Because I was in Sweden for my younger offspring’s birthday, and because my older offspring’s birthday is nowhere near the school year, we gave them a joint un-birthday party today. Each was allowed to invite eight friends. Of these, a total of five attended (plus a younger sib), but there was some suspense about what the actual turnout would be due to low RSVP rates. Summer vacation can be like that.
Food is pretty straightforward for the age-range involved (4 to 7): raw veggies and dip, chips and salsa, Smart Dogs in blankets. Younger offspring and I squeezed a bunch of lemons from our tree and made a gallon of lemonade. For dessert, cupcakes, brownies, fruit, and ice cream.
The challenge, however, was figuring out activities that would entertain kids in two different age groups (which, for the purposes of playing, they are) for the entire three hours. We did not want these kids making their own unsupervised fun around the house or yard, but the standard party games didn’t really seem like what we were looking for. Pin the Tail on the Donkey can get awfully competitive, and a Piñata was out, because I think dizzy blindfolded kids waving bats around is asking for trouble.
Also, it’s been very hot here lately.
Category Archives: Passing thoughts
Mission accomplished, dude! (Or, a peek into my spam folder.)
Sometimes I check the spam folder just in case actual (even important) email from a human being who is not trying to sell me (and the millions of others in that valuable set of email addresses) something I don’t need has been snagged by the filter. More rarely, I open the odd spam message from the spam folder. (By the way, could Gmail please stop suggesting Spam recipes while I’m there? It makes the experience even ickier.)
Tonight, I found spam advertising “real, genuine degrees that include Bachelors, Masters, MBA and Doctorate Degrees. They are fully verifiable and certified transcripts are also available.” In 4 to 6 weeks! With no study required! It’s almost like they have no freakin’ idea what I do for a living.
But what made it art was the cryptic sentence and a half way down at the bottom of the email message:
towards him with his wand. I need to Disillusion you.
And lo! I was disillusioned.
‘That’s Dr. Batman to you, evil doer!’
Ben at The World’s Fair asks what kind of scientist Batman is. (Of course, he does this after producing something like reliable testimony that Batman is a scientist to begin with.)
Sandra Porter makes the case that he’s a geneticist, but I’m not buying it. There’d be more fruit flies in the Bat Cave. I have a different hunch.
Nerds and the dating game.
Given that I’ve weighed in on “nerd culture” and some of the social pressures that influence women’s relationships to this culture, I had to pass this on:
The New York Daily News ran an article extolling the advantages of nerds as lovers. It’s pretty much the dreck you’d expect. Of course, the nerds in question are all male (because, female nerds?!). Also, it’s not obvious to me that real nerd culture would embrace the nerd exemplars discussed in the story as bona fide nerds. Tiger Woods? Adam Brody? David Arquette? We’re not really talking the pocket-protector set (nor even the, “Quick, what’s the one true programming language?” set).
But, Amanda at Pandagon has fed the article to the Regender engine with delightful results. Some of my favorite regendered passages:
Indoor soccer: a few thoughts the morning after.
In my last post, I mentioned that I was about to start a soccer class. It turns out “class” might not be quite the right designation for it, as there wasn’t any formal instruction, discussion of techniques, etc. (Not that I didn’t get schooled at various points in the evening.) Instead, we pretty much just played.
It’s worth noting that this was not soccer on a big, grassy field. It was indoor soccer — in a gymnasium with a smaller “field” surface, with sneakers squeaking against the floor and the ball slamming against walls. In lots of ways, this is a completely different game from the other kind of soccer.
Though I make no promise that they’re connected by any deeply significant common thread, here are my thoughts after the first night of indoor soccer:
Sounds better than pinching yourself.
Younger offspring offers a way to distinguish dreaming from conscious experience:
I thought I was really awake, so I reached up to touch a cloud, but instead of feeling fuzzy like a cloud would feel, it was like touching an empty space. So that’s how you can tell if you’re dreaming, if you touch the clouds and they feel like empty space.
The child hasn’t read Descartes yet, but we’ve got all summer.
The difference between political activism and what I’d like to be doing.
Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance has a great post with some of his thoughts about Yearly Kos. In it, he describes the convention’s heartening attention to matters scientific:
Bringing the new neighbors some pi (a Sb 2.0 meme).
In honor of the arrival of all the new neighbors here at ScienceBlogs Towers, here’s a little getting-acquainted meme.
3 reasons you blog about science:
- To make the scientific method less scary to non-scientists.
- To examine the ways in which behaving ethically really makes for better scientific knowledge.
- Because I find science endlessly fascinating.
Point at which you would stop blogging:
If I ran out of things to say (which is hard for me to imagine).
1 thing you frequently blog besides science:
Academic stuff (pedagogical musings, rants about cheating, etc.)
4 words that describe your blogging style:
- Conversational
- Opinionated
- Curious
- Witty (sometimes … I hope!)
(More decimal places after the jump!)
Rational (cocktail) synthesis, in need of empirical data.
Ah, the power of the internets! Without them, how would I ever have discovered The Mixilator?
The Mixilator is hosted by The Internet Cocktail Database. It presents you with a form asking you to specify your cocktail variety, hour, strength, level of complexity, and special characteristics. It then returns with a recipe for a cocktail.
But, the recipe that is returned to you is not a pre-existing coctail from the CocktailDB. Oh no, it is much more wonderful than that! The Mixilator randomly generates your cocktail recipe using an algorithm based on the theories set out by David Embury in his 1948 book The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks.
We are indeed living in a new age of wonders!
But we who care about science are not satisfied with the algorithmic implementation of a theory. We are the reality-based community. We seek empirical data!
Another villianous internet quiz.
Being a fan of the old Tick cartoons, I had to find out which of the Tick’s nemeses (nemesises?) I am.
I am cackling with glee to discover: