late coffee and oranges in a sunny chair » Life

Our House from the Air

Kai — Fri, 02 May 2008 19:55:29 +0000

Courtesy of a friend of the foreman at the construction site, we now have some very neat aerial photography of Sawyer Hill Cohousing. I highlighted our house with a red oval in all three pictures (click on the pictures for full size versions):

Are Dragons Going to Eat Us All?

Kai — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 13:25:49 +0000

The New York Times reports on worries that the Large Hadron Collider will destroy the world by, for example, creating a tiny black hole that then, instead of evaporating harmlessly as predicted by standard theories, will proceed to eat up the earth and beyond. In what is meant to be a reassuring comment, William Unruh, of the University of British Columbia, is cited as saying “Maybe physics really is so weird as to not have black holes evaporate. But it would really, really have to be weird.” Well, he must be using “really, really weird” in a technical sense, because by any common-sense standards that train has left the station: we already know that the universe is really, really weird and so not having black holes evaporate, perish the thought, doesn’t seem like such a big deal.

On a lighter note:

Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”

Great, don’t tell your kids. That’ll make for doozies of nightmares.

Very Few People Come in Helvetica

Kai — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 19:05:23 +0000

Brilliant:

BTW: the Helvetica movie is very much recommended. Get it from Netflix.

Brotherly Blogs

Kai — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 14:47:41 +0000

Well, now my other brother has tried his hand at blogging for just a brief moment. Thomas, who is a high school teacher in Hamburg, has some posts on educational policy on his blog. But just like was the case with Jens, who is an IT guy at a public broadcast network in Cologne, Thomas seems to have stopped posting. I don’t get it — I wish they kept posting so I could stay informed about what’s occupying them.

Update (4/16/08): Jens now has a new blog on cultural issues.

One thing is for sure: we have cornered the market on “von Fintel” domains: vonfintel.org, vonfintel.de, and kaivonfintel.org are all in the family.

Intelligentsia

Kai — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 04:08:05 +0000

I am in Chicago for the annual meeting of the LSA (Linguistic Society of America), mainly to do a bunch of interviewing of candidates for a job opening in my department. To fortify myself, I needed a balanced breakfast this morning. On the recommendation of my friend Thony, I walked a mile from the conference hotel to a cafe called Intelligentsia for a truly balanced breakfast of carbohydrates, protein, fat, and caffeine, i.e. a cafe latte and an almond croissant. The coffee there is indeed recommendable.

Tonight, my reward for the day of interviewing was several pints of Guinness (more inherently balanced food, even without the lamb stew that went with it). Tomorrow morning, weather permitting, I will get to put in a nice long run.

Storms

Kai — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 23:14:36 +0000

Yesterday was our first serious winter storm of the season. I thank the gods that

the National Weather Service was right in the forecast,
the National Weather Service was forthright,
I could follow their recommendations.

The details:

I get my weather news from wunderground. After a quick look at the summary, when there’s impending doom, I always go to the “Scientific Forecaster Discussion”, a fantastic service. I love the geekiness of it, even if I only understand at most half of it.

So, in the run-up to yesterday’s storm, on Wednesday they had this sentence in the scientific discussion: “Unfortunately timing of heaviest snow will coincide with the late day/evening commute. Therefore … if you have the flexibility you should strongly consider leaving work or school early tomorrow /no later than lunch time/.” I checked my schedule and saw that I would have to cancel/reschedule two appointments, but I decided that this was easier than getting stuck in storm traffic. Then, yesterday morning, the scientific discussion confirmed the previous day’s warning and said: “Travel is not recommended this afternoon … as snow will fall at the rate of at least an inch per hour. If possible … travel should be completed by 1 PM across all of southern New England”.

So, I left MIT at 11:30am to drive out to Framingham to get the kids from school. By 12:45pm, we were back in the city to drop off the carpool kids. The snow had started. At 1pm, we crossed the River Street bridge into Cambridge and almost rear-ended the car in front of us, saved by the ABS brakes. By 1:15pm, we were safely in our house, hot chocolate and all. By then, it was snowing hard. We had 11 inches of snow within a few hours. Quite impressive.

You may have heard what happened to the millions that all left work once they saw the snow falling outside: we have friends that were stuck in the gridlock for hours on end, making for a 5 or 6 or 7 hour commute back home.

So, hurray for the National Weather Service who were right on the money and hurray for a flexible job that lets me rejigger my schedule in cases of emergencies.

Now, we’re waiting for tomorrow night’s Nor’easter.