30 May: <36 hours left in which to donate to my "Sing About Science" #SciFund project! http://rkthb.co/7551 Great rewards, eternal gratitude, etc.

27 May: My 5-year-old, betraying his Seattle roots: “Santa can do anything with magic…. He can *even* use magic to MAKE COFFEE!”

24 May: … to a mellow electric guitar piece representing the stages of sleep (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJJEhvWFtGQ). #BioExpo12

24 May: … #BioExpo12 student compositions ranged from a wailing saxophone piece representing schizoaffective disorder (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiD5aDIW6ng) …

24 May: It was great fun to judge student science music (and catch up with @brianglanz) again this year at #BioExpo12….

23 May: My math and science song database has just surpassed the 6000-song mark. ~2200 of these can be heard online for free! http://singaboutscience.org/MASSIVE/findandaddsongs.shtml

23 May: From Facebook friend Scott Smith (San Antonio, TX): “Is life fair? Short answer: No. Long answer: Noooooooooooooooooooo.”

21 May: The brownies I was making for this AM’s lab meeting came out badly, and I had to eat a mound of half-cooked brownie goo. Where’s my medal?

19 May: One key to happiness is modest expectations. Especially when sitting down to watch “Alvin And The Chipmunks” with one’s 5-year-old.

19 May: The 2012 Seattle Parasitology Conference at @SeattleBioMed included a Plasmodium life cycle sing-along! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igoIsLFCPl8#t=2m15s

15 May: Egads! I think I have a data hangover from consuming too much data at #soSEA last night. It was fun at the time….

14 May: @DustinSmith of @tableau: Data are more like food than like money. Over time, staleness ensues! Get the data out there while fresh! #soSEA

14 May: Eugene Kolker is Chief Data Officer at Seattle Children’s. Hadn’t heard that title before, but I like it! #soSEA

13 May: This morning’s Lego-building innovation: a police convertible. Possibly less safe than normal police cars, but VERY chic.

12 May: Phil’s much-anticipated playdate with his pal Addison is this PM. We’ve been chanting, “Saturday is Addi day! Saturday is Addi day!”

11 May: 5K time trial in 16:33 at Green Lake this morning with Tim Billo. Just like the old days at @WilliamsCollege, only much slower!

11 May: Last night Phil objected to having to write his five teachers’ names all in one sitting. You’re right, poor thing…. What was I thinking?

8 May: To quote Curley from Oklahoma!: Oh what a beautiful mornin’, oh what a beautiful day…. http://ping.fm/DdmNt

7 May: Dear Internet: Can I have some money? It’s for SCIENCE! http://ping.fm/7RXxd

5 May: In an adventuresome mood today; bought provolone cheese slices instead of Swiss. Next stop, lowering sunscreen SPF from 50 to 30.

2 May: Today’s parenting milestone: Phil’s first eBay bid. He knows a good deal on Lego clone troopers when he seees one!

1 May: Was hoping a 4am run would help me fall asleep again. Got a great song idea along the way; now I’m more restless than ever.

I love the phrase “House of the Immediate Future,” which seems to poke fun at the “…of the Future” items often touted by world’s fairs and science fiction. (Folklife is held in the shadow of Paul Allen’s Science Fiction Museum and the Space Needle; the latter was created for the 1962 World’s Fair, whose 50th anniversary we are celebrating this year.) I imagine the underlying sentiment to be, “Yeah, all of that futuristic stuff is cool, but we have serious housing problems right now that can be addressed with current technology, a little bit of money, and some elbow grease.”

The reference to the “Immediate Future” was also amusing in reminding me of the film Time Chasers, which was filmed in the Rutland, Vermont area, where I grew up. I saw an early cut of it (at a point when it was still known as Tangents) at “First Night Rutland” back in the early ’90s. Much more recently, Joe Creighton lent me the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 DVD in which Mike, Crow, and Tom Servo ridicule this low-budget time-travel adventure. “Oh my gosh — they’ve transported themselves THREE YEARS into the future!” exclaims one of them in mock astonishment as the circa-1991 scenery of Rutland, VT is replaced by a circa-1991 mall in Burlington, VT.

The immediate future may not be as exciting to contemplate as the distant future, but it’s more recognizable, more certain, and more directly moldable. Kudos to Habitat for working on the here-and-now, one non-futuristic house at a time.

Opened_Rooms = 0.

WHILE (Opened_Rooms < 7) DO

{

Judith: “Let’s open this door.”

Bluebeard: “I don’t think it should be opened. Why don’t you just kiss me instead? You are beautiful!”

Judith: “Bluebeard, I love you, but we must open the door and let the light in. Give me the key.”

Bluebeard: “Are you sure you want the key?”

Judith: “Let me have the key. Wait — what’s that scary whistling sound?”

Bluebeard: “It’s the wind.”

Judith: “Oh. I’m kind of fearful now, but I still want the key.”

Bluebeard: “Well, I suppose you can have this key. Just this one.”

Judith [opens door to reveal a glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly]: “This is beautiful! Your castle is beautiful! I love you! … Hey, why is there blood on the floor of the chamber? Whose blood is that?”

Opened_Rooms = Opened_Rooms +1.

}

Like the friend who sent me this link, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, the curmudgeon in me bemoans this further erosion of standards. (What’s next — acceptance of frivolous z’s in words/phrases like “For realz?” and “Whatev’z”?) On the other, avoiding nontraditional use of “hopefully” is really awkward in practice. To quote my father, a writer for most of his professional career:

I gave up trying to work around it, since it forces one to sound pompous (“It is to be hoped,” or “One would hope”). I guess you can say, “Let’s hope,” but that may not sound very smooth or natural. I tend to just say “hopefully,” and put up with intellectual stab of pain that accompanies it.

My dad is not simply a descriptivist, either. In his otherwise complimentary reaction to my 1995 commencement speech at Williams College, he noted that I had incorrectly used “aggravate” to mean “to annoy” (rather than “to worsen”).

Overall, some of these distinctions seem useful to me while others seem trivial. I’ve never been able to work up much concern about the splitting of inifinitives, yet I do have deeply held convictions on hyphens (sadly underutilized in compound modifiers of nouns) and Oxford commas (on which I agree with my friend, who writes, “I’m here, I’m pro-Oxford comma, and I vote!”).

Then there are the more straighforward issues such as lie vs. lay and its vs. it’s. I’m strictly a law-and-order guy on those, with no sympathy for the ignorant. Learn the rules, people! Without precise, clear communication, we have nothing but humbergesse and wogenblunks.

My proposal to improve SingAboutScience.org is part of Round 2 of the SciFund Challenge, a crowdfunding platform for supporting science projects with modest budgets (a few thousand dollars or less).

The SciFund Challenge is led by two ecologists, Drs. Jai Ranganathan and Jarrett Byrnes, and unsurprisingly includes a lot of ecology projects (and has drawn commentary from eco-blogger Jeremy Fox). But topics a bit nearer and dearer to my heart are represented as well: tropical parasites (Projet Crevette: Save Children From Disease), high school biology education (Recipe For Scientists), chemical engineering (Renewable Fatty Alcohols From Biodiesel), etc. One might go so far as to say that there’s something for everyone!

21 Apr: I am psyched that Phil wanted to try kayaking, but wish that he had lasted more than five minutes.

19 Apr: Phil saw tasers at the UWPD open house; now his lego clone troopers are tasering each other. Great to see him apply what he’s learned.

16 Apr: tweets from #soSEA

13 Apr: Just mixed hot cocoa mix with cold milk instead of hot water — big mixtake. What a clumpy mess.

9 Apr: I’ve decided to write a Nora Ephronesque rom-com novella. Here goes nothing.

8 Apr: I wanted to clean the patio, but Phil wanted to play jail. The compromise: a prison-camp game where the prisoners must sweep the patio.

7 Apr: New bedtime story routine: Phil offers his bed with the phrase, “Sit anywhere you’d like.” It’s a small bed, but I like the hospitable tone.

5 Apr: Global Health Trivia Night at Seattle BioMed was a hoot, but I missed the bonus question about Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life.” Zut alors!

3 Apr: Just got a smartphone. After 10 days & 2 trips back to the Sprint store, I can finally make hands-free calls & retrieve voice-mail.

2 Apr: Tonight I’m blowing off steam by playing loud, angry piano ballads.

For me, a satisfying aspect of seeing this movie was that it cleared up several confusing aspects of the trailer. Why does Samantha (Sam) get submerged in that giant vessel? What’s the naked guy doing in her lab? How does SHE wind up naked in her lab? Why is she whispering to the cab driver? What does the dude in the white tank top yell at her? (“Get out, you station-checking freak!”)

Alas, I had hopes beyond seeing these questions answered. Above all, I was hoping for a protagonist who is really smart (and, since this is a romantic comedy, likable and funny). But we know that Sam is brilliant mostly because we are told that she made superconducting candy as a kid, she’s a grad student at Harvard, etc. etc. Few of her lines really convey the sense of a gifted analytical mind at work, as with, say, Ellie Arroway in Contact or Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. When her adviser absurdly instructs her to scale up her production of a protein that has failed to yield the desired results for the past four years, she complies unquestioningly. While there are significant power issues in a male adviser/female advisee relationship, especially when the adviser is a jerk, shouldn’t someone of Sam’s tenacity and brainpower have made a counterargument against this ludicrous plan? In portraying Sam’s clever escape from a mental hospital, silly pseudoscience is substituted for genuine ingenuity. And when she asks to sit in the rear of a plane because passengers there are more likely to survive a crash, she comes across as more neurotic than smart.

More generally, the film seems uncertain of Sam’s personality. An A.V. Club review says that it “portrays her half the time as a scatterbrained ditz who falls into a vat of her own chemicals while trying to answer her cell phone, and the other half as an OCD-inflicted Asperger’s sufferer who insists on applying logistical reason [sic] to everything.” I don’t quite agree, but there is a consistency problem.

Some of the other characters seem like one-note caricatures. Sam’s mom is superstitious and meddlesome; her labmates are a bumbling coward and a Chinese guy who doesn’t speak recognizable English; and various date options are easily described in two words or less (exhibitionist artist, polyamorous guy, rude yuppie, etc.). Slightly more interesting is Sam’s vain best friend Leslie, who resembles Shannon Rutherford from Lost (as played by Maggie Grace) in both appearance and personality. The most believable character is Sam’s boyfriend Ben, an East Asian Studies scholar who at times appears to grasp the nature of science as well as Sam. It is he who is given the line paraphrasing the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle as it applies to their relationship: “the act of measuring something [e.g., the trueness of love] changes it.”

The question of the extent to which logical reasoning and empirical research can or should be applied to romance is a fascinating one, and I wish the movie had explored it in greater depth, rather than veering off into a slapstick subplot of international espionage. The film was written and rewritten over several years, and I can’t help but wonder how faithful the final product was to the original idea. Still, if you want to see a movie that looks like it was shot in a real laboratory and includes a bunch of science- and academia-specific inside jokes, you may enjoy “Losing Control,” as I did in spite of myself. Weiss herself earned a Ph.D. in biophysics from Harvard, and this is evident in nicely rendered details such as the lax observance of food-in-the-lab rules and the semi-bribing of thesis committee members with food. I just wish these details added up to more than a knowing chuckle here and there.

When he wakes up, he sneaks up on me and shouts “BOO!” at the top of his lungs. He’s getting pretty stealthy; this week he really startled me a couple of times.

This reminds me of Cato Fong, Inspector Clouseau’s valet in the old Pink Panther movies, who would attack Clouseau unexpectedly to keep Clouseau’s wits and reflexes sharp.

The difference is that Clouseau specifically asked Cato to surprise him, whereas I did not ask Phil. He came up with the routine all by himself.

What will he think of next?