Soon to be a major motion picture?

Apparently Blake Stacey is pitching a movie about the Dover trial and featuring, as central characters, some luminaries from ScienceBlogs. There’s sort of a Star Trek: The Original Series meets Star Trek: The Next Generation meets other iconic exemplars of science fiction and action genres vibe in the plot outline and casting ideas. At least, so far.
Me, I figured a ScienceBlogs movie might run more along the lines of All the President’s Men meets This is Spinal Tap. Although there would definitely be stuff blowing up.

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Some of our language needs an update.

So, there’s some amount of Harry Potter mania out there in the world this weekend, what with a new movie and the last book in the series being released. (To show you how disconnected I am from the mania, I could not tell you without recourse to the internet whether The Order of the Phoenix is the new movie or the new book.) I haven’t read any of the Harry Potter books (yet), but my eldest child recently finished the first Harry Potter book and quite liked it. However, as we were discussing it this morning, we encountered one of my pet peeves:

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I think Google Maps are bad for me.

Another episode in the continuing saga, “Janet is a tremendous Luddite.”
Back when I was “between Ph.D.s” one of the things I did so I could pay rent was work as an SAT-prep tutor. The company I worked for didn’t do classroom presentations to a group of students, but rather sent us out on “house calls” to the students’ homes for the tutoring. This meant I had clients in many different towns in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, from San Carlos to Fremont to Los Gatos. And I had to figure out, from an address, how to get to each of them.

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Real-life encounters with online persons.

Last night my better half and I had dinner with JM — at a restaurant with both excellent sushi and excellent service! Figures JM finds it right before she’s about to flee the state to start her Ph.D. program.
Because my posts are often (as she put it) “long-winded, but in a good way,” she has recommended a coffee mug rating system at the top of each post. You know, to indicate how many mug of coffee you should expect to need to get all the way to the end of the post. Should I pester our developer for this functionality?
Then, today another ScienceBlogger and I had a top-secret meeting:

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A pair of keyboard related questions.

  1. Do you touch-type, or (like me) do you kind of know where the keys are but “freestyle” type, looking at the keyboard on a semi-regular basis?*
  2. Are any of the letters wearing off on your keys?**

In answer to #2, I’ve completely lost L and N, and A and S are fading fast. Which, given my answer to #1, suggests that there will come a point where I’ll be in real trouble.

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