Month: March 2014

I came across this while looking at videos of a baby monkey named Nala. He has such a lovely voice, and this is one of my favorite carols. Plus, dogs.

[Video removed because the link no longer works.]

I often think this. Never mind how invaluable it would be to have up-to-date reports on research in all areas all the time, it would just be more interesting. Right now we’re getting the missing Malaysian plane, 24/7, without much more than a fact or two, often not useful, each day.

On days when planes aren’t missing we get 24/7 politics. This is the most useless of all. By now we all know what everyone is going to say on whatever topic that is raised. Speculation and opinion. No news. And tedious in the extreme.

There has been a HUGE discovery in the world of science. Evidence has been found to support the theory of inflation. Dennis Overbye of the New York Times wrote about it yesterday, and I would start with him if you want to learn about what this means. He is one of my favorite science writers and he generally makes difficult ideas accessible.

Read this piece! It’s not long, it’s got helpful graphics, you can google “multiverse” afterwards for something fun. The findings need to be confirmed, but according to the piece we shouldn’t have to wait long. Lots of other groups are working on it.

I was particularly happy about the news because Andrea Linde, “a prolific theorist who first described the most popular variant of inflation, known as chaotic inflation, in 1983,” was kind to me when I was looking for scientists to propose alternative theories for the results from the work of the Parapsychology of Duke University. (I wanted to know if the Duke experiments were free of fraud and sloppy controls, which I found them to be, were there any other explanations in all of physics to account for what they found.)

Andrei Linde is just such a generous, charming man. I heard him speak at NYU and if you had seen him with those NYU students. He adored them, they adored him. You can get a sense of that here, when you see Chao-Lin Kuo, a Stanford colleague and a member of the team that found the evidence, tell Linde of their discovery.

UPDATE: I went back to find earlier posts of me gushing over Andrei Linde, and I found this one where I went to hear him speak with Alan Guth, the man who first came up with the idea of inflation (if I’m understanding correctly)!! Also, Andrei Linde is a man of many talents.

Oh wow, the World Science Festival put the talk online, you can watch it here.

I’ve been emailing choirs all over the country and the world about my book, and my TEDx talk about singing in a choir, and I recently heard back from a choir in Ireland, the Dublin County Choir! You can hear them here, and I have to say I quite loved the snippet from the piece Mórann m’Anam an Tiarna, “a Magnificat set in Irish by Brian Ingoldsby.” I hope they record the whole piece, it’s quite beautiful. I just read that the composer sings bass in the choir!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day to music directors Colin Block and John Dexter, Repetiteur & Accompanist Celine Kelly, and to all the members of the Dublin County Choir!

I hope they don’t mind, but I grabbed a couple of photographs from their Facebook page.

I’ve been updating my profile on an online dating site I use, and I uploaded this picture, my most recent. God my mouth is crooked!! What the hell? (I blame all my recent dentistry.) Anyway, I also put together the montage below …

Me getting older! I go from 44 years old in the upper left, to 48, to 53, to 56, and finally to 57 in the bottom right (soon to be 58). These are all author photographs except the last one. I wanted to give a realistic sense of what I look like now. The problem is, I photograph well, and I don’t save pictures where I don’t look halfway decent. I don’t know if these pictures really represent me. I think they all make me look better than I truly am.

Perhaps the TEDx talk, which is video, shows what I look like best. But I prefer to start out anonymous, like everyone else on the site.

Every once in a while I read someone objecting to the use of “no problem” instead of “you’re welcome” in response to “thank you”. For the life of me, I cannot understand why some people hate “no problem.” I’ve said “you’re welcome” most of my life, but over the years I’ve slowly migrated to “no problem.”

“No problem” is said with the same spirit of kindness. It is also said by someone who just did something nice for you, or at the very least made some small gesture which you thought was worth thanking them for. So, now you’re mad at them because they didn’t respond with the words you wanted, or the words you think are more … polite? “No problem” is certainly meant to be polite. The person is saying, “Oh shucks, it was no trouble at all, and I was happy to do it.” It’s actually a little humbler than “you’re welcome.”

Speaking of saying thank you—thank you WWII veteran Jack Leroy Tueller for having compassion in the direst of circumstances. Your story made me cry this morning, but it was a good cry. I did my best to put myself in your shoes, to think what it was like to have endured what you endured when only in your twenties. I would like to believe that I would have been capable of such a gesture then, but I was so clueless at that age (not that I am so clue-full now). I’m sure I would have just felt fear and anger.

How on earth did you summon such heart in that situation? Where you just born that way? Was it something about how your parents raised you, or something you were exposed to that made you this generous in your response to life?

[Video removed because the link no longer works.]