You are currently browsing the daily archive for September 3rd, 2007.
Donna and I went to Settlers Cabin Park today just west of Pittsburgh with my friend Eric and his fiancee Julie. The dogs came along and we cooked out and had a nice little picnic. After going on the teepee trail, I came across a woolly bear caterpillar. I’ve always found these caterpillars really interesting, because they look so freaky. People raise them, since they turn into Isabella tiger moths, which are a pretty-ish speckled beige.
After returning home, the dogs were wiped out, which is exactly what we were hoping for.
Daedalus is a sucker for some good sunbathing and stick-chewing. When he should be doing his business, he likes to plop down on some warm grass, grab a stick, and then proceed to gnaw it down until he almost chokes to death on it and I have to rescue him. Once he had a stick jammed between his teeth at the back of his throat and I had to reach in and break the stick in his mouth. This harrowing escape from death behind him, he proceeded to try to grab the shreds of the stick I had just shattered in his mouth and chew some more.
The cute little blighter.
I came across this article in Wired today about a new format for presentations called Pecha Kucha, which comes from the Japanese word for chit-chat. It was invented by a foreign architect duo Mark Dytham (British) and Astrid Klein (Italian) living in Japan who saw a need for a way to showcase their work that blossomed quickly into a international fad. Four years after its inception, there are Pecha Kucha nights in over 80 cities worldwide.
The idea is simple: 20 slides. 20 seconds each. That’s 400 seconds = 6 minutes 40 seconds. The result is a sort of performance art that allows people to network and showcase their work. Pecha Kucha seems to be bleeding over into the mainstream business world based on a couple of quick YouTube searches. I think it should bleed over into the scientific. I see two other places that would benefit greatly from it:
Over Christmas while visiting family in Greenville, SC, I bought a stack of books at my favorite old haunt: Barnes & Noble. Among those books was Stardust
Returning from this digression, I actually finished reading Stardust just prior to said vacation, but it had taken me several months to do so. Really that’s a shame when you consider how short the book is. Just before I finished reading it, I saw a preview on TV that looked extremely familiar: an air ship, a fallen star, a unicorn, and Wall. I love when a movie comes out that really gets me excited. When Stargate
I deliberated reviewing the movie here with spoilers, but decided in the end to avoid that. I highly recommend reading the book. One of the things I like about Neil Gaiman is that he takes old ideas, like fairy tales, and makes them new. If you haven’t read his short story “Snow, Glass, Apples” (off of Smoke and Mirrors
