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drorzel | July 15, 2016A delayed photo dump this week, because I was solo-parenting last week while Kate was traveling for work, and then I took the sillyheads down to Long Island to visit my grandmother while Kate was at Readercon. Recovering from all that took a lot of time, plus there was a bunch of computer wrangling in there. But, on the bright side, you get several cute-kid photos in this set...
And here's a bonus image, which captures something of the flavor of travel with the sillyheads:
Selfie in the car with the kids engrossed in their tablets.
(That was stopped at a light, not actively driving, so don…
drorzel | July 3, 2016A while back, I went down to Vroman's Nose in Middleburgh to go for a hike, and found a sign saying that peregrine falcons are known to nest on the cliffs. Since the peregrine falcon is SteelyKid's absolute favorite bird, and the subject of her school research project, this seemed like a good location for a family hike, so I took the kids down there yesterday. And even though that was really only one day out of a whole week, I got a bunch of really good photos from it, so it will supply all the material for this week's photo dump.
300/366: Panorama
Panorama of farmland from the top of Vroman…
drorzel | June 29, 2016When I was going through the huge collection of photos I have from the Forum in Rome, I kept running across pictures containing two young Asian women (neither of them Kate). This isn't because I was stalking them, but because they were everywhere, stopping for long periods in front of virtually every significant ruin and striking exaggerated poses for each other to take photos of. I had to carefully frame a few of my own photos to avoid them, but I did also take a few that deliberately included their posing, because it was so amusingly over the top.
Tourists taking photos of each other in…
drorzel | June 27, 2016Kate and I spent last week in Rome, to attend the wedding of a friend of mine from college, who was marrying an Italian woman. I've always wanted to see Rome, so this was a great excuse, and of course I took a lot of pictures-- over 1,600 all told.
This happens in part because when I'm visiting a major tourist site with a camera, I'm trying to do two things at the same time. One, of course, is to get good photos of the big attractions, to supplement my memories of the actual sites. But this is always constrained a bit by the knowledge that, you know, major tourist destinations have plenty of…
drorzel | June 18, 2016As of today, I can officially no longer claim to be in my "early 40's," so here's a great song with a thematically appropriate title:
(The lyrical content has no particular relevance to my life, I hasten to add...)
I'm taking a bit of a social-media hiatus at the moment, but it is very nice to see all the well-wishes from Facebook friends and acquaintances. Though I found it a little creepy to go to Google and see a special birthday-cake doodle with "Happy birthday, Chad!" as the mouseover text...
Kate and I are leaving tonight for Rome, to go to a friend's wedding there. So you can expect…
drorzel | June 17, 2016The NPR program Here and Now has been running segments this week on Science in America, and one of these from yesterday featured me talking about science literacy. We had some technical difficulties getting this recorded-- it was supposed to happen at a local radio studio last week, but they had some kind of glitch, so instead we did it via Skype from my office on campus. (Where there was some sort of heavy equipment running outside my window before and after the interview, but miraculously, they took a coffee break for the crucial fifteen minutes of the actual call...)
You can listen to the…
drorzel | June 17, 2016Another week, another batch of photos. This is coming on Friday rather than the weekend because I'm going to be incommunicado for most of the next week, and have some free time now.
284/366: LIGO, Eat Your Heart Out
Gravity wave clouds above our house.
Sure, LIGO detected gravitational waves from a second pair of merging black holes, but I found me some gravity waves.
(The pattern was much more pronounced 5-10 minutes before this was taken, but I was in the car driving when SteelyKid pointed it out.)
285/366:
SteelyKid with her hand-written report on the peregrine falcon.
SteelyKid's…
drorzel | June 12, 2016Shortened "week" this week, because I did the last photo dump on Tuesday. 80% of these are also from a single day, this Friday, when I decided to call a Mental Health Day and get away from stuff that was annoying me by driving down to Scoharie County to hike up Vroman's Nose.
279/366: Road
Rt. 30 from the top of Vroman's Nose.
Vroman's Nose is a huge rock outcrop in the middle of a valley, with a moderately steep trail going up through woods to a dramatic cliff with views over the valley. These are very cool when you're there, but the camera really dilutes the impact of those kind of…
drorzel | June 7, 2016The Pip is nuts about superheroes, so when he and his speech teacher made a book, naturally, it introduced a new super hero: Lightning Bolt. It's only a couple of sheets of paper folded in half and stapled, and the text and illustrations were done by his teacher, but the contents are 100% our Little Dude, so I'll reproduce it here.
LIGHTNING BOLT by [The Pip] Orzel
[Illustration: Lightning bolt's Mask]
Alternate Identity Len Boom
Occupation: Scientist
Speciality: Studying super powers. In his lab there's a computer that can communicate with Lightning Bolt.
Home Town: Lightning Bolt City…
drorzel | June 6, 2016Last in a series of themed collections of pictures. These ones are showcasing my rudimentary GIMP skills, pasting together multiple pictures into composites.
276/366: Sky-Bison for Scale
One of the earliest happenings in the three-week period I'm dumping photos from was SteelyKid getting strep throat again. She spent a Friday at home, and I took the opportunity to introduce her to Avatar: The Last Airbender on DVD. They're now a few episodes into the third season, so that was a big hit.
This reignited an interest in our stuffed Appa toy, which I used to use for scale in baby-blogging photos,…
drorzel | June 6, 2016This one, we'll do sorta-kinda chronologically:
268/366: Niska-Parade
Why is it always bagpipes?
One of the big temporal landmarks of the recent stretch without photo-blogging posts was "Niska-Day," the annual community festival here. This kicks off with a parade, the route for which comes right to the end of our street. Here's one of the first marching elements, the local bagpipe group.
269/366: Niska-Ride
SteelyKid is on this somewhere.
Of course, if you're a kid, the real highlight of Niska-Day is the bit with the carnival rides. SteelyKid is on this, having dragged one of her more…
drorzel | June 6, 2016Once again, I've let a very long time pass without posting photos. It's been a crazy stretch for us, starting with SteelyKid getting yet another case of strep throat, then DAMOP, then a trip to my parents' for Memorial Day weekend, then trying to recover from the previous. As with the last few, I'l group these into themed collections, this one devoted to the kids and my parents' dog. We'll do this in order from oldest to youngest, so:
Bodie
257/366: Two Sticks
Bodie is a good dog. He has TWO sticks.
Fun fact: my parents' yellow lab, Bodie, was born within a day of SteelyKid. I think he's…
drorzel | May 19, 2016Noted grouchy person John Horgan has found a new way to get people mad at him on the Internet, via a speech-turned-blog-post taking organized Skeptic groups to task for mostly going after "soft targets". This has generated lots of angry blog posts in response, and a far greater number of people sighing heavily and saying "There Horgan goes again..."
If you want to read only one counter to Horgan's piece to get caught up, you could do a lot worse than reading Daniel Loxton's calm and measured response. Loxton correctly notes that Horgan's comments are nothing especially unique, just a variant…
drorzel | May 15, 2016Getting caught up to today, a bunch of pictures from the past week (250/366 was the photo of Emmy's memorial shrub):
251/366: Wagons Ho!
SteelyKid and The Pip taking turns pulling each other in their wagon.
Last weekend we had gorgeous spring weather, so the kids were playing outside a bunch. They ended up getting out the wooden wagon SteelyKid got for her birthday some years back, and giving each other rides. This inevitably resulted in me being asked to tow them around the neighborhood, but they did return the favor...
SteelyKid and The Pip pulling me on a wagon.
(Photo by Kate.) They…
drorzel | May 13, 2016As promised/threatened in the previous post, here's a big collection of shots from our cruise vacation featuring the sillyheads.
243/366: Bunk Beds:
SteelyKid and The Pip like the bunk beds in the stateroom.
The sleeping arrangements in the stateroom were pretty slick. We had a double bed that was there all the time, and during the day a sitting area with a couch. While we were at dinner, the housekeeping staff came in and flipped the couch over to become a bed, then lowered a top bunk from a hatch in the ceiling. The kids have never slept in bunk beds before, so this was considered highly…
drorzel | May 11, 2016Since I've given up on the strict daily arrangement, I'm going to somewhat arbitrarily assign photos from the cruise numbers corresponding to the days of the last two weeks. I'll do this in two big photo dump posts, grouped by whether or not SteelyKid and The Pip are in the shots. And since this is a little cheesy, I'll throw in some extra bonus photos as well...
236/366: Ships
The Disney Magic, from the dock at Castaway Cay.
It seems appropriate to start with a picture of our ship, the Disney Magic. This is out of chronological order, as it was taken the last day of the trip, but this was…
drorzel | May 8, 2016There's a discontinuous jump here, if you're paying attention to photo-a-day numbering, but I'm skipping ahead of the cruise-centered backlog to write a more difficult entry.
Back in December, when we lost the Queen of Niskayuna, I had her cremated, and said I'd do something nice as a memorial, once the weather got nicer. We got one reasonably nice day in between bouts of rain yesterday, so I finished the memorial for Emmy:
The Queen Emmy Memorial Shrub.
This is in the weird little cul-de-sac side yard of our house, next to the dining room. For a while I was trying to grow herbs in…
drorzel | May 8, 2016The week leading up to our cruise was crazy busy for me, with a bunch of travel for work. Which means you get a collection of cell-phone snapshots from that week, since I didn't bring the good camera with me on all those trips.
229/366: Man the Barricades
SteelyKid and the Pip behind a wall of sticks.
There are some paths running into the woods near the kids' day care, and the older kids decided to wall one of these off by wedging sticks between trees on either side. Because kids. It's an impressive bit of work, until somebody huffs and puffs and blows it all down.
230/366: Quad
The…
drorzel | May 2, 2016As mentioned in passing a little while ago, we spent last week on a Disney cruise in the Caribbean, with the kids and my parents. We had sort of wondered for a while what those trips are like, and since the first reaction of most parents I've mentioned it to has been "Oh, we've thought about that-- let us know how it is," I figure it's worth a blog post to say a bit about the trip, which the kids enjoyed just a little bit:
SteelyKid swimming with a dolphin, The Pip on a waterslide.
The ship we were on was the Disney Magic, which is the smallest of the Disney ships, and had something like…
drorzel | April 19, 2016It's been a while since I last rounded up physics posts from Forbes, so there's a good bunch of stuff on this list:
-- How Do Physicists Know What Electrons Are Doing Inside Matter?: An explanation of Angle-Resolved Photo-Electron Spectroscopy (ARPES), one of the major experimental techniques in condensed matter. I'm trying to figure out a way to list "got 1,800 people to read a blog post about ARPES" as one of my professional accomplishments on my CV.
-- The Optics Of Superman's X-Ray Vision: Spinning off a post of Rhett's, a look at why humanoid eyes just aren't set up to work with x-rays…