Uncertain Principles Archive
Physics, Politics, Pop Culture; formerly on ScienceBlogs
Elite Northeastern private college tuition and fees (1989-1993): ~$80,000 Gold class ring from elite Northeastern private college: ~$500 Colorful Rainbow Loom bracelet from your seven-year-old daughter: Priceless. SteelyKid made this bracelet the other day at her after-school day care, while demonstrating to her friends that she could knit the rubber bands together with her fingers. […]
SteelyKid spent a good chunk of the afternoon playing at a friend’s house, so most of the photographic activity of the day involved The Pip energetically playing with various toys. This included a good while spent in the back yard with a Stomp Rocket: In this shot, he’s leaped with great force onto the rubber […]
A day or so ago, an essay came across my social media feeds with the title: “Greek Like Me: Confessions of a Florida Fraternity Brother.” I clicked through, and saw the subhed: “The frat code held us together—until it kept us from saving a life,” and started reading with a resigned sigh, figuring it was […]
Another crazy-busy day, with a really exhausting pick-up basketball game at lunchtime, but I did have a little time to try out two features of the new camera: the “Live” shooting mode, and the display screen on the back that flips out. These combine to allow you to take a really expensive selfie, if you […]
I said when I started this that there would inevitably be a few cell-phone snapshots, on days when I’m too busy to get fancy with the DSLR. This was one such, so here’s a quick shot of SteelyKid at tonight’s Elite Team taekwondo practice, talking to her coach. The Elite Team class is all sparring, […]
Over at whatever, John Scalzi posts a lot of sunset photos. I don’t get a lot of those, because for most of the year I need to be dealing with the kids– wrangling them home from day care, making dinner, getting them to bed– during the time when the sunset looks pretty. It’s hard to […]
I’m playing around with the various camera lenses I own, which include a rarely-used fixed 50mm focal length. This is “rarely used” because a good deal of what I use the camera for is taking pictures of the kids, and the separation needed to get them in frame with this lens is really difficult to […]
Having made a passing mention of the lake in my home town yesterday, it seems appropriate to post a photo of the lake itself. So, here you go. It’s been a very long, hot day, coming back to Chateau Steeypips from the weekend away, and then taking the kids to the last day of the […]
Today’s photo-of-the-day is of the point that gives my home town of Whitney Point its name- the Tioughnioga (left) and Otselic (right) rivers come together here, providing as good a reason as any to locate a town here back in the late 1700’s. This was originally named “Patterson’s Point”; Whitney was an innkeeper who ran […]
Today was a busy day– the kids played around my parents’ house for a while, then we went to the Field Days in Johnson City to ride carnival rides for a bit. I have some decent pictures and a bit of video from all that. For the official photo-a-day picture, though, we’ll go with something […]