2024-03-29

Ow, my brain

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)

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 […]

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).

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 […]

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 […]