personal
pharyngula | June 11, 2006My geekishness has a limit, I've discovered. We have a long afternoon and evening to kill in Las Vegas before our plane leaves, and we visited the Hilton, which has a huge Star Trek themed room and exhibit, and Mary even offered to treat me to the Star Trek Experience for Father's Day.
I'm sorry, but it was too, too geeky for me.
Usually, I can wallow in any SFnal environment just fine; I can hang out in comic book stores with the kids, no problem; I'll even seek out fringe SF and devour it as my guilty pleasure. But a place with nothing but ST memorabilia, bins of tribbles, a blue guy…
drorzel | June 11, 2006Today was Commencement at Union, and a cold and miserable morning for it. Normally, the faculty are grateful for our spots on the Library collonnade, where we're out of the sun, and able to enjoy a slight breeze, but today, it was about twenty degrees colder than normal, and the breeze was more of a gale. Global warming, my ass.
It was also a memorable commencement for me personally, as it marked the graduation of my first group of advisees. Last year was the first class I'd seen all the way through their four years of college, and this year's bunch was the first class in which I was assigned…
pharyngula | June 11, 2006I've been off at the big meeting, and it's been a long and tiring weekend in Las Vegas. It's been strange, too: we're surrounded by slot machines and show girls, and our crowd hardly notices them; I took a moment to step outside, and I had to tell my wife, "the sunshine…it hurts…" and we went back in. We were intense, nerdly aliens in a neon world.
It was a good weekend, though. I'll dump a few of my impressions below the fold.
Blogophiles are a diverse bunch. Every age from teenagers to geezers was represented, some were in t-shirts, others in suits. Whatever your stereotype of the rabid…
oracknows | June 11, 2006Janet started it. John and Mike picked it up. Afarensis used it to avoid working on a post. John and Bora quickly chimed in as well.
Well, given that it's a Sunday and that I usually don't do any heavy duty science or medicine posts on Saturdays and Sundays, it looked like a perfectly good way for me to waste some time in a (hopefully) entertaining way for my readers, particularly since the questions are actually pretty good ones.
Yes, it's the ScienceBlogs v.2.0 Meme:
3 reasons you blog about science:
It's my life's work. (What else am I going to blog about, besides science and medicine?)…
clock | June 9, 2006Friday, May 26th.
Morning
After such an exciting and exhausting first day, we gave ourselves the luxury of sleeping late on Friday. After grabbing some bagels and pretzels from street vendors, we took the kids on their first ever ride on the Underground. They were excited. Of course, we got on a wrong train which took us to Brooklyn. After we realized we have crossed a bridge, kids got nervous, but we just got out, crossed to the other side of the tracks and got on the same line in the other direction and back to Manhattan in minutes.
Interestingly, I did not find the NYC underground very…
pharyngula | June 9, 2006As you watch the time fade away, sit back and enjoy it and start mentally rewriting your talk. I had it pared down to "I'll post it on the web later, bye!"
Well, it really wasn't that bad. My YearlyKos panel on science consisted of me, Wendy Northcutt, Chris Mooney, and that big guy most people have heard of, Wes Clark. Clark got up there with a few brief notes and spoke extemporaneously, eating up 40 minutes of our hour and a quarter. It was good to hear a politician speak out forcefully for science and the separation of church and state, so that's what counts. He also packed the room for us…
terrasig | June 9, 2006Welcome to the new home of Terra Sigillata, a blog dedicated to disseminating objective information on Pharmacology, Pharmacognosy, Pharmacy, the Pharmaceutical Sciences, and all aspects of medicines from the Earth.
More later on the theme of our discussions and links to classic posts.
I thought I'd start with a brief introductory essay on coming home, under the fold...
Seed Media Group, the host of ScienceBlogs, is located in the Flatiron District, 11 miles (18 km) from the town in northern New Jersey where I spent the first 17 years of my life. Growing up in the literal shadow of the…
pharyngula | June 8, 2006I'm here in sunny Las Vegas, hanging out in the lobby with the free wireless and watching all the funny blogger nerds with the orange badges walking by. Heh. Oh, hang on…I'm wearing an orange badge and blogging in a corner. Yeah, I'm such a nerd.
I don't know how much time I'll have for actually posting things here this weekend, but I've queued up a series of reruns to appear automagically at various times, so the site won't be totally drying up. Half the liberal blogosphere seems to be here, so I've got to do something to keep a void from appearing.
drorzel | June 8, 2006Because it's not science without graphs:
(Click for larger image.)
Basically the same deal as the last time I posted one of these. It pretty much breaks into three parts: 1) The initial "eat less and exercise" weight-loss plan, with a linear slope through January and February, 2) The "heartburn diet" plan, when the gastroenterologists made me really paranoid about food triggers, and I really restricted what I ate, leading to the steeper downward slope, and 3) The "screw the doctors" plan, where I gave up on trying to find foods that would eliminate the problem, and started eating a bit more…
pharyngula | June 5, 2006
Well, sorta. I arrived back home around midnight last night, and to be honest, I feel like I need another six hours of sleep right now. I also feel like I need to reply to some of the comments on that last godless post. And I also know I need to go take care of my fish for a while. I'll be back in full ranty action in a little while, but meanwhile, contemplate this work of art, "Bob decided it was time to put his degree in philosophy to work."
pharyngula | June 4, 2006We cripples have to watch ourselves, so while I'd originally planned to spend my last day in NY at the big ol' Bronx Zoo, we've scaled back a lot: I'm going to be at the Central Park zoo around noon. Short walks, no strain, that's my policy right now.
Last night I did get to accomplish at least part of the actual purpose of my mission here: I got to meet some of the Seed Corporate Overlords. It was very disillusioning, though, and I'm going to have to come up with a better name for them—they lack the corporate dronishness and aren't very overlordy. They're a bunch of science nerds! It's like…
jstemwedel | June 3, 2006Elder offspring's Spring soccer season ended today. At the start of the season, I nervously volunteered to be the assistant coach for the team, because an assistant coach was needed and I was going to be at all the games and practices anyway. It's not like I had mad coaching skillz; really, I was more of a sous-coach.
Anyway, at the end of the season party tonight, the players surprised us with some awesome gifts to thank us for coaching. They gave me a membership to the Tech Museum.
Awesome kids that they are, they really didn't have to -- but I'm glad they did!
pharyngula | June 2, 2006We were supposed to arrive in NYC at 2, this afternoon.
The plane was diverted because La Guardia was socked in with storms. We spent the afternoon sitting on a runway in Allentown, Pennsylvania. An hour passed. Another, and another, and another. We got vague promises over the intercom, always saying our departure was sometime in the near future. We stopped believing the captain in the early evening.
We had just killed the fat one, the one whose glasses we used to start the bonfire in first class, the one we called "Piggy," when the captain came on again and told us to fasten our seat belts…
pharyngula | June 2, 2006You may be thinking that Pharyngula is going to be awfully quiet this weekend, what with the proprietor gallivanting off to that liberal hotbed of iniquity, New York City. Well, yeah, I probably am going to be rather busy, but I think I'll be able to squeeze in a few things, especially since this tendinitis I've got is going to restrict my mobility a bit. Also, if any New Yorkers want to meet up, my schedule is little bit tight, but I might be reachable at a few times. I'm staying at the Grand Hyatt New York, Park Avenue at Grand Central Station, at (212) 883-1234. Late Saturday morning I'll…
jstemwedel | June 1, 2006I must report the following, although the protagonist wants to be left out of it. (I will allow as how the protagonist has a credit card, lives in my house, and isn't me, but I won't divulge any further identifying details.)
Anyway, it starts out as one of those FedEx horror stories -- far too common to merit a blog post -- but then turns into some sort of parable about common sense. I may, however, need your help in teasing out just what the moral of the story is.
So, our nameless protagonist ordered a piece of computer hardware from some company that offered free ground shipping. Said…
drorzel | June 1, 2006Back in the fall of 2000, I was a post-doc working at Yale, working on a fairly major paper (at least from the my persepctive), and starting to apply for academic jobs at small liberal arts colleges. Kate and I also got engaged that September, so we started doing a bit of wedding planning.
We decided that the most sensible thing to do would be to set the date a year and a half in the future, for just after her graduation from law school. At the time, I didn't have any job offers yet (when I interviewed for my current job, I left Schenectady the next day, and drove to Boston for our engagement…
pharyngula | June 1, 2006My day has not been off to a good start. I'm supposed to fly off to New York tomorrow morning, and just to inspire worry in me, my car had a flat this morning. When just getting to the airport is a three-hour drive, hints of unreliability in the vehicle are not reassuring.
Worse still, I'm having a flare-up of Achilles tendinitis. Every step sends piercing pains shooting up my leg, and unfortunately I know from past experience that not continuing some gentle stretching and exercise will lead to my whole ankle seizing up and rendering me immobile. So, I'm going to be hobbling about New York…
pharyngula | May 29, 2006
Creek Running North has a guest blogger this week, and she has asked for inspirational stories to help her get started. So here's a little motivational tale from my undergraduate days about my love for animals, and how I learned to overcome self-doubt and appreciate myself.
I was one of those nerdy little dormies in college. I thought I was quiet and pleasant, and I showered every day, but there was one troubling thing…I just couldn't keep a roommate. I had a few who lasted a year, and several who only lasted a quarter before transferring out. I was beginning to wonder what was wrong with me…
drorzel | May 29, 2006One of my two classes this term (Quantum Optics) is a junior/senior level elective, and when I teach those sorts of classes, I like to invite the students over to the house for dinner (they're paying $40K/year for the Liberal Arts College Experience, after all...). The problem this year is that it's also a very large class-- 17 studnets, almost unheard-of for a class at that level. Our house doesn't have room to hold 17 students. We barely even have 17 chairs.
This isn't a problem, as long as they can be outside, which is what I prefer, anyway-- I usually make spiedies on the grill, and the…
pharyngula | May 28, 2006On a warm and lazy holiday afternoon, determined to avoid any exertion and relax in my easy chair, I was contemplating something easy on the brain: beauty. I have no idea what makes something beautiful, but I could at least approach the subject empirically and catalog those things and experiences the I have found beautiful…so I put together a list. It's nothing definitive, it's merely personal, a set of memories of moments where I have been awestruck with beauty.
The zebrafish embryo. These tiny little embryos encapsulate everything that's lovely about development and biology. They are…