Related to some recent conversations with friends about the 23&Me DNA testing, my mother recently had it done. I have been giving her a hard time (in a fun way) because she paid them to tell her what she already knew (no surprises for us, 1/2 Eastern European and 1/2 Irish) BUT it's also kicked off a bunch of conversations about various family ( Read more... )

I went to an amazing lecture program at work today, it was a multidisciplinary thing with two neural scientists and one classicist (whose specialty is Greek theater), and the general topic was perception and cognition. It's hard to summarize, but it was indeed one interesting fact after another. One tidbit I thought was especially neat was that ( Read more... )

Last (some day, all the days are blending together because I was on vacation), I took Lu to this carousel museum, which, confusingly to me, is the Herschell Carrousel Museum, spelled with two "r"s because that was the company's actual name, but then in all their materials, they use carousel with one "r" when talking about the thing that is a ( Read more... )

We were at the AMNH again this weekend -- family in from out of town. The 4th floor, which everyone calls the dinosaur floor but also covers anything in the prehistoric fossil record including the evolution of mammals and other non-dinosaur stuff, but sure, dinosaurs, has a volunteer group of people, who seem like mostly retired people, who serve ( Read more... )

As many people probably do, when I was younger, around high school age, I went through a spate of reading a lot of mysteries. It was that transition from reading mysteries for kids -- even things like Nancy Drew, to mysteries that were intended for more of a YA audience (although that was barely a term back then), to mystery novels for regular ( Read more... )

I forgot how tiresome it is to put a picture in an LJ entry, so you're gonna have to follow me on this one -- you know the kind of door handle that is not a door knob, and not a horizontal bar, but like a vertical handle that has a thumb press tab on the top, which is the latch for the door? The more industrial kind that are in office buildings, I ( Read more... )

Three recent cross-cultural observations:

1. I had a bunch of errands to do at lunch the other day, and the route had me ending up near a Subway so that became my plan for lunch.

When I walked in, there was a group of female students, about ten of them, who I would put at high school age or maybe college freshmen, all wearing traditional abaya ( Read more... )

Something that always cracks me up: when you see babies in strollers, at about the "recently learned to sit up by themselves" age, maybe in the ballpark of 6 - 10 months, and they do that thing where they are sitting straight up, instead of leaning back into the recline of the stroller, like THEY HAVE SOMEWHERE TO BE, DAWG. And they look dead ( Read more... )

I don't listen to a lot of podcasts, but the one that I've been the most avid about is Serial, which means that the streaming service is always trying to recommend other types of true crime stories, in that "if you enjoyed Serial, you might like ... " way. But I probably won't necessarily, I'm not that into true crime on its own. However, I did ( Read more... )

In what is now simply comic, we didn't make it to Maple Weekend because Maple Weekend was cancelled due to snow. In fairness to the Maple Weekend people, I suppose, they had activities and demos scheduled all day Saturday and Sunday, and we were free on Sunday so that was when we planned to go. The Saturday activities went on as planned, but then ( Read more... )