Link...

Only two people on the trick-or-treating rounds guessed the costume right . I post it here only to show off my awesome paint-job on the shield and sword. (Note: The Triforce on the hilt of the sword is cut from glow-in-the-dark plastic. No, I will not be YOUR dad next Halloween)




(PS> Credit where credit is due... wife sewed the costume, father-in-law woodworked he shield and sword... Dave just painted and accessorized)

zing...

I intended to get to sleep by 12:00 last night. I did not. I have to grade 35 exams today, and I knew there was NO WAY I was going to be awake enough to get a jump on it on the train, so I did something that I NEVER do. I made myself a cup of tea before I left for work at 6:00... making sure to make it not-too-hot enough that I would be able to drink the whole thing during the drive to the train station. Result...?

I feel fucking AWESOME. I usually don't feel this awake until 9:00 when I make my before-class-cup of precious leafy mild-stimulant. It's weird to feel like you could actually get some fucking work done at 6:37 AM.

I may have just inadvertently increased my daily caffeine consumption by 50% folks. If you need me, I'll be in the bathroom, peeing crystal pure spring water.

exponential decay...

Things are letting up around here, but slowly. The play readings and film festivals are done. Two of the three of the midterms are graded. People are out of my house. Only one graphic design project remains on my plate.

But at the same time, advising and registration is kicking in. I still have a conference to prepare for in Rhode Island that I haven't booked a hotel room for. I have all kinds of paperwork that needs to be dealt with, from receipts and reimbursements to speeding tickets. And I have a stack of problems and papers to grade that was shuffled aside to make room for the midterms. So the date for things settling down to normal has been pushed to probably after November 14th. Just in time to figure out where the hell we're going for Thanksgiving. (Hopefully? Nowhere.)

The thing that has been making it all worse is that I have really not settled on any sort of reasonable sleeping schedule, so I'm ALWAYS tired. Last night I was asleep before midnight or the first time in weeks, and wouldn't you know it... when the alarm went off, I turned it off and GOT OUT OF BED. A big improvement after several days of stumbling out of bed into clothes and into the car after oversleeping 30-90 minutes.

Maybe when things calm down, it will occur to me to write something other than COMPLAINTS when I sit down to blog.

rough start to a long day...

Seriously overslept this morning... threw clothes on and ran to the car and made it JUST in time to the THIRD train on my list... the last one that gets me to class on time. Graded midterms on the train. Combined effect? Massive headache.

At 6:30 PM tonight there is a reading of my play. In the 6 hours between the end of my class and the performance, I should probably...

1) grade 35 exams from my OTHER course
2) make and print out PROGRAMS for the play
3) register for the conference that has rejected my credit card online about a DOZEN times
4) assemble some readings to assign to the religion course tomorrow

I'm sure the list will grow. The one thing I have given NO thought to? What I'm doing in class in an hour.

PS> Make that HALF an hour

clocks...


1) I need to start going to bed earlier. I know there is a problem with my sleep patterns when I wake up and look at my alarm clock to find that it has been snoozed no less than four times, and I have no recollection of hearing it go off even once.

2) I lost my new dress watch, and I broke my cool TokyoFlash nerd watch. This is why I don't own a $350 Movado. Well, this and not having three hundred and fifty dollars.

3) I need to set the clock on my car stereo to more accurately reflect the official MTA time. Twice this week, the train has arrived while I'm still sitting in the car, happily listening to Terri Gross and "Fresh Air". When I say I want to start running again, I am not referring to a 100-yard dash at 6:44 AM.

4) Far too many students in the Einstein class failed to correctly explain the nature of the "Twin Paradox" in the midterm exam. (It has nothing to do with the fact that the twins are different ages - that is NOT a paradox. It's that it seems like each of them will expect to find the OTHER one younger if we naively apply the time dilation equations to both the Earthbound and rocket-borne twins.) I'm not sure who to blame for this. I know I'm not doing AS good a job in the course as I did last year, but I'm also pretty sure there hasn't been a day when all 12 students were present in the class since the first week. Thus, I choose to blame THEM.

5) New train schedules came out this week, so I had to go into the timetable document I keep in my iCal and twiddle a lot of the times by 2-3 minutes in various directions. I always open the new train schedules expecting big news like "We made the insufferable train you get stuck on after faculty meetings an EXPRESS instead of a local that stops every 200 feet in New Jersey" or "We've added a train at 8:45 PM so you can go to an after-work party and not get home at 2:00 in the morning", but... no... it's always just "We've changed the 6:29 AM train to 6:31". Which, when you have no watch and your dashboard clock is 8 minutes slow... really doesn't make a damned bit of difference.

out of control...

I have not exercised in more than a month. I am subsisting largely on candy-bars and cake. I spend most of the time in my office leaning back in my chair strafing the web for something.... ANYTHING more interesting than my actual work.

Something needs to be done.

the McCain voters speak...

So, as I said... I was running a science film festival at the University today. It went pretty well. The main feature was actually very good. The only unexpected occurrence was that during a Q&A session a, 70 year-old lady spoke up and wanted to know why there were no movies about UFO's or extraterrestrials or the cities that NASA discovered on the far side of the Moon. And also a bridge apparently. (She said she was "very up on this sort of thing".)

I deftly dodged this question and foisted it off on the festival organizer, who handily answered it by saying that, after all... these films were all FICTIONAL movies involving scientists... NOT documentaries!

at the movies...

Today I'm running/hosting a science film festival at the University. It's an organization that is sponsoring screenings all over the city, and somehow i got put in charge of our involvement with them.

As is always the case when I am "in charge" of something - my only hope for today is that I don't have to make any decisions or accept any responsibility.

Oh, and I guess I also hope that the films aren't horrible.

one thing that didn't suck...

... yesterday... I was giving my midterm exam in my Einstein class, and when I came up the stairs to class, I saw one of my students (a sorta ADD type kid with a skateboard and "jewfro" who calls me "Doc"...I refer to him as my personal Sweathog) standing at the board, deriving the Lorentz t ime dilation equation for the benefit of the other students who had come early to study.

It was so cute that I took a picture!

on the shoulders of a giant mess...

Welcome, science folks, to my little anonymous corner of the science-blogger community, where the science content takes a distant back seat to my daily bitching and moaning. Today? Speeding tickets, visiting inlaws, students skipping midterm exams, committee meetings, last-minute graphic art projects...

Meanwhile, since my blog is "anonymous" I use an anonymous junky email address for all my correspondence. Including the correspondence where, apparently, who-knows-how-many months ago, I volunteered to host an upcoming Giant's Shoulder's blog carnival of classic science papers. And by upcoming, I mean... I have one hour left to post the thing before I can be accused of totally screwing up and dropping the ball.

Those of you who are regulars here will be less than surprised.

The rest of you... if you are expecting one of those "theme" carnival entries where I wrap all of the posts in some sort of imaginative, high-concept, clever cleverness... well... be prepared to be as disappointed as my 15 regular readers have become accustomed to.

On with it!!

First up, Karin Chenoweth presents There He Goes Again (Charles "Bell Curve" Murray on Education) posted at Britannica Blog.

Alvaro Fernandez presents Santiago Ramon y Cajal: Recollections of My Life posted at Sharp Brains.

Romeo Vitelli presents Dr. Fliess' Patient posted at Providentia.

MBB presents Credit Card Numbers and The Luhn Algorithm posted at Money Blue Book Finance Blog

Yoo presents 137 posted at Stochastic Scribbles.

Greg Laden presents Cultural Evolution from Mosquitos to Worm Grunting posted at Greg Laden's Blog.

John Dennehy presents The Evilutionary Biologist: This Week's Citation Classic: GFP posted at The Evilutionary Biologist.

Scicurious from Neurotopia brings is a post about Aristotle's work on Memory, circa 350 BCE.

Epicanis presents "A Proposed Structure for the Nucleic Acids" posted at The Big Room

That's all I've got for you folks. It looks like a great bunch of posts. Enjoy! And come back again! My pledge to my readers -The curmudgeonliness never ends!

working against the system...

One of the things that bugs me about the MacOS is that they seem to be getting more and more strict about demanding that certain things go in certain system-defined folders like "Documents" "Downloads". (A behavior that strikes me as annoyingly Windowsy.) This is posing a problem for my Hard Drive Reorganization Project, for a couple of reasons. It means, for example, that I can't rename the "Music" folder created by OSX to "Music and Audio" (which more accurately encompasses lectures and stuff I want to store in subfolders) because if I do, the Mac will make a new folder called "Music" with a new empty library every time I start iTunes.

Fuck. You. Steve.

Also, I want my folders to appear in a particular order in popups and list views, with the most-important and most-accessed folders at the top, and I can't get these other stupid folders out of my way. So, my big achievement for the morning was coming up with names for my most important folders that all begin with "A", "B", "C" , or an early "D" so that they appear ABOVE the un-changable "Desktop" and "Downloads" folders. Hence...

* Articles, Books, & Resources
* Consulting & Side Projects
* Coursework & Teaching
* CV & Professional
* Departmental & Committee Docs

The only folder still stubbornly resisting the scheme is the folder full of my writing projects, currently called "Writing and Research". The obvious "Daves Writing and Research" seems like a cheat. Any suggestions for a better name that alphabetically precedes "DESKTOP"?

10.12...

So. This it. The first day of the last year of my "thirties".

It's not starting off so well, honestly.

I'm on the train, heading into the city for a rehearsal of a play that I only barely take credit for having co-written... that I certainly am tired of hearing, much less "performing" in and reading all the way through two more times in the next two weeks. I'll be gone until at least 6:00, because the trains only run once every fucking 2 hours on the weekends. There will be perfunctory cake when I get home I'm sure, to be followed by a return to cleaning the whole fucking house in preparation for a visit from the in-laws that will involve recruiting my father-in-law to help us with what I regard as an utterly pointless (and financially wasteful) remodeling of the first floor washroom. Given the usual dynamic between my wife and her father, I'm willing to bet all of my birthday money that at some point during the week, there will be crying.

Oh, yeah. and if I don't spend this train ride in grading papers, I am utterly fucked for the remainder of the week. My iCal screen looks like a decorative tile mosaic.

commuting woes...

Not only are they checking the boxes now, but as of next month, the parking fuckers are charging $2.25 for parking instead of $2.00. Now I have to keep a fucking pile of quarters in the car.

The 8:30 train is kinda awesome. The 9:50, on the other hand, is full of large groups of children and large groups of old people. Which group will irritate Dave more? STAY TUNED!!

i'm too sexy for this party...

I can't believe I hung around my office all day for THAT. A party with almost nobody to talk to from my division of the school, no booze other than wine... a complete waste of my evening.

I had already decided to bail on the Death Cab gig... I can't stay out that late in the middle of the week... I'll be a wreck for DAYS.

In the meantime, I got almost nothing accomplished today. And I have a headache.

old white bluegrass musicians for Obama...

This radio ad from Virginia is a million kinds of awesome. Even more awesome...? I read today that new polls have Obama with a double digit lead in VA.

I'm starting to move beyond fantasizing about an Obama win and fantasizing about a big blue map electoral landslide. How awesome would that be? Last time I poked at an interactive map, I gave Obama 290, but it looks like I may have been being conservative. (no pun intended.)

Hopes? Up!

Mistake? Usually!

getting things done...

Or, NOT. The weekend was a compete fucking waste. I mowed the lawn, that's about it. We have less than 2 weeks before the in-laws come, and the house is still... oy.

Work is starting to pile up. I have things to grade all of a sudden, and exams start up next week. Then there are all these other projects - the film festivals and the play readings - that require my attention.

Today I have a morning class, then no other "official" commitments until 5:00 PM, when I have a work party. That gives me 4 or 5 hours to sit and catch up on stuff. Then Thursday I have no classes (Yom Kippur) but I do have a 4:00 meeting, so... here is another day when I can just focus on the crap that slips through the cracks of my everyday routine. No plans yet for closing those cracks.

screw the Dow, this is gonna cost me $2 EVERY DAY...

When I first moved here, parking at the train station was free. Then the greedy bastards at the MTA decided that, no... this would not do, and started charging $2/day for parking. And instead of offering a monthly pass, you can only buy passes in 3, 6, or 12 month amounts, which doesn't always work well if you are in academia and have long stretches when you don't have to commute. The alternative is to pay every day, and the high-tech system they have in place is a BOX with numbered slits in it. You note which spot you parked in, fold your two dollar bills 10 times until they are narrow enough to fit into the slit, which if they are the slightest bit wrinkled makes them too THICK to fit into the slit. Luckily they provide a helpful "crammer" tool dangling from the box to aid with this task.

So one morning last November I'm cramming my wrinkly dollar bills into slot 210, and a few minutes later a guy walks up to me and says - "Hey, I see you here a lot... I thought I'd let you know... they don't really check those boxes, they just take the money out. I haven't paid for parking in months."

Now, I'm not one to take legal and or financial advice from random guys on train platforms, but I figured, what the hell... let me try not paying a few times. That was last November. I have not paid for parking since. No tickets.

Until this Monday, that is. The jig is up!

I assume the financial crisis has taken its toll on the MTA and they are cracking down on their lazy parking money collectors. Either that or too many friendly people on the platform let this secret get out and they noticed that the lot was full and the box was empty. Either way, the upshot is... $40/month that I have to spend now that I haven't been, which really fucking sucks. I probably saved something like $300 over the past year (minus this week's $7 ticket) so I probably shouldn't complain. But I will, of course.