Okay, it is time to get things going again with the Mindcast. A new show will be uploaded this week, but before that happens I’m announcing a few changes and a few potential changes. You could read the brief summaries below, or you could listen to my audio explanation and hear more details below. Read More…

I meant to post this on May 10, 2008, exactly one year after I popped The Question to Ariela on the air, unscripted, live, and obviously so. But today should do just as well, for it is now exactly one month until the day we get hitched. Let me tell you about The Haro von Mogel Wedding.™

Ariela and I have been together since December 4, 2003. We knew within a few months that we were more than just together, we were an indivisible unit - a system that was more than the sum of its parts, with the emergent property called love. We were friends for half a year before we hooked up, and living as neighbors. But when we got together we were inseparable. Really. We had to flip a coin each night to decide who’s place we slept in, to keep it fair. Before we had left the co-ops we lived in (more like large apartments than anything else), we were fundamentally in an irreducible state.

Ariela was deciding what she wanted to study when we first got together, and she settled on sociology. Ariela’s real passion is music history, particularly classical music, and especially Mozart. I graduated first with my degree in genetics, and a passion for being scientific and communicating things scientific. Sharing interests in philosophy, sleeping in, talking about all things academic and nerdy, food, bees, and buttered popcorn with orange juice, it’s been a real fun time for both of us. We’re all set to build a life together. Actually, we’ve already started.

You know you’re getting married when you start talking about the sound system you’ll eventually buy 2-3 years down the road. Or when you whip out paper to re-design the Ideal Home™ and decide for yourselves what functions belong in each room. Who needs a formal ‘presentation’ living room? What a waste. When I got accepted to grad school, we made plans to move across the country and start anew. It was never a question that we were going together, it didn’t even need to be said. Read More…

My friend Chris Hallquist has recently moved his blog The Uncredible Hallq from blogspot to his new home at uncrediblehallq.net/blog. He is another inductee into the ranks of Wordpress users, in fact, I helped him get his system up and running a couple weeks ago. Now he’s got a killer ANSII theme that makes you think that you’re reading something on an old IBM 286 computer. But it’s got all the advanced functionality that Wordpress has.

If you blog, and don’t use wordpress, you don’t know what you’re missing! There’s nothing like having a free, ever-updated, and uber-customizable program that runs on your web server and keeps everything running smoothly. Heck, even my graduate school program had its website built using wordpress. In other news, I just got drafted into maintaining and updating it.

The Uncredible Hallq also has a new series of posts that might interest you, Sunday Science. Sleep in, get your science, and enjoy your Sundays over there. His first two Sunday Science posts are about Botox (the chemical of the week for Mindcast Episode 20 [page]) and Cannibinoids. All the essentials!

Today marks the end of my first year in graduate school at UW-Madison. On June 4th, 2007, I showed up in the lab to get to work on my research project. I had a fun an interesting field season and a summer getting myself oriented in Madison. I started filming (well, I wasn’t the one with the camera) for my plant breeding videos, and soon enough my two classes started up in the fall. I took the first Read More…

Jonathan Eisen, who you may know from Episode 60, or from my blogroll, has posted a video naming Davis, CA, as one of the 5 friendliest cities in the U.S. Of course, you have to really know you’re in a friendly city when you know that your own city has to be one of them. And lookie here, Madison WI is one of them! From one transplantee to another, back ‘atcha.

Composer Alexander Courage died on May 15, 2008. He worked on several television series, but is best known for composing the theme music for the original Star Trek. He stopped working for Gene Roddenberry after Roddenberry took 50% of the royalties from the theme song for himself. Would the quality of music have been better had Courage stayed on during the series?

Each Star Trek incarnation develops its own musical pattern, but pays homage to the original theme created by Courage. Either in the opening moments of the main theme, used as a baseline to come back to in the closing theme, or mixed somewhere into the score. Deep Space Nine and Voyager didn’t seem to obviously use the original theme, but still borrow some of the style and mood. Enterprise totally abandoned the style and went with Where my Heart Will Take Me, which, if you ask me, was half the reason why Enterprise failed. (The other half was the lack of relevance)

Later this year, as Star Trek XI comes out in theaters, Alexander Courage’s memorable musical phrasing is sure to be a part of the score. It will continue in the ST franchise, and continue to influence science fiction music. And he didn’t even like science fiction!

Wonderful news! I was thrilled to hear about it a couple days ago, though I was too busy to post it then. The graduate school has just seen fit to award me the O.N. Allen Graduate Scholarship this year! Awesome!

Yeah, so the scholarship award was based on my undergraduate record and GRE scores, and my project description. I’m not entirely sure what the history of the award is, but I’ll know soon enough. It’s good to learn about the history of these things. Anyway, I’m not sure when I’ll be getting it, but at some point in the near future I’ll probably have a nice piece of fancy paper with my name on it, and a huge cash windfall to the tune of Read More…