Britt's Blog

I’m working through a backlog of old Point of Inquiry podcasts, and just listened to this episode:

Greg Craven – What’s the Worst That Could Happen?

It’s an interview with high school science teacher Greg Craven, who created a massively viral YouTube video which presents a somewhat different way of looking at the global warming debate, which is to acknowledge that science will never provide THE TRUTH, or an absolutely certain answer to whether global warming is happening, whether it’s anthropogenic, etc. and so deftly side-step the “yeah-but-als” of the climate-change denialists.

So, consider both sides: What if it’s right? What if it’s wrong? Moreover, consider both responses: What if we do nothing? What if we make the drastic changes required to reduce our atmospheric carbon output?

Which response carries the greatest risk?

And remember, we’re already running the experiment by doing little to nothing to reduce our carbon output.

The first video is pretty simplistic (you can skip it without missing much):

This followup (which responds to criticisms) is better:

I’m struck by the fact that he considers only the possible negative outcomes. A lot of the kicking and screaming about carbon reform makes me think of this cartoon:

I’m not saying Craven’s argument is as bulletproof as he seems to think it is, but I like how he urges you to gather your own information, make your own assesements and come to your own conclusions. I also respect a guy who’s willing to put something up on YouTube and actually read and respond to the comments.

I’m going to subscribe to his newsletter check out his book, which, it is claimed, is about how to make big decisions with limited information. As suggested in the interview, this could be a great part of a freshman seminar course.

This is a video from last year, but it gives you a sense of scale of the Board Room (which was downstairs in one of the Exhibit Hall this year (boo). Sorry the quality is so poor, but it does lend an appropriate sasquatch-film atmosphere to the three frames in which I walk past in my yeti hat at the 1-minute mark.

This year, Team Ithaca representation was weak, but we had a lot of fun with Dan, Amy and Zach.

New games played:

• Galaxy’s Edge Previously unknown to me, yet not a new game. We kinda liked it. The military control resolution is kind of brain-hurty and neat.
• Darjeeling Tea! Yay!
• Pack & Stack An all-too-eerily-accurate simulation of moving, including not being able to get the right truck from U-Haul.
• Steam Excellent new track-building, goods-delivering game.
• San Juan All the best elements of Race for the Galaxy and Puerto Rico, in one convenient package.
• Le Havre OMG too effing long.
• Race for the Galaxy: Brink of War Prestige can bite me.
• Nautilus Neat underwater exploration game with a a pretty board. Unfortunately, it just barely surpassed the fiddly-bits limit.

We never did quite manage to get into a game of Martian Rails. It was not available at Origins 2009, and we’ve been trying (in a half-hearted way) to get a copy for a while, though I’m deeply disappointed by the fact that the cities are drawn from fiction, unlike Lunar Rails, which awesomely uses actual lunar geography.

Acquired:

• Darjeeling, Assyria, Street Illegal and Dragon Parade (You get two randomly selected free games you get when you first visit the Board Room with your ribbon. This is the first time we got bumpkis in the Board Room raffle, which was a disappointment. :( However, Rio Grande Games provided free lunch and dinner for the Board Room, which was pretty extravagantly generous of them! Thanks, Rio Grande!).
• Powergrid China and Korea boards, RftG:BoW (at the Rio Grande Booth)
• Steam, Fredericus and Oriente (at the Mayfair Booth, the last two at deep discount)
• Suitors.

(Can’t wait for this week’s boardgame night: Origins Swag Edition!)

On the not-spending-all-my-time-inside front, I did manage to go running three times along the Scioto and Olentangy Greenways that follow the rivers through downtown Columbus. (Yay for Google maps, without which I would never have known that they exist.) The Olentangy Trail was especially nice.

Okay, this was done a while ago, but I wasn’t happy with the pictures I took, but i’m too lazy to take new ones, so here they are.

Here you can see our new bench, and the very attractive pillows we used as the inspiration for our color palette.

And here you have the best feature in our whole house, the awesome woodwork by the staircase. The new paint is much brighter than the gray that was previously on the back wall. And I think the cool color of the paint really makes the warm color of the woodwork pop.

So, the net result is that the woodwork stands out more and the foyer is a lot brighter, in a kinda chilled out aquatic way. Worth the effort, for sure.

Mauna Kea has kept popping onto my radar for some reason. I’ve never been… Maybe I should start proposing for IRTF or Keck time.

I just listened to this old ep: Aloha Astronomy from Are We Alone, the SETI podcast.

And saw this on Facebook. It really captures the flavor life on an observing run. “You can close the dome any time you like, but you can never leave…”

I finally feel like it’s summer, having gotten over the run-over-by-a-truck feeling that follows the semester.

J and I are finally tackling our front hall, where we had some water damage that necessitated the replastering of a section of the front wall, which has been naked since, like, last summer.

We have chosen a color scheme and we may, one day soon, actually be able to paint. But with the all the stuff you have to do before you paint, I’m wondering if we ever actually will.

Today, we’re finishing up stripping off the wallpaper.

This is an activity which seems to tap strongly into certain not-always-positive personality traits of mine, namely the compulsion to work systematically through tedious, detail-oriented tasks. This can, under certain circumstances, be a good thing, of course. I think pretty much any scientist, or even every academic, has to have this tendency to some degree—otherwise you don’t end up with a PhD thesis, and you quit graduate school and do something stimulating and fulfilling with your life.

But the same tendency can also cause me to spend two hours hour grinding through a sudoku, despite the fact that I really don’t like doing sudokus. (No offense to people who like sudoku. For me they’re a noxious cocktail of un-put-down-ability and uninteresting math that doesn’t lead to the solving of a physics problem.)

See also my unhealthy relationship with my Christmas tree.

Luckily, J is around so that I don’t forget to eat. I think at this point we are going to have to set a timer, and after it goes off, declare the walls Clean Enough. Otherwise I’m going to spend the rest of the week scratching at sub-millimeter-sized gobbets of wallpaper paste. Last night J had to physically take the scraper out of my hand while I protested, “But there is still stuff on the wall.”

Wish us luck. Next: patching and priming.

It took forever, I unraveled it an re-knit it twice, and I had to send away for another ball of yarn to get it done, but it is, indeed, done.

The pattern is the Wildflower Sweater from Handknits For Kids by Lucinda Guy.

The yarn is Shine Sport from Knitpicks in Green Apple, Marmalade, and Butter.

This was my first real intarsia project (with large blocks of color) and it was not, in retrospect, a good choice to learn a new technique because of the complex shapes and multiple colors. I thought I had enough experience in colorwork, because I’ve done quite a bit of Fair Isle… but then again, I’ve always kinda sucked at Fair Isle. :)

I left off the additional embroidery on the flowers, because I thought they stood up just fine without it. The puckers that are due to my bad technique actually don’t look too bad in a flower-like context. And I love the faux smocking at the top.

It was a lot of work, but I’m better at intarsia now, all the ends are worked in, all the seams are seamed, and the sweater is delivered to its intended recipient, who, thank heavens, did not outgrow it in the year I spent knitting, unraveling, and re-knitting it.

I now know what I want done with my remains.

I want to be made into a box of pencils. Distribute these pencils to my colleagues.

Derive away, ladies and gentlemen. Derive away.

Also, feel free to give them to your students to use when taking the Physics GRE.

When I was in junior high, Swatch watches were the big thing. Everybody was wearing them. Rich and popular kids wore several on each arm. It was madness.

It is probably surprising to no one that I did not have one.

One could argue that this has contributed to the swatch-knitting aversion of my early days, but I have finally learned my lesson. I have weird, very loose gauge when working with most fibers, so I really do have to swatch to figure out what needles to use. Following the recommendation in the pattern is almost never going to work.

But then, there are fun swatches, like this one:

The yarns are Stroll (formerly Essentials) from Knit Picks: Cartoons hand-painted and Ash Tweed.

The socks are inspired by my colleague Katie’s awesome mittens, which I am totally obsessed with, and the book Knit One Below, which I picked up at the library on a lark a while back.

The swatch was worked in the round, so all rows are RS rows.

The bottom pattern on the swatch used the Knit One Below K1B stitch, alternating with regular knit stitches: *K, K1B* with MC for one row, *K1B,K* with CC for the next. This creates excellent vertical stripes that look especially striking with the handpainted yarn.

The middle section was an attempt to reproduce Katie’s mittens with K, *K1B, K3* with MC, followed by *K3 K1B* with CC. It makes an interesting pattern, but nothing too exciting.

It is the top section, which is K *Slip 1, K3* with MC and *K3 Slip 1* with the CC that reproduces the excellent raised columns that I fell in love with on Katie’s mittens.

Unfortunately, the slip-stitched fabric is pretty tight, as the Slip 1 has the effect of tightening the neighbors of that stitch on the previous row quite a bit, whereas the K1B technique leads to a much stretchier fabric which might be more appropriate for socks.

So, I’m not thrilled by the middle section, but I’m going to have to swatch some bigger pieces before I can decide between the bottom and the top.

What do you think?

Every once in a while, it’s a good thing to just surrender yourself to a Big Damn Project.

We were invited to a Film Food potluck, where you bring a dish to pass inspired by a movie. In a move that is either sheer genius, or totally gross, I decided to make prawn spring rolls in honor of District 9.

This turned into a Big Damn Project.

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