When you’re a scientist, visualizing data can be crucial to understanding and communication. Graphs are almost always better than data tables and a smartly-drawn diagram can often convey more than a long, detailed paragraph. I was thinking about this today because of a YouTube link a friend sent me that had a visualization of the…
This is the first in what I hope is a continuing series of Interesting Things I Forgot To Post – trips and stops and things that happened this year that I thought, “I should post about this,” but never seemed to get to. This past summer, the weekend we went up to San Jose and…
I don’t read a lot of nonfiction. Actually, that’s not true. I read a good deal of nonfiction in the form of science journals for my day job, so when I read for pleasure I prefer fiction because I’m usually looking for a bit of escapism. However, a couple of months ago, I read two…
A drabble is a very short story of exactly 100 words. Feel free to join in and write your own drabbles on Fridays and tag them with “friday drabble” and on Twitter with the hashtag #fridaydrabble. The Two of Us We’ve been together for years now, though sometimes I think I hardly know you at…
I’m not sure what happened to the good momentum of The Musical Bum Club last month – I didn’t see an April selection, but we were just coming back from vacation, so I know a lot of things fell through the cracks. Anyway, regardless of whether we have more new music to review and discuss, I…
It was with a lot of interest that I started listening to February’s musical bum club selection, Gotye’s Making Mirrors. I had never heard of the artist before (I thought it was a band name…sigh), but really isn’t finding music you haven’t heard of part of the point of this club? I think Jimmy gave…
Last month, Jenny made the effort to arrange an “album club”, which sort of like a book club, will listen to one album over the course of a month and discuss it. We voted. This is the first month and review for the group. A few years ago, I turned 40 and about the same…
One of our favorite things this weekend was attending a concert by the Eroica Trio at the La Jolla Music Society. For those of you that might not know, The Eroica Trio is a piano trio (piano, violin, cello) that has made a fairly well-known name for themselves adapting classical and other pieces into chamber…
So, the last time I’d had my piano tuned, Debbie Pianotuner* was cleaning the inside of the case and ran a cloth along the strings. She looked at the cloth and said, “Hmmm…” Now, “Hmmm” is rarely good and so I came over and there were little streaks of rust where the cloth had been.…
So, one of the things I’ve gotten to spend some more time with during my – err – sabbatical from gainful employment – is my piano. For those who’ve been around here a while, you might recall that a couple of years ago, I was stressing about and then actually enjoying learning a little music…
Stevil 