Kelly's parents came to town for Thanksgiving this year. They really had a lot of fun with Gunner. Kelly made Tofurky with all the trimmings, and awesome vegan meatloaf, some vegetables from the local farmer's market, and vegan blueberry cobbler. It all tasted so good it makes you wonder about all those people who complain about how you're missing out if you don't eat meat.
If you have written any kind of crystallography-related manuscript or report, you’ve probably run into one of the most annoying problems I’ve encountered in my academic career—the lack of a proper overline character. You see, instead of writing “-3”, crystallographers change the negative sign into a line on top of the 3 and call it “bar 3”. Unfortunately, there is no font that does this. Some font sets have a “combining overline” (U+0305) which you place between two characters and draws a bar over both characters, as in “4̅3”. In some font sets, this character extends over both letters, and in other font sets, it is centered over the first letter but extends towards the second letter. But I haven’t found a font yet that can just place an overline over a single character (yes, there are macron characters, but they don’t cover the entire letter).
However, just recently a bunch of scientific publishers have released a comprehensive, royalty-free font set for scientists called STIX. It is supposed to contain every character required by any scientific discipline. The STIX font set now has a proper combining overline character, so now I can write that the space group of bornite properly as F̅43m instead of F-43m. One quick note, the STIX fonts are in beta testing right now, but you can download them from the STIX website once you sign up. Also, the STIX combining overline must be inserted before the letter or number you want the bar over.
I saw six homes today. This is the one that sounded good to me, so I made plans to see it first in the morning. I also stopped by again later in the afternoon, after my expectations had been calibrated, and I decided to apply for it. It is smaller than the home we are renting now, but compared to other homes in the area, the price for the size is a great value.
I'm blogging from my hotel in Mount Vernon, Virginia. According to internet reviews, this place is supposed to be a shithole, but I guess the owners have remodeled it over the past two years, and I think it's not that bad. My room is actually pretty nice, if small. I was surprised to walk into the place and see this huge courtyard in the middle, so I thought I'd post a picture. The hotel has free wireless, as you can probably guess.
"It was there that night that I accepted the Word of God and rejected all that would ever counter it, including evolution. With that, in great sorrow, I tossed into the fire all my dreams and hopes in science."He could have taken the Bible as an allegory or symbolic text, as many do. But this is what fundamentalism does to people. It causes people to ignore scientific evidence. It causes people to want to be dumb!
We took the dogs to Bartlett Lake yesterday. There was barely anybody there, so we let the puppies off the leash. They had a great time, although Gunner thought the water was too cold.
Don't cross the street, but it's OK to ROCK OUT! The cool thing about this crosswalk sign is that they didn't just use electrical tape to block out the two middle fingers. They actually made small triangular plugs to fill in the holes in the mesh!
We had a sudden frost in early January that killed all the ficus and bougainvillea plants. I took this picture in the early morning after the sprinklers went off and covered the grass with a thick layer of ice.
Sexy malachite! Of course it's from Arizona.
Extinct dodo birds. It's sobering to think that we killed all these fuckers off just for fun.
Cool escalator!
