it.
You know the one-panel strip "Love Is ..." that's been syndicated since 1970?
The one that Homer Simpson described as being "about two naked eight-year-olds who are married"?
Do you ever wonder what might have become of those married former eight-year-olds?
(For that matter, did you ever notice how much alike those naked eight-year-olds looked?)
Brace yourself.
My better half's theory is that the "Love Is ..." kids grew up…
jstemwedel | June 4, 2007I fell prey to another silly internet quiz, which deigned to tell me which science I am.
It wasn't chemistry, but ...
What Science are You?
You are Physics! You're quirky and you set yourself on fire alot. You're really really into your science. I had a physics teacher who singed his eyebrows off...twice. Man. You're a danger to yourself and others, but mostly to yourself. It's great that you're so caught up in your science because it is way awesome. Oh, yeah... the picture. I guess particle physics falls into your domain. and physics people love stick figures. Take this quiz…
jstemwedel | June 2, 2007Today the soccer team I coach (on which the younger Free-Ride offspring is a player) had its last game of the spring season.
"Yay! Trophies!!" screamed the players at the end of the game. So, off we all went to the traditional end-of-season pizza party and trophy distribution event.
At the pizza parlor, as the players were running around and shaking down their parents for quarters, it hit me: All the pizza parlors in our area have quarter-gobbling arcade games. The one with the fewest has no fewer than four. The one where we were today had at least a dozen.
Now, we eat pizza at home…
jstemwedel | May 31, 2007I want to lay this at Julie's feet, or maybe John Lynch's, but I'm starting to think the LOLcats are taking over! My kids speak to each other in LOL dialect, and I've been mentally captioning ... well, everything.
My internal dialogue from part of commencement transcribed below. If you know a good deprogrammer, please email me!
On noes! Where da sientistz?
Lookin for LOLrus bukkit?
Grapplin wid invizible labware?
Mebbe invizible sience grads?!
O hai!
Weer in ur stadium, makin u proud.
Bukkitz iz kool, but nowlij iz teh bestest!
Thx k bai!