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drorzel | November 24, 2013Since SteelyKid got her own cute-photo post last night, it's only fair to give equal time to The Pip. This morning, for reasons that passeth adult understanding, the kids decided to balance teddy bears on their heads, SteelyKid using Bertha the Big Bear (who is just a little smaller than The Pip), while the Little Dude had a tiny neon green beanbag bear. Leading to the "featured image" above, which is my new favorite picture of Il Duderino.
"Yeah, I got a bear on my head. And I make it look good."
Lest you think his exceptional knowledge of forces in equlibrium is employed only for totally…
drorzel | November 23, 2013One of SteelyKid's classmates came over for a couple hours today. After a bit, they got into the Magic School Bus science kit she got for her birthday, and decided to invent "new kinds of water." The "featured image" above shows her reinventing stock images... And doing a better job of it than this clown. If you need an image to illustrate your chemistry story, shoot me an email-- our rates are very reasonable.
(The sludgy brown mixture in the tube is water with soap, cinnamon, and cracked pepper floating in it. If you shake it back and forth a bit, the pepper does float around in a kind of…
drorzel | November 20, 2013A couple of Mondays ago, I was at work and got the dreaded phone call from day care. "[The Pip]'s got conjunctivitis again. It's really bad, and he needs to go home right away."
Admittedly, this isn't the very worst phone call a parent could receive, but it's very much Not Good. Conjunctivitis means a trip to the doctor for antibiotics and eye drops (which The Pip HATES), and being sent home knocks out not only the rest of that day, but the entire next day, as he has to be on medication for at least 24 hours before he can return to day care.
The call came in around 10:00, and I had a class to…
drorzel | November 18, 2013In comments to the Sagan post, Niall asked about how I spend my time. This is about to change, as today is the last day of my class for the fall term, then we have an extended break, but it's probably interesting in a life-in-academia way to put up my schedule at the moment:
Monday, Wednesday, Friday
06:00 - Alarm goes off. Wake up, get out of bed, drag a comb across my head. Release dog, start breakfast prep.
06:30 - Wake SteelyKid, take her downstairs, give her breakfast. The usual division of labor is that I get the food, then carry her upstairs to go to the bathroom (because she's tired…
drorzel | November 10, 2013Because I know there are still a few people who come here for the cute-kid pictures, I give you the official SteelyKid portrait for the 2013-14 academic year. This is actually a photo of a photo, because that's the easiest way to convert the print they sent us to a digital format, and also because it gave me an excuse to play with GIMP a little. It's not the greatest reproduction, but it's good enough for blogging.
I'm not entirely sure what's up with her hair, here. There were a few days when she went in with a braid, and this might've been one. Or she might've asked somebody to put it up…
sa smith | November 9, 2013If you know me, I have raved about these products for a long time, just to my friends. But I thought it was high time Paulas Choice got its own shillery post.
Over the past couple of years, people in the skeptic community have mentioned wanting skepticism to branch out into 'lady topics', like encouraging skepticism with cosmetics/beauty products/etc. The thing is, that view is a day late and a dollar short. Because people into cosmetics/beauty products have already branched out into skepticism. Like, for a really long time now. Beauty bloggers are known for buying, testing, and reviewing…
drorzel | November 7, 2013Two years ago, as of 4:35 this morning, The Pip was born. And now he's a great big toddler, obsessed with pirates and dinosaurs, running everywhere and talking a LOT...
He's had a bit of a rough week, with another flare-up of conjunctivitis in his right eye, requiring eye ointment and antibiotics, the less said about the administration of which, the better. He's a remarkably cheerful Little Dude by nature, though, and is all smiles and giggles mere minutes after the screaming stops.
His main birthday gift is going to be a big-kid bed, just like his sister's, that's supposed to be delivered in…
sa smith | November 5, 2013
In the past two weeks I have:1-- Defended my dissertation
Thanks in part to the extra experience I got giving presentations during my graduate student career, this was not a big deal for me. I rather enjoyed it, but I wish I had more time (I 'shortened' my presentation to 73 slides. :-/ ).
2-- Made corrections to my dissertation
Luckily, I had no major re-writes, it was just a lot of typos/grammar/formatting I had to fix. If you have ever read ERV, this is not a shock to you.
3-- Moved across the country.
Me: *sick of packing* Lets just burn everything.
Partner: Hahaha!
*over 9000 hours…
drorzel | November 5, 2013In January of 1990, a friend and I designed the ultimate message to an alien civilization.
Okay, admittedly, this wan't a recognized scientific accomplishment. After all, in January of 1990, I was a freshman at Williams. The alien message we designed was part of a first-year Winter Study seminar class. Winter Study, for those not part of the Cult of the Purple Cow is the one-month January term sandwiched between the Fall and Spring semesters, and at the time, first-year students were required to take one of a handful of interdisciplinary seminar courses intended to introduce students to a…
drorzel | October 26, 2013[Scene: In the car on the way from soccer to lunch at Five Guys. SteelyKid is in her car seat, studying the Halloween-themed temporary tattoos all over her arms.]
SteelyKid: Do bats fly right-side-up, or upside-down?
Daddy: From the bat's point of view, it's right side up more or less by definition. They do sleep upside down, though.
SK: Yeah, they're the only animals that spend their time upside down. Except sometimes monkeys. Monkeys can hang upside down from their tails, and sleep that way.
D: Well, they can certainly hang upside down sometimes. Sloths spend a lot of time hanging upside…
drorzel | October 24, 2013In the interest of household balance, I should note that while The Pip was home sick, SteelyKid had her first taekwondo class. She spent a week bugging us every day about wanting to go, and it falls entirely within the time of her after-school day care, so we said sure. Of course, on the actual day, she had to be basically pushed down there by her teachers, and sat most of the class out because she wasn't familiar with what they were supposed to be doing. She assures me she was watching carefully, though, and next week will do the moves with them. We'll see.
The important thing here is that…
drorzel | October 23, 2013The Pip has pinkeye. Again. This means he can't go to day care for at least one day, which means I'm home with him for the morning, and Kate will tag in at lunchtime so I can go teach my class. This, in turn, means that you don't get any substantive blogging today, because the second I start typing a real post, he'll demand... something. Hard to predict what.
Happily, this has done very little to dampen his mood-- he's fundamentally a very cheerful Little Dude, and we spent an hour or so at Panera chatting about birds and cars in the parking lot, and then ran some errands. And now, he's…
drorzel | October 19, 2013It's been a rough week, so here's some cute-kid stuff. The "featured image" above is a giant picture from SteelyKid's after-school day care, where they're talking about bodies and bones. It's a tracing of her outline, filled in with her drawings of bones, joints, a grinning skull, a brain, blood vessels, a spine, and what I think are meant to be nerves. This is all up to date with the very latest kindergarten medical science. She's even written books about it:
SteelyKid's medical books
We wanted to get a good picture of her for the jacket copy, but alas, she's too busy doing archival…
drorzel | October 16, 2013The nice folks at TED have put up a giant Flickr set of pictures from last week's event. I'm not sure it's complete, but I happened to notice it this morning, and it already had several pictures of me in it, which is all I really care about. I particularly like the "featured image" above, which kind of makes me look like some kind of quantum demagogue urging my electrons on to more efficient production of interference patterns like the one over my shoulder.
But I also like this one, in which a deranged Max Planck looms behind me like a serial killer:
Max Planck knows what I did last summer…
drorzel | October 10, 2013On Monday afternoon, I walked into the TED offices in lower Manhattan just as Zak Ebrahim was starting his practice talk, a powerful story about being raised by a father who subscribed to an extreme form of Islam and eventually assassinated a rabbi and took part in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. And I said "What the hell am I doing here?" My science-is-awesome shtick seemed pretty weak tea compared to that.
I managed to get past that pretty quickly, without anyone noticing, but the first hour or so I was there was another Impostor Syndrome: Activate! moment. It was a pretty amazing…
drorzel | October 7, 2013I'm off to The City for TED@NYC on Tuesday, and while I might schedule something with the approximate text of my talk for Wednesday morning, more substantial blogging won't resume until Thursday. But I don't want to leave political post as the top thing on the blog, so here, have a cute kid picture.
This is SteelyKid at the Schenectady Curling Club, which had an open house this past weekend. Plan A was to go to the women's soccer game at Union instead, but I made the mistake of mentioning curling as a fallback in case of rain, and after half an hour of soccer, SteelyKid demanded "People…
drorzel | October 4, 2013SteelyKid's kindergarten teacher is big on incentives and prizes-- there are a number of reward bags that get sent home with kids who excel in some particular area. I'm not entirely sure what's in these, because SteelyKid hasn't gotten any yet.
This isn't because she misbehaves-- from all reports, she's very good-- but she's in a class with 21 other kids, and they've only been in school for a couple of weeks. Still, she regards this as a grave injustice, and I occasionally get aggrieved reports about the distribution of reward bags when I pick her up from after-school day care. I try to…
drorzel | October 4, 2013I almost killed the Pip last week. By accident, of course, but I do mean that literally. His day care was closed for the day, so I took him out to the store to avoid a freakout when Mommy left. I was heading into the store with him in one arm and a hot cup of tea in the other hand, chattering inanely to him as one does with a toddler, and tripped over the curb.
I took three huge stumbling steps that probably looked pretty comical on the security cameras, but somehow managed to avoid dropping him right on his head, falling on top of him, or scalding him with my hot caffeine. I went down really…
drorzel | September 26, 2013As I alluded to a while back, I've been accepted to speak at TED@NYC, which serves as a "talent search" for TED-- the top talks from the event a week from Monday in The City will get a spot talking at the 2014 TED conference in Vancouver. I've got six minutes to wow them with a story about quantum physics and crossword puzzles.
I submitted my original application in response to a blog post back in July, more or less as a lark. I didn't notice at that time that the image they had with that post was a talk at a previous talent search event by John McWhorter-- I only spotted that this week, when…
drorzel | September 11, 2013Every year since this blog started in 2002, I've marked September 11 with a moment of silence post, as acknowledgement that I don't have anything to say that would be worth sharing with the Internet. This is the very first year that I've had any hesitation about it, because in addition to being a Very Bad Anniversary, this was also a happy day in Chateau Steelypips. This morning, we put SteelyKid on the bus to her very first day of kindergarten.
And, you know, that's worth breaking tradition for. Really, it's as good an excuse as any to retire the tradition altogether-- it's probably time to…