Bovine Milliners in the Lab

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Experimental Error: Don’t Try This at Home

I recently watched the online trailer for a stage scientist named Doktor Kaboom!. (I presume it’s a pseudonym. Either that, or his grandparents had it changed from Kaboomowitz at Ellis Island.) From the trailer, I gleaned that Doktor Kaboom!’s primary mission, as one might imagine, is making various household objects go kaboom. Watching him catapult a banana across the stage, I realized exactly how Doktor Kaboom! and his ilk perpetuate myths about scientists.

“He’s completely misrepresenting us,” I complained to my wife as the video clip played. “He’s making us look awesome.”

Media portrayal of scientists is pretty much a binary state. Either we’re boring automatons in lab coats, babbling incomprehensibly, or we’re like Doctor Kaboom!, hiding the 80% of the job that’s not particularly exciting. Why do it, then? Because the other 20% of it is worth it.

One nit, though:

We are distrusted, feared, but most of all, misunderstood. We work, after all, in one of the only two professions that idiomatically follow the word “mad” — the other such profession being “hatter.”

The author forgets “cow.” Not that that is a profession to which one aspires. Outside of India.

via ZapperZ

Jump, Frog! Jump!

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More accurately, it’s “Backflip, Frog! Backflip!”

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My sister had bought some of these toys for the purpose of distracting small children (with whom she works), and since I often play a small children on not-TV, I had to film it. Unfortunately I was lacking in the proper lighting equipment and it was raining, I made do with indoor lighting and my one lamp. Ergo, it’s a little dark (as far as the lighting goes. The plot is rather uplifting, I would say) though I was able to improve it a little with iMovie.

Sunset

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Time-lapse sunset at Lake Chautauqua, though it loses something with the youtube compression. The lake is not slanted — that was user error in setting up on a bit of a hill and not noticing that the camera wasn’t level. 12 second pause between shots, and the twilight is extended because the camera was on autoexposure, so it compensated for low light by taking longer exposures. Also used a polarizing filter to cut some of the glare, since we know that light reflected off of the lake will have a component that is linearly polarized, parallel to the water.

Tom's Back

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As promised, Tom’s back. (Wearing a NYC subway tee given to me by my brother)

I won’t get into whether it was a well-deserved vacation — I’m a federal employee and I am entitled to it. And now, of course, I’m exhausted. Vacations are restful in one sense, but tiring in another; add to that the drive back, through Pennsylvania’s road construction “paradise” and entering the Washington traffic at rush “hour” on a Friday, with its stress and fatigue. Add to that the toll that eating vacation cuisine puts on you. I’m glad I have the weekend to recover.

I did all the things I promised I would. The reunion had ~150 attendees, and I got to see all of my aunts and uncles and all but one first cousin on both sides of the family (the outlier being a Florida resident, on my dad’s side, i.e. not drawn in by the reunion of my mom’s side of the family), and loads of more distant relatives. Of course you can’t get that many people together without some melodrama, because not everybody gets along (owing to some slight, real or imagined) but I try to stay away from all that. I plead ignorance and apathy, and not necessarily in that order. It’s just so high school.

Even without the reality non-TV, we had an eventful week. Rain early on, peaking with a storm on Saturday that spawned several tornadoes, with damage being done just a mile or two up the road (including destruction at a condo where we had stayed a few years ago). The weather after Sunday ~noon was fabulous, so the lack of air conditioning wasn’t a problem at all. Got out geocaching Monday – Thursday, with the only issue being that I didn’t have time to download the clues, note the size or read the backstories of the caches, which undoubtedly cost me a find or two; micro-caches in the woods are tough without a clue, with a potential search area of up to a thousand square feet (or even more, on occasion). It also helps to know if you’re looking for a pill bottle vs an ammo container.

I also put my cameras to work, and will be processing the results and posting them soon. I’m way behind on internet reading, but did manage to finish two books I was working on (Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre, which had popped up on my radar recently, and Collapse by Jared Diamond, that I’d been working on for seemingly forever)

The Butler Didn't Do It

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Recently a colleague and I were noticing a potentially dangerous sharp edge in the lab, and the phrase “blood on the optics” was uttered. Which would be a really good title for a murder mystery taking place in a physics lab. Perhaps using the detective character I invented for the story line of a “puzzle” geocache: Daft Madly. I love you Madly, though you treat me badly … (His mother’s name is Truly and has remarried, making her Truly Madly-Deeply)

Blood on the Optics
A Daft Madly Novel