the difference between scientists and the rest of you...

A normal person might be browsing the Facebook members of his or her graduating high school class and have the thought, "I wonder why there aren't more people on here?" While a scientist will spend the next half hour tallying hits for every graduating class from 1975 to 2009 and looking for a correlation between age and likelihood of having a Facebook page..



(The blue line is a fit to a decreasing exponential)

There is nothing more beautiful than DATA!!

first week...

First day of class was highly awesome, despite having a cold and only half my normal voice. Classes are full-ish. Only 2 or 3 students frightened away.

First day of no-class was excellent and productive. New plan for no-class days. Connect old G4 to big monitor. Open Hulu.com. Watch last night's Daily Show while working on Keynotes.

Second day of class... snow and ice storm plus COMPLETE loss of voice results in decision to cancel classes for the day. It kills me to do this on the second day of a course, but in both cases I came up with a plan to get us back on schedule by week 3.

Second day of no-class... Left the house a little late for the 8:30 train, but I had to get the hell out of there. The kids were NON-STOP-CRAZY all day yesterday, and I just can not deal with another snow day at the house. I'll be taking a 9:50 train (i think... i should check that) but for now I'm hanging at the coffee house and answering some nagging emails. Thursday will be "nagging email day" this semester.

I have other things going on today too. We'll see what gets done. I should probably wrap up here and head to the station now.

back...

First class in about 2 hours. I feel like crap. Headache, sore throat, stuffy, sniffly... all of the Nyquil Dwarves. Hoping that a combination of decongestants, tea, and adrenaline can get me through.

The thing that I knew would happen has happened already. I'm teaching a big NEW class this semester and a smaller taught-many-times-before class. The new one is at 2:00 PM and the older class is at 10:00 AM. The new class obviously involves more preparation and will receive most of my attention. This means that every Monday and Wednesday at around 8:00 in the morning, I will be in the middle of working on a Keynote for my afternoon class, and I will have the thought - "FUCK! I haven't thought about what I'm doing in my 10:00 class today!!"

To try to head this off, I'm using the new outlining tools in Pages to assemble a daily outline for the morning quantum mechanics course. Since I've done this class before, I'm pretty clear on the topic for each day. If I look about 2 weeks ahead and write a detailed outline for each day, I should be able to walk into class and teach it off the top of my head without experiencing that panic-moment. I already have the first two classes done, and the next two roughly sketched. I feel very good about it. Imagine how useful these outlines will be next time I teach the course! Imagine NOT re-thinking what to do in class every year. What a concept...

hope-jitsu...



Is it me or is our new President GETTIN' SHIT DONE?!! I bet the Republicans are gonna be real sorry they've spent the last 8 years giving the executive branch unchecked power. Executive order away!!

pre-semester work day...

Heading in on the train today. I really had to DRAG myself out of the house. Nothing I have to do today is URGENT, and most of it could be done at home, but... it would make for a hectic Monday if I didn't have some of the photocopying and whatnot all ready to go, so... here I am.

I had to free my car from a fucking GLACIER to get out of the house. It hasn't snowed for weeks, but I haven't driven in about a month, so my car was carrying the crust of about 3 snowstorms. I finally resorted to banging it with my fist to break off giant sheets of 1" thick ice. I love winter.

Not much to say about the past few days. The inauguration was hope-tastic. My wife's birthday was yesterday and we went out for lunch by ourselves, then I made Chinese food for dinner. (Most remarkable part of that - the Boy ATE some of it. MEAT even!!) There was also supermarket-cake. Once the supermarket-cake is gone, I'm going on a fucking fast. I think I've gained back all the weight I lost from before I started running over the summer. The problem is... I can't be left at home all day in a house full of food. If I'm not careful, when I go on sabbatical next spring, I'm going to gain 100 pounds.

Anyways. I don't want to spend too much time on this, because I really DO want to accomplish some things before I get to work. It's going to be an interesting semester. I have a light load, but a new course, so... I can't really figure out how busy I'll feel. I'm going to try to be more disciplined about my schedule, but.. we all know how THAT usually works out.

travel blogging 3...

San Antonio, 11:53 PM : I was going to complain about the short connection in Houston and the 10 minute lateness and having to go through security again and almost missing my flight, but instead I think I'll just shut the hell up and be thankful that none of my three planes LANDED IN A FUCKING RIVER.

travel blogging 2...

Philly to Houston, 2:45 : The first flight was short and easy, but the connection was tight. I got to the gate just as they were boarding my zone. I can do without that. It doesn't promise to be much better on the next leg, given that we are apparently facing some kind of unusually strong (120 mph) headwind all the way to Texas. If we land more than about 10-15 min behind schedule, I'm going to have a hard time making my next flight.

I made a serious miscalculation in my plans to watch a movie. I brought the nice, new, hi-fidelity headphones with me that I got for Xmas, but I left my regular ear-buds at home. Bad call. Because while the new headphones are great quality, they are NOT high volume, and given that they are an open-ear design rather than a in-ear or closed-ear... I can't hear a fucking thing on a plane. Not enough to make out dialogue when I'm already going deaf, anyway. (They'll probably do for music, where my brain can fill in the gaps.) Meanwhile the chick behind me has the music so loud in HER earbuds that I can hear every fucking word.

I suppose I could work instead. Or nap. I brought my special napping-glasses!

Over Mississippi, 3:45 : One more environment to add to the list of things-what-hurt-my-arthritis... joining "cold" and "damp" it's... "fluctuating cabin pressure".

Slept through the bulk of my Philip Glass string quartet collection. Woke up and now I'm fucking starving. I've had nothing to eat but LifeSavers, TicTacs, and a chocolate croissant, And I haven't had time for a second cup of tea, so I'm going to have a raging headache soon.

Just set my watch back an hour, then realized something seemed amiss. Checked the time on my computer and found it TWO hours ahead of my watch. Wtf? Realized that I hadn't worn this watch since I was in Chicago, and it was ALREADY set an hour back.

travel blogging...

New York, 10:44 : I'm thinking a full day of bouncing from airport to airplane (x3) would be a good time to catch up on some blogging. Of course it would be a good time to catch up on a lot of things, not the least of which is the work for the consulting gig that I'm flying to. But... no need to rush things.

I forget how much nicer it is to fly out of these local airports than a big airport like JFK. It's not just the short (or nonexistent) lines, but the fact that the TSA people at security are actually FRIENDLY instead of being assholes. That makes a big difference in how one's mood starts out at the beginning of a trip.

If only the same were true at my house. Oh the chaos. The chaos and hysteria. It makes me crazy. I have been to the funerals of dear, dear relatives where I did not cry nearly as much as my daughter does when she can't find her hairbrush. Readers with girls (or who are girls and can remember being 9), please tell me... WHEN DOES THIS STOP??? If you say never, I may not be coming home from San Antonio.

RE: Work: Probably the most surprising thing about the past 2 weeks is how much work I've gotten done. Of course, it's been at the expense of neglecting a bunch of household stuff, but... my syllabi for the upcoming semester are basically solid. THis is a big deal because one of the courses is new. Usually for a new course, my syllabus is a little sketchy... week one... week two, etc. This new syllabus has specific dates and due dates for assignments and stuff. It's very impressive. Take my word for it.

RE: iWork: I downloaded the 30 day demo version of Apple's iWork 09 last week, and it only took 2 days of messing with it until I broke down and placed my order. The changes to Pages are minimal-if-handy, but the new doodads in Keynote I can not live without. The MagicMove transition is really awesome when used with purpose. (A bunch of stars of different types shuffling positions from a pie graph of their population into a Hertzprung-Russel diagram! Take my word for it.) The ability to edit gradients means that I can make circles look like spheres. Being able to draw spheres in Keynote is incredibly important when almost every lecture you give mentions balls, stars, atoms, or quarks. And then there are little things like a greater variety of little shapes that can go on the ends of lines instead of plain arrows. A lot of the text transitions are incredibly obnoxious, and will be used to distracting effect by people with less visual style than yours truly, but... having a big new bag of tricks to play with is going to make creating new presentations for this new class feel a lot less like "work".



(POSTED VIA FREE iPHONE ACCESS USING "USER AGENT SWITCHER" FOR FIREFOX! TAKE THAT STUPID NON-FREE AIRPORT INTERNET)

O' Christmas Tree, O' Christmas Tree...

You are so dry and prickle-y...

O' Christmas Tree, O' Christmas Tree...

We leave you up til' Febru-ree...

poor blog...

Poor neglected blog.