personal
drorzel | July 30, 2006The internal distribution of picture of the ScienceBlogs get-together in NYC (referred to here) prompted several calls for me to update my picture. I have, after all, lost rather a lot of weight since the picture in my profile was taken. Thus, I had Kate take a new picture of me post-weight-loss:
For the sake of science, the "before" picture (which was cut down to make the old head shot) is below the fold, so you can do a valid comparison:
As you can tell, my hair has gotten messier, and I've changed my shirt. The profile picture has been updated to reflect this.
terrasig | July 30, 2006If posting frequency is any indication, regular readers might be able to tell that the last two or three weeks have not been the highlight of my life. And, thankfully for you, I've kept much of it off-blog because of the unique personal identifying characteristics than prevent me from being too honest here. But, let it suffice to say that several friends of mine and old lab colleagues have had deaths of family members due to cancer, two of which were at painfully young ages...not that there's any 'good' time to die of cancer.
Is this odd? Do my recent experiences represent a statistical…
pharyngula | July 30, 2006I'm an exceptionally sound sleeper. I've been known to snooze through fire alarms.
jstemwedel | July 30, 2006It's hard to know the best way to blog a dinner (especially when you have agreed, with your dinner companions, that each of you should blog it to discover whether the result is a Rashoman-like situation wherein each description might as well have been of a different event). Also, I was up late packing and up early catching my airport shuttle. So this may be somewhat stream of (un)consciousness.
The Restaurant
Very good food. Very bad service. The umeshisho makimono was especially good. Less good: the fact that the veggie sushi was plated with the non-veggie, resulting in half of my…
j7uy5 | July 28, 2006
At La
Cueva. I'd appreciate it if someone could
identify this lizard. It is about 5 inches (12cm) long.
UPDATE: thanks to a tip from Kevin, I think I have ID'ed the little guy...
It appears to be a greater earless lizard: Cophosaurus texanus.
pharyngula | July 27, 2006I'm heading in to Minneapolis for my morning at Camp Quest tomorrow—comments awaiting authorization may be held up for a while, so don't panic.
I may just pop in to the Minneapolis Drinking Liberally event tonight—we'll find out who actually reads the blog by who is surprised. There's also a Morris Drinking Liberally tonight that I'll have to miss, unfortunately.
j7uy5 | July 27, 2006
href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/62864816@N00/199733007/"
title="Photo Sharing">
src="http://static.flickr.com/64/199733007_049cdd3911.jpg"
alt="IMG_1332" height="375" width="500">
This is the approach to Aguirre Springs, on the east slope of the Organ
mountains.
drorzel | July 26, 2006I drove down to NYC yesterday to have dinner with some of my ScienceBlogs colleagues, and put faces to names. Seven or eight years ago, I probably would've driven back that night, but I'm old and settled, so I shelled out for a hotel room the size of our spare bedroom (maybe 9' square), and drove back this morning.
Not to get all Stan Murch on you, but what I did was I got on the West Side Highway, and took that up to the Henry Hudson Parkway, to the Saw Mill Parkway, and then the Taconic State Parkway, which got me all the way back to Albany. It's an old reflex-- the Taconic was the standard…
jstemwedel | July 26, 2006This morning, I finished making the slides for a talk I'm giving at the BCCE at Purdue next week. (Any of you chemists or chemical educators in the audience planning on being there?) I feel very proud of myself for having the slides written and ready to use days before I even board the plane. I'm even sufficiently enthusiastic that I may just start writing a paper-version of the content I'll be giving in my talk.
That brings me to my question for academics and others who work in the media of "paper" and "presentation":
Which do you typically write first?
Do you write a paper first and…
drorzel | July 26, 2006So, here's a different sort of scenario for an audience-participation post:
Imagine that you are in a weirdly well-stocked karaoke bar, and you have to sing a song. There's no way out of it-- if you don't you'll lose your job, rabid squid will eat your family, deranged America-hating terrorists will kill a puppy, whatever. The bar has absolutely any song you might want, no matter how obscure, and you only have to do one.
What song would you sing?
This post really begins with a conversation at Readercon, where it was noted that the World SF Convention will be held in Yokohama in 2007. Kate and…
jstemwedel | July 25, 2006In light of some of the comments on my ongoing series of posts on trying to combine a family and an academic career, I think a few clarifications may be in order:
1. Children and/or a partner are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for having a life. As it happened, I wanted children and an academic career, but that's my path. Not everyone would want to be on that path, and I would never presume to tell anyone that he or she was "missing out" by not electing to raise children.
One of my reasons for blogging about my attempts to have both an academic career and a family is that I…
pharyngula | July 25, 2006…because Pam Spaulding at Pandagon had a kind word to say about James Lileks. Not his Bleat or Screed blog, fortunately, or for his regular column in the Strib which I find tediously twee, but for his masterful book, Interior Desecrations. You have to have lived through the 1970s to be able to understand how tacky things got for a while there—someday I'm going to have to dig up that old photo of myself in a polyester paisley print shirt and bell bottoms just to put the younger generation of readers here into shock.
While I'm in a "what were they thinking?" mood, I'll mention one shock we had…
jstemwedel | July 25, 2006A long time ago, on a flight to a conference, a friend and I discussed the psychology of search committee members. We noticed that even people who thought they were exceedingly fair and open-minded might unconsciously make decisions that don't seem fair, but do, from a certain point of view, seem rational. So, when faced with two equally talented and promising job candidates, the committee members might opt against the one with visible signs of "a life" (such as children, a partner, even a serious hobby) and for the one with no visible signs of a life. Why? Well, which candidate is more…
clock | July 24, 2006My daughter is getting really good at taking pictures with our digital camera lately. Every now and then, I'll post one or two. Her favourite subject: our cats - below the fold:
Our older cat, Bisquit:
Our kitten, Marbles:
jstemwedel | July 24, 2006At the end of part 2, I had just dropped the baby-bomb on my unsuspecting advisor. Happily, he did not have a cow about it. Now, as we move into the stage of this story that is A.P. (after pregnancy), we lose the coherent narrative structure for awhile.
Given what the first several weeks with a newborn are like, that's entirely appropriate.
This, also, is the part of the story where particulars start making a huge difference. The decisions we made were contingent on the range of options that were open to us at any given moment; with different circumstances, we might have been on a…
pharyngula | July 23, 2006Honestly, I don't feel a day over 12. I remember leaning on an old fence near the rhubarb on a fine fall day in 1969, looking out over the mucky little stream that ran near our house and listening to the frogs creak, and thinking that this was a very fine life I've got, and I think I'll hang on to it for as long as I could, and maybe in a little bit I'll get on my bike and pedal into town to see if there any new model airplanes at the five and dime, and browse the comic book rack at Stewart's Drug, and then maybe say hello to Grandma and fuel up on cookies and kool-aid. That was me then, and…
jstemwedel | July 22, 2006Where we left off in part 1: In my fifth (and last) year of funding in my philosophy Ph.D. program, staring down 30, trying to finish a dissertation, and bracing myself for the rigors of the academic job market, I said to myself, "How could having a baby make things noticably more difficult?"
Then I remembered: I'd have to tell my advisor.
I would characterize my relationship with my graduate advisor as a pretty good one. He always found time to meet with me, gave me good suggestions about what to read, made useful comments on my writing, and really pressed me to figure out what my view was…
pharyngula | July 22, 2006The Strib has an article on Camp Quest of Minnesota, the secular summer camp that is starting up this week. It's a fairly good story, although it's unfortunate to see it overwhelmed by the gigantic rah-rah story on crazy Pentacostalism spread over the next two pages of the paper, by the same reporter.
By the way, I'll be volunteering at Camp Quest on Friday, to show the kids how to deal with creationists.
jstemwedel | July 21, 2006I've decided to go ahead and say something about how I navigated (and am still navigating) the challenge of trying to have an academic career and a family as well. This is not a topic I can adequately address in a single post, so bear with me. And, since my main motivation for doing this is the hope that knowing about my experiences may be useful, somehow, to other people contemplating these waters, ask me if there's something I'm leaving out that you want me to talk about. (If it's too personal, I'll say so.)
I think Rob Knop's comment is dead-on. Many of us in academia have been trained…
clock | July 21, 2006I had lunch with Anton yesterday. We talked about the upcoming busy blogging Fall and he showed me his new book.
We ate in my neck of the woods, at Town Hall Grill in Southern Village in Chapel Hill. Anton brought his laptop - the wi-fi signal is strong, so, after Brian and Ruby get married tomorrow (OK, they already are), Brian can add this restaurant to the Chapel Hill Wireless map.
Being very hungry, and knowing that the food there is delicious, I came prepared. While Anton had their lightly-battered fish and chips, I ordered a NY strip.
When the food arrived I reached down into my…