As ever, Online Sudoku Workshop is brought to you by your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke.
As billions of eidetic readers will no doubt remember, we last left our sudoku in this position:
Our genders were, as yet, unaffected by this configuration.
As ever, even though it’s the very first in the series, Online Sudoku Workshop is brought to you by your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke.
This is a strange turn, I’m sure. Gender and sudoku? Well, yes. But not yet. Mostly I’m doing this because it’s fun to talk logic and sudoku and just how exciting it is to learn new things, but I will use this as a metaphor in discussing gender later. Come for the sudoku, stay for the sudoku. Come back again later for the gender. If you’re only in it for the gender metaphor, this will certainly be too long for you. In fact, it’s too long for a single post. I’ll start my puzzle-solving with some of the puzzle already done, and still I have to break this up into 3 posts. [Don’t worry, though. If the merchandizing revenues are good enough, I’ll go back and do the prequels so you can see how we arrived at the point we’ll begin our exciting puzzle-solving together.]
This thread is for talking about whatever doesn’t fit into the other categories. Caine is your curator.
Whoa, somebody in Minneapolis really gets into their snow sculptures. Here’s a description of how it was done.
If you’re in the market for California real estate, be sure to take a look out the back window before signing the papers.
A while back, I posted a scan of my daughter’s fractured elbow — Skatje had gone on a trek across Siberia and broken it, but soldiered on. In case you were wondering, she’s now had it treated: doctors broke it again, put her through surgery, bolted it all up, and she’s now recovering, with drugs and a sling and a supportive husband.
Just think: every time her joints ache, every time alarms go off as she goes through airport scanners, she’ll be reminded of her glorious Russian adventure on the Trans-Siberian Railway.
My peripatetic daughter, during her trip across Russia, took a fall on the ice in Irkutsk and broke her elbow. She didn’t see a doctor, but just kept going, stoically trudging across the vast wasteland of Siberia, no tears or whimpering, fighting off giant bears and the fierce nomadic horsemen of the steppes, etc., etc., etc., and didn’t bother with that doctorin’ thing until she got home.
She has posted the scans of her fractured joint! Now I’m going to have to ground her, or something.
Those are the best things in life, according to Cohen the Barbarian, and I spent most of my morning taking advantage of the middle one. I have been shirking — it has been four years since my last dental checkup — so had a few hours to get a good thorough working over. My morning was spent lying back, getting x-rayed, having my teeth poked and prodded and scraped, getting the occasional metallic taste of blood, being ordered about, open wider, turn this way, bite down on this.
It was terrific. I don’t know why I don’t go more often — probably because I don’t have any pressing dental issues, and it does take a chunk of time — but a good workout at the dentist’s office is so relaxing, and I feel so mellow afterwards, in addition to having a sparkly clean tasty mouth, it’s like a spa day for me. I love the gadgets and the pointy little tools and dental chairs are incredibly comfortable, and it helps to have a bunch of competent professionals I can trust. So I’ve decided to be a responsible adult and made another appointment for the same thing in April.
And now, while I’m all loose and unstressed, it’s a good time to get the next step in my lab prep done for next semester, and finalize those syllabi. I don’t know why Cohen didn’t include a university education in his list…maybe it’s #4, right after the soft lavatory paper.
So, next term I’m teaching our introductory course, Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development, and I’m also teaching our Genetics course. I can do these two course in my sleep, so prep is easy, except for the fact that I’m always tweaking something. The challenges I’m facing are:
Genetics is horribly oversubscribed. Our enrollments keep going up and up, and this year our required molecular biology course filled up fast (don’t panic for the students, they’ll just take another section in the fall) and everyone who couldn’t get in seems to have signed up, with my permission, for the elective Genetics course. Either that or I’m just incredibly popular.
So I’m making up extra large batches of flies, and I’m going to be making extra, unscheduled time available in the lab.
I’ve taught FunGenEvoDevo many times…but on our weird two days a week, hour and 15 minutes each schedule. This time around it’s on a three days a week, 50 minute schedule. I’m going to have to tweak my timing, but it might actually work better to hit first year students with smaller, more digestible bites.
Notice that both courses have “genetics” in the title. This sometimes confuses me: I’m supposed to give the first-years a gentle, conceptual introduction to the basic ideas of Mendelian inheritance, while in the upper level course I can hit them with the wickedly tricky problems and hard ideas. Sometime I might mix the two up, which isn’t good.
Also, so many fly lines. I now have to go up to the genetics lab with my minty clean teeth and spend a few hours setting up dozens of bottles for the first fly lab, in two weeks.
Wingnuts are freakin’ hysterical. Guess what triggered this meltdown at Breitbart?
There has been a bit of silence here because my mad wife decided she wanted to go camping. In Minnesota. In the middle of January. I know winter camping is a thing, it’s just not my thing, but I went along. So we headed off to Glacier Lakes State Park yesterday, where she’d reserved a snug little cabin for the evening.
Strangely, the DNR link above advertises the place with lots of pictures of beautiful meadows and sparkling lakes and groves of wild flowers. For some reason, they don’t tell you what it’s like in January. It’s like this.
Skies like spilled milk. The lakes are sheets of ice, covered with snow. The trees are barren and skeletal. Which isn’t unlovely, in its own way, but it’s not how I picture camping (which is more gray, with constant drizzling rain, and bears.)
It wasn’t bad. We settled in, we later went to bed, and we turned off the lights, and discovered something else about the experience.
Total darkness and silence. We were far from anywhere, there were no other campers, the heavy cloud cover meant the moon and stars weren’t shining through at all. I held my hand up to my face, and saw nothing. I waited an hour, for my eyes to adjust…still nothing. There was no wind, and no animals were crazy enough to be out and about, so there was no sound, either. So this is what a sensory deprivation tank might be like.
It turns out I do not cope well with sensory deprivation. I was lying there awake all night, my brain churning away trying to find something outside itself to latch on to, and refusing to go to sleep until it heard a little noise or got a faint glimmering of something. I don’t know whether it was claustrophobia or agoraphobia, but something about being swaddled in dark emptiness was unsettling.
So next time my wife demands that I share her madness, I’m bringing a metronome and a night light. I’m kind of wrecked for the day now, too, and am suddenly noticing more acutely the tick of the clock here at home, the occasional distant swish of a car driving through the snow, and all the clutter in our house.
