Trophy

Feb. 8th, 2026 12:14 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll




This detached from a car as it passed me. Missed me, hit a snow bank. When I returned from work, it was still there, so I collected it.

Not sure what happened, except the car's bumper also (mostly) detached.

Oops

Feb. 7th, 2026 05:13 pm
koshka_the_cat: Beach! (Default)
[personal profile] koshka_the_cat
Remember the desk I was painting during break until covid stopped everything? I was going to put the wax top layer on it today. It went fine on the back. Then it peeled off the side, once again, like Tinkerbell nail polish. I guess the sanding I thought did nothing worked? Oops.

I peeled off everything but the front drawer, which had also been sanded, and tried waxing that. It worked.

I'm not sure about repainting. It's fine with just the drawer green. The back doesn't show, obviously. I painted that as a test.

IKEA should sell paintable options. You're already building it, so why not paint?

And the cats woke me up in the middle of the night. A kitchen drawer was open, the tray from my espresso machine was pulled out, a lamp was on the floor, a small scratcher was feet from where it should be, and they crashed into the food and water bowls in my room. I think it was all of them because they were all lurking when I woke up.

Website Updates

Feb. 7th, 2026 06:09 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Thanks to [personal profile] fuzzyred, the series Peculiar Obligations now has its own landing page.  This series features Quakers and organized crime, particularly with pirate allies.

[navel-gazing] reading, fast & slow

Feb. 7th, 2026 11:21 pm
kaberett: Photo of a pile of old leather-bound books. (books)
[personal profile] kaberett

At some point in proceedings (depression? pain? migraine? dense technical text for the PhD? poetry?), I realise, I have gone from reading Unusually Quickly to still reading More? Than Population Norm? (75ish books last year, of which 15ish were graphic novels or otherwise not-a-novel's-worth-of-words), but no faster than I'd be able to read the text aloud -- "hearing" each word in my head, and often rereading sentences repeatedly.

This is in contrast to how I type, which is much faster than I can speak comprehensibly (... though I now recall that I am in fact often asked to Slow The Fuck Down when providing information verbally).

I have over the last little bit been tentatively experimenting with trying not to read each word "aloud", mentally, and instead treating The Written Word as something that doesn't always need to be (pseudo-)vocalised.

It feels weird. It's an active effort. I am extremely dubious about the impact on how much information I retain; Further Study Required. I think this is probably how I used to read (when?); I'm not sure what changed; I'm unsettled.

(And I want to post something to Dreamwidth before bed, and this is a thing I was thinking about a lot while almost-but-not-quite finishing Index, A History of the -- I'm at a point I'd ordinarily count as "finished" but obviously it is in this instance both important and rewarding to read the index, all two of it, so here y'go.)

Else? [status, bicycling, food]

Feb. 7th, 2026 05:47 pm
rebeccmeister: (Default)
[personal profile] rebeccmeister
1. I got more amazing things in the mail this week!

Great things continue to arrive in the mail

[personal profile] threemeninaboat sends such cool things in the mail. So does the organizer of the annual Coffeeneuring Challenge. <3


2. We got another 1.5 inches of snow overnight. You might think that would be trivial after the foot and change we got 2 weeks ago, but you'd be wrong, in large part because it still takes time for people to come along and clear the snow after it falls (and blows around in violent gusts, this time). Making it over to the fitness center for rowing practice was an...adventure. More fishtailing than I like (I really don't like fishtailing at all). The worst is trying to bike across snow where people driving have already compacted it. Slippery stuff.

By the time I went to the grocery store, the major roads were plowed, at least. But don't ever expect that bike lanes will get plowed in the winter in a place like Albany, New York, as if to suggest bicycles are a legitimate transit mode. No, in the wintertime, bike lanes are converted to car parking spots, because the cars can no longer park near the curb, because the parked cars have blocked the snow-clearing equipment and so the space at the curb is full of snow.

So you can see, I'm a deep believer in the value of bike lanes.

Not that I enjoy having to play chicken in traffic.

Not even the grocery co-op had bothered to shovel out the bike parking racks. Sigh.

So by the time I was home from it all, Frodo was coated in a heavy layer of Slop.

Big Slop

I rinsed it all off, and hopefully enough of the rinse water will drip/sublimate off that Frodo will be rideable by Monday morning. If not, I'll have to switch over to Princess TinyBike for a while.

I did spend an extra 15 minutes this morning with my avalanche shovel, digging out and widening a particular neglected crosswalk downtown. That's the best I can do, folks.


3. I will console myself with freshly-baked lemon rhubarb buttermilk bundt cake.

Lemon rhubarb buttermilk bundt cake

Fin.
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

I watched the whole thing, start to finish, and I thought it was good. Not as good as Paris (2024) or Pyeongchang (2018), but good. Both A. and L., who watched it with me, were kind of freaked out by the large-head dancers of Puccini, Rossini, and Verdi, but they were actually one of my favorite parts of that section. The performance by Andrea Bocelli was enjoyable, but at the same time felt kind of stuck in. The multi-site Parade of Nations struck me as a good idea, because athletes not being able to march in the parade because they were up on the mountain has long been a problem for the Winter Games — I hope future host cities make this into a tradition. I got a laugh out of the DJ switching over to The Barber of Seville for the Italian team to walk in!

I also have to give NBC a big thumbs-down for one of their choices during the Parade of Nations: There were only about half a dozen nations that NBC chose not to show in the streaming version of the ceremony (there might have been more skipped over in the broadcast version), and they picked Mongolia for one of them?! WTAF! Mongolia is always one of the best-dressed teams and I think skipping them was a terrible idea!

And while we're on the subject of team uniforms: I will be so, so, so, SO glad when Team USA lets someone other than Ralph Lauren design their uniforms! (And just in case anyone from Team USA is reading this: By "someone other than Ralph Lauren," I don't mean Tommy Hilfiger. I mean someone actually different.)

第五年第二十九天

Feb. 8th, 2026 06:58 am
nnozomi: (Default)
[personal profile] nnozomi posting in [community profile] guardian_learning
部首
手 part 15
拐, to turn a corner; 拒, to refuse; 拔, to pull out pinyin )
https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?cdqrad=64

语法
3.1 应该
https://www.digmandarin.com/hsk-3-grammar

词汇
此, this; 此外, in addition; 从此, from then on pinyin )
https://mandarinbean.com/new-hsk-4-word-list/

Guardian:
来者不拒, to take on all comers
他是什么人你应该知道, you should know what he is
从此相安无事直到今天, from then on peace has continued through today

Me:
我拒绝被拔牙,我太害怕了。
咱们在拐角见面吧。
rebeccmeister: (Default)
[personal profile] rebeccmeister
[I started out writing this bit of preamble below, but as you'll observe, I then found I had a lot of things to remark about, after all!]

It was a busy one, but a lot of the busy-ness wasn't particularly remarkable. I guess some weeks in life are just like that.

Tuesday's lab involved the characterization of breathing in fish and reptiles. It is always a long lab that takes the full 4 hours for each lab section, because it involves gradually warming the animals up to see how temperature affects their breathing rates (fun fact, breathing volumes in both groups don't change very much, so their primary method for getting more oxygen as metabolic demands increase is to breathe faster). We also investigate how hypoxia, and in the case of the reptiles, hypercapnia (elevated carbon dioxide), affect breathing rates. This year I tried to emphasize the distinction between fish and reptile responses; fish show a pretty clear and dramatic response to low oxygen, and in species that can, it will often cause a switch to air-breathing. In contrast, like us and other terrestrial animals, reptiles respond much more quickly and dramatically to hypercapnia.

Wrangling the reptiles is always a wild card. Here's Gary the Gehrrosaurus major with a small piece of tape as a largely symbolic restraint against wiggling:

Comparative Physiology Lab

Sometimes he has an opinion about being cooled down, but most of the time he is exceptionally chill. This year, though, we observed that he has learned my ways when it comes to hypoxia and hypercapnia exposure! The way I expose each reptile to a different air composition is by using a gas pump to flow air through a 60-mL syringe with the plunger removed; I have students put the open end of the syringe barrel in front of the reptile's face for a few seconds at a time so that most of the air the reptile is getting is coming from the syringe. We start out just exposing each reptile to room air, then I plug a gas bag full of either nitrogen (hypoxia) or carbon dioxide (hypercapnia) into the gas pump. In general, our reptiles respond very quickly and dramatically to hypercapnia, but not by breathing faster: they instead hold their breath, aka use apnea to avoid the high carbon dioxide.

Well. This time around, when we brought the syringe near Gary's face, before changing the gas composition, he just went straight to apnea. It was a repeatable response, too. I think we tried it three times. So I had to conclude that Gary has learned my tricks over the years, and we had to skip that part of the lab.

Now, in contrast to Gary, here's an Anole:
Comparative Physiology Lab

I have stopped trying to acquire Anoles for now, because it's really hard to keep them happy in our lab setup. I think I just haven't managed to dial in the humidity correctly for them. But they're adorable, and also a lot more wiggly than Gary. So they require both a more delicate touch, and more taping so they stay in place.

The leopard geckos and skink, however, are usually the most challenging reptiles to work with. For several years I've been trying to use some gauze so we aren't directly putting masking tape onto reptile skin, but this year we went back to just straight-up tape, because the gauze method gives the reptiles just a little too much leeway to wiggle loose. We then use mineral oil to free the reptiles from the tape at the end of the procedure.

One of the three leopard geckos was pretty well-behaved this year (Shadow Luna, named by the students). Trinity and Baby Gramps, however...Trinity tried to bite me while I was trying to free her at the end, and Baby Gramps actually succeeded in drawing blood this time around. At least he didn't bite a student!

I kind of wish this bite mark would turn into a scar, because that would make it feel a little more worthwhile: a little, circular gecko bite scar.

Bit by Baby Gramps

I doubt that will actually happen, though.

Anyway, also on the lab front, towards the end of the week, two packages I'd been concerned about safely arrived. Whew. One contained a small bottle of citrated cow's blood, which we're after for the fresh hemoglobin it contains. The other contained two more horseshoe crabs!

New crabs meet the old crab

These are Gulf crabs, and the styrofoam box they arrived in had a big sign on it that said to keep it at or above 70°F. When I opened the box...let's just say the crabs definitely weren't at 70°F. Sigh. They sat somewhere significantly colder than that for a while on their journey north from Florida. Sigh. After a bit of time to warm up, they started to perk up, so I added them in with the last one of last year's crabs, as pictured above. If Methusalah makes it until Tuesday, that will be the first time I've managed to keep a crab going for the entire year. I'm trying to do the best I can with them, but it's difficult in the midst of 500 other responsibilities.

--

So then on Thursday, my institution had an all-day symposium that's part of a series titled, "Earth's Cry, Humanity's Call," motivated by the Laudato Sí encyclical letter written and released by Pope Francis, calling for people to take action in the face of global environmental crises. I somehow wound up as a faculty representative on the symposium's organizing committee, so it seemed like a good idea to attend as much of the symposium as I could. (As a faculty rep I feel like I played only a bit part in the organizing, but it was still an important bit part because it involved recruiting colleagues and students from our School of Science to participate). The theme for the year was focused on "integral community development," which is also a focus of my institution's Business School, so the sessions were on a series of topics related to business and finance, but notably, NOT "make as much money as humanly possible at any cost." I wasn't able to go to the first session of the morning, but the second session featured a speaker named Kirsten Moy, who has recently been working to apply ideas from complexity science to community development.

So, that got to be pretty interesting. Just to point out why, at one point while she was giving an overview of what complexity science is, she listed "Ant Colonies" as her topmost example of a complex system. I was reminded of the time I spent interacting with colleagues in graduate school as part of our institution's Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity, and I've also known multiple people who have spent time at the Santa Fe Institute engaged in that sort of work. Anyway, here's an interview with Kerstin in the event you're interested in understanding more about her analysis of why lots of community development initiatives wind up having all sorts of unintended consequences (tied to thinking about communities as complex systems).

I could go on, but really, the overall consequence of the symposium on Thursday was that it led to a second weeknight where I didn't leave campus until after 8 pm (also happened on Tuesday because I had a rowing club online Board Meeting immediately after the back-to-back 4-hour labs ended, sigh).

Other than those items, we've reached a point in the semester where a good number of my Animal Physiology students have realized that they could maybe benefit from some more help with their statistical thinking and decision-making. This is really, really great for them to be realizing, but it also means very busy office hours for me. And a lot of what happens in those office hours isn't particularly new or interesting. But hey, that's just often the nature of teaching life.

Early Humans

Feb. 7th, 2026 02:51 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
These 773,000-year-old fossils may reveal our shared human ancestor

Exceptionally well-dated fossils from Morocco capture a moment nearly 800,000 years ago, right at a major turning point in Earth’s magnetic history.

Fossils from a Moroccan cave have been dated with remarkable accuracy to about 773,000 years ago, thanks to a magnetic signature locked into the surrounding sediments. The hominin remains show a blend of ancient and more modern features, placing them near a pivotal branching point in human evolution. These individuals likely represent an African population close to the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens, Neandertals, and Denisovans
.

Birdfeeding

Feb. 7th, 2026 02:46 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Today is sunny and cold.  Much of the snow has melted.

I fed the birds.  I've seen a few sparrows.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 2/7/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

I refilled the hopper feeder.

I've seen a female cardinal.

EDIT 2/7/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

There were two cardinals in the forest garden, but it was hard to tell colors at dusk.

I am done for the night.
 

Locus List

Feb. 7th, 2026 12:00 pm
marthawells: (Witch King)
[personal profile] marthawells
Some good news:

Both Queen Demon and the Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute anthology, made it on the Locus Recommended Reading List:

https://locusmag.com/2026/02/2025-recommended-reading/

with a lot of other excellent books and stories, including a new section for translated works.

You can also vote on the list for the Locus Awards. Anybody can vote here with an email address: https://poll.voting.locusmag.com/ though they have you fill out a demographic survey first with how many books you read per year, etc.

Of course a lot of great work did not end up on the list, like I was surprised not to see The Witch Roads and The Nameless Land duology by Kate Elliott, which I thought was excellent.
oursin: A C19th illustration of a hedgehood, with a somewhat worried expression (mopey/worried hedgehog)
[personal profile] oursin

That was a week that felt a bit odd, which may have been quite a bit down to my not sleeping as well as have latterly been doing.

Also not getting out for accustomed daily walk as often as usual because RAIN.

Somewhat stunned by phonecall from friend with whom I am collaborating on various projects who has recently had some rather devastating health news.

Resumption of contact with two other friends: one of whom I had contacted after receiving what turned out to be, as I had suspected, spam email from her hacked account.

Having the February blahs, pretty much.

Isn't It Punny.....

Feb. 7th, 2026 11:01 am
disneydream06: (Disney Funny)
[personal profile] disneydream06
February 7th/8th...


What Is A Hurricane's

Favorite Game?


Twister.

Books read, February 2026

Feb. 7th, 2026 09:26 am
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian
  • 7 February
    • Library Wars: Love & War, vol. 10 (Kiiro Yumi)
    • Good Old-fashioned Korean Spirit (Kim Hyun-sook and Ryan Estrada)
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


With two books new to me, this just barely qualifies as books received. One SF, one fantasy and the SF novel is from a series.

Books Received, January 31 — February 6


Poll #34194 Books Received, January 31 — February 6
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 26


Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

A City Dreaming by Maurice Broaddus (June 2026)
11 (42.3%)

Lord of the Heights by Scarlett J. Thorne (July 2026
5 (19.2%)

Some other option (see comments)
1 (3.8%)

Cats!
21 (80.8%)

October 2025

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