I am … unhindered by talent

Photo by Bob Lord via Wikipedia

Of course I never actually mentioned here (at least not recently) that I was giving a Cafe Scientifique talk, but I did and it went fine. I gave a presentation last night at the Common Cup coffee house entitled “An overview of cryptography: What happens to your credit card number on-line, and is that e-mail really from your boss?”. The audience was small (20-ish?), but attentive and interested, and I think it went nicely. The truly shiftless can download a PDF copy of my slides for their amusement.

Many thanks to PeeZeed for bringing this wonderful Cafe Scientifique idea to Morris and organizing the events. The quality of both the talks and the audiences has been very high, and I know I’ve learned a lot from attending.

The one slightly unfortunate thing has been the degree to which the audiences have been primarily University folk, and science folk at that. Nothing wrong with that (I got lots of very cool questions last night, for example), but if one of the goals of C.S. is to bring science to the “general public”, having the audience be largely university science faculty isn’t quite the game plan.

I think that there are some historical and cultural issues at work. Also, despite the oft-heard mantra that “There’s nothing to do in Morris”, there were quite a few competing events last night that I know pulled quite a few people away. Ultimately, though, we haven’t done a terribly great job of advertising/promoting these things. Sadly, I’m as guilty as anyone here. I had grand plans to promote last night’s talk (radio interviews, newspaper promotion, posters, etc., etc.), but in the end life pushed this right on down the list of important things to do. Sigh.

We’ve got one more this school year, with Mark Logan discussing origami and mathematics, which should be a fun evening. We’re great at the science - now we just need to work on our PR. :-)

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I am sad to announce that after some 12 years of craziness, Turq’s wild run is likely to come to an end this week. He’s had feline leukemia for nearly 3 years, and when he was diagnosed they only gave him a few weeks to live, yet here he still is. The leukemia, plus surviving being hit by a car a number of years ago (which included getting disoriented and lost and living rough for almost a month with a badly broken jaw before we were reunited), suggests that he’s used up all his nine lives and a few of Portia’s.

It’s all catching up with him, though, and things have deteriorated to the point where we all agree that the time has come to put him to sleep, probably this week.

Sniff.

Turq was born almost the same time as Sub-Evil Boy and they’ve spent pretty much their entire lives together. (We’ve got some amazingly cute pictures of them together as baby and kitten.) It’ll be interesting see how Portia (who’s 2 years older than Turq) reacts to his absence. She’s been doing this weird stress thing where she sits and pulls out clumps of her hair and we don’t know why. Having this happen, as well as the chaos engendered by the bathroom remodelling (more on that later), may really freak her out. Hopefully not, though…

In these last few years of his life there have been more than a few times where he’s been, well, pretty gross (chronic sinus infection and less than optimal personal hygiene), but he was always an amazing character in the best sense and our lives are all much richer for knowing him.

We’re probably going to scatter his ashes in the yard where he spent many happy days lording over his domain. Sub-Evil is planning on inviting some friends over and we’ll make a proper ceremony of it. So raise a toast to our strange little friend.

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Photo by gnuf

Eric is the evil genius behind the highly tempting Do You Know The Muffin Man blog, full of very tasty recipes and cooking info. He also uses Flickr to post fine photos of his handiwork such as the buttermilk blueberry muffins to the right.

(And, to be fair, I knew none of this half an hour ago, but I’m glad I know it now, and so are you. Really. Honest.)

And Eric was kind enough to let me know that products from Jenaer Glas, which I had reported earlier was closing its doors, are now available from a new (Hungarian) manufacturer: trendglas. A little digging suggests that Jenaer had been contracting out a lot of their production to a Hungarian glass maker for quite a while, and the Hungarian firm has now acquired the Jenaer molds, etc., and will continue production of their line.

This is happy news for me, as I quite like the Jenaer bits that we own (like the Zylindro, now renamed the Zyclo, pictured on the left) but, being glass (even if very good glass), they will eventually break, and I was assuming that it would be the end of the road when they did. Of course now that I know that we’ll be able to replace bits I’ll go and break it all…

And to round off a post full of shameless plugs, I’ll mention that we first hooked up with Jenaer gear through Adagio teas, which remains one of our fave tea sources. We just got a big batch a few weeks ago, and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying some nifty new oolong and white varieties.

Hmmm, the kettle’s just boiled - I’m off to make a pot…

Thanks again to Eric for the happy news!

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Photo by Hugo*

Please forgive me for another round of pro-Flickr babbling, but I just ran across some really wonderful photojournalism and had to share. The photo above is by Hugo* and is part of an excellent series documenting recent unrest in France. This is truly fine work, and certainly as good (or better) than a whole lot of the “professional” work out there. Time Magazine, for example, recently published their Best photos of the year 2005, and while they have some really nice ones, their list has several that I’d enthusiastically replace with images like Hugo*’s or some of the excellent post-Katrina documentation of Tampen (below).

Photo by Tampen

I should also point out that I don’t particularly look for “photojournalism” kind of shots on Flickr and don’t think I have anyone on my contacts list that would describe themselves primarily in those kind of terms. They’re just really good photographers who can also capture events in wonderful images. I’m sure there are lots of self-styled photojournalists on Flickr, and I’m sure many of them are also extremely good, making the two I mentioned just a tiny drop in a very large bucket. And of course Flickr isn’t the only photo sharing site/system out there (even if I talk like it was).

Wow. It’s just so damn cool…

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Flickr keeps track of how many times your “photostream” (as opposed to individual photos) is viewed. I’ve been heading towards 10K photostream views and was planning on posting a self-congratulatory (but ultimately pointless) note when that happened. Today, though, I happened to see it when it was exactly 9,000 views and just couldn’t resist the opportunity to capture the moment.

Yeah.

After all the winter pictures I’ll leave you with a green, summery image. It was actually taken inside, but Spring is coming. We actually took the bikes out of the basement a week ago Sunday. Then, of course, it snowed that night and the next day and there they sat looking cold and miserable. Arggghhh. Things did improve, though, and Sub-Evil Boy and I biked in both yesterday and today, and it was quite wonderful. Still a bit chilly (esp. with the windchill at bicycle speeds), but we’re moving in the right direction.

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Lots of people have been taking photos of our nifty wind turbine (or a PDF fact sheet), including some very cool sunset shots by biology prof Van Gooch that will be hanging up here in the Science Building sometime soon.

We had a very cool fog last week, and when I dropped Sub-Evil Boy off at school, the turbine was just peeking out through the top of the fog bank. With WeatherGirl’s encouragement, I grabbed the camera and dashed off to snag some shots, several of which I’ve uploaded to Flickr.

I never did get the image that first caught my eye because we just don’t have anything telephoto enough for that shot, and by the time I was closer I was down in the fog looking up at the turbine. Yet another reason why we really need to get a digital SLR so I can buy fancy lenses again (evil grin). Still, I was able to have some fun and grab some pretty nice images.

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In one of those happy on-line community moments, I got a cool pointer on Flickr from imago (who has some very cool photos - see the example to the right) to a neat clip of Ivor Cutler performing a great little song “Shoplifting”. This was pulled from an old UK TV show called The Old Grey Whistle Test (also here, and the Beeb will sell you DVDs), and features Ivor playing his harmonium and singing. It’s a wonderfully goofy song and a totally dead-pan performance that is, in some ways, just what I would have expected from Cutler.

Check out the video here. imago found it on WFMU’s blog, and they snagged it from YouTube. Great fun and definitely recommended.

It looks like Andy Kershaw’s BBC Radio 3 show on Sunday is a very popular “Listen again” show this week, which is a nice sign. The show featured a great Cutler session recorded for John Peel in 1979, as well as a fine tribute to Ali Farka Toure, who also died recently. And who couldn’t love that Rev. Charlie Jackson guitar sermon track! This show should be available until sometime Sunday, so check it out while you can!

And again a huge thanks to imago for the tip!

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These are the two gift samplers mentioned earlier. The one on the left is the one Carole made for Randee, and the one on the right is the one WeatherGirl did for Athena.

While I was there on Saturday with my tripod I took various random pictures, including this shot of one of the two spiffy new hand-painted ceilings that were done by Lisa Johannes as part of the rennovation of the Stevens County Museum.

The discussion of this over on Flickr has been interesting. I was especially struck by a comment from Eryximachos (who has a cool photo stream) that he had initially thought it was done with Photoshop. I hadn’t thought about it that way at all until I read the comment, but immediately saw where he was coming from when I did. I was drawn to the image in part because of the incongruity of the chandelier hanging down from “the sky” with the birds flying around it, which is exactly the kind of thing that Magritte did in paint and Pedro Meyer has done with digital image editing (I highly recommend Meyer’s wonderful Truths and fictions CD-ROM).

And then one could riff on how hip-hop turntabling grew in part from kids thinking that things they were hearing on the radio were being mixed “live” when in fact they had been spliced together in the studio. But not today…

The construction of reality is an amazing thing.

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My wonderful wife as a wee one with her mum. The picture’s actually hanging with the dress she was wearing, which her mum made out of scraps.

This was part of a display at the Stevens County Museum in association with the EGA National Exhibit that’s been here in Morris for the past several weeks.

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As mentioned earlier, this is the last weekend for the EGA National Exhibit’s sojourn here in Morris, Minnesota. (Although this isn’t entirely true - see below.)

As part of today’s events, Carole Johnson and Susan Gilbert presented Randee Hokanson (left, Director, Stevens County Museum) and Athena Kildegaard (right, Coordinator, Prairie Renaissance Cultural Alliance) with samplers commemorating the hosting of the exhibit.

They were wonderful and well deserved gifts, and all five of the women that worked so hard to bring this excellent exhibit to Morris, and to organize the bucket of associated events over the many weeks it was here, deserve the gratitude of the entire community. They are (left to right) Carole Johnson, Randee Hokanson, Sue Gooch, Athena Kildegaard, and Susan Gilbert.

Visit the PRCA web site or the PRCA Flickr photo collection for more.

Also, if you just haven’t found time to come check out this wonderful exhibit, it looks like the national exhibit may remain in Morris for a few more weeks. It’s not due in it’s next home (Irving, Texas) for a bit, and the EGA has asked if we’d like to hang on to it for a bit longer since that makes more sense than crating it up and putting it in storage. There won’t be any additional events (these folks are pooped), and it’s unclear how long some of the associated exhibits will remain up, but the national exhibit will be here a little longer for people to have another (or first) look.

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