Chad Orzel's Blog, page 7

257-267/366: Kids and Dog Photo Dump

Once again, I’ve let a very long time pass without posting photos. It’s been a crazy stretch for us, starting with SteelyKid getting yet another case of strep throat, then DAMOP, then a trip to my parents’ for Memorial Day weekend, then trying to recover from the previous. As with the last few, I’l group these into themed collections, this one devoted to the kids and my parents’ dog. We’ll do this in order from oldest to youngest, so:

Bodie

257/366: Two Sticks

Bodie is a good dog. He has TWO sticks.

Fun fact: my parents’ yellow lab, Bodie, was born within a day of SteelyKid. I think he’s actually one day older, thus he gets pride of place. And even if I have his birthday wrong, he’s a very good dog who retrieved both of these sticks.

258/366: Shake

Important to shake off after a swim.

You can’t have a camera and a dog in a lake without taking a photo of the shake afterwards.

SteelyKid

259/366: At the Plate

SteelyKid getting a hit.

We’ve seen a lot of softball in recent weeks, and I amuse myself during the games by trying to get good photos of the action. This one of SteelyKid at the bat came out pretty well (I butted the lens up against a hole in the backstop; I’m not dumb enough to stand right behind home plate with my expensive camera).

260/366: On the Basepath

SteelyKid running as the ball is hit.

Again, amusing myself with the telephoto lens from the third-base line.

261/366: Shortstop

They also serve who only stand and wait.

Softball isn’t all exciting action, though.

262/366: Surfin’ USA

I’m sure this is totally safe.

Never underestimate the ingenuity of seven-year-olds when it comes to finding off-label uses for playground equipment.

263/366: Tournament

SteelyKid (in blue) waiting for her match at the taekwondo tournament.

This past Saturday was a tremendously busy day, with a softball game in the morning, then a taekwondo tournament (SteelyKid won a bout (her first win!) against a friend from her school, in sudden-death overtime, then lost to a girl who was four years older and two belts higher to end up with another silver medal), then a birthday party. It’s tough to say which was the most difficult– SteelyKid tensing up at the bat (they just added strikeouts to the games), SteelyKid getting kicked in the face, or all the sitting and waiting for her turn to fight.

The Pip

Last but hardly least, the Little Dude!

264/366: Take a Walk

Kate and The Pip enjoying the outdoors during a softball game.

Softball is sometimes a little slow for the seven-year-old attention span, which means that to a four-year-old it’s basically like watching glaciation. There is a playground in the same park as the softball field, but sometimes you just need to go for a walk, as you see here. Or you can sit down under a tree and try to count to 1000 (he got to 708 before the game ended).

265/366: Triangle Tunnel

No web of ropes can stop The Pip.

A different waiting-for-his sister event, this one involving Girl Scouts, I think. Anyway, he’s gotten very good at climbing things.

266/366: Tae Kwon Pip

The Pip shows off his punching.

The Little Dude is doing “Little Dragons” taekwondo classes at day care, which is kind of like superhero training. Here, he shows off his skills next to a chalk drawing by SteelyKid and Grandpa, which Il Duderino has helpfully labelled “BATMAN.”

267/366: Zzzzzzzzz

It’s hard work being The Pip.

Shhh! He’s sleeping. Tiptoe out quietly, and there will be another photo dump in a bit…

Beyoncé and LIGO: Stochastic Awareness of Science Is Probably Okay

I’ve had this piece by Rick Borchelt on “science literacy” and this one by Paige Brown Jarreau on “echo chambers” open in tabs for… months. I keep them around because I have thoughts on the general subject, but I keep not writing them up because I suspect that what I want to say won’t be read much, and I find it frustrating to put a lot of work into a blog post only to be greeted by crickets chirping.

But, now I find myself in a position where I sort of need to have a more thought-out version of the general argument. So I’m going to do a kind of slapdash blog post working this out as I type, and hopefully end up where I need to be, whether or not anyone else pays any attention.

So. The general thrust of both Borchelt and Jarreau’s pieces is pretty similar: a lot of work in “science communication” seems to be misdirected or ineffective. The audience for science blogs and web sites and the rest is drawn from the same limited pool of people who actively seek that stuff out. Most of the rest of the public isn’t looking for information about science, and thus, they’re not getting it. Which is generally a cue for much hand-wringing among the science-communication crowd over how we’re failing, and need to Do Better.

But over the last few years, I’ve started to wonder whether that’s really as big a problem as all the deeply concerned blog posts I’ve read seem to think. And the reason for that is Beyoncé.

It’s not anything that Beyoncé herself did, just the fact that I’m aware of her. I don’t own any of her music, and I’m not sure I’ve ever listened to a complete song of hers, as occasional snippets have been enough to confirm that it’s really not my thing. Nevertheless, I know of her, and have a generally positive impression, because news about her manages to impinge on my awareness in a variety of indirect ways– performing at the Super Bowl, bits of gossip on the pop-music station I listen to when SteelyKid’s in the car (they don’t regularly play her stuff, but they talk about her a bunch), or various science-y people on Twitter gushing about her dropping a new album, etc.

Beyoncé is just the most positive example of a general category of people I don’t have any particular reason to care about who I am nonetheless vaguely informed about. I think of this general phenomenon as “stochastic awareness of pop culture.” I don’t have any systematic knowledge of Beyoncé or the various Kardashians, but I know who they are and a bit about them because that information randomly shows up in front of me. Which is more or less inevitable, because there are a lot of people out there who care very deeply about the activities of these individuals, and pump an enormous amount of effort into generating stories about them. And the end result is that even though her music is not my thing, I have a hazy sense of her place in the pop-culture firmament, and a generally positive impression.

And hand-wringing blog posts aside, I think science communication could do a lot worse than operating on this same basic model. That is, we generate a lot of content about science that is primarily consumed by people who already care about the subject, in the same way that legions of reporters generate endless stories and thinkpieces about Beyoncé and other celebrities. And some fraction of that content will, from time to time, randomly end up impinging on the awareness of people who aren’t actively seeking information about science, leaving them with the same kind of stochastic awareness of science news that I have about celebrity culture.

Most of the time, this involves big, splashy stories– LIGO detecting gravitational waves, or the Pluto fly-by, and that kind of thing. In the pop-culture analogy, these are basically like Beyoncé performing at the Super Bowl. But there’s also a lot of connections that are essentially random. My favorite personal example of this is when my Forbes blog post about friction, inspired by a silly episode where I didn’t lose my phone off the roof of my car, wound up as a story in the Daily Mail. On a typical day, I’m pretty sure the overlap between my blog readership and the readership of the Daily Mail is negligible, but for essentially random reasons, this story ended up being put in front of a lot of people who wouldn’t actively seek it out.

From a communications and policy perspective, the hope is that when these stories land in front of people, they spark a “Hey, that’s cool…” sort of reaction. Ideally, this might prompt people to learn a bit more about the specific random topic, by reading other articles, or striking up conversations at work, etc. I can’t say how effective this is for random phone-on-the-car stories, but it works for big news events– whenever NASA holds a press conference, I can expect a few questions about it at Starbucks the next day, from the regulars who know I’m a scientist. And hopefully those leave a generally positive impression about science as something that’s pretty cool and thus worth a bit of money.

I would argue that the implication of the Borchelt and Jarreau posts I linked at the start of this post is that this is essentially what we’re already doing. That is, the work people who write about science (or make videos, etc.) are doing mostly ends up in front of an audience who already care about that subject. In the same way that most of what celebrity-culture reporters write about Beyoncé ends up in front of people who already care deeply about pop music. But I think those posts, and a lot of other writing about this, sort of underplay the effect of the occasions when, for random reasons, science news ends up in front of pop-music fans.

This isn’t an argument against doing science communication, though I’m sure it will be taken that way by some. It’s not even an argument against trying to find better and more effective ways to communicate science. On the contrary, I think both of those things are essential– the more science content we put out there, the better the chance that something breaks through, and if we can figure out and put into practice techniques for making stories land more effectively, we can hopefully boost the impact of those stories that do break out. I think we’ve seen some real progress on the latter, actually– NASA comes in for some ribbing about the number of press conferences they hold, but their PR people are genuinely good at crafting their messages, and the LHC has done a brilliant job of getting public attention for really abstract stuff.

So I don’t mean this as a “Science Communication: You’re Doing It Wrong” article. Instead, it’s an “Everybody take a deep breath and try to calm down” article. Yes, we’re mostly talking to ourselves, but “mostly” isn’t “only,” and I’m not so sure that stochastic public awareness of science is a major crisis that we need to wring our hands over endlessly.

——

(The obvious counterargument to my position takes the form “Yes, but science news is Important, while celebrity gossip is just trash.” Which is true to a point, but this is yet another area where science is not in any way unique. Pretty much any field of study that has even a slight connection to public policy has the same issues of stochastic public awareness of their subject, which is more Important than whatever Beyoncé is up to these days. And it’s been that way for decades (at minimum; Borchelt offers some documentation in the case of science) without the world coming to an end. So, you know, maybe it’s not that big a problem.

(I also find that I’m becoming less comfortable with declarations that this issue or that is What Really Matters, because there’s a kind of fundamental elitism to the whole business that rubs me the wrong way. At the end of the day, what matters to the general public is what they say matters to them, and if that doesn’t align with the elite consensus, it’s on us to convince them otherwise. This is maybe a sign that I’ve been in academia too long, and the secondhand smoke of “postmodernism” is rotting my brain, but whatever…)

Physics Blogging Round-Up: Books, Entanglement, Optics, Many-Worlds, Two Cultures, and Clocks

A whole bunch of physics posts over at Forbes so far this month:

—Recent Physics Books: Gravitational Waves and Brief Lessons: Short reviews of Janna Levin’s Black Hole Blues and Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.

—The Real Reasons Quantum Entanglement Doesn’t Allow Faster-Than-Light Communication: Expanding on and correcting some stuff I didn’t like about Ethan “Starts With A Bang” Siegel’s take on entanglement as a communications tool.

— Why Does The Rising sun Change Color?: I watched a bunch of sunrises on the cruise, which led to me scribbling equations, and then a blog post.

— How Quantum Entanglement Can Help You Understand Many-Worlds: Entanglement is weird, but serves as a nice concrete system for talking about how decoherence hides quantum behavior without requiring “collapse” into a single well-defined state.

— How Even Research That Sounds Silly Has Value: Kind of a weird thinkpiece, because that’s the sort of mood I was in.

— Why Do Physicists Want A “Nuclear Clock”?: A story about a key step toward making a clock based on a nuclear isomer transition in thorium-229 caught my eye, so I tried to explain why that’s cool.

— Historians and Astronomers Share These Scientific Methods In Common: A neat project based on digitizing ads about fugitive slaves reminded me of some of the things astronomers do, so I wrote about the parallel.

As usual, quite a range of stuff. I’ll be at DAMOP all next week, which may or may not allow time for on-site blogging, but will almost certainly give me some topics to write on when I get back.

Division of Labor Is a Good Thing for Science and Skepticism

Noted grouchy person John Horgan has found a new way to get people mad at him on the Internet, via a speech-turned-blog-post taking organized Skeptic groups to task for mostly going after “soft targets”. This has generated lots of angry blog posts in response, and a far greater number of people sighing heavily and saying “There Horgan goes again…”

If you want to read only one counter to Horgan’s piece to get caught up, you could do a lot worse than reading Daniel Loxton’s calm and measured response. Loxton correctly notes that Horgan’s comments are nothing especially unique, just a variant of an argument that you find everywhere:

I’ve spent much of my career confronting the common argument that skeptics should not perform the service skeptics do best, but instead tackle other subjects we may not be qualified to address. It’s a head scratcher, honestly. “You have specialized expertise in X, but I think X is trivial. Why don’t you specialize in Y, because I think Y is important?” Nobody ever says this to Shakespeare scholars or doctors or plumbers. (“Dear ‘fire fighters,’ fight fires less and solve more murders”?) Seemingly everyone says it to skeptics.

There are only two minor points where I disagree with Loxton. One is the claim that this is primarily deployed only against skeptics, because the general tactic is everywhere. I get occasional comments and emails of the form “Why are you wasting time writing about arcane quantum physics when climate change is so much more important?” The endless arguments defending “the humanities” in academia are another version of the same basic thing– “Why should students study English lit when computer coding is so much more important?” And there’s even a sense in which much of the Democratic primary campaign has been dominated by this sort of thing– the arguments between Bernie Sanders supporters and Black Lives Matter activists, for example, basically boil down to each side thinking that the other is too focused on an issue that is not as important as their own primary concern.

So, skeptics have a lot of company in fending off “Your issue is trivial, you should spend more time on what I find most important.”

The other tiny disagreement I have is that I would slightly expand the qualifications justifying a decision to work on X rather than Y. That is, I don’t think it’s just a matter of specialized knowledge, but also a question of temperament. I don’t spend a whole lot of time battling quantum kookery– a rich source of targets both hard and soft– not because I lack specialized knowledge, but because I don’t have the right sort of personality to be good at it.

It’s not that I’m not bothered by charlatans trying to profit from misrepresentations of physics– on the contrary, I’m a little too bothered by it. I do occasionally write about this sort of thing, but it’s very difficult for me to do it without becoming snide. It’s sort of cathartic to vent about on occasion, but mostly not particularly productive– when I go back to stuff that I write in that mode, I generally don’t like the way I sound.

And it’s absolutely not in any way sustainable for me. One of the most notable thing about the skeptical fight is that it’s neverending. No debunking of Bigfoot, or Ancient Aliens, or quantum crackpottery is ever definitive– the folks on the other side always come back for more. There are two ways to deal with this: you either draw from a bottomless well of righteous indignation, a la Orac, or have a similarly deep reservoir of patience, as Loxton seems to.

I can’t really do either of those. I can be patient long enough to give a reasonably gracious reply to the nutty questions I get after public lectures, but that’s exhausted pretty quickly. And while I can get angry about this stuff at times, I can’t keep it up long enough to sustain me through the fifteenth round of the same stupid shit. I burn out, and that leads nowhere good.

Don’t get me wrong– I’m not saying this to disparage Loxton or Orac or any of the other folks out there fighting the good fight. What they do is good and valuable, and I’m glad they’re doing it. I’m also glad that I don’t have to do it, because I just don’t have the temperament.

But in the end, that’s the fundamental problem with Horgan’s provocation, and the similar arguments deployed by advocates of every Cause Y confronted with people who work on Issue X. It’s not necessarily the case that someone who does good work on X will be well suited to help with Y. There’s specialized knowledge involved in any of these issues, but also questions of personality and inclination. I’d do a lousy job of fighting kooks even within my field of expertise, let alone some other kind of “more important” political activism, because I don’t have the personality for it.

At bottom, this is just the classic problem of specialization and division of labor in economics. Different people are good at different things, and making people do things they’re not suited to will get you sub-optimal results. The best course is to have everyone work on the things they’re good at: Orac does rage, Loxton does patience, I do “Hey, isn’t quantum physics cool?” And Horgan pokes anthills with sticks.

This can be really hard to remember, especially when you’re passionately attached to a particular thing. God knows, I do my share of grumbling about the overemphasis on particle physics and lack of attention for atomic and condensed-matter physics. But it’s important to try to maintain perspective and recognize that just because you think Y is the most important thing in the world doesn’t mean that the world would be improved by making people who are good at X work on Y instead.

Imaginary Syllabus: Science of Sports and Games

It’s one of those days where none of the stuff I probably ought to be writing seems even slightly appealing, so instead I’m going to do something frivolous and morale-boosting, namely think out loud about an imaginary course. Despite being on sabbatical, I do still check my work email, and have caught the edges of a new round of arguments about whether we’re providing enough “Gen Ed” science courses pitched at non-majors. The hardest part of this is always meeting the “science with lab” component, because those courses are pretty resource-instensive, and we have a limited set of them that we run through. Which has occasionally led me to speculate about what we could do to offer another science-with-lab course for non-majors.

The one semi-serious idea that’s stuck comes from a joking tweet I made some time back, when I said I was going to invent a “physics of sports” class to justify making the college pay for me to go to the Sloan Sports Conference. Which, like a lot of good jokes, sort of stuck in the back of my head, and every now and then I run across something that I mentally add to the imaginary syllabus. Which sort of looks like this, in roughly the order that they’d go in:

Topic 1: Kinematics: Position, velocity, and acceleration, and the relation between them. Basics of video analysis using Tracker to look at things like parabolic motion of thrown objects, acceleration of sprinters, etc.

Labs: Make and analyze video of simple motions. Look at existing video to check physics, a la Rhett’s Angry Birds stuff.

Topic 2: Momentum: Conservation of momentum in collisions of simple objects– billiard balls, etc.

Labs: Video analysis of simple mostly-elastic collisions.

Topic 3: Energy: Get into it with deviations from ideal elastic collisions– energy loss in bouncing balls, etc. Potential and kinetic energy, energy loss to thermal motion, etc.

Labs: Video analysis of motion with energy loss: bouncing balls slowing to a stop, projectiles with significant air resistance, etc.

Topic 4: Rotational Motion/ Angular Momentum: Start with energy in bouncing footballs, etc. Look at conservation of angular momentum in ice skaters, gymnasts, etc.

Labs: Video analysis of motion of spinning things.

Topic 5: Basic Probability and Statistics: Different types of averages, their pros and cons. Some discussion of uncertainties.

Labs: Flipping coins, rolling dice, etc.

Topic 6: More Advanced Statistics: Why do all these people on ESPN go on about “advanced metrics” all the time?

Labs: “Hot hand” experiment?

Topic 7: Final Project: some sort of student-chosen investigation to end the term. Either a pro sports incident that can be analyzed on video, or making a video of something that can be analyzed.

Typed out like that, this seems like a good deal of fun, but also a shitload of work. There are a whole host of reasons why this probably won’t happen, of course, but it has served its basic mood-elevating purpose for the morning, so hooray for that. And if you have suggestions of topics to add, or grant funds you’d be willing to direct my way to actually do this, well, you know where the comments are…

251-256/366: The Week in Photos

Getting caught up to today, a bunch of pictures from the past week (250/366 was the photo of Emmy’s memorial shrub):

251/366: Wagons Ho!

SteelyKid and The Pip taking turns pulling each other in their wagon.

Last weekend we had gorgeous spring weather, so the kids were playing outside a bunch. They ended up getting out the wooden wagon SteelyKid got for her birthday some years back, and giving each other rides. This inevitably resulted in me being asked to tow them around the neighborhood, but they did return the favor…

SteelyKid and The Pip pulling me on a wagon.

(Photo by Kate.) They’re very strong.

252/366: M-V-P! M-V-P!

SteelyKid’s MVP of the Week poster.

Just a cell-phone snap of a display in the hall at the JCC, so not a great picture. It does, however, commemorate two things: 1) SteelyKid being honored for being a good kid at her after-school program, and 2) the bug-eyed face she’s doing when asked to smile for a picture these days. This is entirely deliberate on her part, for the record– she knows it’s a goofy face, and delights in making it whenever anybody tries to take a picture.

253/366: Lead Off

SteelyKid on first base, ready to run.

SteelyKid is playing rec softball this spring, which gives me an excuse to take a lot of telephoto pictures, because baseball variants take a loooooong time. This is probably my favorite from the batch of photos I got at her very first game on Tuesday.

254/366: At Bat

SteelyKid about to get a hit.

Of course, I can’t post a softball picture without showing her at the bat. Where she’s the Ted Williams of the second-grade set– the longest at-bat she’s had in two games has gone three pitches.

255/366: Climb High, Climb Far

The Pip can climb very high.

The park where the softball games are played has this big Platonic solid with a web of ropes inside for kids to climb on. When we arrived on Tuesday, The Pip promptly climbed to the little platform in the center, then demanded in a slightly whiny voice “Dad, why can’t I climb higher than this?” I was a little frazzled trying to identify the correct field for SteelyKid’s game and herd her in that direction, so I distractedly replied “What? You don’t have to stop there. Climb as high as you like. Go nuts.”

So, yeah, that got a little scary. Notice Kate in the lower right, for scale.

256/366: Sakura

Two pictures of the flowers on the ornamental cherry tree in our yard.

I realize that in a lot of the country, peak flowering-tree season passed a month or more ago, but remember, we’re in the Northeast. So we just had pretty cherry blossoms this week on the small tree in our front hard.

243-249/366: Cute-Kids Cruise Photo Dump

As promised/threatened in the previous post, here’s a big collection of shots from our cruise vacation featuring the sillyheads.

243/366: Bunk Beds:

SteelyKid and The Pip like the bunk beds in the stateroom.

The sleeping arrangements in the stateroom were pretty slick. We had a double bed that was there all the time, and during the day a sitting area with a couch. While we were at dinner, the housekeeping staff came in and flipped the couch over to become a bed, then lowered a top bunk from a hatch in the ceiling. The kids have never slept in bunk beds before, so this was considered highly neat.

244/366: Grandma and Grandpa

SteelyKid with my parents on the top deck during the glass-bottom boat ride.

The Pip in flight.

The trip was a gift from my parents, who came with us, and helped make it tons of fun for the kids. Thanks to their help, we had the kids outnumbered at all times, even without using the floating day care option of the kids’ clubs.

245/366: Turtles All The Way Down

Kate and The Pip touching a baby sea turtle at the Cayman Turtle Farm.

SteelyKid holding a turtle she caught herself.

One of the port stops was Grand Cayman, where we visited a turtle farm. Part of the turtle side of the operation (they also had a snorkeling area and a freshwater pool) was a set of shallow tanks where you could touch and even pick up young turtles. SteelyKid doesn’t deal well with heat (my Northern European genes have their down side…), and had a bit of a meltdown here, but rallied to catch a couple of turtles. They’re very agile in the water, so this is a testament to the reflexes she’s honed with all that taekwondo…

246/366: Pools

The Pip jumping to Grandma in the wading pool on the ship.

SteelyKid giving The Pip a piggyback ride in the wading pool on the ship.

There were two kid-friendly swimming pools on the ship, one a shallow wading pool and the other a four-foot-deep pool next to a giant video screen playing Pixar movies. The latter was kind of terrifying, at times, because it was full of bigger kids careening around playing tag games, and I seriously thought one of them was going to swamp The Pip. So I don’t have any good photos of that.

The wading pool, on the other hand, was a rich source of photos of the Little Dude, who really loved splashing and “gliding” and jumping in the water. You wouldn’t guess that up until mid-July last year, he acted like the swimming pools at day care were bubbling vats of sulfuric acid.

247/366: Beach

SteelyKid learning to snorkel from Grandpa.

SteelyKid and The Pip floating in a tube at the Castaway Cay beach. With just-barely-visible Kate.

It wouldn’t be a Caribbean trip without a beach. As mentioned before, SteelyKid tried snorkeling for the first time at Castaway Cay, as seen in the photo above. After lunch, we went on an epic swim, while The Pip bobbed happily on an inflatable tube in shallower water (the second photo is after our snorkel expedition, when SteelyKid joined him for a bit).

248/366: Action

The Pip going down the waterslide on board.

SteelyKid approved of her swim with dolphins.

We were very busy on this trip, especially the last day or two after the kids finally tried the water slide, then went on it over and over again. The second photo is obviously a bit of a cheat, as I’m in it– that was at the swim-with-a-dolphin excursion in Cozumel, where I gave my father my camera with the telephoto lens, and he took a few shots from the approved photography locations. (They only let you take pictures from a good long way away from the actual dolphin swim, because they want you to buy shots taken by their professional photographers who are right up close…. And I have to admit, they did a better job than I could, as you can see in this composite I posted a while ago:

SteelyKid swimming with a dolphin, The Pip on a waterslide.

But, you know, that guy got to be a lot closer to the action, and had a much fancier camera…)

249/366: Dude-ly Dude

The Pip eating the ears off a Mickey Mouse waffle.

The Pip telling us a joke of some sort.

I don’t really have corresponding photos for SteelyKid at rest, mostly because she didn’t hold still for long the entire week. She got to do the dolphin thing without him, though (that was only for ages 5 and up), so he gets a couple of extra photos. The top one shows him chowing down on the ears of a Mickey-shaped waffle, which is one of the very few things he would reliably eat. He’s an insanely picky eater.

The bottom shot is my new favorite picture of him, as it gets his fantastic facial expression when he tells a joke. He’s a little hazy on how humor actually works– most of his jokes involve copying the form of more traditional jokes told by his big sister, but plugging in other nouns that make no sense– but he’s so cute and pleased with himself when he tells them…

And there’s a massive dose of cute-kid photos to send you into the weekend. Enjoy.

236-242/366: No-Kids Cruise Photo Dump

Since I’ve given up on the strict daily arrangement, I’m going to somewhat arbitrarily assign photos from the cruise numbers corresponding to the days of the last two weeks. I’ll do this in two big photo dump posts, grouped by whether or not SteelyKid and The Pip are in the shots. And since this is a little cheesy, I’ll throw in some extra bonus photos as well…

236/366: Ships

The Disney Magic, from the dock at Castaway Cay.

It seems appropriate to start with a picture of our ship, the Disney Magic. This is out of chronological order, as it was taken the last day of the trip, but this was the one stop where we thought to tie something to the balcony rail so we could spot our staterooms. If you squint really hard along the last row of balconies, you’ll see a little red dot near the middle of the ship. That’s us.

And here’s a bonus photo:

A couple of cargo ships passing us off the coast of Cuba.

This is me playing with the telephoto lens, taking pictures of merchant shipping in the Caribbean.

237/366: Slide

Maintenance workers cleaning and checking one of the waterslides on board.

It took most of the trip to get the kids interested in going down the waterslide on board, but once they did, they were really fired up about watersliding… This is from earlier in the trip, when I was wandering the decks not long after sunrise.

238/366: Sunrise

Sunrise on 4/25/16.

Sunrise on 4/29/16.

Not long after sunrise on 4/30/16.

Artsy shot of the rising sun refracting through a lamp at the front of the ship.

As mentioned above (and also in a physics post at Forbes, which includes yet another sunrise photo), I woke up early pretty much every morning of the cruise, so I spent a lot of time wandering the decks with my camera. This led to some nice pictures of sunrises, with varying degrees of artiness.

239/366: Birds

The osprey that rode with us from Grand Cayman to Cozumel, and an ibis that flew out from shore.

One morning when I walked up to the bow of the ship, I was surprised to see a raptor perched on the flagpole at the bow. Another passenger, a British man who was apparently a birdwatcher, said it was an osprey that had landed there the night before. I guess it was just hitching a ride from Grand Cayman to Cozumel.

Sadly, I didn’t have the telephoto on the camera, so I couldn’t really zoom in (and I just knew that if I went down to get the telephoto from our room, it would fly away…), but I did get this nice shot of the perched osprey and an ibis (I think; I’m going on what another passenger called it) that flew past not long before we spotted land on the horizon. The osprey took off shortly after this.

240/366: F*&k Yeah, Fluid Dynamics

Swirls and eddies in the wake of the ship as we maneuvered into port.

Wave patterns are pretty. That is all.

241/366: Cartoons

Animated drawings by the guests at dinner one night.

One of the onboard restaurants is called “Animator’s Palette,” with an obvious cartoon theme. One of the nights we ate there, we got placemats with a crude figure outline and instructions to color it in. They collected these while we were having appetizers, then scanned and animated them into a little cartoon that played during the main course. The red one just behind the Lion King characters was The Pip’s.

242/366: Beach

The beach at Castaway Cay.

This one’s cheating a bit on the “no-kids” thing, as you can see Kate and the kids in the water if you look carefully. They’re hard to spot, though, and I like this both as a jealous-making shot and for putting our grand snorkeling adventure into perspective. The nice woman in the yellow-and-blue shirt is watching over the snorkel-only part of the lagoon, where we entered the water with SteelyKid. We left the water over an hour later, down at the far end, by the rocks that you can just barely make out. So, you know, quite the swim for SteelyKid…

That’s also a nice lead-in to the next batch of photos, tomorrow or Friday, which will be seven days’ worth of cute-kid photos. Get your insulin shots ready.

250/366: Final Resting Place

There’s a discontinuous jump here, if you’re paying attention to photo-a-day numbering, but I’m skipping ahead of the cruise-centered backlog to write a more difficult entry.

Back in December, when we lost the Queen of Niskayuna, I had her cremated, and said I’d do something nice as a memorial, once the weather got nicer. We got one reasonably nice day in between bouts of rain yesterday, so I finished the memorial for Emmy:

The Queen Emmy Memorial Shrub.

This is in the weird little cul-de-sac side yard of our house, next to the dining room. For a while I was trying to grow herbs in planters over here, but we never really used them quickly enough, so it’s just been dead space for a while. So it seemed like a good spot for something decorative in memory of the Best Emmy Ever.

The shrub is a tall arbor vitae of the same type as the one at the edge of the patio/deck that was one of her favorite places to lie in the shade. You can see their relative placements in this wider shot:

The original arbor vitae that Emmy loved, and her memorial shrub.

I dug down a bit before adding dirt to the planter, and mixed her ashes down in the bottom level of soil. Which was a suggestion from one of the dead-pet books SteelyKid’s second-grade teacher sent home (which helped her, but man, that was a rough bedtime-story night…). So in a very distant way, some bit of her will get incorporated into the new tree, which seems like a very fitting memorial.

(I had thought of maybe burying the ashes in her usual spot by the original arbor vitae, but we’re looking at extending the back of the house out a bit, which will probably mean removing that tree, so this seemed more permanent…)

And now I need to stop blogging for a bit, as the house is suddenly full of smoke, judging from the way my eyes are watering…

229-235/366: Phone Snapshot Photo Dump

The week leading up to our cruise was crazy busy for me, with a bunch of travel for work. Which means you get a collection of cell-phone snapshots from that week, since I didn’t bring the good camera with me on all those trips.

229/366: Man the Barricades

SteelyKid and the Pip behind a wall of sticks.

There are some paths running into the woods near the kids’ day care, and the older kids decided to wall one of these off by wedging sticks between trees on either side. Because kids. It’s an impressive bit of work, until somebody huffs and puffs and blows it all down.

230/366: Quad

The central quad at Mount Holyoke College.

One of the out-of-town trips was a quick run to give a talk at Mount Holyoke over in Massachusetts. They have a very pretty campus, as one would expect of an elite liberal arts college.

231/366: Poster

Poster for my talk at Mount Holyoke.

Holyoke gets two spots in this recap, because I really like the graphic design on the poster they did for my talk.

232/366: Red House

Red house facade on the roof of the Met.

The other out-of-town trip was a run down to NYC for the conference associated with the Space Apps NYC event. This started early enough on Friday morning that I needed to go down there on Thursday, so I decided to make a day of it, and get some culture. This is the current display in the roof garden at the Met, a facade of a red house. It’s the usual quasi-joke sort of thing they put up there, but I like it better than many of the others I’ve seen.

233/366: Wood Art

Part of a chapel from the 1500s done in wood inlay.

The great thing about the Met isn’t just the big shows they host– though the Pergamon exhibit was excellent– but the oddball little galleries in the permanent collection. This is one of my favorites, a chapel from the 1500’s that’s been reconstructed here. All those panels with pictures are done in wood inlay, with incredibly detailed (and M.C. Escher-esque) pictures made by fitting different types of wood together. It’s really very cool, and you should look for it.

234/366: Memorial

The 9/11 memorial in Lower Manhattan.

The meeting was in a building on Broadway wayyyy down in the financial district, and my hotel was a couple of blocks from the World Trade Center site and the 9/11 memorial. Which is very impressive.

235/366: Cover Art

Two works by Armando Mariño from a show at the Rubin Museum.

After the meeting I needed to kill several hours before my train left Penn Station, so I stopped by another favorite NYC culture spot, the Rubin Museum. It’s dedicated to Himalayan art, but they had a show on religious imagery in contemporary Cuban art that included these two very cool pictures by Armando Mariño, which look like cover art for exceptionally awesome urban fantasy novels.

The day after the SpaceApps meeting was the day we left for Florida and our big cruise; the next two Photo Dump posts will be shots from the trip, since I averaged better than 100 shots per day while on the boat…