Jealousy

I'm not gonna link here. But I am going to say that I'm jealous of PhD students that get invited to present at $1200 conferences when my full time employer only offers to pay 55% of $300 conferences. (And that's the "high" level of funding.)

That said, L wants to be known in this blog only as L, and that's fine with me.

And some folks at work were surprised that I was keeping a blog. Duh!

I actually attended my first collegiate athletic event this weekend. Who needs football in 100 million dollar stadiums when I can stand 5 feet away from the players for free.

The inspiration for going was that the coaching staff and some of the players put on a little clinic at the Y on Friday night. 2 hours of strategy and then a chance to hit with some world class players. It was pretty cool. Seeing them play two days later made me really appreciate the athleticism involved in high-level tennis. These guys can really move around the court. Several times I saw guys sliding to a stop on the hard surface to change directions. I'm sure I'd blow out a knee if I tried the same thing. Hell--I'm sure I couldn't build enough momentum to make myself overcome the friction of the surface.

Late, oh so late.

So I told myself that I'd quit working when my battery ran low, which I did. But it only caused me to walk across the room and plug in. But I did stop working--I just switched to reading and surfing. Visited a couple friends. Moved around a couple bookmarks. Looked at the logs for whatsgrowing. The new host provider includes a report that shows what words people used when they searched for something and wound up finding your site. It is incredibly weird, and someday I might just share the results with someone other than my wife.

But for the insatiably curious: strange things happen when you use the word dildo on a webpage.

Where's the scientists?

Can somebody please tell me why there are thousands (well, ok, maybe hundreds) of librarian bloggers, but no scientists? I can't find a damn biologist with a blog?

Is it because there's actually news magazines and sites for biology that are commercial ventures?

I finally found a chemistry blog. It's of the news sort--not a diary.

Oh--nevermind. Down at the bottom of the chemistry one above. Found them. See, all it takes is one?

This one is completely what I've been looking for. It's also got some links to an alternative pubmed browser that looks all xml'y. This definitely warrants looking in to--many of the posts are dedicated to literature searches. People are using this like an online endnote--just what I had in mind for the OnlineNW paper.

The lecture lifestyle.

Two more this week. The first was on post-fire salvage logging in SW Oregon. Very dissappointing. It seemed like neither OSU professor actually gave any sort of opinion. They also filled their talks with technical jargon that was probably only understood by the loggers and hard-core environmentalists in the room. There was a lot of grumbling all around.

The second was also sort of dissappointing. Oddly, I don't think it would have dissappointed at all if it was in a room with 50 people, but it was a standing room only ballroom in a downtown hotel. I thought this guy was gonna be rock star--but he turned out to be an average academic.

Neither lecture warrants a link.

Oh, ok. The geographer deserves one just because radical geography is cool. Maybe if he was miked better...?

Good lecture.

Just saw a great lecture by an evolutionary biologist who's been working on religion as an evolved trait of humanity. And who says it's all in your genes.

Here's my full description.

white fluffy cold

SNOW! I could have stayed in the midwest and suffered a week of snow and freezing rain. We managed to make the most of it though, and went snowshoeing at a place that didn't have any snow at all last year.

I'm starting to think there should be light rail up to Willamette Pass, we've been driving up it so much. Such a fantastic landscape right in our backyard. Our friend Kelly brought her digital camera, so we get to share these pictures immediately:

Isn't she lovely ladies and gentleman? That's my wife:




For a good chunk of the hike, we were in some pretty tall forest:




It's hard not to be picturesque. When I met with the Photozone people, they all agreed that when you first move to the west, you can't help but take Western Landscapes. By the way: this is a color picture. Can't hardly tell, can you?



Did I mention Kurt was with us?




I've been slowly reading this here blog from its inception, three years ago. I like the guy's work, and for some reason find his story really compelling. Also--some of the best photo links I've seen. How come I never find good stuff like this?

Why Things Bite Back

Edward Tenner. 1996.

I'd like to get back to this book at some point--it's been recalled, so I haven't had a chance to do more than skim. Presents tons of references and examples of how technology is a double-edged blade, and how we design around it's destructive possibilities. And it's well written--which makes it automatically not a Science Studies book. Not useful for class, but possibly intersting at a later date.