Antimatter: does it fall up or down? Fascinating to think about, and now they’ve designed an experiment (download the PDF) which will, with luck, provide an answer. But reading the paper made something in my brain seize up, I think. (h/t to Slashdot)
New glasses
New glasses Originally uploaded by morecoffeeplease. Woo, I can see again! Although I’m still in that new-glasses phase where the ground isn’t quite where you expect it to be.
I love the Internet, pt. 7 billion and 2
GraphJam: pop culture in graph form = much geeky happiness.
Book a Month Challenge #5: Mother
(http://bamchallenge.wordpress.com/2008/05/01/challenge-5-mother) I cheerfully tossed Andrea Buchanan’s Mother shock : loving every (other) minute of it and (perhaps less cheerfully) Susan Wicklund’s This common secret : my journey as an abortion doctor on my library hold list, intending to review one or the other. Neither of them has yet turned up, but coincidentally the library coughed […]
Europe’s Best
Ah yes, Europe’s Best, purveyor of frozen veggie blends. Europe apparently extends further east than I previously suspected:
Plush roadkill
(hat tip to Boing Boing) …to go with your plush guts and plush microbes, of course.
Book a Month Challenge #4: Beauty
(http://bamchallenge.wordpress.com/2008/04/01/challenge-4-beauty/) Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession with Cosmetic Surgery by Alex Kuczynski The initial tone of this book is wildly uncritical — she skims quickly past the notions that half the American population isn’t comfortable with their looks and are subjected to a constant barrage of images of surgically-sculpted perfection and gets right […]
Upward!
Last year she was juuust a bit too short to climb this tree at the park. No longer! She’s about eight feet up off the ground here: I like the colours — spring drabness broken by the bright-yellow forsythia and M’s fuschia dress (which she insisted on wearing for her tree-climbing exploits).
Sometimes the blog posts, they write themselves.
Me: It’s time to go inside. We need to make some dinner. M: Can I watch a movie? Me: No, it’s not the weekend yet. Why don’t you play with your Webkinz on the computer? M: Nooooo. I want to just sit and watch a movie. D: Hey, I know. Why don’t you come upstairs […]
Falafels and process
Just down the street from my office, and around the corner from D.’s old office, there was a falafel place with much promise. The area is high on all varieties of Asian but decent shawarma is a little thin on the ground. I went there a couple of times and each time I had a […]
Neil Gaiman on Douglas Adams
From an introduction to a biography: After he died, I was interviewed a lot, asked about Douglas. I said that I didn’t think that he had ever been a novelist, not really, despite having been an internationally best-selling novelist who had written several books which are, a quarter of a century later, becoming seen as […]
An overexcited post about drywall.
Once upon a time a long long time ago there was a downstairs kitchen in our house. It looked something like this: …and despite its extreme ugliness when we bought the house we fully intended to use it for a time, then switch to the upstairs kitchen temporarily while we renovated. But no. Once we […]
Numbers
55: Approximate weight of a sheet of 1/2″ x 4′ x 8′ drywall, in pounds. 9: Height in feet of our kitchen ceiling 639: Approximate number of muscles in the human body 600: Approximate number of those muscles that will hurt the next day if you spend a lot of time lifting 1/2″ x 4′ […]
Better hope it’s a girl
M: look! A robin! Do you know you are named after it? Me: I see it! and yes. M: I’m not named after anything. Me: I suppose that’s true. Daddy isn’t either. M: When I have a baby I’m going to name her after something. She’ll be called Tulip or Rose or Chrysanthemum or Petunia. […]
Ah yes, the appendix
How odd to see this float through my inbox — Quotation of the Day for April 4, 2008 “Its major importance would appear to be financial support of the surgical profession.” – Alfred Sherwood Romer and Thomas S. Parsons, explaining the role of the human appendix, in The Vertebrate Body. I remember doing a double-take […]
Book a Month Challenge #3: Craft
I thought I’d read about the craft of writing for this month’s challenge. Quotation of the Day for March 19, 2008 “I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret […]
Finally!
Finally! Originally uploaded by morecoffeeplease. They weren’t blooming this morning, but this afternoon they are. AT LAST.
Birthday wisdom, 2008
If it’s a windy night, don’t put out your paper recycling until morning.