Today is one of those days. The younger Free-Ride offspring is a prime number again. (Indeed, she’s a prime number that is the sum of the two prime numbers before it.) The earth has orbited the sun (or vice versa, for my Ptolemaic readers) five times since she arrived on the scene.
Category Archives: Personal
Sad news to report from the back yard.
The continuing saga of the uninvited nest seems to have come to an end. The hatchlings have died.
The consequences of our choice.
The choice in question was whether to try to relocate a nest full of eggs in a tree whose number is almost up. With your help, we decided against relocation. Moreover, we’re ready to delay removal of the tree as long as might be necessary until the nest is vacant.
Today’s developments documented below the fold.
Uninvited nest update.
Yesterday I asked for advice about how to deal with a nest of eggs that presents itself in an inopportune place (a tree slated to meet a gruesome end in a whisper-chipper) at an inopportune time (mere days ahead of when we finally launch our backyard overhaul). The consensus among commenters who professed knowledge of or experience with birds in the wild seems to be that there is no promising way to relocate the nest without scaring the mama bird away and leaving the eggs cold and orphaned. Given that the whole point of moving the nest would be not to throw out the baby birds with the despised tree, this outcome would be sub-optimal.
A call for advice: nest relocation?
I need to call on the collective wisdom of the internets to address an issue in my back yard.
We have this tree in our back yard. It’s a pretty awful tree. It was probably a living Christmas tree that the people who lived here before us planted, but it’s in a really bad location (from the point of view of being able to use the rest of the yard sensibly), and it’s ugly, and it’s also sharp and pointy.
We want it gone. Indeed, finally, after about a year of planning, we are ready to have it removed (replaced with a Fuyu persimmon tree, in a slightly different location) as part of a major back yard improvement project. Work is scheduled to start Monday.
But this week, a complication presented itself:
A meme between stacks of papers needing grading.
The grading is unrelenting. The crud is not entirely cleared from my system. I still owe you the promised post on plagiarism.
Must be time for a meme (specifically, the ABC meme, which I saw at jo(e)’s)!
A new banner has ascended!
I want to thank the many kind folks who submitted banners to my little contest. (Y’all are talented!) As you may have noticed, the winning entry is now gracing the blog.
The banner was designed by P.D. Magnus, who is not only a talented artist, but is also a fine philosopher of science (with his own weblog, of course). That comic book heroine graphic pretty much sealed the deal: though she is largely black and white (like our ethical ideals), she’s blasting through a universe that isn’t (and apparently throwing off some sparks in the process). I hope my blogging can live up to the promise of the banner.
Not out of the woods yet.
Perhaps when I said I was on the mend I was jumping the gun a little …
“Please excuse this blogger’s absence.” (a note in haiku)
I have not been well. Indeed, I had a few days where I was not fully convinced of my own humanity. (Also, I was having febrile “dreams” in HTML.)
I think I’m on the mend. However, I seem to be unable to crank out an actual blog entry. Rather, I’m coughing up language in 17 syllable chunks. The course of my illness after the jump. Just in case I’m still contagious, don’t lick your keyboard.
Help me be less boring (banner-wise)!
Dear readers, if you frequent the other fine blogs here at ScienceBlogs, you will have noticed that a number of them have neat-looking banners. For example, look at Afarensis, or Evolgen, or Gene Expression, or Uncertain Principles, or Cognitive Daily. Check out the rotating cast of critters in the banner at Pharyngula, or the base ticker at Daily Transcript.
And, look at the banner that won the Make-Ed-a-Banner contest at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.
Now look at my banner. Really boring, isn’t it? Maybe you can save me.