Terrible Lizard

Beware, if you find yourself in Indonesia (or Chicago) one day. The Shedd Aquarium has this notorious monitor lizard.

Continue reading "Terrible Lizard"!

Windy City Excursion

I'm traveling to Chicago this weekend to attend a conference with some grad-student friends. Chicago is one of my favorite cities, so it should be a good time. I'll post about it while I'm there, hopefully with some decent pictures.

In preparing for the trip, I searched Google Maps for my hotel's location. Has anyone noticed they have added Wikipedia to the maps of most areas of the country? If you toggle the option on, dozens of tiny W's pop up, each representing a Wikipedia page corresponding to that location.


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Most of the articles relate to architecture and geography, but one can assume Google is adding more every day. This is such a useful idea. Along with street view and the photos option, you can get a pretty realistic account of a place, beyond simple geography. It's one thing to read about local attractions in a book or on a website, but integrating that information into a map allows you to see at a glance where in space it's located. When I visit a new place, I try to form a map of it in my head, based on the real map, and refer to it as I go. This just makes that easier. Information association and merging of this sort is really powerful, and it seems like a lot of new web applications are going in that direction.

Aside from conference talks, I plan to spend some time at one of the main museum campuses.


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I've been to the Field Museum multiple times, but wouldn't mind going back, it's so good. The Shedd Aquarium, however, I haven't been to, so that's on the list of things to do. Continue reading "Windy City Excursion"!

Something to watch/TiVo/download from the internet

Airing on public television his fall.



Mario Batali and Gwyneth Paltrow travel and cook Spanish food. They are friends? It appears so, because, at one point, she calls him "Batals." They are totally BFFs. Willie Nelson music and Michael Stipe from R.E.M makes an appearance. Bizarre, sure, but this looks sort of interesting. It also features Mark Bittman, a food guy for the New York Times. Coincidentally, Bittman has a NYT blog called Bitten. Continue reading "Something to watch/TiVo/download from the internet"!

Media wallz

Sensory tables are often used in elementary schools to provide children, especially those with developmental disabilities like autism, something to play with and focus on. The're filled with things like small blocks, stones, sand, popcorn, buttons - great for providing tactile stimulation. That's nice, and I'd sure like to have one, but it's sort of a stone-age solution. The sensory table of the future will look a lot different. Echoing something out of Minority Report, this interactive media wall is now on sale at Neiman Marcus. Only 100,000 dollars! Check out the demonstration video, it's so cool. Here's another one from Youtube.



Oh, I want one. I'm used to the touch screen on my iPhone, but this thing recognizes some really complicated hand gestures. Imagine having one on every flat surface in your house.

If things pan out as they do in Minority Report, we'll be doing our computing like this, by 2052.

Continue reading "Media wallz"!

Hard mistake

It's been a while, I've been distracted with end of term. That's all over now. I plan to post thoughts on my first year of graduate school later. For now, a silly story.

A University of Michigan professor of archaeology recently took his 7-year-old son to a Detroit Tiger's game. The boy was thirsty, so dad bought him a lemonade. Oops, it was alcoholic - a Mike's Hard Lemonade. In the ninth inning, a security guard stopped by and took the bottle from the kid. Sounds like an honest mistake, right? Enlighten the guy and be done with it. Well, no.

The kid was rushed to the children's hospital, given blood tests, and observed for the rest of the day. The father was questioned by police, and then child services took the kid into foster care, where he remained for two days until his mother was allowed to retrieve him. The father was then forced to move to a hotel for a week.

All of this for 12 ounces of sugary swill? This man was ostracized and denied parental rights - legally obligated recourse - because he accidently fed his child a few grams of alcohol, but there is no action against parents that chronically medicate, overfeed, and home school their children into oblivion. The worst part? That lemonade cost 7 dollars! Continue reading "Hard mistake"!

Elements of a good evening

Finals are approaching. I studied all day and rewarded myself.



Otherwise busy with more end of term nonsense. Frak! Undergraduate interviews, experiment planning, conference scheduling, advisory-committee forming, meetings...

Some quick notes.

Today is the 76th birthday of Cheeta (aka Jiggs), the oldest non-human primate. Cheeta appeared in some of the Tarzan movies, Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (which sounds amazing) and the original Doctor Doolittle. There are plans for a ghost-written autobiography.

This article from The Atlantic critiques the state of education in America and offers some suggestions in the spirit of Horace Mann. It's one of those problems without a clear solution and I don't think we're to see any change soon. At least not until unscrupulous, out of touch baby boomers are gone from local school boards and teacher unions. Study your maths, kids!

There is a vacancy at the post of London Underground announcer, and people want David Attenborough to fill it. The woman who has provided the vocals for the "mind the gap" and other Tube voice overs years past was sacked a while back, partly over spoof announcements posted on her website, such as "We would like to remind our American tourist friends that you are almost certainly talking too loudly" (its true, the gits).

Cheers Continue reading "Elements of a good evening"!

One more thing I can blame on George W. Bush

I didn't get the NSF fellowship. No, it wasn't some demented April-Fool's joke, I tripled checked the list for my name. Today I've oscillated between vague annoyance and bitter resentment, but thankfully this has little bearing on my future in graduate school. Contrary to popular belief, life is not all about the Benjamins. I also maintain eligibility for the fellowship this fall, so I can reapply if I wish. The experience wasn't a complete waste of time, however, as the NSF politely awarded me an Honorable Mention (read: better luck next time, sucker!). This is actually a nice distinction. It means I was in roughly the top 20% of applications, just missed that elusive It Factor, that hook.

Jeremiah, fellow first year, received one of the awards. He totally deserves it (though, so do I), but of course I can't help feeling a little competitive. This is how I imagined everything would play out. I assumed one of us, if any, would get it. Given the limits placed on federal research funding over the past few years, these organizations are left with fewer awards and growing applicant pools.

So today, I am the bridesmaid, the wingman. I am Barney Rubble and Fred Mertz. Continue reading "One more thing I can blame on George W. Bush"!