personal
pharyngula | August 21, 2007If not, Minnesota Stories has a short interview with PZ Myers, taped last year. It's too bad the camera didn't pan to my left a little bit, because my Trophy Wife™ was sitting right next to me the whole time, and she would have been much more restful on the eyes.
sheril | August 20, 2007So, Chris and I arrived in style Friday night to find out what happens when SciBlings converge on the city that never sleeps...
The reason for our journey? SEED had invited all the bloggers to NYC--and sure enough, it was a weekend to remember! You may have already noticed photos of our mischief in The Big Apple appearing on some of the other blogs. I shopped 5th Avenue with Jennifer and enjoyed after hours adventures with Shelley and Karmen. Bora introduced me to Professor Steve Steve and Chris and I even sat down for good times with PZ.
Hey Chris, think readers would be interested if…
pharyngula | August 19, 2007So … this weekend, we had an odd and informal secret meeting of the SciBlings in New York City. This was nothing official, it's like a whole bunch of the bloggers here decided they ought to get together some time, and a plan slowly crystallized and the precipitate settled out on NYC. It was decided to keep it informal and in-house, or I would have advertised our presence further ahead of time — but with about 3 dozen of us present it would have been too much to invite in a lot of others, even though there were lots of other NY bloggers and readers I would have liked to have met.
I flew in…
pharyngula | August 18, 2007So, there's about 30 or so of the ScienceBlogs clan gathered in New York City this weekend. We've been busy, ummm, bonding or something, and also having some serious discussions, but now we're more or less free. We're kind of dispersed in a chaotic fashion, but some of us, including at least me and Bora, and probably several others, are planning to meet at the BBar and Grill, at 40 East 4th St., from about 7:00 on. All are welcome, come on down and join us!
jstemwedel | August 16, 2007On the basis of this article about emissions from laser printers, our department administrator came by this week to take my HP 1200 series LaserJet away.
I said I wanted to keep it.
The worry is that the particles of toner emitted when printing with a laser printer may be just as bad for human health as secondhand cigarette smoke.
But ... I like my laser printer! It yields a higher quality printout than the inkjet printers I've used. And it's still working really well. And it's not like I'm printing stuff on it all day, every day. There are some days when I don't print anything at all.…
drorzel | August 16, 2007One final vacation picture: what with all the snorkeling and boat-chartering and hiking, I was starting to worry that I might seem too cool to be a physicist. There was a chance that I might meet somebody, and not have them realize immediately what I do for a living.
At the same time, my Northern European heritage doesn't exactly put me in a great position for dealing with intense tropical sun. After a day or two, I noticed that my scalp was strting to sunburn, through my hair. So I needed a hat of some sort.
I decided to kill two birds with one stone, and looked long and hard to find a hat…
jstemwedel | August 15, 2007As I mentioned in my last post, I was sucked out of the blogosphere for much of last week by the International Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry (ISPC) 2007 Summer Symposium .
I did not live-blog the conference. I did use overheads. Why, other than being a tremendous Luddite, would I use overheads?
One big issue that has me using overheads rather than PowerPoint presentations is time. As many conferences are, this one was scheduled within an inch of its life. Each speaker had 20 minutes to talk and 5 minutes at the end for questions and answers. Indeed, if the previous speaker…
jstemwedel | August 15, 2007Two items in particular.
From Julie:
post something! :)
I'm starting to worry!
From Super Sally:
no blog since we left causes a mother to worry
Hope you are just busy.
"Busy" gets the general idea (and careful readers will have anticipated from this post that I had some serious three-dimensional-world business to attend to). Have you ever wondered what it might be like to be spread to a thickness of just a few molecules? In the last 12 days, I think I've gotten pretty close.
I got through my conference (and even had the overheads for both my talks made by the day before the conference…
oracknows | August 15, 2007Yikes!
In my grant writing frenzy the last few days, this could easily have been me:
Jasmine Willis, 17, developed a fever and began hyperventilating after drinking seven double espressos while working at her family's sandwich shop.
The student, of Stanley, County Durham, was taken to the University Hospital of North Durham, where doctors confirmed she had overdosed on caffeine.
She has since made a full recovery and is now warning others about the dangers of excessive coffee drinking.
Ms Willis, who had thought the coffees were single measures, said the effects were so severe that she began…
drorzel | August 14, 2007In just a few days, Kate and I are leaving for Japan, for a couple of weeks of tourism before Worldcon. Most of the important things have been done-- we've got tickets, and hotel reservations, and JR Pass vouchers, and that sort of thing. Things remaining to be dealy with (a partial list):
Medication. What a drag it is getting old-- when I went in 1998, I didn't take anything other than Advil and Aleve, but now, Kate and I rely on a variety of prescription medications. We need to pick up refills of our various drugs, and copies of the prescriptions are supposed to be in the mail to us-- I'm…
pharyngula | August 13, 2007Well, I was trying to get home from my talk in Stillwater (more about that later), but the weather did not cooperate. We're having one of those spectacular midwestern summer storms — a watery deluge, non-stop lightning so close and so bright it blinded me, a threat of tornados, etc. Since I couldn't go faster than 10mph on the freeway, visibility was nonexistent, and word was that the storm was traveling in exactly the same direction I was, I decided maybe I should bag this travel stuff and found a no-name motel somewhere. If you hear that Clearwater, MN was demolished by tornados overnight…
clock | August 11, 2007Since I came back from California, I've been trying to get Time Warner to remove one of the firewalls from my cable connection so I can get into the belly of the beast of PLoS. The wifi in the apartment complex is pitiful. I also tried at Town Hall Grill, but the loading of every page was very slow on their wifi.
The absolutely best wifi in the area is at La Vita Dolce. It is superstong and superfast, both inside and outside, and I've been going there every day to do my work. In addition, I just love the place - since new owners took over several months ago, this little cafe has become…
pharyngula | August 10, 2007It's a busy weekend coming up. On Sunday, 12 August, I'll be speaking at the St. Paul Critical Thinking Club, at The Kelly Inn (off I-94 at the Marion St exit) from 10:00 AM to noon. Well, it's scheduled for two hours, but I promise not to babble on for that length of time. There is a $10 fee to cover the buffet breakfast, and you need to rsvp to Lee Salisbury if you want to attend.
Progress and Opportunities in Evolution
Scientists are a pragmatic bunch who typically don't worry too much about the deeper philosophical meanings of their vocation: the important property of a good theory is…
sheril | August 10, 2007Well, I showed up here at The Intersection, and boy, the place needed some cleaning up...Chris's bad habits, leaving unwashed dishes in the sink, mountains of empty Miller Lite bottles everywhere, and most troubling...we have no proper Scibling banner. So after some sidebar housekeeping and other small-scale fixing up of things, it was time to address that major faux pas. As a result, Chris and I are now ready to announce:
The 1st Annual CRASH THE INTERSECTION Contest
Design an "Intersection" banner and have your art displayed atop our blog for at least one year where the world can be…
clock | August 9, 2007As I predicted, bloggers have waited a day or two before they wrote much of substance abour Scifoo. First, you don't want to miss out on any cool conversations by blogging instead. Second, the experience is so intense, one needs to cool down, process and digest everything. Before I write my own thoughts, here are some links to places where you can see what others are doing:
The campers are joining the Science Foo Camp Facebook group (honor system - only campers are supposed to join, but it is open) and exchanging links, pictures and information.
There is an official aggregator where you can…
clock | August 7, 2007Well, it's been a long time since I posted pictures of my cats, and a month since I last saw them and photographed them, so here they are (under the fold):
Last time you saw Orange Julius he was just a tiny little kitten. He is a huge cat now:
Marbles looks a little skinny now. I think I'll take her to the vet this week. Certainly, with O.J. growing fast, Marbles needs to loose a couple of ovaries ASAP:
Biscuit is her old own magnificent self, the ultimate Aristocat:
clock | August 6, 2007Finally got home - after a month! So nice to see my wife again, and my son (daughter is at the beach). Dog and two of the cats (Orange Julius and Biscuit) were very happy to see me - I'll find the third one later.
I need to sleep.
Scifoo is a 20h/day affair - getting up at 7am, eating Googleplex food while talking to some amazing folks, attending about a zillion sessions per day (each one-hour long with no breaks in-between), then staying up until 3am or so talking to smart, interesting people, until the wine and sleepiness make us all a little less smart and interesting.
I promise I will…
oracknows | August 6, 2007Seen on the road on my way into work this morning:
I passed a bus going the other way. I noticed that it had a prominent sign over its front window scrolling, "NOT IN SERVICE." We both stopped at the light, the bus on the other side going the other way from me. I then noticed that the sign switched to scrolling "GOD BLESS AMERICA." It kept alternating between those two messages.
Make of this observation what you will. Was it a message? Or was it just strangeness?
oracknows | August 6, 2007I hate flying these days.
I'm almost certainly not alone in this dislike of what air travel has become. After all, between widespread flight cancellations and delays, service that would make even cell phone tech support seem attentive and pleasant by comparison, and the necessary but degrading security gauntlet, in which old ladies are treated with the same level of suspicion as someone wearing an Osama bin Laden T shirt, that one has to run before boarding the plane, flying has become downright ugly. The only time it's tolerable these days is on the rare occasion when I can score first class…
drorzel | August 6, 2007I took a rather large number of pictures on the recent trip, and I'm very happy with at least some of them. I'm uploading the raw images to Flickr, but I'm also cropping and tweaking them in GIMP for posting here. Because, well, it's my blog, and if I want to try to make you all jealous of my tropical vacation, I can do that.
This is the first post in what will be a series of vacation-picture posts, from our recent trip to St. John in the US Virgin Islands. This time out, I'll just talk about where we stayed, just outside of Cruz Bay:
Our rooms were at Estate Lindholm, a small B&B on a…