Britt's Blog

1. Gamma rays interfere with microwave communications.
2. X-rays counteract gamma rays.
3. Ergo I feel quite safe in concluding that x-rays would make microwave communication clearer.
4. If you have a hypothesis based on four data points, the next obvious step is self-experimentation. Alone, at night, using equipment that you are not familiar with.
5. The automobile tires of the 70′s cannot compare with today’s super-tires in terms of not blowing out and subsequently not causing the vehicle to catch fire.
6. How did we achieve the technological superiority that gives us the super-tires of today? I’m guessing self-experimentation.

If you’re not listening to the Moth podcast, like Dan and me, you really should be.

The Moth consists of true stories, told on stage, without notes, from famous as well as regular people.

An excellent recent episode which would be of interest to my Gentle Ithacan Readers is Alternate Ithaca Tom.

Tom ruminates about mid-life crisis and wonders about what might have been, specifically if he had studied Animal Behavior at Cornell University. He conflates Ithaca’s town and gown community and seems a little unclear on academic life in general, but nonetheless it’s a lovely piece about Ithaca and mid-life crises in general.

I felt an eerie sense of resonance as I listened.

One reason is that I am doing the typical holy-crap-I’m-on-the-tenure-track-do-I-really-want-to-do-this-for-the-rest-of-my-life thing. (This probably doesn’t qualify as a mid-life crisis, unless, heavens forfend, I die at the age of 66.)

The other reason is that I’ve often thought about the fact that according to the Many-Worlds Interpretation (which Tom explains quite well) there is a universe (many of them, in fact) where I went to Caltech, the other grad school I was accepted to.

In our Universe, I visited campus, got a somewhat creepy desperate vibe off the grad students, and decided I would probably be really, really unhappy living in southern California. But of course one still wonders.

Unlike Alternate Ithaca Tom, who springs, it seems, fully realized into Tom Weiser’s mind, Alternate Pasadena Britt is a mystery to me. I bumbled into planetary astronomy more or less by accident, so what does Alternate Pasadena Britt study? Did she end up doing planetary anyway, or follow Unbranched Undergraduate Britt’s passion for space and plasma physics, or does she do solar physics, or is she a radio astronomer, or what? Did Alternate Pasadena Jason marry her? Was she academically successful, or did she burn out and punt on grad school? Did she realize that she liked teaching and wanted to do that, or did she go on to do research postdocs instead?

How many million weird little things happened to me in Ithaca, things that would be impossible in Pasadena, to make me the person I am today? How many snowfalls and long, gray, Ithacating days, how many moments of stunning beauty looking over Lake Cayuga or lingering in a gorge, how many chance encounters at Wegmans, how many idle thoughts while waiting for the TCAT or for the elevator in Space Sciences… let alone the friendships made, the mentors met, the students taught, the miles and miles on the Stairmaster at the Ithaca College faculty gym…

How many versions of us had the courage that we lacked to do the brave thing at a critical juncture, or the wisdom and foresight to make the non-obvious lateral move that makes all the difference?

How many versions of us out there died in car crashes, got cancer, ruined their careers with bad decisions, went broke from poor financial management, or suffered all the other fates we worry about?

Is it at all comforting to think that there is a person out there who zigged where you zagged?

Thanks entirely to Jason’s tireless efforts to a) find more local gamers, b) communicate with them, and c) schedule stuff, we’ve been playing boardgames much more regularly.

It’s so relaxing and enjoyable to sit down with friendly, smart, fun people and play a game or two. (Even when I lose.) (Unless the reason I lose is that Jason is hogging all the wood.) (Then I get cranky.)

Lately we’ve played Carcassonne, quite a lot of Agricola, Shadows Over Camelot, Powergrid, and a new game that Jason is working on.

We also have a wee little Amber game going, which I’m sure is contributing to the gentle glow of gaming well-being that I feel.

I hope that I’ll have time to continue gaming once classes start next week—or maybe I really should be making the time to game for the sake of my mental health!

My sister-in-law requested a hat and scarf for Christmas. Yes, I know this is rather late; see Grandma’s Shawl. In order to assuage my guilt, and also because I’m a big believer in overkill in general, I decided to make some mittens, too.

She has a silver coat and a black coat, so I thought some nice wintery blue or green would look good with both. I acquired some of my favorite yarn, Paton’s Classic, in Faded Denim.

I thought the Wavy Scarf designed by Sarah Smith and published at knitty.com would do nicely: very interesting but not too fancy for everyday.

A few tweaks: I was concerned what the edges would look like, so I added a stitch at either end, knit the last stitch of each row, and slipped the first stitch of each row. I also did a tubular cast on and tubular cast off, which took quite a bit of squinting and fiddling to work with a K3-P3 rib, but was well worth it. It looks awesome. Next time you do any project with a ribbed edge, try it!

After finishing the scarf, I was an expert at the Wavy Pattern, so the next logical step was to try it in the round, on the hat. Again, I did a tubular cast on (since it is awesome.) The decreasing at the top took some careful planning.

Finally, we come to the mittens. Again with the tubular cast-on (at which I am now an expert.) The wavy K3-P3 rib makes for a fine cuff. Because the merino isn’t superwash, it will felt up a bit when you get the wet and wear them and stuff. (Shoveling snow is an excellent mitten-felting activity.) As a result they’ll actually take on some shape and develop handedness (i.e. the left mitten will fit funny on your right hand.) That being the case, I decided to give them a distinct palm and back, and ergo a distinct handedness, by continuing the wavy pattern up the back of the hand only. (Doing it all the way around would start to get a little crazy in the thumb gussets, anyway.) I did a 180° phase shift between the left and right so they’d be symmetrical. (For non-math-nerds, that means I started in the middle of the wave pattern on the right-hand mitten.) They look a little flat and goofy without a hand in them, but very nice on:

Me: Oh, goodness. It is possible that I have cut off my yarn too short to graft together the end of this mitten, even though I usually leave pathologically long tails on everything. Perhaps I should just put this down until morning.

Mitten: I, your almost-completed mitten-end, taunt you!

Me: Curse you, foul mitten! Your taunting compels me! Yes, indeed, I will graft you! O, the grafting you shall have!

Mitten: Heh, heh, looks like you only caught that stitch once there, you sad and pitiful excuse for a knitter!

Me: You cannot stop me, vile mitten! Lo, I go back and start again.

Mitten: Bah! Your graft is too loose! Your skills are weak! WEAK! Kitchener is spinning in her grave!

Me: Silence, mitten! You will be grafted, yea, loosely for the nonce, but as God is my witness, I shall pull you snug! O, yes, snug indeed!

Mitten: You are running out of yarn. I predicted this. I am smug. Smug, I tell you.

Me: The snuggening! Bow before the snuggening! Now look upon it and see, that there is a great abundance of yarn!

Mitten: O, lo, I am snuggened, and there is yarn enow… but wait… what is this… Extra stitches on the front needle? Bwah ha ha ha, you are undone!

Me: Be silent. There are always extra stitches on the front needle.

Mitten: Yeah. Maybe you ought to look into that, genius.

Me: Oh, sneer and taunt all you wish, for I am done! A great graftening has been wrecked upon thee, today, O mitten! Yes, indeed, and you are now sealed snuggly against the winter’s cruel chill, and I declare thee to be warm! Warm and comfortable, even when wet, for thou art woolen.

Mitten: Uh, yeah, except that I don’t have a thumb!

Me: …

Mitten: You could totally put a thumb on me in, like, 15 minutes.

Me: …

Mitten: You know you want to.

Me: I’m going to bed.

Okay, I thought “Flat Daddies” were… sketchy. But, hey, it seems to give some kind of comfort to the families, so far be it from me to criticize.

But an AI mommy or daddy that can videoconference with toddlers while Mommy or Daddy is off in harm’s way? That is a whole order of magnitude higher on the “Eek!” meter.

via Boing Boing

Our friend Alex was kind enough to send some images of his daughter Chloe in a sweater that I knitted.

I must confess, this is my very favorite baby sweater to knit. I think I’ve made five or six by now. It’s the “Baby Sweater on Two Needles” from The Knitter’s Almanac. Every time you make it, you can try a different, simple lace pattern, so it never gets boring. This one is the pattern suggested in Almanac, just ’cause I hadn’t done it in a while.

I’m getting something like 100-200 spam comments a day, and manually moderating posts is growing untenable. (Ask poor Dan, whose comments got lost amongst the pitches for Viagra, incest porn and escort services.)

You’ve probably seen CAPTCHA before; it’s the program that gives you an image of some supposedly non-machine-readable distorted text, which you then have to type in to prove that you are a human and not a spambot.

I heard about reCAPTCHA a while ago and thought it was pretty damned awesome, so when my spam problem escalated, I was thrilled to find out that WordPress has a plug in. (Thanks to Jason, who takes care off all my WordPress administration crap, for installing it for me.)

When you enter a comment, you will be asked to enter two words from an image that looks like this:

These words are not just randomly generated strings of characters, they are actual words from scanned documents, like out-of-copyright books and archival issues of the New York Times, words which are not readable by OCR. One of the words is “known,” so if you get it right, we know you’re not a bot. The other word is an unknown. The words you enter are sent back to the reCAPTCHA folks, and after an unknown word image has been identified as the same word by a bunch of people, they’ll know with some confidence what the word actually is. (So don’t panic if you can’t make one of the words out; you’re only required to get the “easy” one right to post your comment.)

Incredibly, brave commenter, you’re not just proving that you’re not a spambot, you’re making teh internets better for everyone by digitizing what the machines can’t.

If you find this irritating, I have enabled registration to my blog. Look over at the sidebar to the right under META for the “Register” link. If you register you can then log in and post comments without having to go through reCAPTCHA, though, if you ask me, it’s probably quicker to just type in the two words.

You can make comments below to try it out. :)