I haven't posted anything on here in a while, but for some reason this one feels a little too long to post on Facebook, so I'm putting it here. Matt convinced me to watch the Alien series of movies over the past few weeks. It's interesting how different they each are. Alien and Aliens were both pretty good, in somewhat different ways. Alien in ( Read more... )

One of the nice things about being an academic is that you can take the day off to go to the beach if you need to. And today we definitely needed to. It was 113 degrees F today, which is a record high for all time in LA. I believe that temperature was actually recorded on the USC campus - somehow it was hotter in Downtown than in Pasadena. And ( Read more... )

Don't ask don't tell was declared unconstitutional (1st amendment!)

The stem cell ban got an injunction

The Koran-burning pastor decided to cancel the burning

Sarah Palin endorsed the teabagger in Delaware

I was on a long wikipedia jag this evening, reading about oils of all sorts, ranging from petroleum, gasoline, and mineral oil to vegetable oils, trans fats, and triglycerides, as well as some issues about how you get the products we use out of the naturally occurring mixtures of chemicals. But I ran into some interesting stuff about oil spills, ( Read more... )

A variety of events conspired to make it very difficult for me to vote. First, voting day was the day I flew back down to LA from Berkeley, and I didn't notice this fact until the day that was the deadline for the secretary of state to receive my vote-by-mail form. But fortunately, I managed to get standby on an earlier flight (Matt had to go to ( Read more... )

Apparently, Deepak Chopra is the most influential person in her life. Given the way she was dressed, I assumed she was going to say Madonna, because i seems like an obvious homage outfit.

A few weeks ago, I noticed that the "S" key on my keyboard was getting a little loose, and then one day it just fell off entirely. I was very worried about this because my computer is less than a year old so it's really nowhere near time for an upgrade, and if I took it in to the Apple store to get it fixed I might have to go without my computer ( Read more... )

I had some strange dreams last night involving iPads. (I don't know if it counts as one especially disjointed dream or several individual dreams.) I was using an iPad somewhere, but accidentally left it when I came back home. Fortunately, I was able to use the button on my computer that either turns off the iPad remotely or brings it back home ( ( Read more... )

Apparently Barack Obama will be on campus this evening ( Read more... )

How many of you get e-mails like this one? I never have, but perhaps this is just because I don't work in a field where people are expected to do post-docs. It seems really sad to me - it sounds like this person has learned a lot about some very specific things, and yet is at the same time woefully clueless about absolutely everything else. I ( Read more... )