Punoween

Last night Ben and I went to a Halloween party. We both dressed as doctors, I had a sign that said "Ben is lying," and he had a sign that said "Caroline is telling the truth." Nobody figured it out the whole night.

Anyone here get it?

Ben on TV

Penn and Teller have a new TV show where they feature random cool things, and Ben's lab was recently on it!



You can see Ben for almost a full second at 1:13. Science!

Open source x-stitch-cd

I've had a few requests for a pattern for my xkcd cross-stitch, and while I (sadly) don't have pattern-making software, I was able to get a somewhat decent scan of the pattern I drew:

• Top half
• Bottom half
• Ball pit (This part was just a randomly generated matrix of R/G/B/Y, thanks MATLAB!) To make the top row of balls look wavy, I alternated 3/4 stitches with full stitches and blanks, so the top row was like /X\_/X\_/X\_/X\

I used 18-count white aida cloth, and 2 strands of floss for pretty much everything - the exception being fine things (like the hair on the female stick figures) and pale lettering (like "internet" and "outernet"), which I did with 1 strand. In addition to black, I used the following colors:

• DMC 3046 (medium yellow beige) for the map of the internet, bakery rolls, and trees
• DMC 304 (medium red) for the sheets, spider, cape, skateboard, roller coaster, and red balls
• DMC 444 (darl lemon) for the yellow balls
• DMC 702 (kelly green) for the green balls
• DMC 826 (medium blue) for the blue balls
• DMC 647 (medium beaver gray) for the transistor

The finished product was about 9" x 12" - which was quite convenient for framing purposes.

Hope that helps any nerdy cross-stitchers out there!

What is this?

It just appeared on our block, and has been there for a week now.

Any ideas?

A Beautiful Map

We had this great idea at work to buy a giant map of Philadelphia, put it on the wall, and mark all of the schools where we have teachers. Then we thought it would be even better to put all of the teachers' names along with their schools, but they didn't quite fit so we thought it would be cute to connect names and schools using color-coded strings:

While we were successful in our aim, the unintentional result is that it kind of looks like the work of a paranoid schizophrenic.

THE KEY TO CLOSING THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP IS DESTROYING THE NETWORK OF SPY SATELLITES THE CIA IS USING TO CONTROL OUR THOUGHTS THROUGH SMARTBOARDS.

Hallmark Occasion

Look what I just bought!

They really do make a card for everything nowadays.

Oh Yeah

I forgot to post this on my actual birthday, but we went out to a fancy restaurant and I wanted to share this prettiness with you:

Believe it or not, that is very fancy, deconstructed s'mores: molten chocolate cake, caramelized meringue, and graham cracker ice cream. It didn't actually taste anything like a s'more, but it was still delicious.

Data Data Data!

Guess where my work sent me today?

Edward Tufte's one-day course about presenting data and information! Not only was it awesome for all of the obvious reasons, it was double awesome because I got a set of all of his books for attending, and a neat little carrying case for them:

AND I got his autograph in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information:

Somehow I am not surprised that his signature is so... concise.

It was a little disconcerting to be back in an academic lecture setting, since I have gotten used to being a regular working adult. It was also disconcerting to be in a room that was probably 80% men, since I don't work in CS. Oh well. I learned a lot, and tomorrow I will go back to work and yell at everyone about their graphs until they regret having sent me!

Perfect square!

Look what I got in the mail:

 

At first I was like, "I can't believe they would send me another guilt mailing, especially since I didn't even give them anything last time!" But then I opened it up, and found:

 In case you can't read the small script:

It's from my aunt and uncle, or - as it says on the certificate - "Lady High Mistress of Muckety-Muck" and "Grand Poo-Bah." And people wonder where I get my sense of humor from.

There was a bunch of other silly stuff in there too:

They crossed out "erasers" on that package, and wrote "mistake catchers" instead.

I think I'm going to wear the "Birthday Girl" ribbon to work tomorrow, and see if anyone comments. I think I'm entitled, after having spent a quarter century among the Muggles of Planet Earth.