Me: "Alaska State Troopers"?
Dad: Uh-huh.
Me: You're kidding me.
Dad: Ha ha, no.
Me: It's not a parody?
Dad: Nope.
Me: Not "Reno 9-1-1, Alaska Edition"?
Dad: I think it's pie time.

Apparently, pie includes brown sugar ice cream.

Happy American Thanksgiving! For the rest of you, have a nice Thursday evening. Today I am grateful for dads who cook. Tonight I am noodling on Perl For Bioinformatics and generating about 20 lines of error message with a single extra backslash. Troubleshooting is hilarious, especially when pecan pie is on tap.

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin): I'm starting to notice a trend: I like biographies that do a great research job on the individual, and tie that person into the larger social context. (Case in point: the Alice Sheldon bio.) So take a heavily end-noted biography that does all that and is about science, and I say it is the best thing ever. ( I really liked this a lot. )

An extensive look at a fascinating life. Absolutely recommended. In the land of small coincidences, this was my reading on my San Francisco trip (and for several weeks afterward); my sister and I nearly went to the Exploratorium, founded by Robert Oppenheimer's brother Frank, but couldn't get the scheduling to work. Maybe next time.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: A Novel (Mark Haddon): 15-year-old Swindon boy tries to solve the murder of a neighbor's dog. Oh, he's got an unspecified autism spectrum disorder. Someone recommended this a couple years ago, and I just now got around to it. If you have any familiarity with autism spectrum disorders, you can check off the characteristic behaviors as you read. Some cursory googling suggests that people who do not have autism found this interesting and entertaining, but people who are autistic or routinely interact with autistic individuals are a little less sanguine, pointing out that Christopher Boone - the protagonist - is an amalgam of autism spectrum traits, and is remarkably self-reflective, and can't stand in for every autistic person everywhere. So I would say, if you're using this as a Handbook to Dealing With Your Autistic Whatever, you'd do better to google "autism" or "autism books" and do some nonfiction reading, but if you're looking for an interesting story, this may be of interest.

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party (M. T. Anderson): A fictional slave's narrative in immediately pre-Revolution Boston. What people always neglect to mention about the American Revolution is that it was an illegal (if highly popular) guerrilla action against a legitimate (by England's lights) government, and without that little detail it feels like another retelling of first-grade history. I think the focus on how, really, the Boston revolutionaries were in it for the money and property (westward expansion, slaves) makes it much murkier and interesting.

I also flipped through many of Catherine Asaro's Skolia stories: Primary Inversion, The Radiant Seas, The Moon's Shadow, Skyfall, "Stained Glass Heart", "A Roll of the Dice", "Walk in Silence", "Aurora in Four Voices", The Quantum Rose. ( It's a sickness. )

Science Fiction: The Best of the Year (2006) (Ed. Rich Horton): From the dollar rack at the used book store. ( Split into the good, the meh and the ugly. )

Skin Deep (Mark Del Franco): Laura Blackstone: PR director by day, freelance druid and/or high-powered player on the DC scene by night. Now her public and secret identities are on the trail of the same blown drug bust that may have political implications.

So: billed as a thriller, with magic. About a century back, the faerie realms merged/dumped magical beings into Earth, with surprisingly little backlash. Now the Irish and Germanic magical courts interact with the governments of the 21st century, with the Fae Guild - Laura Blackstone's employers - acting as the public face of the Fae Court, based out of what used to be Ireland. Laura works out of the DC branch, which is where my first major bump comes in: where the heck is the Guildhouse? Sort of by the Reagan building? On Capitol Hill? Up and over in NE or NW? del Franco fails the "feels like DC" suspension of disbelief test hard: for one thing, no one complains about the metro. Granted, that's because the milieu is high-powered fae who don't take public transit, but I'm pretty sure at least one of Blackstone's personas - the broke one - should have some familiarity with chronic weekend single-tracking and trying to find a decent grocery store in the city limits. And parking. There is a reason metro is so popular in DC, despite its many failings. Once you've broken the suspension of disbelief, I started questioning more of the setup - so, Farie is now on Earth, circa 1900-ish, how did WW1 go down? Religious implications? Racial/ethnic tensions? And why are all the paranormals drawn from European tradition? - which distracted me from the Burning Hunk of Love subplot, alas. Not sold.

Unfallen Dead (Mark Del Franco):Connor Grey, druid, ex-Guild guy who's lost his magic and is stuck on disability, sometimes Boston PD free-lancer, starts the book with an occult murder and ends it confronting the Opening of the Ways between life and death. ( This was crack. The really good kind. )

Numbers: 6 total plus Asaro rereads. 6 new, ~2.5 reread; 5(+~2.5) fiction, 1 nonfiction. 1 short story collection.

Yesterday I had magic hands at work; today I had Hardy-effin'-Weinberg after work; tomorrow morning I will have crockpot chili for lunch, and an eight hour countdown to four free days. M. has been persuaded that she wants to spend Thanksgiving with me and dad instead of driving to Michigan; Oshkosh's boyfriend showed up tonight; I was catching up with tashok and cleaning up from a double batch of chocolate chip cookies when they got in. Now I am regretting the amount of sugar in my system. Mmm, chocolate.

I had brilliant plans for a special two-month deal, but then I noticed it was swiftly heading for a three-month book log. So here's September.

The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University (Kevin Roose): The subtitle says it all: a Brown University student transfers to Liberty University, bastion of evangelical thought, to learn what's behind all those conservative Christian stereotypes.

Basically, I was sold in the first section, "Prepare Ye", where Roose seeks help from one of his Christian friends to prepare for "Bible boot camp":

"So, do you think you're ready for a semester of Christianity?" she asked ... "No, that's not what I mean. I mean, are you spiritually ready?"

She took my silence as a no.

"Kev, places like Liberty are designed to transform skepticism into belief, and you're not going to be immune to that. You have to be open to the possibility that this semester is going to be bigger than you think." (p14)

Roose's frankness about the participatory nature of his semester (culturally) abroad is a key point: he talks about the changes in his perspective and ingrained behaviors as a result of obeying Liberty's stringent written and unwritten rules. He also takes a very human approach to his exploration of Liberty's culture, focusing on his interactions with individual dorm-mates and other people on campus. This is, fundamentally, about the building blocks of culture: individuals, in concert with their environment. One of Roose's Brown friends comes down for a weekend, and on seeing him interact in the dorms, Roose reflects: "Liberty students who struggle with lust. Secular Quakers who enjoy prayer. Evangelical feminists who come to Bible Boot Camp out of academic interest. I used to think my two worlds were a million miles apart. But tonight, the distance seems more like a hundred thousand miles. It's not a total improvement, but it's not meaningless, either." (p213) Which is not to say it's all smooth sailing, but Roose does a great job reminding liberals that hey! Conservative evangelicals are people too.

The Language of Bees (Laurie R. King): First of a two-part Russell-and-Holmes adventure which - about - I keep trying to type "Holmes' illegitimate son by Irene Adler comes for assistance finding his missing wife and daughter" with something like a straight face, and I cannot do it. Small adorable girls make a cameo, people race about England in dramatic fashion, and the arts world is mildly mocked. This is the umpteenth in the series, do not start here; people who like the series, you will like this. I am not sure if I should mention the thing with the ending or not; it's a spoiler but might be nice to know going in. I keep waiting for tragic foreshadowings of WWII and Holmes' passing, and remain disappointed that so far, this has not been played for significant pathos. I am not in love with the Holmes canon or character, so other people may have different reactions.

Science Fiction: The Best of the Year (2007) (Ed. Rich Horton): I saw this on the discount shelf and picked it up because ann_leckie had a story in it, and I realized I hadn't read any of her fiction, even though we've been reading each other's LJs for a couple of years now. I liked her story, and would love to do a book club sort of discussion of it, because I think different people would get different things out of it it. It wasn'tmy favorite in the collection, because Walter Jon Williams made an appearance in the table of contents. WJW is one of those writers who isn't high on my radar, but rarely fails to entertain me. Carolyn Ives Gilman's "Okanoggan Falls" also happened to hit several bullet-proof story attractors, including a major hook for further development. I am a novel-reader at heart. ( Blurbs for particular stories cut for space. )

Numbers: 3 total. 3 new, 0 reread; 2 fiction, 1 nonfiction. 1 short story collection.

I'm getting back in touch with my ex-boss the college professor, in that way you do when you're deeply divided about applying to grad school for Fall 2010 (application deadlines Dec 1st for the most competitive programs) versus slipping your application a year to better prepare. I think there's a lot of mutual liking and respect between us, but we're both terrible correspondents. It gives me a better grasp of the Christmas card thing: gestures of continuity, because you blink and three months have gone by. It's reassuring to swap emails with people who are happy to hear from you, because this hasn't been a great week.

Monday's flu vaccine was followed with Tuesday's sore throat and Wednesday's stuffy nose. The weather's been nice, and no crises have landed in my vicinity, but I've just been wiped out. I killed a minor but highly irritating work thing which we shall never discuss again, except maybe in terms of setting things on fire and salting the earth where the ashes fall, but now I have more time for other projects. I also went out to a farewell lunch, which was an excellent break. Class is rolling along: we're cytogenetics techniques applied to the head in generous, class-filling blocks, with promises of linkage analysis and population genetics to follow. Other people are pre-emptively fussing over the population genetics stuff, so I probably ought to be worried. I have my old undergrad notes in a box somewhere, and have this delusion they'll be applicable, so I'm not worried yet.

My epic two-month book log is on hold until this weekend, or I throw in the towel and call in sick. I am really tempted, but I think this is more sleep deprivation than actual illness. Other people get SAD in the winter; apparently I get insomnia when the days get short. It would explain a few things about college.

I had a terribly depressing thought today: there is an upcoming generation for whom Greedo always shot first, and midichlorians always existed. Fortunately, I have a distraction: 350 pages into Anathem, I no longer care if Stephenson is messing with me. I'm just annoyed there are "only" 450 pages left. I am trying to stretch it by being a good student and dragging through stupid lecture review - seriously, how do you make cutting-edge genetic techniques mildly interesting in lecture and boring in review? That's the most useless superpower ever.

I need three more hours in today, thanks much. Or maybe a sudden adverse reaction to today's flu vaccine. Work ethic vs slacker ways: if Thanksgiving weren't next week I'd take a personal day in the very near future.

Instead of doing anything I was supposed to tonight, I watched movies. After this week, I deserved a night off.

( The Producers, 2005 version )

( The Bourne Identity )

After 8 hours of work, grocery shopping, lecture review, and popping the chili in the crockpot for the night, I think I can call it a day. If I hadn't accidentally quadrupled the cumin in the chili, I'd be feeling pretty good right now.

Weekend recap: half day of overtime Saturday, errands, crockpot chili thwarted by still-frozen ground beef, game night - Dominion the board game is pretty awesome, BTW - and Sunday morning I made beef stew and snickerdoodles before doing a carpool to the Baltimore afternoon/evening stich-and-bitch, chili thwarted once more, this time by unusable produce.

The next morning I went to work. But first I kicked an "off" button and spent 15 minutes convinced I'd killed the baby laptop's a/c port. That was fun like smashing my kneecap into a desk. Not that I've done this lately. Cough. So the good news is, the baby laptop is still alive! The bad news is that I have no excuse to replace the baby laptop, such as a grad school plan.

I am enjoying a fairly epic bout of life strategy angst, while reading Anathem, so my thought processes are cycling like this:

1.) grad school means Meaning of Life stuff here
2.) Is Neal Stephenson
a.) writing geek Gilbert and Sullivan on purpose
b.) reading whatever he wants, channeling it back through a keyboard, and laughing all the way to the bank?
3.) OMG grad school Meaning of Life stuff system malfunction TILT TILT TIL- oh hey my bus is here. Seriously, Stephenson; seriously?

I am delaying all Meaning of Life angst to Thursday night, when I intend to watch The Producers or The Bourne Identity, finish two months of book log, and drink heavily. By which I mean two beers or hard lemonades, on a work night. I am a wild and dangerous person to know.

Cooking is also conducive to Meaning of Life angst: so far I have made cookies, beef stew, and chili, and possibly I will do stir fry later this week. Mmm, food!

I have seen WALL-E and now I am going to bed. Since wiki can tell me what I skipped last year, I can start putting DVDs on hold at the library first thing tomorrow.

Woo-hoo! Bought Perl for Bioinformatics. I think I have a plan: pick 5 schools to apply to, write pathetic multiply-proofed emails to Bay Area faculty sounding them out wrt application, game system for admission to Fall 2010 quarter. Email contacts for letters of recommendation. If all else fails, pick up classes and/or subject GREs, reapply for Fall 2011. Debate value of education versus location. Angst a lot. Consume comfort foods at an alarming rate. Run anxiety off on evil treadmill. But it's all going to be okay! I have Anathem to keep me company through the cold dark winter of my soul.

Just in time to save us all from my overwrought emotions, XKCD brings us all back to dorm living and geekery. But does this count as a sort of posthumous example of the Pauli effect?

A couple months ago I saw the LeSportsac deluxe everyday handbag at the mall. Today I opened the shipping box and started the miscellaneous items transfer.

Guys - ladies - my bag holds the basics for a day trip plus Anathem. Freaking Anathem. And I am not a light packer on a good day. It has an adjustable strap for cross-body carrying. So far, the only thing I would add is a clippy key thing. I suggest eBay for an affordable print in your style. My bag shopping is done for at least a year, woo-hoo!

Today I had an unbeatable hair day, and brought brownies to work, and I discovered a copy of The Best of C. L. Moore on my hard drive. When I need some perspective on life, I can open "Shambleau" or "Vintage Season" and all will be well.

Last night M. mentioned she was going to the haunted forest with her friends Friday night, and I tagged along. Apparently I am easy to startle but hard to scare, since I lead the way through the haunted forest with cider in hand. I lost it when the chainsaws came out, but dude. Chainsaws. I faded early, since I know I'm doing overtime this weekend.

Apparently I am going through a period of trashy fiction: I have been reading hardboiled noir with fairies, and flipping through Catherine Asaro's novels. I am also going through a period of retail therapy, which may need to be photographically documented when my Macy's package is opened... tomorrow morning? Tomorrow afternoon? If I did this right, the package contains a Handbag of Awesome, which should be savored as long as possible. My life is a perfect cake of cool with awesome frosting on top. And tomorrow I am going to work four hours of OT as part of Project Grad School Application Procrastination and Project Meredith (my next laptop will be named Meredith; do not question this on any level lest your brain explode), and maybe finish my October book log. Or sleep. I miss sleep!

Dear universe: the ringback is another sign of the decline of America.

A question for techies: why do files occasionally just disappear off my external hard drives? Both of them? The entire point of having files in two places is so that when something happens to the music on one drive it's still there on the other drive, and then I have awesome music when I'm at a lab bench.

Highlights of this week include touching the ABI machines, and figuring out that to get people to do what you want you have to talk to people, or occasionally more than one person, or occasionally people's bosses. And that is how I scored overtime authorization for Saturday.

Roommate M.: "I could do this all day."
Me: "Stare at pictures of your hot boyfriend?"
Roommate M.: "Yes."

Tonight M. and I and our laptops are sharing kitchen table space with two pans of brownies. The survivors go to my work's Halloween potluck tomorrow. Either my oven runs cool or the recipe is 25 C too low; the first pan is under-baked. What a shame if my roommates and I have to keep the first pan. Terrible, I say.

I think I'm trying to have a book club. If you live in the DC area and like me have a burning desire to talk about wacky sort of femnist hijinks on alien planets or that first contact book I actually sort of hated (in my defense, I was about 15 when I read The Sparrow, and wildly misread anything to do with religion), or feminist speculative fiction novels, feel free to get involved.

The baby laptop decided to start randomly shutting down last weekend, possibly because it's been a while since I blew the dust bunnies out of the casing. So Wednesday I went to the computer store to restock on air cans and incidentally cheat on the baby laptop with other portable PCs. Netbooks are right out: the tiny screens gave me eyestrain within five minutes. Then I let myself be talked into looking at Macs. The MacBook Air is very sexy to the touch, but got slammed on wiki for overheating and hinge issues, and despite its weight and nerdcore solid state drive, is pretty much out of the running. I am being tempted by the 15" MacBook Pro, which is sort of impossibly over my original tentative budget, but is leading me down the pros/cons primrose path:

Pros: 15.4" widescreen, at least a pound lighter than the baby laptop, my sister loves her Mac. Everything I do on a Windows box is available for Mac: Firefox, MS Office, Photoshop.

Cons: Limited ports, proprietary Apple stuff, limited DIY. (I grew up on home-built desktops. Voiding the warranty was not an issue.) Freaking expensive. Jerks in the Cult of Mac. Turning into one of the Cult of Mac jerks. Still 5.6 lbs to haul around.

Unresolved concerns: durability and battery reputations, money,

Possibly it's time to look into working retail for the holidays for an employee discount? Unfortunately, Apple keeps such a lock on prices I'm not sure authorized retailers extend the discount to the Macs. Maybe I need to find the magic words that will persuade my supervisors I want to work extra hours, and that they want me to work the overtime.

The internet tells me that the Orionid meteor shower peaks in the predawn hours tomorrow, so I am unplugging myself from the internet and setting my alarm for a hideous 5 AM wake-up call. I plan to stagger into the night with Bag Of Stargazing Awesome in one hand and a thermos of Earl Grey in the other. Notice I didn't say anything about changing out of my PJs.

Because of work* and midterm studying, I missed most of the day programming, but I had a good time at the evening/night parties. Friday was dominated by the Brave New World party, Saturday I got sucked into the Erfworld crowd (Wiki article) - mostly college-age and 20somethings - and Sunday was dominated by a pass through the dealer's room, and heading home with norabombay for a hard drive dataswap and pancakes. We learned that a shot of amaretto is an excellent addition to pancake batter. I saw lots of WSFAns, and hung out with many new people whose online handles I neglected to get.

*So far I am two for two on the Friday after Columbus Day coinciding with work wackiness. But this year I didn't have bronchitis! A vast improvement. Next year I will pre-plan and 1.) take October 15th as my optional holiday, 2.) schedule Friday overtime, or 3.) be in grad school.

Ultimately, I made it to only two programmed events at Capclave: the "Fandom: Losing by Winning?" panel, and the Small Press Award presentation.

The Losing by Winning panel may be summed up for biased and comedic purposes as:

PANEL: Why are none of the young people reading the SF classics? Dune, Asimov?
NORABOMBAY: Because they suck.
ASE: Have you read Foundation recently? Interesting idea, bad plot, bad prose. No girls. The cool parts have been mined by other authors.
PANEL: Space isn't romantic anymore. No one reads hard SF. Why are all the younger fans into unskiffy anime and stuff?
NORABOMBAY: Seriously? You have answered your own question.
ASE: Can I invoke the neocolonialist attitudes of steampunk now? Please?

( Possibly I should not plan my panel attendance as The East Coast H8rs Reunion Tour. )

In conclusion, a weekend made awesome by people. Go people.

I am filled with the serenity and self-loathing only achieved during midterms, finals, and major papers.



And now I am giving up on stupid linkage analysis - when did my classes start incorporating sudoku puzzles? - and moving on to brief nightmares of mitochondrial defects. Hopefully the alarm will kick me alive before I dream up an exam question involving risk calculation for a mito defect of unknown transmission with attached wacky pedigree. If I were writing the exam, I'd totally make a question like that, but if I were writing the exam, I would've used my lecture time more effectively than I think the teacher has.

On my LJ f-list tonight: "imbrolgio" in 1word1day community, right above the latest news post.

How has the rest of my week been? Snickerdoodles and soccer are made of awesome, but the weather has turned chilly and rainy, with no sign of remission before Sunday. Gossip is that we're in for a cold, cold winter. Work awesome will be severely hampered by broken equipment until Monday at least. Capclave is this weekend, norabombay flies in tomorrow, and I am feeling none of it. I blame a combination of factors, most importantly the rain. Last night was saved by cookies and an amazing USA-Costa Rica game. Tonight I failed to study enough, and my room is still only 80% ready for people to crash this weekend.