Entries Tagged 'Life' ↓

Happy Truck Day!

[Thanks to Diana for the picture!]

Courtesy of our neighbor Diana:

This is cool and these features are very cool indeed:

• Honk your Zipcar’s horn with your iPhone to find it in a crowd
• Unlock and lock your Zipcar with your iPhone after scanning your Zipcard at the start of each reservation

On a gorgeous fall morning today, I ran my third half marathon in the last 372 days. This one was the toughest one, because my training had suffered over the last month from my being under the weather a bit and from my dean-ly duties. So, I just barely managed the 13.1 miles in 2:15:48, not my best time. But for the first time, my family was there at the finish line and that was a great feeling (even if the kids were apparently a bit impatient — next time I have to run faster). I seem to have signed up for the Hyannis Half in February, so training will resume soon.

Courtesy of a friend of the foreman at the construction site, we now have some very neat aerial photography of Sawyer Hill Cohousing. I highlighted our house with a red oval in all three pictures (click on the pictures for full size versions):

The New York Times reports on worries that the Large Hadron Collider will destroy the world by, for example, creating a tiny black hole that then, instead of evaporating harmlessly as predicted by standard theories, will proceed to eat up the earth and beyond. In what is meant to be a reassuring comment, William Unruh, of the University of British Columbia, is cited as saying “Maybe physics really is so weird as to not have black holes evaporate. But it would really, really have to be weird.” Well, he must be using “really, really weird” in a technical sense, because by any common-sense standards that train has left the station: we already know that the universe is really, really weird and so not having black holes evaporate, perish the thought, doesn’t seem like such a big deal.

On a lighter note:

Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”

Great, don’t tell your kids. That’ll make for doozies of nightmares.

Brilliant:

BTW: the Helvetica movie is very much recommended. Get it from Netflix.

Well, now my other brother has tried his hand at blogging for just a brief moment. Thomas, who is a high school teacher in Hamburg, has some posts on educational policy on his blog. But just like was the case with Jens, who is an IT guy at a public broadcast network in Cologne, Thomas seems to have stopped posting. I don’t get it — I wish they kept posting so I could stay informed about what’s occupying them.

Update (4/16/08): Jens now has a new blog on cultural issues.

One thing is for sure: we have cornered the market on “von Fintel” domains: vonfintel.org, vonfintel.de, and kaivonfintel.org are all in the family.