6:15 am
Me: Brendan, time to get up! I’m making you scrambled eggs!
Brendan: mmmpfgh. Umm hmmm.
6:25 am
Me: We’re leaving in 15 minutes!
Brendan: (between bites) What?!
6:45 am
Me: OK, Brendan! Let’s go!
Brendan: (opening the sack I have packed) are there pencils in here?
Me: Trust me, everything’s there, passport, pencils, eraser, calculator, snack, water. Chop chop! Continue reading
Guest post by Gydle’s resident geek, my brother Dave.
I’m not all that thrilled that my first post here is a techie one. I was kind of hoping I could write about flowers or something. But Mary was so impressed by my decoding skills that she prevailed upon me to write this. So blame her. Here is a picture of flowers anyway. Continue reading
Just a quickie update on THREE things today:
FIRST, as I anticipated, my brother Dave cracked the Venter code. Actually, within minutes of reading my post, at 12:34 am his time, he was trying to explain it to me in a gmail chat. Continue reading
Who says scientists and writers can’t play God? My sister recently alerted me to a story in which science and literature intersect in a very bizarre way. It’s weird enough that I thought I’d pass it on.
A little less than a year ago, maverick geneticist (and yacht owner) Craig Venter rocked the world (again) by announcing that he had created synthetic life. His team had developed a bacterial-like genome from DNA made in the laboratory. Continue reading
No, not that kind of weed. Sorry, people. This is a gardening post.
Spring has come three weeks early to Switzerland. It’s 24 degrees (that’s 75 to you Americans), everything is bursting into bloom, the birds are singing their heads off at 4 am. The sound of the lawn mower can be heard throughout the land. Unless it’s lunch time or after six pm. Or Sunday. This is Switzerland, after all. There are rules to follow. Continue reading
I can’t find my notes! Panic! Not long before I left for the US, I interviewed a scientist who is studying chemical dispersion from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Boats from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute making daring underwater measurements, vast plumes of noxious chemicals threatening sea life for miles around, international scientific intrigue, sex, drugs, rock and roll… well, maybe not all that. But it was really interesting.
I should have written up the article right after the interview. I intended to. It’s all the European Commission’s fault. I got bogged down in completing the final report for an EU project I participated in last year. Continue reading
On a ride into San Francisco one day my brother pulls out his smartphone, hooks it into a cradle on the dashboard. So let’s check out the traffic on Google maps! Up pops the live traffic situation — the freeway is green if it’s smooth sailing, yellow if it’s slow and – 10 points if you can guess the color – if it’s stop-and-go.
How do they figure that out? Does the satellite look down, count the number of cars or their speed, judge the traffic flow, and upload the color? No, Dave tells me, it’s a clever app that takes advantage of the fact that most Californians have two things in common: they have GPS-enabled smartphones and they’re obsessed with avoiding traffic jams. Here’s an explanation of how it works from an official Google blog back in August 2009:
When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you’re moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions.
The world feels so unstable. The earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan, the volcanoes coming to life in Hawaii. Here in Switzerland, someone I barely knew but had hoped to see again soon passed away in the night. How can that happen? Now I will never know her. All that she had not yet said, not yet done, not yet written, will never come to be.
My teenagers are moving into their own lives. I’m racked with doubt. Did I do what needed to be done? I’m standing at the side of the road, watching them head off, full of hope and trepidation. I want to go with them, patch up their problems, organize their backpacks, take inventory of the contents of their hearts. But I can’t. This is their road to take, not mine. Continue reading
Will I never learn?
It’s happened again. Someone I’ve never met who is now working for my ex-boss has an Important Document that needs to be translated, it’s grippingly interesting, really, there’s just this one thing… it’s a tome with an undisclosed number of pages (I am in possession of “chapter 2” which is already 28 pages long) and needs to be done by next Friday. Continue reading