personal
clock | August 29, 2007I mentioned that I met Tanja and Doug on Sunday. They just sent me some pictures from the meeting (under the fold) and you can also see their wildlife pictures here.
oracknows | August 29, 2007Here's another random observation that hit us quite rapidly upon our arrival in London and is reinforced almost every time we decide to dine out:
Why is restaurant service here so crappy?
We've been to several restaurants now, and only one of them (ThaiSquare near Trafalgar Square) had reasonably good service by American standards. I have to wonder if it had something to do with the fact that we were out with a former postdoc of mine and her husband, both of whom are natives, her having moved back to London after finishing up in my lab. A second restaurant, Bertorelli on St. Martin's Lane had…
pharyngula | August 28, 2007Hey, you know that $15 million lawsuit that was filed against me by Stuart Pivar? He's been getting hammered on the weblogs, the City Pages was preparing a story on it, the Seed lawyers were unflappable, and Peter Irons was constantly sending Pivar and his lawyer cutting dissections of their poor case. Peter was in contact with the City Pages reporter, who received a brief comment from Pivar earlier this evening.
"My attorney withdrew the suit today."
I wonder if the article is still going to be published…?
I can't say that I was ever really worried — the man had no case — but it's nice to…
oracknows | August 28, 2007
Now that I've been in London for three full days, I've noticed a few more things. Here's one.
Although my experience is anecdotal over the course of a weekend, I've still been wondering: Why are the British so darned polite and friendly? Is it the long Bank Holiday weekend? (And why do they call it a "Bank Holiday" instead of giving it a name of some sort, to make it seem as though there is a purpose to the holiday other than a day off?)
Everywhere we go, we seem to be approached by various Brits, who want to engage us in conversation. It started with the Tube into central London on the day…
jstemwedel | August 27, 2007This is our third teaching day of the semester (which started last Thursday), so of course, WebCT's servers decided that it would be a good time to freak out. (The official description:
... experiencing network latency within our VA2 data center that may be affecting your Blackboard environment. This may result in increased latency and/or packet loss when trying to access your hosted Blackboard system.
But you can't tell me that this doesn't amount to the servers freaking out, especially as they are still "working with our Infrastructure team to determine the cause and to work towards a…
clock | August 27, 2007There is a good reason why scientists in general despise MS Excel. It is cumbersome, non-common-sensical, and the stats cannot be trusted. The graphs are ugly. I am sure it took a lot of hard work to design Excel (and Word), but if I were Charles Simonyi, I would hide the authorship of those two programs as much as possible. Charles went to the Space Station, after all, paying for the ticket out of his own pocket, so there is something much more exciting (and safe) to brag about (not to mention dating Martha Stewart).
There are so many good pieces of software out there, many capable of…
clock | August 27, 2007Yesterday I had lunch (and coffee and another coffee - this lasted a while because it was so much fun) with Tanja and her husband Doug. Regulars here probably recognize the commenter who goes by the handle "tanjasova" - that's her.
They just bought a nice house in Winston-Salem and will completely move to North Carolina next month, so we'll get to meet each other and indulge ourselves in Serbian cuisine often in the future. They have three teenage boys (from their respective first marriages) and they live on his salary as she is still looking for a job. Now that she will be here, she can…
pharyngula | August 26, 2007How come you people never come visit? I'm only an hour from the freeway by way of a two-lane county road, roughly equidistant from Fargo, Sioux Falls, and Minneapolis, yet somehow no one ever happens to be passing through this remote rural town … until today. Jim Moore took a little detour from his road trip from Victoria, BC to Oklahoma to pop by lovely Morris, Minnesota and say hello. Now we expect the rest of you to come on by.
In case you don't know who Jim Moor is, he maintains this web page, a critique of the Aquatic Ape "Theory". This "theory" (really, it doesn't deserve the promotion…
oracknows | August 26, 2007Now that I've been in London for a couple of days and have started to acclimate to my surroundings, I've started to notice some things. As I said in my vacation announcement, I don't plan on doing a lot of blogging, but a short take here and there to break up the reruns definitely seems advisable when I happen to have some down time to do it, particularly since I somehow loaded the weekend with so many Hitler Zombie reruns. (Don't worry, there are only a couple more before a more varied set of topics start.)
Soooo....
[Enter Jerry Seinfeld voice]
What is the deal with mushy peas?
[Exit Jerry…
pharyngula | August 25, 2007It's like a fantasy land!
It was a perfect day at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, and I got my exercise wandering around this huge event — I think I also got my yearly allotment of dirty jokes. When they say it's kind of like the good parts of the Middle Ages, I think they specifically mean they kept all the ribaldry and threw out the unpleasant bits like poor hygiene, disease, and famine.
This was the weekend of the Highland Games, and the Scots took over. I saw so many burly men in kilts throwing heavy objects that I was starting to feel uncomfortably overdressed, and wondered if I…
pharyngula | August 25, 2007Not for me, for someone else. I just sit quietly and listen, but I must say this "Rule 11 of the FRCP" sounds awfully interesting. I'm not sure exactly what it means, but there sure are a lot of smart lawyers lining up on my side; they probably know, don't you think?
pharyngula | August 25, 2007Last chance at escapism before the school year starts: Skatje, her friend Nathan, and I are heading off to the Minnesota Renaissance festival today. I don't know about this; hanging out with a gang of people pretending it's the 13th century is a bit too much like meeting up with creationists.
jstemwedel | August 24, 2007One of the best things about Fridays on my campus is that hardly anyone is around. Not only does this make parking less of a headache, and interruption mid-task less probable, but it means that there's even less pressure to dress in a manner that asserts, "I am a responsible adult!"
I mean, I am a responsible adult, but must I prove it by wearing a suit?
I'm on a campus committee that meets every few weeks, on Fridays. This means that the other committee members are also likely to dress as if it were a Friday -- in jeans and T-shirts. Even dressed like graduate students, we get the job…
oracknows | August 24, 2007
Around the time you read this, barring any flight delay agonies, I will have touched down at Heathrow Airport to spend a week in London. It's the first real vacation that my wife and I have taken, possibly since our honeymoon. Certainly it's been the first time I've been out of the country since my honeymoon and the first time I've been to London since Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister and I was too young to appreciate it properly.
After the last couple of months, I desperately need some R&R, and this will hopefully fill the bill. This trip means a couple of things. First, the blog…
jstemwedel | August 23, 2007Regular readers of this blog know that I'm a Luddite who composes her posts on wax tablets before uploading them.* So it may seem curious that nearly every semester I teach at least one section of my Philosophy of Science course online.
What would possess me to do such a thing? The ability to make active student learning inescapable.
Let me first give you a bit of background on where Philosophy of Science fits into the curriculum at my university. As I described it a long time ago:
[A]t this university, th[e] philosophy of science course satisfies the upper division general education…
pharyngula | August 21, 2007On the advice of counsel, I'm not going to say a word, yet.
However, I've been getting lots of email and seeing lots of articles on the web; I've been getting offers of pro bono lawyering and to set up donations for a defense fund. Thanks to everyone! I haven't been replying to most of those offers because, on the advice of counsel, yadda yadda, but I appreciate them all. If the need develops I may take advantage of them, but until then, I just crouch, gnawing on the muzzle, mad eyes rolling, doing my best to be a good little doggie.
But really, thanks, thanks, thanks — and now we just sit…
jstemwedel | August 21, 2007In the aftermath of the ScienceBloggers' assault on Manhattan, Mark Chu-Carroll put up a nice post on the ways in which bloggers' real-life manner seemed to match or depart from their online personae.
Maybe philosophy's to blame, but I think there's a deep and interesting question here.
Mark writes:
It's quite an odd experience in its way; between our blogs, and our back-channel forums, we've become a tight-knit community, and the people there were my friends, even though I'd never seen them before.
And yet, as is clear from Mark's blogger-specific observations, there are ways in which a…
sheril | August 21, 2007Yesterday, I mentioned our late night karaoke duet when SciBlings converged on New York City. Thanks to Coturnix's phenomenal camera work, the performance has been filmed for posterity in short segments which I've spliced together. [Note we do not actually appear on screen for the first half.] The camera is swung about liberally, so I should probably supply some kind of warning for women who are pregnant or those with sensitive stomachs. In fact, this entire video is not for the faint of heart...
That said, sit back, relax, and enjoy the Mooney-Kirshenbaum rendition of Dylan's 'The Times…
pharyngula | August 21, 2007It's nice to see these casual references to PZ Myers, as if anyone would have heard of me:
The lab is at 101 Theory Drive, a developer's idea of a scientific street name that Lynch found presumptuous.
It is a mark of the difficulty of life sciences — biology and its many descendants — that to call something a theory is to honor, not slight it. Theory, evolutionary biologist P.Z. Myers has written, is what scientists aspire to. Lynch, for all of his bombast, was respectful of the intellectual protocols of his science.
"I would have called it Hypothesis Drive," he said.
The article is part of…
jstemwedel | August 21, 2007Actually, my memories of the semi-spontaneous confluence of ScienceBlogs sciblings in the vicinity of the Seed mothership this past weekend are quite vivid, and I'll put up a proper post on that later today.
But in the event that I hadn't remembered things so clearly, and had to piece it all together from what came home on my digital camera, my reflections on the last few day might be distorted.
I might end up with something like this:
Rob: You know what this place needs?
Chad: More physical science bloggers?
Rob: Mmm-hmm. There're lots of biologists, but they're small enough that I think…