Sick Dude Day

Nothing that an Elmo shirt, a pacifier, and Jake and the Never Land Pirates can't fix.

The Pip has pinkeye. Again. This means he can’t go to day care for at least one day, which means I’m home with him for the morning, and Kate will tag in at lunchtime so I can go teach my class. This, in turn, means that you don’t get any substantive blogging today, because the… Continue reading Sick Dude Day

SteelyKid, Life Scientist

SteelyKid's precise internal structure, illustrated by SteelyKid/

It’s been a rough week, so here’s some cute-kid stuff. The “featured image” above is a giant picture from SteelyKid’s after-school day care, where they’re talking about bodies and bones. It’s a tracing of her outline, filled in with her drawings of bones, joints, a grinning skull, a brain, blood vessels, a spine, and what… Continue reading SteelyKid, Life Scientist

Optics Question: How Did the Photographer Do That?

Max Planck knows what I did last summer. (Photo by Ryan Lash)

Yes, that’s another TED@NYC picture as the “featured image,” but don’t run away! It’s a post about science, I swear! The photo up above is from the Flickr set (which, by the way, has been edited significantly since yesterday…), and I like it a good deal. Mostly because, as the joking caption suggests, that photo… Continue reading Optics Question: How Did the Photographer Do That?

Supreme Leader of Quantumland

"We must move forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards the formation of an interference pattern from many single-particle detections!" (Photo by Ryan Lash)

The nice folks at TED have put up a giant Flickr set of pictures from last week’s event. I’m not sure it’s complete, but I happened to notice it this morning, and it already had several pictures of me in it, which is all I really care about. I particularly like the “featured image” above,… Continue reading Supreme Leader of Quantumland

SteelyKid: Junior Rock Star Scientist

SteelyKid playing with the rocks at the Schenectady Curling Club's open house.

I’m off to The City for TED@NYC on Tuesday, and while I might schedule something with the approximate text of my talk for Wednesday morning, more substantial blogging won’t resume until Thursday. But I don’t want to leave political post as the top thing on the blog, so here, have a cute kid picture. This… Continue reading SteelyKid: Junior Rock Star Scientist

The 15 Most Interesting Force-Carrying Bosons

CGI photon from Physics World (http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2012/aug/10/photon-shape-could-be-used-to-encode-quantum-information )

It’s gradually becoming clear to me that this blogging thing is old hat. It’s a Web 4.0 world now, and we’re all just Tmblng through it. So, I need to get with modernity, and start posting the listicles that are the bread and butter of the new social media order. Thus, I give you a… Continue reading The 15 Most Interesting Force-Carrying Bosons

So Long, Summer

Last ice cream of pool season.

It’s Labor Day in the US, and due to a weird quirk of scheduling, for once I didn’t have to spend it at work. This is also the traditional end of the summer season, so SteelyKid and I went over to the JCC pool for one last dip and a final ice cream cone from… Continue reading So Long, Summer

Get to the Chopper!

SteelyKid is my co-pilot.

We won a family pass to the Empire State Aerosciences Museum just across the river in Glenville, and since soccer was canceled for the holiday weekend, I took the kids over there this morning. They had a couple of their collection of decommissioned military aircraft open, including the Huey helicopter SteelyKid is thinking about co-piloting… Continue reading Get to the Chopper!

It’s Not Scientific Parenting Without Graphs

Growth curve for SteelyKid. The solid line is a linear fit to the data.

Early last year, we began marking SteelyKid’s height off on a door frame in the library. She occasionally demands a re-measurement, and Saturday was one of those days. Which made me notice that we now have a substantial number of heights recorded, and you know what that means: it’s time for a graph. The “featured… Continue reading It’s Not Scientific Parenting Without Graphs