I am … unhindered by talent

• They have a fancy new redesigned web site.
• You can check out cool photos like the one above in their new gallery.
• They have the schedule on-line so you know who you’re listening to!
• They’re way cooler than the lame radio station that those other people are listening to.
• You know you want to listen to a station where the DJs have that many CDs to play with.
• We’re in Britain, so you’ll almost guaranteed not to hear our voices for several months. (It’s not 100%, though, because the promo spots that we’ve done over the years have a habit of turning up now and then.)
• Cory Funk (a mighty and wondrous KUMM alum) is back on the air and has a killer 1 hour show at 5pm (Central time) on KUST. (Yeah, I realize that I’m plugging another station here, but Cory wouldn’t be that amazing without all his KUMM experience, now would he?)

I enjoy listening at what are very odd hours back in Minnesota and then IM’ing requests. It really messes with their heads to have profs listening at 3am…

Related posts

• UMM students are just so cool! (5)
• This is really why I teach (1)

I realize that I’m fashionably late for Darwin Day (12 Feb), but I offer cool-scary dinosaur skeletons and flesh-eating beetles in apology!

We were in London Friday to see the Kildegaards who (a) are friends of ours from Morris, (b) are living in Denmark this year on sabbatical, and (c) were in London for a week. We had a wonderful day, which included time in both the Natural History Museum (NHM - where the photo above was taken) and the V&A.

As part of our time in the NHM, we toured the wonderful Darwin Centre. (See the nifty connection? See? See? :->) This included amazing cool things such as a giant squid in a tank, loads of great big animals (mostly fish) preserved in equally big custom-made glass jars (including a Coelacanth and a whole jar of platypi), and flesh-eating beetles! They have a whole room of incubators of flesh-eating beetles that they use to clean specimens without damaging the skeletal structure. And to top off this festival of biological delights, they have a real-time beetle-cam where you can watch the little critters roaming around over the carcass of the moment (in a grainy, low-res format, to be sure), busily contributing to the scientific process. I suspect, in fact, that they will, in their oblivious fashion, will probably contribute more to science than someone like Huckabee.

I want to thank our tour guide (whose name I, sadly but predictably, have forgotten), as she did a great job. She was full of useful information, and handled our numerous questions gracefully and informatively.

Related posts

• The things you learn on the Tube (0)
• More fun (with skulls) in London (1)

Almost had an alliteration in the title, but then lost it at the end. Sigh.

I’ve finishing dumping all my Dagstuhl photos (uncleaned and unedited) to my event account on Flickr, so those with more time than sense can rush over and gaze upon them all. Over the next week or two I’ll work on cleaning some of my favorites and posting them to my “real” Flickr account, but who knows how long that will take.

Related posts

• Far too many photos from Dagstuhl (0)
• Wrapping one’s head around the data (0)

As mentioned before, I’ve been pretty insanely busy, trying to get four different co-authored research papers ready in time for the submission deadline next week for one of the major conferences in my field. Part of the reason I’m busy is that I procrastinate, but part of it is that I’m damnedly slow. And an important part of that is that I spend roughly forever making and fiddling with graphs.

See, I just love a good graph. One of my great goals in life is to give a standard length (20-30 minute) conference talk where my entire collection of slides is just one gorgeous, illuminating, data rich graph. The graph would need to have all the information I want to convey and enough to support 20 minutes of me talking about it. So far I’ve not come anywhere close. I’ve occasionally had single graphs that could support more than five minutes of presentation, but I’m not sure I’ve ever hit 10. But I’m working on it.

In the meantime, I tend to collect vast whale bellies full of data (my research generates data with wild abandon), and then make plot after plot after plot, trying to figure out both what the data says, and how I can best share that with my potential audience. Hours and hours constructing different views on the mystery. And, of course, I don’t then leave them alone. No, I fiddle and twist, spindle and mutilate, trying to get it “right”.

Technical papers come with page limits, however, so many of these graphs wander around for a while through the land of drafts, only to have their ultimate fate be the rubbish bin of ruthless editing. Some I really like, but they lose out to the necessities of the day. Others were probably never destined for greatness, but served some purpose, like an intellectual scaffolding that helped me build my understanding and argument, but was always going to come down when the construction was finished.

This image combines three of those pieces of scaffolding, freed of their labels and tickmarks, but together as team. I knew all along that these weren’t gonna make the big time, but I needed to plot them to make sure that my intuition about them was (mostly) correct. It was, they served their purpose, and now they’re off to oblivion. Except that I just liked the way these looked, so I joined them all up like little Legos to preserve here on Flickr.

You can think of it as a curvy Mondrian, without being nearly as good :-).

Related posts

• Show me what they really want (and don’t assume it’s the money) (2)
• UMM students are just so cool! (5)

I can’t really imagine that anyone’s going to want one of these, but just in case…

As a Xmas present for our various family members we used Blurb.com to create a photo book of some of our images from 2007. But hey, you can join the family by purchasing one as well :-). It’s 127 photos on 38 pages, and they have a PDF preview so you can see what you’re getting into before you put your money down.

This was our first use of Blurb, and their software was pretty decent. Amazing, really, how easy it is these days to publish books that no one really cares about. It used to be hard to publish books no one cared about; they regularly gave people degrees for it.

Related posts

• Happy Thanksgiving to our American friends! (2)
• We have arrived in Spain! (2)

Today Sub-Evil Boy celebrates 14 years of being, well, less than evil. For this his parents are extremely grateful :-) !

To celebrate the event I decided to (I’m guessing) annoy him mightily by fishing up an old shot from out last sabbatical. Here he’s 6.5 years old at the thermal pools in Iceland near the Strokkur Geyser.

He’s just a tad bigger now, but no less cute :-).

Happy Birthday, and thanks for being significantly less than evil!

Related posts

• Weeeeee’re back! (1)
• We have arrived in Spain! (2)

While we were in London, Sub-Evil Boy and I went out to Leicester Square early Saturday morning to get some cheap theatre tickets. We were there an hour before they opened, so we wandered around some, stumbling upon Trafalgar Square along the way. Standing in the square was the annual Xmas tree from Norway, and (quite surprisingly) sitting in the tree was a hawk there in the center of London.

Turns out that that it was there on "official business", being used to scare off the great squadrons of pigeons that frequent the square. It was clearly successful in the sense that the pigeons were all up wheeling in the distance. We had a nice chat with the hawk’s handler, and I asked him about the long term effectiveness of this approach. Apparently presence of food outweighs threat to life and wing.

The handler talked about walking through a veritable carpet of pigeons drawn by a couple with a large bag of seeds, completely unmoved by the presence of the hawk. Recently he saw a truck passing slowly in front of the National Gallery kill 13 pigeons who refused to move because of a large supply of corn on the road. We didn’t see any actual attacks when we were there, but the handler did say that it’s not uncommon for the hawk to get a pigeon or two out of a visit.

Below is the handler calling the hawk down from the top of the National Gallery. That’s a small (dead) baby chick in his right hand, which is the hawk’s treat when it comes down to him.

Related posts

• The things you learn on the Tube (0)
• Divine cat (Ours never had a nose ring) (0)

We’re back from an excellent little 24 hour whirlwind visit to the Mighty Metropolis aka London. Most of it was spent in the British Museum, where we had tickets to see the Chinese terra cotta army. No photos from that, but it was quite remarkable and absolutely worth it.

I took lots of photos (many quite mediocre, or worse) in other parts of the British Museum, including this in a small temporary exhibit right by the entrace called "Divine Cat". This bronze egyptian scuplture was donated to the Museum by a Major Gayer-Anderson, who "was a keen restorer of ancient metal objects". Recent analysis (including X-rays) revealed that the good Major jammed a metal cylinder in the head to give it more strength, repaired a major crack, and applied a thick layer of green paint to help hide the repairs.

Oh.

An excellent little exhibit, and a nice example of the many complexities of managing a collection such as theirs.

And the cat was cool too.

I’ve posted the whole unedited lot up on my Flickr events account, and will post tidied up versions of some of the more interesting ones to my “main” Flickr account.

Related posts

• More fun (with skulls) in London (1)
• Darwin, dinosaurs, and flesh-eating beetles! (0)

This morning I’m off for Dublin! With scheduled entries broken, however, so there could well be a yawning silence for a few days. I’m not taking a laptop (gasp!), so unless my B&B has a a computer out for their guests I’ll just have to cut you all loose for a few days.

Consider it a holiday gift from me. :-)

The photo? It’s from the Prairie Pioneer Days parade in Morris in July, 2006. Gotta love the glasses on that one young lady.

Related posts

• Off to Dublin soon (1)
• Hurtling through the night (0)

Tuesday morning (4 Dec 07) I set off from our happy home for a few days in Dublin. To quote myself (how pathetic is that?)

At the kind invitation of Michael O’Neill, I am going to the University of Dublin to give a talk in early December, which will be lots of fun. I’ve been to Ireland once before, to give a talk at the University of Limerick, and really enjoyed it. I’ve never been to Dublin, though, so I’m quite excited. Dublin Tourism has a very cool set of free podcast walking tours (smart people, them) which I’ve been listening to as a way of figuring out where I want to visit in my limited tourism time.

Giovanni (my office mate) pointed out the helpfully obvious today, namely that I could probably get a tour guide to Dublin from our city library. Duh. I’d looked at some in shops, but spending £10 for a book seemed a bit daft when I’ll only have one solid day of touring to do. Checking one out from the library, however…

I’m hoping for some nice weather so I can spend a lot of time just walking around and taking photographs. The aforementioned walking tours are really nice and have me quite pumped. We are talking December in Ireland, however, so I’m not holding my breath. Happily, there are lots of cool indoor things that I also want to visit. Chief among these is Trinity College Library, as they have many wondrous things including the magnificent Book of Kells.

I’ll also be flying Ryanair for the first time. The flight is incredibly cheap, to the point that it seems fundamentally wrong. The true cost (including pollution and other environmental impacts) just has to be more than the £40 or so I’m paying round trip.

Thanks to Del Amitri for the cool photo, which I discovered using Flickr’s nifty “Places” feature. Being able to quickly sift through some very cool photos of Dublin has both given me some ideas of things I’d like to see and photograph, while also pointing out some clichéd shots I may want to try to avoid. (I’ll probably fail, since I’m a total sucker for a pretty cliché shot, but I can try.)

Related posts

• Waving goodbye (0)
• Right in the thick of it (0)