The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by TChem:

Less useful, but somewhat less ugly and created for essentially the same purpose: Thread Cutter Pendant. In early '02 when they started confiscating tiny thread scissors, I started seeing these at a lot more craft shops. Like the key, its purpose was pretty obvious.

Caroline @56: Naught but symptathy; I was terribly, terribly burned out by the time I finished my thesis, and the most painful parts were right around this time of year too. Some things that worked for me below, in no particular order.

You don't have to write the final version first. I had an outline that started similar to an outline as recognized by the general public, but when starting at blank space, adding a paragraph or some references or *something* to the outline helped, and made progress through the actual writing phase okay. At first, I'd find myself easily distracted--if a particular sentence required a particular reference, I'd go look up that reference, and by the time I found it I forgot what I was saying. I realized at some point that it was more efficient to say "ADD REF HERE" and continue if I was in a writing groove, and then go have a reference-adding groove later on.

All that led to my general rule of "don't make the last paragraph too pretty." Having some minor editing to do in the previous page got me in the right mindset for the next. If I'd just written a good paragraph and was ready to finish for the day, I made sure to write an ugly sentence or two, just so I had an arrow when I sat down again.

Physical movement is necessary. I almost included Dance Dance Revolution in my acknowledgments section, because it was so helpful for me to jump around like a fool for 20 minutes before sitting down and working. It would have been much more painful without it. Do jumping jacks, walk to work, something.

When I had no-accomplishment day and beating myself up over it, I was occasionally able to take that self-hatred and turn it into getting stuff done. It's not especially healthy, except that then at least I'd done something that day, which ended up making me feel better.

Any progress is forward progress. For me, when it came together, it came together rather suddenly, in part because I had pages of all those ugly paragraphs on days where I said "quantity over quality" and just wrote nonsensical, unconnected paragraphs that I knew would fit in somewhere. None of that had felt like forward progress, but it really did help.

Having a job offer was very helpful for me, but YMMV on that one.

I'm loving looking at all the photosets. Even when there are lots of cars and people they still look peaceful, somehow--maybe because I know how good I feel traveling by bike myself.

I photographed my walk to work. It turned out that every ~150 steps was a block-and-a-bit, which seemed like a good balance. I posted it here. At some point I may photograph a different route home. I tagged it with "walkcommute".

I've been meaning to do this for a while, so thanks for the push.

I walk more often than bike (there's a serious hill, and when I lived at the top of it I biked more often), but I think the principle would be the same. Maybe every 100 steps?

864 Diatryma: the water at the ice machine's a good one we hadn't thought of. There will be lots of sloppy glassware washing at the sink, I'm sure.

865/866: Fire's good for future reference, though our building has a no-open-flame policy. Burns, yes! (she says, one hand in cool water after touching a fresh from the oven pan with WET HANDS grrrr)

jules: I did not know that! Nitrogen in a small room it is, then. I considered giving them a hint at 10 seconds, but I think having the third student come upon the first two who failed will be more effective.

xeger: Unknown spill is even better than a known, actually, because the secondary lesson is to label everything. Cool.

David: We were going to do an eyewash; the shower makes a terrible mess. And possibly having a fellow student come up to them saying: "Hey, this peroxide goes in with the organic solvents, right?" No glassblowing, thank goodness.

This question made me think of you all.

I work in a lab. We have 10 high-schoolers coming up for an intensive 5-week internship program soon. Lots of chemistry, some relatively non-hazardous biology. We're going to give them the standard safety talk, but we also want to do an hour or two of some role-playing stuff in actual plausible scenarios, in a way that doesn't actually pose any danger.

Current ideas being batted around involve dropping a beaker of "acid" (actually water) that they'll need to do spill cleanup on, someone getting solvents in their eyes and helping them to the eyewash station.

Thanks to reading Jim's emergency entries, I came up with one for which the right answer is "Don't help that person, get the heck out of the room." (Air nozzle falsely labeled "CO2" in big letters, person "passed out" on the floor. If they don't leave within ~20 seconds, the group leader taps them on the shoulder and says "Everything goes black. Lay on the floor." then calls in the next student.)

Does anyone have any other ideas? Basically, we're looking for things that could happen in a lab, that can be faked convincingly and safely, and that involve at most one "actor" (probably me).

Re: "Morning Has Broken": The only version I'd heard until very recently was of the jokey doggerel type, sung to wake people up at a UU religious retreat where I worked for a summer:

"Morning has broken
But we can fix it,
So pick up a mop and
clean up the mess,

People are scrambling
Your eggs for breakfast
Youuuu can have some
If you get dressed."

No one at church knew why I shouted with understanding laughter when we sang that song sometime last year.

Xopher #533: Harder flour contains more gluten. I only learned about this recently myself, reading "It Must Have Been Something I Ate". A fun book and very informative, though it made me realize that there are foodly lengths to which I'm not willing to go.

No presidential-themed stuff here that I've seen in WI, though we've gotten a few letters from the Democratic Party asking for money, and a very odd political mailing set up like a Christmas card* from someone so sure they're a household name that they didn't bother saying who they were, or what they're running for.

If I knew who they were, and would still be in the state for the election, I would vote against them for displaying that level of ego.


*One side of the postcard was a family picture. On the back was printed "Merry Christmas, from Joe, Penny, Sarah, and Jake"--Can't remember the real names. There was teeny writing along the bottom saying that it'd been paid for by a group with a frustratingly vague name.

Born in late '79, I remember the World Series, the Challenger explosion, and Halley's comet from 1986. Can't remember anything earlier that doesn't have that "pasted over later" memory-feeling (I remember Mary Lou Retton, but can't guarantee I saw her in the Olympics and understood what was going on with it right at the time, for example).

The earliest event that I remember seeing on the news myself and making my own conclusions about was the US invasion of Panama ('89). I thought it'd be the start of WWIII.

I somehow missed the fall of the Berlin Wall completely; I missed a question about it in a school-wide trivia contest in 5th grade and my teacher got mad at me for losing on something so easy after answering things mentioned once in a textbook. "But it wasn't IN the textbook," I answered. I was that kid.

41, 44: In my family they're called pinwheels, and if there's a kid in the house, that's who they're reserved for. I like them barely cooked.

VictorS #42: A friend of mine made a pie with that recipe that at a party recently, and I was really impressed with how it came out. I mysteriously ended up with a big bottle of vodka recently, and may try baking with it soon rather than letting the ethanol go to waste (since I don't drink and husband prefers beer).

Mary Frances #4: What book was that about the Hartford Circus Fire? I'd be curious to read that sometime--my grandmother and her siblings were supposed to go to the circus that day, but the youngest came down with the flu. They didn't hear what happened until my grandmother came home early from work, shellshocked because she hadn't heard about the change of plans.

#134 Xopher: I say "doodle" a lot. And "tchotchke", though not entirely for tchotchkes.

When giving a scientific presentation, "moiety" is my thingy-like word of choice when I lose the noun. I realized early on that I needed such a tool.

There's a USB plug-in thing called a dongle which some companies provide as a frustrating anti-piracy device (without the dongle, their software won't run). Fun to say.

Prescription glasses for dogs with poor vision are called Doggles.

Apparently my brain is only accessing "do*" words today.

#7 Jakob: He's also a fantastic swimmer.

And I blame Charlie Rimmer.

#146, Actual UFO Picture: Aw, I'm disappointed, I thought it was going to be some of those flashing lights on towers to warn off low-flying aircraft. They fooled me a few times as a kid.

Diatryma #84: That's exactly when I got married, the summer after I graduated college, and that's exactly what happened. We were the first ones, and we did an acceptable, reasonably-priced job of it, but in the 5 years since, it's obvious that we provided an object lesson to many (people have also imitated some of the cool stuff we did too, which is nice).

Examples: double check times with every service provider several days before. Include a map to the hospital in the "info for out-of-town guests" packet, if you're making one up (90+% of our guests were out-of-town, so there wasn't a critical mass of collective wisdom). Set up some chairs near the dance floor. Don't get sick.

My advice for people is always the same: "Make a list of the bare minimum that will make you happy that day. Refer to that frequently. It *always* gets more complicated, but you'll get less wrapped up in it if you remember what's important."

#124 when looking at the reference set, look at the publication years, and imagine them plotted on a graph. Does it look like a bell curve? That's often the sign of healthy research.

*scuttles off to poke my thesis bibliography*

Would you look at that. That's like a magic trick.

Sisuile 103: I haven't seen it in anything scholarly (and I'm not a textile scholar, anyhow, just nosy), though the Kiewe sometimes gets taken as such. But I've seen it in knitting books that should know better, and the Internet considers it common
knowledge.

Kiewe, Heinz Edgar (1967). The Sacred History of Knitting, along with anyone who claims that figures in The Book of Kells are wearing Aran fisherman's-style sweaters.

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