Monthly Archives: May 2011

My parents never made me mow the lawn, and I never volunteered until yesterday. My dad had already done most of the work, but there was one central patch still not ready for the big picnic. We went through the … Continue reading →

I got my first Scrabble today playing with my parents. It was “sealable”, (well, sea_able with a blank tile, and the second l already on the board). The above statement is somewhat problematic and requires at least 3 qualifications. I’m … Continue reading →

I whipped up a WAV recording of VoiceLab’s most recent concert, using gstreamer to decode it from a videocamera. I tried to load it into Python using the wave module, but I got an error, which I determined was because … Continue reading →

On Monday, I went to a barbeque of sorts near Porter Square, and there were no bugs. Today, biking just a few blocks further North, I felt like I was riding through a bug storm. I got bitten by gnats … Continue reading →

No! It turns out that there’s a family that contains at least 17 different non-photosynthetic plant genera (all parasites, which makes sense). Unsurprisingly, there’s even been some genetic analysis (for a long time now) to explain how and when this … Continue reading →

When I was a slightly younger man, my father once said* to me “Son, one day you will be one of those fellows who wears a baseball cap everywhere”, and I knew exactly what he meant. Last week, when I … Continue reading →

I received the most amazing wedding invitation from one of my college friends a few weeks ago, and I haven’t responded yet because I wanted to put up some pictures of it. The invitation came in a plain manila envelope. … Continue reading →

After hearing vaguely about strangelets for years, I finally looked them up today. It’s a wacky hypothesis, but it makes sense. Now I kind of hope that the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer detects one. Most of the descriptions of strangelets are … Continue reading →

(no pictures this time) After 25 years of matzoh ball soup in chicken broth, I began to wonder if there was another option. Ingredients Soup-ish stuff 2 28 oz. cans of plum tomatoes with basil from Trader Joe’s 2 onions … Continue reading →

I wanted to contribute something to a seder this year and the morning of I had a flash of insight. Here’s the recipe. Ingredients One box of Matzoh (~15 sheets) 1/2 gallon of orange juice 8 oz baking chocolate Sugar … Continue reading →