personal
pharyngula | May 28, 2006
I'm not a particularly attractive person. I'm your typical middle-aged schlub, someone you wouldn't look at twice on the street. But I have a secret: there's a part of me that is spectacularly beautiful, and every once in a while I get to take it out and admire it.Tonight, while I was preparing dinner, I slipped and gouged out a small chunk of my thumb with a knife—it stung for a moment, but it was nothing serious, just large enough and deep enough to bleed copiously. It was gorgeous. It welled in cycles with my pulse, and it was like I was dripping rubies. Brilliant, scarlet rubies polished…
pharyngula | May 27, 2006I believe in making things easy for my stalkers, so here's where you can find me in the near future.
Our good and gracious Seed overlords are flying me in to New York next weekend, June 2-4. I'm going to be wrapped up in a little bit of a social whirl, but I might have a few scraps of free time in there—and I know there is a plan to turn me loose in the Bronx Zoo for a while. I will be attended by my trusty batman, Connlann, so if any young NY ladies want to meet a hunky midwesterner, let me know—I'll have one with me. I, of course, will be more interested in the non-human organisms, and am…
pharyngula | May 27, 2006
My daughter has turned out to be a hippie. How could that have happened?
Oh, wait. It's been a long time, so I forgot. I guess maybe she just bred true.
Peace and love, baby.
jstemwedel | May 23, 2006Dear inventors,
My personal experience (and what I have heard from the many other academics with whom I communicate) suggests a number of inventions that would sell a bazillion units at colleges and universities world-wide. For your convenience, I list the items that would have the biggest demand first. However, it's worth noting that even the items at the bottom of the list would make professorial lives significantly better, and that we would gladly dip into the funds currently allocated for recreational reading and hooch to purchase them.
Self-grading exams. (No, not those scantron…
pharyngula | May 23, 2006My smarty-pants daughter got accepted to UMM…she's going to be starting at the university at the way too young age of 16 15*.
*She insists she'll only be 15, which is technically true…but her sixteenth birthday will fall in the first week of classes.
jstemwedel | May 20, 2006Yesterday, I returned home after an excellent five days in Stockholm, discussing philosophy of chemistry with philosophers of chemistry, eating as many lingonberries as I could manage, and trying not to wake up instantly when light started pouring through the curtains at 4 AM.
It was a good time.
My last night there, we decided to go to Stampen, a club in Gamla Stan (the old part of Stockholm), to hear the Stockholm Swing Allstars. They were fabulous. If they are playing anywhere near where you are, you should see them without fail. They have no CD (yet), but they have some MP3 demos on…
jstemwedel | May 16, 2006Today is one of those days. The younger Free-Ride offspring is a prime number again. (Indeed, she's a prime number that is the sum of the two prime numbers before it.) The earth has orbited the sun (or vice versa, for my Ptolemaic readers) five times since she arrived on the scene.
As best I remember, this is not how she arrived. However, I don't think she'd have any hesistation about climbing into a space suit and doing some interplanetary travel at this point. (You'll notice, up in the right, all the planets and the sun are there.)
Also, it would seem she's into multiplication. Kids…
pharyngula | May 15, 2006Take a look at the guest list at next January's ConFusion—there I am! It's cool that they also mention Chris Clarke's pulpy turn (maybe they should have invited Chris to attend). This is going to be great fun!
Not so fun is the way I spent my day: grading. I can at least say that one class is completely done, and my physiology students can now look their grades up, if they want to. I'll be putting in another long day tomorrow to wrap up the second class.
drorzel | May 15, 2006On one of the occasions when I called the gastroenterologists to complain that my heartburn wasn't getting any better (there were a couple of rounds of such calls, before I went back to my regular doctor), the woman I spoke to asked "Are you experiencing stress at work?"
"Yes," I said, "and before you say anything else, there's nothing I can do about that." Which is absolutely true-- if stress is the real cause, then I'm stuck with this until at least December (which is about the earliest my tenure decision could come through).
College teaching is an extremely stressful job, as this Inside…
drorzel | May 14, 2006So, after noting that yesterday morning was grey and dismal, I headed over to work to take care of some grading and other sutff, and the clouds lightened up a bit. I went out to run some errands, and the sun came out. so I headed home, and what did I do?
Yard work. Rather than, say, sitting out in the sun with a good book, I spent the nice part of the afternoon mowing the lawn, planting seeds in the herb planters over on the side of the house (my stomach is gradually improving, so I feel safe putting in some basil, sage, parsely, and cilantro), and pulling up some miscellaneous weeds.…
oracknows | May 14, 2006Nothing much to say today (I'm ensconced in the Bat Cave working on two grant--well, three, actually, but one of them is just a shortened version of the other, so I hardly count it), but I do have to take a minute to wish my mother, my mother-in-law, and all the other moms out there a very happy Mothers' Day!
I'll be back tomorrow.
tlambert | May 14, 2006
We were out walking the dog at Malabar Bay and saw some dolphins. They're not an unusual sight in the ocean off Sydney but I've never seen them this close before -- you could almost reach out and touch them. There were about a dozen of them and they were splashing around for about half an hour. More pictures and a video below the fold.
I didn't have a telephoto lens -- these were taken with my little Ixus 55. Fortunately they were really close.
drorzel | May 12, 2006Last night was the third annual faculty-student basketball game, held as a fund-raiser for charity by a local sorority. This year the threw us a team that included five players from the varsity, including the only 2,000-point scorer in school history. Needless to say, we didn't win...
It was sorta-kinda close for a while, until a stretch of about 4-5 minutes in the third quarter when the guys from the team played really hard. They eased up on us later, but the official final margin of five points owes a lot to the scoreboard operator "missing" a few of their baskets...
My personal stats…
jstemwedel | May 11, 2006The continuing saga of the uninvited nest seems to have come to an end. The hatchlings have died.
It's not entirely clear why they perished, althought there is no doubt that they perished -- the nest is crawling with ants.
Possibly the noise of the work being done in the yard kept the mother bird away from the nest too long. Possibly the blazing hot, full-on summer weather made the newborn chicks more vulnerable (e.g., to dehydration). My better half opines that mama bird appeared very young herself; is it possible she was not yet capable of providing the necessary care for a nest of…
pharyngula | May 10, 2006We're still on the road here—we've ducked into a place in Eau Claire for dinner, and it has free Wi-Fi!—and while sucking in the pile of email waiting for me, I see that our prom photos have arrived. Here's me and Mary at the Geek Prom.
Yeah, she does look better than the octopus woman from yesterday, even with the deficiency of limbs.
drorzel | May 10, 2006As noted in passing in the previous post, I try to ride my bike to and from work when the weather is nice enough. In a good week, I might get three bike rides a week in, which is a little extra exercise, and that much more gas I don't have to buy.
The major drawback of this plan, other than the fact that I look like a dork in a bike helmet, is that at this time of the year, riding my bike in to work has me basically seining pollen from the air like a baleen whale. I'm taking Allegra anyway, which controls the symptoms, but my allergies have definitely kicked up more since the flowering tree…
jstemwedel | May 9, 2006The choice in question was whether to try to relocate a nest full of eggs in a tree whose number is almost up. With your help, we decided against relocation. Moreover, we're ready to delay removal of the tree as long as might be necessay until the nest is vacant.
Today's developments documented below the fold.
Keep in mind that these pictures were taken from higher on the ladder than one is officially supposed to stand, with the needles of the tree digging into my flesh as I held the branches back to get a good shot. (Also, raising hives; my pine allergy strikes again.) So yeah, I know…
drorzel | May 9, 2006Woke up, got out of bed
Ran a comb across my head...
8:40: Leave home, bike to work.
8:50: Arrive at work, stow bike in lab
8:55: Download electronically submitted papers to be graded. Determine which students haven't handed papers in yet.
9:15: Change into teaching clothes, review lecture notes.
(Continued...)
9:35-10:40: Teach class on basics of quantum computing, logic gates, supeerpositions and entanglement.
10:45: Let class go five minutes late. Run to bathroom.
10:50-11:55: Second class, review for Tuesday's exam. Answer questions about right-hand rules, magnetic fields, and Faraday's…
pharyngula | May 9, 2006It's another traveling day for me! I'm off to Minneapolis for a few meetings, and also this important event tonight:
Café Scientifique
Antibiotics in Agriculture
with Timna Wyckoff
Tuesday, May 9, 6-8 p.m.
Varsity Theater, Dinkytown
Free. Must be 18 or older to attend.
The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that more than 70% of the antibiotics produced each year in the U.S. are used in livestock production. How exactly are antibiotics used in agriculture? Do those uses lead to bacterial resistance? Does this have an impact on human health? Timna Wyckoff, assistant professor of biology…
oracknows | May 7, 2006Today is my sister's birthday, and what good is a blog if I can't shamelessly hijack it when I wish to wish family members a happy birthday?
So, happy birthday, sister! Have a great day!
And our mascot does, too!
EneMan says: "Happy Birthday!"