1. Cutest ESL mistake of the day:

Me: How old are your children?
Student: Ten o'clock and eight o'clock.

2. Mark your calendars, SFF fandom folks. Today is the day an NPR reporter mentioned Wincest by name on the air. In a positive story about fan fiction. I may not be a Supernatural fan specifically, but I feel like we've passed some sort of ( Read more... )

In his research paper, student talks about Archimedes' principle and gives, as an example, elevated water sources that deliver water to a municipal area. But I don't see how that's an example of buoyancy. I think it's just gravity that creates the pressure that delivers the water ( Read more... )

Just finished my last research paper first draft! And it's not even midnight yet! I only had six papers in this batch, and half of them weren't even finished, so I was able to do one per day and maintain something like what passes for a normal life for me in the summer. I don't think I spent more than five hours on any of the papers. Unfortunately ( Read more... )

Today, I received two tiny items in the mail, each in its own giant box.

( See the out of control packaging. )

(New icon: this is Clyde Langer. He is pleased.)

At the bookstore Friday, I also picked up a shrubs & vines field guide I've been coveting for years and two games: Bananagrams (a sort of freestyle Scrabble) and Rory's Story Cubes (like the Harold & the Purple Crayon game but with dice and no drawing). I was thinking I could use Bananagrams in my ( Read more... )

I was falling asleep while walking back across campus to my office for lunch. Let's hope this super duper healthy smoothie picks me up, because there's another three hours to go, and it mostly consists of "What time do you have breakfast?" "I have breakfast at seven o'clock" and how to use capital letters ( Read more... )

I just wrote the following feedback to a student's presentation: "Too much time on tentacles."

All the while, influenced by anodyna and her Vulcan wedding blancmange which led to someone making Tentacle Blancmange, and by jadesfire2808 sharing the world's teeniest Kraken, my brain was protesting, "But there's never too much time spent on tentacles ( Read more... )

Question for my British English-speaking friends ( Read more... )

It's still very green around here, not looking like fall yet. In fact, August was so cool and September so wet that the woodland sunflowers and wild marigolds, which normally come on in August, are just starting to bloom. They're everywhere, fields and fields of them. This is on the dirt road just coming out of the woods, with some rare blue sky ( Read more... )

Frustrated IT techs in South Africa prove their point with an information-transfer stunt using a pigeon named Winston. I love the photo on the same page, a beautiful shot of a pigeon flying over New York City. (And speaking of pigeons, have I ever done my post about hero pigeons in WWI and WWII?)

Frustrated vineyard owners turn to falcons to scare ( Read more... )