Greetings from Washington, D.C., where I gave a colloquium yesterday at Goddard Space Flight Center. Had fun catching up with old friends, and listening to NASA scuttlebut. (Science-wise, things are looking pretty gloomy right now, although not completely hopeless.) Less fun was when my laptop, for the first time ever, balked at transmitting my talk to the projector. I managed to convert my OpenOffice presentation to PowerPoint, saved it to a flash drive, transferred it to another laptop, and used that. (I don’t have PowerPoint on my computer, and nobody else has OpenOffice.) So it was salvageable, but about 10% of my figures didn’t show up, which was disconcerting.<\/p>\n
In lieu of substantive blogging, the good news is that I am now empowered to participate in everyone’s favorite blog game: the Friday Random Ten, in which you put your iPod (or whatever) on shuffle and list the first ten songs that show up. I think I saw it first at Rox Populi<\/a> (who disowned<\/a> it, but can’t seem to give up), but also at Feministe<\/a>, Pandagon<\/a>, Pharyngula<\/a>, Grammar.police<\/a>, Majikthise<\/a>, Yglesias<\/a>, and Crescat<\/a> — so an eclectic crowd indeed. After buying the damn iPod six months ago, I have finally gotten around to downloading my CD’s to it (half of them, anyway), and am now equipped to play along. Day late, dollar short, whatever.<\/p>\n Not sure how accurate a window into my soul this is supposed to provide. But any technology that juxtaposes Yes with Isaac Hayes can’t be all bad. The world needs more progressive soul. (Or hot-buttered pretension, depending on your view.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Greetings from Washington, D.C., where I gave a colloquium yesterday at Goddard Space Flight Center. Had fun catching up with old friends, and listening to NASA scuttlebut. (Science-wise, things are looking pretty gloomy right now, although not completely hopeless.) Less fun was when my laptop, for the first time ever, balked at transmitting my talk […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellany"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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