Haggadah

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Passover Seder plate from thedailygreenI hope Passover was good for those of you who observe it. I was honoured to be invited to a Seder last night and thoroughly enjoyed it, actually. Lots of telling, reading, telling, and more telling. And food. Plenty of food. And wine. Plenty of Wine. Then, lots of conversation into the night. More food, more wine. Excellent. (Image: Passover Seder plate from thedailygreen.)

Today, I was sent* a link to a Graduate Student Haggadah. It will no doubt resonate with many of you from either tradition. Among my favourite bits:
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Some Changes, and Connecting with Facebook

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Well, I’ve upgraded my WordPress installation and since some plugins might be not quite working with the newest version, things are going to look slightly different for a bit. But not hugely so.

Oh, if you are on facebook, you might like to know that I have put Asymptotia on the NetworkedBlogs application so that you can sign up and get a feed directly within facebook. Click through to here if signed in. Please note the difference between me, my facebook page, my blog Asymptotia, and Asymptotia’s space on facebook. All four are different. I’m just sayin’. Don’t forget to keep visiting here, for example.

Strangely, as a result of upgrading a few things, something weird happened that I Click to continue reading this post →

Pit Visit

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I promised a report on last week’s College Commons trip to the Page Museum at the Tar Pits, here in Los Angeles. It was an excellent trip. The usual thing I do for blogging these things is, some time later, as time allows, I sit down and do a sort of brain-dump. I tried to do something different this time, and walk on the tour with my Palm Tungsten (yes, really really old technology, I know) and simply write a sort of narrative into it as I went along. Then I combined the uploaded file with the images I took as I went along, and supplemented with some extra sentences here and there. The overall effect should be a sketchier description of the event than I usually do, which may or may not be an improvement given that everybody seems to skim everything these days anyway. (Click on the photos for larger views.) So, here goes:

tar_pits_trip And so it begins. And it begins well – after a name tag is given out, upon check in for the bus, we are given a little brown paper bag of snacks. Hurrah!

3:39 and we’re off! (We run by the excavations for the Expo line and since it is an elevated bus, I get a nice view of what’s going on for quite a way. Wish I’d had the camera out to make a video for you.)

My colleague David Bottjer, a paleontologist, gives a little run down of the history of the region (both social and paleontological) as we go north on La Brea (appropriately – they are the La Brea Tar Pits… Or given that La Brea means The Tar, they are The Tar Tar Pits…)

4:05 We’re here! Somehow, the little bag of goodies is all empty already. Except for Click to continue reading this post →

100 Hours!

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telescopeThis weekend, you might like to participate in the 100 Hours of Astronomy events going on all over the world. Recall that it is the International Year of Astronomy, and that there are lots of things going to celebrate the 400 years of the Astronomy era launched by Galileo’s use of the telescope for his landmark Astronomical observations. There are all kinds of exciting events, from local astronomers setting up telescopes in your neighbourhood for all to use, to things involving some of the great professional telescopes around the world live webcasting and even… twittering. From the main page of the organizers:

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Pit Stop

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saber toothed catI’m going to another interesting College Commons event today. It’s an away mission. We’re off on a specially arranged tour of the La Brea Tar Pits! This is part of the 1859 celebration series, and of course Darwin is the focus here to some extent. We’re going to be taken around the famous Pit 91. I shall try to take some pictures and report later. The image on the left is a painting of the saber toothed cat, by John C. Dawson. (It is in the LA Natural History Museum.) (By the way – yes, the “Los Angeles 20059 B.C.” on Click to continue reading this post →

Chess Tic?

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So, lovely idea to use the floor in this way, but what’s wrong with the picture?

chess_set_wrong

I spotted it while going past (downstairs in Doheny library last Tuesday), and could not let it go. In the end I had to go and figure out who was in charge of the exhibition and politely point out that there was a mistake. Apparently, people have been using it to play games and it might be that it is players who leave it improperly set up. My goodness.

Anyway, they said I should feel free to change it back to the right configuration. So I did. Some days later I went by and it was wrong again. I changed it back. Now I am thinking that I simply should not pass by that part of the building anymore to preserve my sanity…

It might seem a little nuts, but this is one of the campus flagship buildings that people visiting USC come through, looking at the building itself, and the exhibits down in the parts where this chess set is. Looks bad if we don’t know how to set up a chess set, doesn’t it? Well, I don’t know, maybe that’s silly… Also, I realized a bit later that maybe I am nuts, because… this has happened before.

I was in a Pottery Barn, maybe about two years ago, browsing through some of the Click to continue reading this post →