The things you learn in the newspaper…

I’ve been profiled in MinnPost — and it’s mostly boring stuff I already knew, but the reporter apparently called around the Morris community, too, which is how I learned this:

Myers acknowledged that he is something of a curiosity in a Minnesota community of church-goers, many of them deeply committed social and political conservatives.

Still, Myers has created no big buzz in town, said the Rev. Tom Fangmeier, an Assemblies of God pastor who chairs the Stevens County Ministerial Board. One Lutheran pastor complained to the board about Myers, Fangmeier said, but “I haven’t heard about him in the cafes or anywhere else around town.”

How … strange. I wonder what exactly they would expect to hear about me? I’m sitting in the Common Cup cafe right now, and I don’t think I could generate much of a buzz. “Oh. He’s sitting. He has a nice laptop. He doesn’t slurp his coffee.”

It’s very amusing that I’ve been reported to the Stevens County Ministerial Board. Perhaps I will be defrocked.

Bad professor

To my students and advisees: I’ve emailed a few of you, but just in case, I’m also putting this here. You’ve been trying to get in touch with me, especially this week when registration is pending, but when I’m not in class I’m flitting off to somewhere else. I was away in Washington DC last Thursday afternoon through Sunday, and I’m about to do it again with trips to Mankato tomorrow, a long weekend at a conference in Oregon, and then zooming away again right after class on Monday to Fergus Falls. Trust me, though, you’re not the only one feeling a bit tired of it all.

Here’s the deal, though. I’m done with today’s teaching at 12:45. I’m going to be in my office from 1 to 5, with the door wide open. I’ve even shoveled the stacks of books off of two of my office chairs — it’s almost hospitable in here. So come on by, I’ll be there all afternoon, and the only business will be student business. If you’ve got registration stuff to take care of, we can do that; if you just want to say hello, that’s cool, too.

Airplanes make me cranky

I’m home. It’s been a very long day with horrible flight delays, and I’m grouchy. I must frog blast the vent core.

I was stuck on an airplane for far too many hours, and I wanted to get some work done — on my laptop. Have you noticed how tightly packed the seats are in coach? It was tight, but I could at least get started on some work, when the guy in front of me decided to recline his seat back and sleep. Suddenly there was a head rest aimed at my throat and the back of the guy’s head in my nose. I could smell his shampoo! (I think it was scented with sweat vinaigrette, with extra animal fats added for body). I tried to work some more, but the only way to do it was to partially open my laptop, rest the hinges on my thighs, and reach into the gap to type; it was like squatting by the tank at Seaworld, trying to do dentistry on a dolphin while squinting at the phosphorescent herring stuck to the roof of his mouth.

Airlines, please. If you’re going to squeeze the seats together that closely, could you please lock them all in one position? It just doesn’t work otherwise. And how about screening passengers for basic hygiene? By the end of the trip I was beginning to think that it would be a mercy if the hairball in front of me detonated.

OK, I feel a little better now.

Wheee, another airplane ride

In spite of all of the work piled up around me, I’m taking off today to attend the NEA/AFT Higher Education Joint Conference in Washington DC. I’m in the middle of this busy month where I spend just about every weekend flying off somewhere, in between weeks that still have the same teaching load waiting to be done.

I’m also supposed to be taped for WCCO while I’m in Minneapolis this evening, but after that, I may have to gatecrash the Minneapolis Drinking Liberally event, if it’s still going on. I hope I’m not thrown out by security.

Look up!

What an honor: Jeff Medkeff, an astronomer and discoverer of asteroids, has been generous to name a recently discovered set of distant rocks after Michael Stackpole, Rebecca Watson, Phil Plait, and me. That’s right, there is now a few billion tons of rock and metal spinning overhead with my name on it, asteroid 153298 Paulmyers. You can find a picture of its orbit and location, just in case you want to visit.

Now I don’t know much about astronomy — I know this rock doesn’t have any squid on it, unfortunately, and that it’s small, cold, and remote (hey, just like where I am now! Only more so!) — but Phil Plait describes the details of his asteroid.

To give you an idea of the asteroid’s size, it has more than 200 times the volume of Hoover Dam. Assuming that it’s made of rock, it has a mass of about 2 quadrillion grams, or about 2 billion tons. If it’s metal it’ll be about twice that massive.

When I mentioned this to Skatje, the first thing she asked was whether mine was bigger than Phil’s. Phil admits that it probably is twice the size, although it’s an estimate from relative brightness, so it could be that they’re of similar size, but mine is brighter, or Phil’s is dimmer … it’s all good. The rivalry continues!

Now I have to wonder…do I have mineral rights? Can I at least retire to 153298 Paulmyers? When’s the next space bus to the asteroid belt? How about some photos of my rock (near as I can tell, any photo is going to be just of a tiny point of reflected light)?

Friction-free morning

This is my least favorite time of the year in Minnesota. I hate early spring.

Everything is melting during the day: there’s a constant drip-drip-drip, puddles everywhere, the snow is shrinking away from all those untrammeled areas surrounding us, and during the day, the walkways are all like shallow streams. And then at night it freezes again.

Which brings me to by big complaint: I get up early in the morning, and I step outside, and the sidewalks are all these beautifully smooth sheets of ice; it’s like a Zamboni has gone down the streets of Morris, polishing everything. There’s this path through some trees that I take to work, and it has a very gentle downward slope that makes it like a luge track, and I just know that some March day I’m going to step on it and find myself rocketing at a 100 miles an hour down to the row of lampposts at the bottom.

I was spared that this morning, though. Instead, as I was walking down my sidewalk, I hit one of those glossy smooth ice spots at my usual barely conscious amble of about 3 miles per hour, and whooosh, I was momentarily airborne, and made a perfect landing flat on my back, knocking the breath out of me and jarring every joint in my body. Nothing was seriously damaged, but even now I can feel every muscle slowly knotting in protest at the rude treatment they received — it’s going to be a painful day, I can tell.

And worst of all, my morning coffee flew out of my hands before I’d even had a sip. Do you hear me? I spilled my coffee. There is no god.

Wait…what about me?

There are all these PharynguFests going on, but they all make me entirely superfluous…I may have to pout. Why isn’t anyone inviting me to London or Anchorage? I know, it’s because you don’t need me, and you’re cheap and don’t want to spend the money on some distant nerd, since you’ve got plenty of local nerds right at hand. And that’s OK. I do have some traveling in my near future, in case anyone wants to take advantage of it.

I’ll be in Washington DC for the AFT/NEA conference the weekend of 28-30 March, so I might be available that Friday or Saturday evening.

I’ll be in Eugene, Oregon the weekend of 4-6 April for an Evo-Devo conference. Of course, there’ll be some major biology celebrities on hand, and I also have some old friends out there, so that might be trickier to schedule.

Then there’s a midweek event in Berkeley on 28-30 May, another evo-devo-genomics meeting, and I’ll be juggling TAM6 (Las Vegas) and the Evolution 2008 meetings (Minneapolis) on 19-24 June, and a MENSA conference 2-6 July in Denver, GECCO in Atlanta on 12-16 July, and Netroots Nation on 17-20 July. And then the Atheist Alliance convention somewhere in California on 25-28 September. Other events may gradually fill in my calendar, too.

See? There might be some chances to invite me to one of these events someday.

Acknowledgment

Thank you to everyone who noticed that yesterday I was one day older than the day before! And a special thanks to Bora for collecting all the various links together in one place.

Now I do have to remind you all, though, that we’re all aging at exactly the same rate (unless you have access to a spaceship that travels at a significant fraction of the speed of light), and all I’ve got is a head start on many of you, and a bit of a delay relative to some of you. So don’t go getting cocky, you young whippersnappers — you’ll be here someday, too.

It’s a conspiracy!

So a guy gets a little older, and what happens? All these people try to draw attention to my age, largely with a collection of photoshopped pictures of yours truly. Don’t they know I’m funny-looking enough that no photoshop is necessary?

By the way, I got a nice present from my family: a new, ergonomic Cephalopod Throne. You’ll be reassured to know that now, when I fling thunderbolts of furious vituperation about the web, I shall be doing so with excellent posture.