The wait is finally over. Actually, "waits" since I now know both when I'll be starting my new gig and what I'll be getting paid. On the first point, I'm officially starting on Monday. The upshot of that is that I'll be flying out to San Jose Sunday night and spending the week at GWHQ, treading on the ground that was so recently graced by the ( Read more... )

A friend of mine gave his first-ever conference talk last week. He's a math grad student and mathematicians are an even worse talk audience than string theorists. Any niggling point is an immediate excuse for everyone else in the room to start in with the questions. Then the rest of the talk is spent fending off every two-bit grad student, post- ( Read more... )

Not a whole lot of work getting done tonight, but it has been a delightful night of TV watching. The Mythbusters did the "Mentos in a 2 liter bottle of Diet Coke" myth tonight. For those who've managed to miss this little bit of Mr. Wizard-esque home chemistry, you drop a handful of Mentos into a 2 liter bottle of soda (Diet Coke is the best ( Read more... )

The godfather of the intelligent design is a law prof from Berkeley named Philip Johnson. He's the guy you want to go to for quotes about how ID is really just another front in the culture wars and has nothing to do with science qua science. If you want someone who'll give the theology a patina of respectable-looking math, then Bill Dembski is ( Read more... )

I've gotta whole post building up on the weekend o' wedding back in Lamar, but I had to put this up tonight (via Pharyngula):
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This is new. Thanks to the pasty complexion of just about all of my genetic forebearers, I don't really tan in any useful sense of the word. Back when I was a kid, I'd go through a three-stage sunburn, really bad sunburn, grudging tan process every summer. Now that I'm semi-nocturnal, it's pretty much just one of the first two stages and melanin ( Read more... )

After two weeks of completely null productivity and constant pestering calls to my boss to find out where things stood, I finally have an official start date for my tenure at The Empire That Tries Not To Be Evil. I'll be starting the 21st. Or possibly the 28th. By September, for sure. It kinda reminds me of Kevin Smith's story about his phone ( Read more... )

I'm not quite sure whether it's being burned out from basically having no time off since December or the indecision of the job stuff hanging over my head or what, but I've been almost worthless work-wise for the last two weeks. I could kind of write the previous week off with the combination of being at the conference and being sick, but this week ( Read more... )

Well, neighbors at any rate. A letter to the editor of Pittsburgh's Scaife-owned Tribune-Review (via Spork):I hope Andrew Clearfield takes full advantage of being a student at Carnegie Mellon University. He has a lot to learn ( Read more... )

Nearly a decade into my career as someone who's paid to do astronomy, I've learned a few lessons. One of the first was taught me by Jonathan back in our first year of grad school and over the years I've expanded it into the Evil Genius Theory of Academic Life. The basic idea is this:During the course of your academic life, you're gonna ( Read more... )