December 2010
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“Make it back—we’ve got too many good things on the horizon here for...”
– Boss’s rendition of “have a good trip” was extra charming.
More in the vein of talks at beginnings →
Who at KC did what to whom in order to get speakers like these? (The day I noticed both talks were at the same place, I was super self-satisfied.)
This is water. →
How awkward that my bimonthly sadness as regards DFW has arrived during a workday, in the middle of a workday. Oddly, it was induced by thinking about the Danny Glover debacle yesterday.
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Casual racism/Leaks in the pipeline/Demographics... →
This month last year was rough. But that is a pretty amusing set of tags.
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Watch“If you can do this, why do you do science?”
This came out of a colleague last Friday, which means I’ve had a brain churning about it for 5+ days. 11^2 hours. (Maybe subtracting 6 hours of dwelling on my power to turn any man into Keyser Söze by floating the idea of “hanging out” out there. It’s a gift, or maybe a curse.) Anyhow, the “this”...
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And, in the end, me and the ghost of Burgess... →
TN’s threshold for work canceling “inclement weather” is lower than mine, which explains why the parking lot was empty and the building is like a ghost town. Given good eyesight, no inclination to leave, and time enough (at last) I can’t explain why my fingers are not yet warmed up for science writing.
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We were driving back from his friend’s house...
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The ~7 most important scientists in my origin...
At a conference in 2002, I was hanging out with #2’s wife, who I’d met almost a year before I worked for him because I used to go swim by the bowling alley on campus in the middle of the day during summertime and we were both fans of the post-swim-sauna, which seems ridiculous, but there it is—the memory: a ~20 year old and a ~70 year old, with no idea that we’d have any...
A terrible mistake
M1: Ohman, I think he's running "The Game" on me.
M2: What?! How are you even familiar with that?
M1: When I shared the front bathroom with Dennis, our back of the toilet library was 1. Nintendo Power, 2. Chemical and Engineering News, 3. Snow Crash, and 4. An Introductory German Textbook.
M2: Okay...
M1: Well, Neal Stephenson wrote Snow Crash, Neil Gaiman wrote that dark book with Terry Pratchett, and Neil Strauss had a dark and Germanic sounding last name. It just sort of happened. Anyhow, missing the point here.
M2: Good things happen to good people?
M1: You can see how on its face that should have no bearing on my life.
M2: Why were you trying to learn German?
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Not what was expected, and yet not uninteresting. →
“Marian” is my favorite fake name to use in encounters with strangers who may or may not become more familiar, because it’s common enough that people don’t get bogged down with grappling with a weird name AND it is close enough to my actual name that subsequent encounters can bear out that others simply misheard it the first time. (Which sometimes happens anyhow, because I mumble.) If...
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Family Word: Semaphorous →
I was literally midway through graduate school before I found out that the word that I had grown up with as an indicator for the lights at intersections (i.e., turn right at the 7th semaphorous) was
not an English word.
not a Spanish word.
not an Arabic word.
Scientist nomenclature being what it is, I can see how it happened, though. Tangent: in 1999, the family stopped pronouncing the L in...
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“Good co-authorship is like layer tennis.”
– There may be a little battling to be the dominant voice, but I’m really liking what this aspect of my work-work is turning into. I’m not sure if it’s temperamental meshing or just that this is the first co-author situation where the interaction has felt adult-adult as opposed to...
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“The day I realized that I could plot my projects as a 2D projection of a set of...”
– Seriously, happy. Not that the 4-sided die representation was terrible, but it was crowded.
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My oldest mentor on his “mentor in how to...