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Here are some photos from days 2 & 3 in Florida (mostly from monday). I’ll caption the photos that require explanation. Happy new year!
Day one in Florida! We took it easy, walked on the beach, and watched the sunset. That’s about it! Good day. We saw lots of birds, some of which are in the photos below: baby osprey in a nest, pelicans, very brave great blue herons, a little blue heron (which is all purplish blue!), many mocking birds. And, a manatee.
Here are some photos:
Life has been hectic lately to say the least, and I like the phrase “to say the least” because in the name of efficiency I’ve been saying as little as possible lately (it seems). But, let me just say that Wifey and I had a really lovely weekend of low-key movie watching and lying about with the cats, and she cooked some indian food (yes, she cooked! that’s usually my schtik – it was very delicious!), and we delved into the collection of CDs from the late 80s and 90s and rocked out old school. Let me just say that the Pet Shop Boys were involved. To say the least.
I drove on back to Castleton VT early this morning to make some afternoon meetings with students, and left behind (on purpose) both kitty cats in Ithaca. So, I am kittiless (kittyless? kittieless?) this week, which makes the apartment somewhat quiet. This is sad in some ways, but, in other ways, it’s quite nice. To say the least.
Sooty [3:47am]: MOWWWWW!
Since this blog is feeling a little multiple-personality-syndromey, I’m starting a new blog over at wordpress called Chemistry Learning, where I will, from now on, put all my posts about teaching and environmental chemistry and education-related geek stuff. This blog (the one you’re reading now) will be more specifically a personal blog. I know, I don’t post often enough to have two blogs. But, I wanted to make the teaching posts more of a project, so that will hopefully pick up. In the meantime, I ported some representative posts from here to there, so that it isn’t empty. The header image is stock, and will hopefully change once I have a spare minute to think about graphic design.
The wild wild world of web!
The menu will include, in addition to Turkey (not the country, capitalized because that’s his name), green bean casserole (wifey’s favorite), mashed potatoes boiled Rochester style (ie in saturated salt water) with caramelized shallots, apple rye stuffing (ala Real Simple), wild rice, cranberry sauce (congealing in the fridge right now), salad, and squash soup. Mmmmm. In the meantime, I have no food in the house I can eat. :)
Happy turkey holiday!
I so want to try this. XMas present hint: plane tickets to Wales. And a Kayak.
(Via Ben’s googleshares)
Teaching is great. It’s lots of work, but rewarding. My Monday/Wednesday schedule right now is: Wake up at 4:30 am; Get to work before 6 am; hopefully have a decent lecture ready for 9:00 am (General Chemistry I); then finish up the lecture for noon (Analytical Chemistry); Panic for the rest of the day about what we’re doing on Friday in Analytical Chemistry Lab; try to take care of some kind of professional development or service task; go home and grade stuff; go to bed. But, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays are much less stressful and more easy-going, so it’s alright. The students are really great. One of the other new professors described them with a really appropriate word, “earnest.” They are earnest–they work hard, and are really kind and honest, and they understand that going to college is a big deal.
More on those labs for Analytical Chemistry: I’m making them up as I go! I really want the course to be built on what the pedagogy-savvy folks call “inquiry-based learning.” The basic idea is that students get more out of science courses if they’re designing experiments, asking questions, and taking responsibility for their own learning. That makes it interesting to write labs. Rather than spend time writing up an accurate and complete step-by-step cookbook (which would be boring for me and for the students), I spend my time looking for research questions and things we can explore with the scientific tools we have available in Analytical Chemistry. Then I write up an introduction to provide some background/motivation, and a bullet list of goals and questions students should address. In the writeup I make some suggestions of different options they might consider for their experimental design. But, really, most of the guidance is live, in the classroom, in group discussions. The art (which I could use plenty of improvement in) is to guide the conversation without giving people step-by-step instructions. In the end, I’d like the students to be able to design analytical chemistry experiments, carry them out, and analyze the data intelligently (using lots and lots of spreadsheets!). Every day, I have to repeat to myself, “What do I want them to be able to do?” Wifey taught me that line, and it really helps focus the learning goals. Maybe I’ll post some stories from labs we’ve tried. So far, they actually have been working really well!! The only lab that didn’t work was the one lab that I copied from a lab manual. Bah!
Since the dawn of Windoze 95, I’ve secretly (and not so secretly) hated all Microsoft products. That’s why I use OpenOffice.org instead of M$-Office! But, there is one thing that has been cheesing me off for the longest time about OpenOffice: You haven’t been able to graph data with different error bars on each data point. The only error bars you could add had to all have the same value. Which is stupid. Who measures numbers that all have the same error? Seriously. How useless is that feature? Well, worry no more! You can now graph data with independent columns of error data! Check out my data and all their gloriously variable errors!
I think I peed my pants. Just a little bit.
Hup Hup Hurrah! Hold onto your foam eyeballs, muppetics! Hulu is now featuring a large selection of videos from Sesame Street! Here is Johnny Cash telling Oscar the Grouch to have a rotten day:
SNL did a pretty accurate 10-minute version of Biden and Palin in the vice pres. debates. Spot-on!
Check it out, another awesome Jerry Schnoor editorial in Environmental Science & Technology. He keeps me feeling positive about whether scientists can communicate relevant and accessible commentary on public policy. Schnoor talks about the politics of writing energy legislation/regulation that would actually do something, and recommends an official ES&T-endorsed three-step plan. It’s pretty punchy. Here’s a good quote:
This year Congress debated the Climate Security Act. Last year we passed the Energy Independence and Security Act (but it hasn’t worked yet). If I wanted education reform, I’d label it the Stupidity Prevention and Security Act. But that’s a topic for another editorial.We need to have journalism awards for scientific journals. There are several good contenders in the ACS.
Wow, a lot has happened since I last posted. I’m a professor, the world economy has collapsed, Dan and Lynn had a fun wedding reception in Madison, the nation has embraced a republican vice-presidential candidate who seems to me to be a female copy of George W. Bush, and the leaves are now starting to turn in Vermont. Some are good things, and, well, as for the bad things – bankers will get used to the realization that they’re stupid, and Obama will hopefully kick McCain’s ass anyway.
So, is anyone still checking this blog? I hope so (though not everyone knows how to use RSS feeds). Let me know, and I’ll keep posting more stuff. :) Later!
If you do any kind of wet chemistry or molecular biology, you probably have some supplies in your lab from Eppendorf International. Well, they have a new robotic pipetting machine. And, what better way to sell robots to scientists than by casting a ridiculous boy band and filming a music video!?!
Here’s the awesome video:
[via boing boing via lynn’s google reader shares]
Perhaps it’s a response to BioRad’s PCR music video?
Thanks to mrcomfypants and froggy-dear for the
coolest cat toy ever!
Seriously, shoots foam darts AND projects a red dot? Whiskey
just about crapped his fluff.
Especially when the darts stick to the mirror,
which combines his two favorite past-times of chewing on things that
go “crunch” and looking at himself. And, Hungry Hungry Hippos were also to
be had, which is unpopular among neither the cats nor the humans. And all in
the name of St. Exuberance Day! (which as far as I can tell they
made up) Thanks!
I feel the exuberance! I like holidays.
So the other day I was totally rocking out at the diner with the Nerf Gun, you know, practicing my skills, and this ninja comes by and is all, like, “UR MORE AWESUM THAN ME!” and he exploded his own head by wailing on his electric guitar.
Wifey and I always put off going to the gym, and we always put off doing laundry, until finally on Sunday we say “that’s it, we have to do laundry today or we never will,” and “that’s it, we have to go to the gym today or we never will.” Hence therefore thus, there should be a Gymdromat. A gym with a laundromat attached. This is wifey’s idea, and we’re reminded of how often we would use such a business once a week pretty much. Any wealthy entrepreneurs listening?
I was listening to Hober Radio online while working today, and this Tuvan throat-singer named Kongar-ol Ondar came on. Wow, that’s amazing; they don’t use any kind of instrument to make that noise. They create crazy overtones, somehow, so they sing harmonies to themselves. You just have to listen… below is a video of Ondar playing alongside this other dude, Paul Pena, who in addition to playing slide guitar is doing the really low, growly throat singing. Ondar is the one who sounds like a combination of cicadas and whistles.
The video:
ur a geek if…
When you zone out in-front of your web browser, having forgotten what it was you were going to do, you instinctively type “ls” and hit ENTER.
Incidentally, in Firefox doing that will send you to the Wikipedia page on ls. Which is not nearly as helpful as listing the contents of the current directory.
Sorry, I don’t have the joke presentation style like Jeff Foxworthy.
Over the June 21 weekend wifey and I took the ferry from Portland ME up to Nova Scotia. Our friends were getting married at a bed and breakfast up there, and it was really fun! I’ve always wanted to go to Nova Scotia, perhaps because of Stan Rogers. It’s very pretty, and the wedding was beautiful (congrats, Jen and Terry!). Here are photographs:
The whole world of Google stuff is becoming head-spinningly useful. I never knew I had so many different kinds of nails until Google started handing out all these different kinds of hammers.
In this post, I’m going to test one of the new features of Google Docs: forms. I expect that I may use this feature a lot in the future, for both fun and work interests. The forms are integrated with spreadsheets. There are a bunch of different ways to graph the results, and the number of different analyses and graphics plugins is growing exponentially thanks to Google’s 3rd-party plugin interface. In my spreadsheet, I made a graph of annotated locations on a map:
and you can add additional data to the source spreadsheet by filling out the following form (please fill it out!):
How cool is that? Think of all the applications, online class participation in teaching, surveys, collecting scientific data (fancy citizen science?), etc. And, you can graph the results for participants in a million different ways. You can control who has access to the poll if you want (mine is open to anyone), and hopefully they’ll add an anti-spam filter in the future.
Here are the results of the Beer/Cheese question summarized in a pie chart:
In case you’ve been wondering whether or not mandolins are fun, I’ve taken
the initiative, put in the time, and I got some real answers. Yes, they are.
Wifey and I were walking back from The Commons in Ithaca a few months ago when we passed
Ithaca Guitar
Works
and found this pretty awesome
mandolin (pictured left) for quite cheap (at least, I feel like I could play faster on
this
one than on some of the fancy ones that cost twice as much; so, as far as
“plays real fast” goes as a judge of quality, t’ain’t shabby). So fun! Wifey sees
it as a good investment too, because before now I’ve been playing diddly-diddly music
from
The Session on the banjo (4-string), and the same tunes
on
the mandolin sound, well, let’s say decidedly less plunky.
The look of this blog has changed a little, to get
more in tune with the 21st century. No, I haven’t stopped using
the ancient, obscure, perl-powered, database-free CMS
blosxom. The
change is that I now have the coolest blosxom flavor
ever! (imho.) The layout is entirely CSS controlled, with
no tables (aside from a single cell to keep the header
elements in a freely scalable box). Everything else is
floating around in a div tag! It was surprising how easy
and fast it was, considering I know nothing about web
design. The new code is less than a quarter as
long as the old code, because I just went through and
deleted all those dozens of nested table tags. Woo hoo!
Let me know if it causes any errors on your screen, especially if you’re using an outdated, unpopular web browser that I don’t have access to, like Internet Explorer.
While we were out for the wedding of mrcomfypants and froggy-dear, we also got to see Victoria, BC (took a boat from Seattle!). Here are the photos from that adventure. All the pretty garden photos are from the Butchart Gardens, where Wifey was inspired to take lots and lots of pictures.
- My brother mrcomfypants and froggy-dear got married! Beautiful wedding in Gasworks Park in Seattle!
- Due to the above event, we got to spend lots of quality family time which was really great. And we saw many neat things, including a really big waterfall, the town of Ellensburg, the museum-to-be at central washington university, and Victoria BC (via a turbulent boat ride).
- I got some textbooks in the mail so I can figure out what book I want to use for Analytical Chemistry. I’m pretty sold on Daniel C. Harris’s Exploring Chemical Analysis. It totally covers everything, but keeps it short and clear, and applied. He introduces techniques within the context of asking questions (environmental questions, biological questions, etc) which jives with my intent to include a lot of inquiry and student-centered learning in the classroom.
- In the past three weeks, I think I made four posters. Poster time. Thankfully, I only presented one of them. I’m looking forward to a summer free of poster printing. :)
- Wifey just went to the cinema to see Sex in the City: The Movie. I hate to admit I’m a little jealous.
(Oops, was editing the original post and it got evaporated.) I’m a tenure-track professor! Assistant professor of environmental chemistry at Castleton State College in Vermont. It’s great, the students are really mature and friendly, and University of Vermont has a program to share instrumentation and resources so that Castleton students can do proteomics (identifying and quantifying proteins using a tandem mass spectrometer). I’m excited!!
There’s a pretty cool collection of everything
Charles Darwin ever published online at
this cool website. At first I thought
“Okay, whatever. About time.”
But then, wait a second, he made a ton
of drawings, and they are all scanned in and
available on the site! It’s totally cool. The
bird embedded in this post, labeled
Tanagra darwini (Darwin’s tanager),
is one of many many
drawings from The Zoology of the Voyage of the HMS Beagle. And, he has a number of other books with
lots of drawings. What a great collection of public domain stuff.
Via Marginal Revolution, via Ryan’s googlereader shares.
Wifey and I are on our way to New York City! We’re
meeting her brother
and his wife down there for a weekend of hanging out
and seeing city
stuff. We’re riding on the awesome
Cornell Campus-to-Campus
bus right now, which has free food
and wireless internet and big
plush chairs with footrests. Pretty snazzy.
We forgot to bring a camera (doh), but we did bring my laptop with a webcam on it, so here we are trying to hold the lappy steady and look like sophisticated travelers. Yes? Have a good weekend, internets! I’m on vacation.
Al Gore has a new talk on climate change, just posted on TED. Less “doom and gloom” and more “what to do,” which is a more helpful way to discuss things. I feel like we’ve been too focused on restating the evidence, over and over again, for anthropogenic climate change. By doing that, we play into the hands of people who try to say there’s no such thing. We’re justifying their ridiculous rhetoric by continuing the conversation of “is there a problem?” Instead of allowing Fox News pundits to frame it as an unresolved dispute, let’s just move on and talk about what people can do. If you care, then contact all those people you vote for and tell them so. Below is Al’s talk. Convenient timing with a recent (well-written) story on a lawsuit bringing out details of the Bush administration’s atrocious surpression of science, forcing the EPA to ignore data about CO2 and sit on thier hands.
Wifey and I had a great time at the
Ithaca Farmer’s Market
on Saturday (first day of the season!).
It was loads of fun. We met some friends there,
and ate some tibetan and cuban food, and then
the four of us bought a bottle of wine and spent
a lazy afternoon eating popcorn. I haven’t done
something so relaxing in a long time, and I found
myself wondering “why do we work so much?” And
then I remembered the looming pile of things to do,
and I lost that wonder completely. Maybe next year
will be relaxing.
An odd occurrence: I’m not a doctor, but I am going to make an estimated guess that Fruit Loops are not normally supposed to grow on one’s arm. I was going to have it checked out, but then a few weeks went by, and now it looks like it’s ready to fall off. The texture and rainbow-like colors are uncanny. Wifey’s been the voice of reason, and she convinced me it wasn’t anything to worry about. Probably just a bug bite, chemical spill, or some ridiculous combination of the two. It was a nice chance to use the “macro” setting on our camera, which, incedentally, works really well! To see what I’m talking about, follow this link. (Not an image I’d like to post on the blog’s front page…)
I just gave a class on chemical equilibrium, and one of the big concepts was that although some things don’t look like they’re changing there are probably still a bunch of chemical reactions happening. They just have opposing reactions that balance things out. After a ridiculously fun experiment with some buckets of water, we talked about an example of the first person to suggest chemical equilibrium: Claude Louis Berthollet.
Berthollet, back in 1803, observed sodium carbonate
(Na2CO3)
on the shore of a lake, and thereafter proposed the
world’s first back-reaction. The “forward” reaction in question
was the well known fact that if you took
Na2CO3 and CaCl2
and reacted them in
water, they
would form CaCO3 solid (limestone)
and salt water (NaCl(aq)). Nobody had yet observed
chemical reactions to go in the opposite direction like this.
Reactions were just thought of as one-way processes.
The observation of Na2CO3
on the shore of a (very salty) lake led Berthollet to
propose that it came from the combination of
CaCO3 and NaCl. So, this begins to form a very
new picture of what’s happening in a lake with a bed of limestone.
You look at them and see a system that looks quiet and unchanging.
On the molecular level, however, the lake and the limestone are
continuously reacting with each-other. There is a constant reaction
of limestone dissolving into calcium and carbonate ions, and there
is another constant reaction of calcium and carbonate reacting to
form limestone. The lake and the limestone, therefore, are not static,
unchanging things. They’re interdependent, continuous processes.
Which is cool to think about once in a while. Dude.
Now that I’ve had to give a number of teaching talks on different topics, I’ve gotten into a rhythm of including historical information, which turns out to provide a lot of interesting stories and examples. A few years ago, even, this would not have been very feasible unless you had a collection of books on the history of science and a lot of time on your hands. With Wikipedia, though, you can get stories, time lines, drawings, and old photographs in a matter of seconds. And it’s all Creative Commons, so you don’t even have to think twice about the legality of copying an image. That’s what it’s there for! (Though you may technically be required to reference the original work/artist/license in some cases).
Hello! Time to insert some more personal stuff into this personal blog. What’s happening now (Sunday, 9:45 pm): I’m writing a teaching talk for an interview, wifey is reading a historical fiction book of some kind, we were going to watch a netflix movie In the Mood for Love (Chinese), but then we got sidetracked trying to load photos into a digital picture frame, and now it’s too late to start a movie. We keep saying we’ll go to the gym, but this weekend we didn’t. It’s really nice out lately, and the other day we walked down to Stewart Park on Lake Cayuga, and looked at water birds with binoculars – we saw one interesting somethingorother that wasn’t a goose or a mallard. We’re finishing up a 2-wk regimen of dewormer powder that I’m adding to Sooty’s food dish. He was wary at first, and looked at me like he suspected I was trying to poison him. Eventually his stomach convinced him to put aside his conspiracy theories and eat the stuff. Since then, he’s been totally cool with it.
In addition to Netflix, there’s a new way for us folks with no TV to watch some TV: Hulu! It’s totally awesome: tons of full episodes of most shows that air on NBC or Fox, as well as lots of great movies (Big Lebowski, dude!). Here’s a good example, a Cheech and Chong movie I haven’t seen yet. Don’t know if it’s good, but now that it’s posted here I’ll hopefully remember sometime to come back and watch it. If not, well, no big loss anyway. Happy Easter!
Jon Stewart deserves a few more Pulitzer prizes. Here’s a spot where he nails the media’s response to Obama’s response to that pastor dude from his church. Seriously, what qualifies these news channel meat heads and slime balls to go on the air and tell millions of people what to think? I’d rather get my news from The Internet.
Via the Daily Show website, via Ezra Klein, via Ryan’s google reader shares.
I changed the title of this blog,
and I guess it doesn’t need any explanation or anything,
but I’m going to post about it anyway. I just got sick
of the header grunting broken English at me every time
I looked at it, “me weblog!” I didn’t have too many ideas
of a simple word or phrase that would sum anything up, and
also not get old, so I just picked a good general word:
“Question.” I usually have questions about stuff I guess.
And it’s a nicely scientific concept. And, if anyone is going
to subliminally misinterpret it as a command, it’s a pretty
good one to follow anyway. It’s not pretentious, is it?
In other news, not much is up. Research, job applications, enjoying life, we haven’t done taxes yet, etc. Later.
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There’s an interesting
news report in
Environmental Science & Technology
that hormone pollutants
can cause birds to sing more complex songs. Where do these
hormones come from? We produce them in our
bodies, and we take extra hormones through various
medications, and then we pee them out. They end up at
the
sewage treatment plant, where they’re either poured into
a river or lake, or in some places they can get
spread onto farm fields in solid waste (yes, using
our own poo as fertilizer) or treated water (for irrigation).
More importantly though, I think, are the loads
of hormones we give
to dairy cows, beef cattle, swine, chickens, goats, sheep,
buffalo, emu, etc. We feed them hormones constantly,
and those hormone supplements don’t magically disappear
(they do degrade a little, but not completely). They
end up coming out the other end.
What Markman and colleagues have found is that when those hormones get sucked up into worms, and then those worms get eaten by songbirds, it can cause problems for songbird populations. The lady birds looking for a babydaddy make their decisions about who to get with based partially on how well the dude can sing. A male songbird who is doing really well physically is able to turn up his hormones a bit and develop more brain capacity for song complexity. The result is that his singing prowess is normally a good indicator of how well-off he is. The study showed that worms tainted with hormones and endocrine-disruptors (hormone-like pollutants) caused male starlings to over-develop their singing skills, and now the female starlings are more likely to chose a loser to mate with, possibly someone she never would have picked if he wasn’t taking hormones. Will songbird couples around the world start having below-average babies? Or are there some ladies out there who care more about other qualities in a mate? Will we start seeing more songbirds in the coming years who don’t put so much trust in songs? (In which case, we may eventually stop calling them songbirds…) Either way, it’s creepy what kind of world you’re paying for when you buy a hamburger.
I’ve refrained from making the “canary in a coal mine” analogy, because screwing up bird populations is bad enough in-and-of itself. But, so far, we’ve noticed birds and fish having trouble with all of our hormones… what’s next?
This site you are visiting is called a “world wide web page.” You may or may not be familiar with this thing called The Internet, but you are actually connected to it right now, in order to receive this information. See the embedded video, below, “Internet Power! (1995) which was recently dubbed from VHS to FLV! For example, did you know that The Internet is the world’s largest computer network? There are at least, like, a million computers connected to it!
Via an awesome post at waxy.org, who incidentally sounds like he plans to digitize a number of old VHS tapes…
I was happy to run across
this cool chemistry blog
called The Culture of Chemistry. The blogger,
a physical chemistry professor, is surprisingly engaging
and interesting (as opposed to most chemists who attempt
to make prose that’s “cool,” but often can come off as boring
and irrelevant). She’s very genuine and has a lot of great stories and
background information, as well as just the right scientific
details to make the posts accurate and informative without
getting bogged down. As well as being high quality, the
posts are very frequent and regular, which is a big plus
(and not something that most academics would want to keep
up indefinitely). Yay science!
I was inspired by
reports
of
this person realizing that his/her eee pc was the same
size and shape as a paperback book, and putting eBooks on it. So, I decided to see what it was like to read “EeeBooks”
(because I am so hipster cool and I have an Eee PC).
It was surprisingly wicked awesome.
You could do this with any number of portable computers,
but here’s the DL on my favorite way to get the Eee PC to
be an eBook. Find your favorite public domain/copylefted
book on
manybooks.net, and click on the
pull-down menu on the right to select a format.
Choose “Custom PDF.” This is the trick. Set the pdf to be
exactly the dimensions of your screen, sideways. And,
make sure the font settings are appropriate for what you
can read easily on your screen. For the Eee PC, the following settings work nicely: dimensions 90x152mm, 13pt Times body font, and 4mm margins all around. That’s it, download it! It’s amazingly fast. For example,
here is the EeeBook version of
Alice in Wonderland. They have through the
looking glass too, but go get your own. My bandwidth
is limited. To read an EeeBook, I just open it in the
Gnome (Linux) document viewer (Evince), flip it sideways,
and hit the fullscreen button. The document viewer remembers
which page you were on, next time you come back to the
book. If only there were a plugin to bookmark pages,
though, that would be awesome. You can see in the photo to the upper right, it’s pretty easy to hold, and tap the
arrow key by your thumb to turn the page. Yay! I guess
this would work just as well in Windoze with Adobe Reader,
too, if that’s what floats your boat.
After weeks of experimenting, I’ve developed the best whole wheat chocolate chip muffin recipe ever. It’s easy to make using all natural/organic ingredients, and there’s no refined flour or refined sugar (except for the chocolate chips, which are key ingredients by the way). So it’s good for you, sort-of, plus chocolate.
- 2 cups whole wheat flour
- 2 tbsp brown sugar
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 2 tbsp butter
- 1/3 bag of mini chocolate chips
- 1/2 cup maple syrup
- 1/2 cup canola oil
- 1 cup water
Preheat oven to 375 F and grease ten normal-sized muffin tin cups. In a large bowl, mix all the powdery ingredients (from flour down to the salt), and cut in the butter with a fork til it’s homogeneous. Add chocolate chips. Add everything else. Mix quickly (don’t over do it), and pour the batter into muffin tin cups. Bake for 20 minutes, maybe a few more minutes if they need it. Eat warm.
Wifey and I went to Taughannock Falls on Sunday, and it was really fun. We had gotten a lot of snow, and it’s a couple-mile trail through a gorge, so we figured that it would be a great chance to use the snowshoes. But, when we got to the mouth of the gorge, there was a ton of people there, and the trail was totally packed flat and easy to walk on. So, it would have been silly to snowshoe, unfortunately, but it was still a lot of fun! There were lots of little frozen waterfalls along the gorge, and then a big real waterfall at the end. The freezing spray from the falls felt neat. And wifey threw a snow ball at me. Here are some photos:
Check it out, here’s an excellent
animated gif that wifey ran across on a
random website.
He’s impatient, he’s cranky, he looks like soot. Grouchy cat
will be turning up from time to time I have a feeling.
What is Grouchy upset about today? For one, there were some
great articles around the world about
how big of an idiot our president is, and we totally
missed out on it in the US. Not fair.
Also, as wifey points out, Grouchy Cat is not a big fan of the City of Ithaca’s ridiculous parking laws. If it’s an even day tomorrow, you have to park on the odd side the night before, and vice versa. Every night. Forever. And, my battery is dead. Cuz, it turns out that if you drive your car around the block once and that’s it, it wears down your battery. Grouchy cat disapproves. And, also, it’s a leap year, so I just jumped my car and moved it for no reason. Excuse me while I go and move my car again.
Check out Garfield Minus Garfield, an awesome website where they take out garfield from his comic strip, and you’re left with John Arbuckle acting loony. Here’s a good one:
Please vote for our poker lolcat. Wifey came up with it. The winner gets a trip to vegas.
More on the online Poker Cats Contest
Sorry there have been no posts for a while.
I swear, I have a lot of things to talk about,
but not a single spare minute unfortunately.
By this friday, for some reason,
I have a paper to write and two jobs to apply for.
There was a grant to apply for too, but it turned out
to not be a very good fit for me. So, I hope to actually
have time to go to buddhism class tonight, instead of
staying up and staring at the computer screen for 24 hr
straight.
Okay back to computer. Can you believe I just took a break form my computer, and decided to use this time to post on the blog?
Okay, for some reason I just watched this trailer for Indiana Jones and Crystal Skull Land or Something:
and I have a few questions… I’ll just ask one important one. When did Indiana Jones become an elderly Batman? He’s swingin all over the place. Egads.
Jerry Schnoor is awesome. He just published
this editorial in Environmental Science &
Technology (the top journal in environmental
science and environmental engineering) with some brilliant damnations like
This type of scientific journalism is fantastic. It seems like at some point half a century ago scientists decided that it was unprofessional to have strong feelings or a personality. I’m glad to see that starting to fade a bit. Research and data analysis, sure, should be unbiased. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be human beings when we’re talking about how academia relates to the reality outside the ivory tower. If US environmental policy is just plain stupid, let’s call it stupid. That’s more meaningful to most people than citing data, because someone else is always going to have a stupid counter-argument with smoke and mirrors to make the data seem irrelevant to the average person.
Which gets me to a second point: scientific literacy. How much would be enough for most people, to make informed political decisions? I don’t know.
Wifey and I just started getting Flight of the conchords episodes from Netflix. It is hilarious. Take a hip, dry BBC comedy and sprinkle in some wicked-awesome imitations of bad ’80s music videos. In some ways, it’s like Sifl and Olly without socks, and in other ways it’s nothing like that at all. If nothing else, then you should at least watch the episode “Bowie” to see Jemaine’s fabulous David Bowie imitation.
Bowie’s in space!
I still don’t know who to vo