Personal – Page 26 – Spinor Info

Popular science

Dec 162010

It’s official: the work we are doing about the Pioneer Anomaly qualifies as popular science according to Popular Science, as they just published a featured article about it.

I admit that it was with a strong sense of apprehension that I began reading the piece. What you say to a journalist and what appears in print are often not very well correlated, as politicians know all too well. My apprehension was not completely unjustified, as the article contains some (minor) technical errors, misquotes us slightly in places, and what is perhaps most troubling, some of the work that it attributes to us was done by others (e.g., thermal engineers at JPL). These flaws notwithstanding (and this article fares better than most that appeared in recent years, I think), it is nice to have one’s efforts recognized.

Time travel

Canada, Personal No Responses »

Dec 132010

In the pre-Internet days, when I traveled to a city that I never visited before, the first thing I did was to buy a copy of the local newspaper, and then read the local pages and some of the classifieds.

Now, thanks to the Internet, I can time travel the same way, without leaving my chair. For instance, I can browse the pages of the Ottawa citizen from 1973, the year my Mom and I visited this fine city. Not sure what is weirder… how much has changed or how much remained the same.

Home

Personal, Physics No Responses »

Nov 212010

This sunset above an eerie landscape of orange-lit clouds looked much nicer to the naked eye than it looks in a picture:

Yes, it means that I am back home. As a matter of fact, I arrived back home some 2.5 hours early. My flight from Mexico City landed 15 minutes early in Toronto, and after dashing through the airport like crazy, I managed to make it to an earlier Ottawa flight… which had ONE (!) seat left. Talk about luck.

It was an interesting conference. Useful discussions, good people to meet. I had a chance to talk about MOG cosmology to a not altogether unfriendly audience.

Still, it’s good to be home. Sleep in my own bed and all that.

Blogs and dark matter

Astronomy, Personal, Physics 1 Response »

Nov 182010

This is John Moffat, talking about blogs, dark matter, and the Bullet Cluster:

It’s going to be my turn Friday. Of course I won’t be able to take a picture of me.

Washing Machine

Personal No Responses »

Nov 172010

Here is a fine view of Ciudad de Mexico from my hotel window:

The building up front, housing the corporate headquarters of several multinational companies, is aptly named by the locals: they call it the “washing machine”.

I am used to seeing architecture like this in vintage futuristic shooter games, like Duke Nukem.

X10

Computers, Personal No Responses »

Nov 142010

This, really, is just a test, to see if WordPress works on my freshly updated Xperia X10 phone, letting me post to my blog.

OK, it works. Android 2.1 is nice, well, much nicer than 1.6. At least now I can Skype or use Acrobat to view PDFs.

One thing I need to figure out is how to stop this blessed thing from replacing every word it doesn’t recognize with a silly guess (WordPress=Sorceress?)

Buffet

Food, Personal No Responses »

Oct 312010

The other day, my wife and I visited a restaurant in Gatineau. We were not disappointed; the quality and selection of “Le Buffet des Continents” was quite excellent.

But then, there was this fine piece of socialist realist art greeting us upon entering the establishment:

It won’t prevent us from going back, though.

Handyman

Handyman, Personal No Responses »

Oct 302010

I am 47 years old, but up until last week, I never ever painted a room. I knew more about how paints behave on spacecraft surfaces than on drywall.

Well, this is no longer true. I just finished the walls, window, door, and floor in our small bedroom:

Yes, I am proud of my handiwork. Our cats appear to be satisfied, too:

But no, I am not planning to give up my day job.

Worried kitties

Cats, Personal No Responses »

Oct 142010

Caught on a Web cam, two very worried kitties in my wife’s room, listening intently as workmen were demolishing an old furnace in the basement:

The other three cats were in hiding.

Mobile in the 21st century

Computers, Personal No Responses »

Sep 132010

So here I am, posting to my blog from my new smartphone. Neat. I suppose it was time for me to join others and acquire my very own 21st century toy… I have to confess though, the touch screen is nice but it’s much easier to type on a real keyboard…

Legal drinking age

Personal No Responses »

Sep 122010

As of today, our marriage with Ildiko can legally drink and vote. Well, at least in some jurisdictions, insofar as the drinking part is concerned. Here in Ontario, our marriage could now be employed in a liquor store, but it’d have to wait another year before it is actually allowed to buy the products sold there.

Blogging software

Internet, Personal 1 Response »

Aug 202010

I went for a walk last morning and it gave me time to think. About this here blog of mine. Notably, about the fact that this is my first new entry in ten days, probably a record since I began this habit some eight years ago.

Of course eight years ago, I was not using blogging software. I was originally just adding content to a static HTML page. Eventually, I wrote some home-brew server-side code that allowed users to access a specific day. Which is how the software organized entries, by day that is. So I felt compelled to put something in every day, even if it was nothing more than just the comment, “another boring day”. (Not boring to me mind you, but to people reading my entries.) But then, two years ago I decided to join others in the 21st century and set up WordPress. (It was perhaps around this time that my resistance finally broke down and I began to accept the word “blog” as part of my vocabulary.) One side effect of this change was that I no longer added a new entry every day… but then, there were days when I added more than one. Even so, I blogged less. Was it because of the change in software?

Or perhaps I just have less to say? How many original (or, well, not too unoriginal) thoughts can be stored in an average human brain? How soon before we start repeating ourselves, griping about the same issues over and over again? Perhaps I am blogging less because I already said everything I needed to say?

Or maybe it’s something else altogether. Maybe it’s not the blogging software per se, but the fact that it allowed me to configure my Facebook account to pick up my blog entries and post them there. Suddenly, people actually responded to what I had to say. They actually commented. What on Earth?

You see, blogs (and I mean real, personal blogs, not news media outlets that call themselves blogs) are the ultimate write-only media. You write about things that matter to you, not about things that matter to others. You yell at the world, not expecting the world to yell (or, for that matter, whisper) back.

So perhaps I just became shy because suddenly the world talked back. Suddenly, I had to pay attention to what I wrote because there was a reaction. Usually a friendly one, but even so… I had to explain my thoughts. Heaven forbid, I sometimes had to revise them because somebody convinced me that I was mistaken. When you yell at the world, you’re not expecting the world to explain to you why you are wrong.

Maybe I’ll just establish a secret blog site. One that is not linked to Facebook or anything else, the URL of which only I know. (Who needs pesky readers?) Then, I’ll happily yell at the world again secure in the knowledge that nobody pays any attention whatsoever…

23,000 lines later

Personal, Programming No Responses »

Aug 062010

Well, almost 23,000. Mostly JavaScript and PHP, also HTML and SQL. This is a project I’ve been working on all summer. Lots more to do, but at least one deliverable is complete, and I can finally spend a little bit of time doing something else. Plenty of other things I’ve been putting off while I was on this programming binge.

It’s good to be home

Personal, Weather and Climate No Responses »

Apr 032010

I’m back from a week-long trip to Hungary, visiting my Mom, relatives, and friends. Apart from the fact that the second half of my trip was made unnecessarily unpleasant by some cold bug I picked up on the flight from here to there, it was fun. But, it’s good to be home, even though, it seems, I came home in the middle of a heat wave. Yesterday, the heat almost killed me when I was looking for my car at Montreal airport (cars have the nasty habit of moving about when you leave them in large, public lots) while hauling my 60-pound suitcase. Today, it’s going to be even warmer. (No, we’re told, it’s not global warming… it’s the same El Niño weather that brought an unusually cold spring to parts of Europe.) I better check to see if our A/C still works after its winter hibernation.

Perimeter

Personal, Physics No Responses »

Jan 282010

The Perimeter Institute turned into a major construction zone. But, it’s still fun to be here. And useful… I work very well with people over the Internet and the telephone, but some difficult issues are better discussed face-to-face.

Zsóka néni

Personal No Responses »

Dec 302009

It’s just been a little over eleven months since my uncle Jóska died… and now it’s one of my aunt’s turn, aunt Zsóka (as a child, I called her Zsóka néni) died in her sleep this morning in Budapest.

I have Zsóka néni to thank for many things, most notably for improving my English. I was around 16 at the time, and I was complaining to her that despite my best efforts, my English is still not anywhere near where I think it ought to be. Her advice: go read a book or two. And don’t use a dictionary, figure it out yourself.

The first ever book I read in English was a gift from her: The Eagle Has Landed, by Jack Higgins. It took a year or so, and several false starts before I was able to get to the end. But my next book took only a few months; the next, just a few weeks; and after that, I was reading English almost as well as I was reading Hungarian.

Needless to say, a few years later when I came to Canada, near fluency in the English language was a tremendous asset. Instead of washing dishes or selling hamburgers, my first job in this country involved writing C-language driver code for a government client. Thanks in large part to Zsóka néni.

Who is no longer with us. She was 77, the oldest of four siblings; now only two of them remain, my mother and my aunt Edina. I hope both of them will remain with us, in good health and in good spirits, for many more years, never mind years, how about decades, to come.

Sliced bread

Personal, Society No Responses »

Oct 042009

I bought this at our favorite Portuguese bakery the other day:

sliced bread In case it’s not obviously visible from the picture, it’s a sliced loaf of bread… sliced lengthwise, that is.

No, I did not ask for it to be sliced lengthwise. I’d have preferred it to be sliced the conventional way, but unfortunately, I was late to the bakery, and this was the last loaf of their uniquely tasty nine-grain bread that day. So I bought it, and they were kind enough to sell it to me at a discount.

The explanation? “New employee,” I was told. Now why do I have the feeling that this new employee will not be employed at that place very long?

Then again, it could have been worse. She could have sliced it horizontally.

Handyman

Handyman, Personal No Responses »

Sep 282009

Today I turned this

into this:

I am almost beginning to believe that I am actually good at this handyman stuff.

My brand new toilet

Handyman, Personal No Responses »

Sep 262009

I was a very brave person today… I peed in a toilet that I just finished installing.

So far, no sign of leaks below.

The toilet saga, part 2

Handyman, Personal No Responses »

Sep 252009

I’m most pleased with myself tonight. Maybe I have an aptitude for the experimental side of physics, too, as it appears that I was able to repair successfully my subfloor around the leaky toilet. I took some pictures:

Next task is to finish the floor and put the new toilet in. Maybe tomorrow, maybe not… I’m rather tired, so I might skip a day. But then again, I seem to be on a roll…

Older Entries Newer Entries