This is a double post, also appearing on our wedding blog.

A few weeks ago we had an informal engagement party with our friends in Amherst. We were lucky to have a beautiful spring day perfect for a barbecue and drinks in our yard. Between the 3 grills, 35 people, 2 croquet sets, 8 pitchers of sangria, and I’m not sure how many cases of beer, everyone was kept busy and entertained!

Many thanks to everyone who helped out, plus Ilene and Gal who took all the photographs! You can find even more here and here.

I have been driving by myself more often lately since I’m off doing an internship.  As a result, I’ve been listening to a lot of the radio (by that I mean NPR) and to various podcasts.

I always enjoy Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me, NPR’s news quiz show as well as Prarie Home Companion when I’m looking to be entertained. The latter option only has podcasts of Garison Keillor’s ten minute long weekly update on the News from Lake Woebegone, but it is always good. Of course another great show is This American Life, which provides a series of stories and interviews each week on some intriguing topic. One episode in the last few weeks was on the scandal of a famous southern evangelical preacher who decided that he didn’t believe in hell. He has been formally ostracized by his former colleagues and labeled a heretic, all because he thinks starving babies in africa shouldn’t have to spend eternity burning in the fires of hell.

A completely different kind of podcast that I’ve also been listening to is a series of Spanish language lessons. Coffee Break Spanish is a pretty good introductory Spanish course, although I can’t judge how useful it would be if you were starting with no knowledge of the language. There are over 70 free episodes available for download.  Most were too easy for me, but I did appreciate the review on some trickier tenses like the subjunctive. Unfortunately I could not find a good index of each episode’s contents, so it is tough to find particular topics of interest.

From the same group, Radio Lingua Network, comes Showtime Spanish, which seems to be exactly what I need. Each 20 minute episode starts with a conversation between the two hosts (in reasonably slow and well ennunciated Spanish), followed by a review and discussion of what they talked about. Most of the discussion is in Spanish as well, with English just used to clarify vocabulary. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by my ability to understand what is being said even though I haven’t had any formal training with the language in (wow!) eight years. A further bonus in this podcast is that every five episodes is a mini (audio) soap opera. I’ve always wondered whether Spanish people themselves are as in love with soap operas as Spanish language instructors seem to be…

I’m very impressed by the amount of work that clearly goes into both of these free podcasts (they also have ones for a variety of other languages, including Luxumbourgish). On the down side, both Coffee Break Spanish and Showtime Spanish feature absolutely ridiculous introductory jingles…

Numbers can be tricky.  As a scientist I am more used to dealing with numbers than many, but it is still hard to wrap my head around what millions and billions of something really look like. Visual representations of large numbers can be quite striking. Chris Jordan is an artist who creates incredible images to show the scale of many of the issues facing our society, particularly our rampant consumerism and wastefulness.

Below is one of his pieces, a recreation of Serat’s “Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte” made out of 106,000 aluminum cans.  Why that number?  Because that is how many cans Americans use every 30 seconds.

You can see a presentation by Chris Jordan showing some of his other pieces if you click below.  It is about 10 minutes long, and has some very striking imagery. Part of his thesis is that there are many small things which we all do unconsciously, and while on an individual scale they are relatively harmless, once there are millions or billions of people doing those things, they add up and put a large strain on our world.

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I’ve been doing an internship at AT&T at&t Research for the last few weeks. It’s always fun to see how industrial research works, in particular the idiosyncrasies involved with working as part of a giant corporation.

As an employee of at&t Research, I am technically considered one of at&t’s management employee (finally I get some well deserved recognition). Unfortunately, at at&t, this essentially means that I am not part of the union.

Normally my management status would have no impact, but this spring at&t’s unionized employees are up to renew their contract, and there is the chance of a strike. A strike at at&t would be a big deal — they are responsible for more than just a cell phone company.  They run a large part of the networks that handle both telephone calls and the internet backbone, plus they provide TV service.

Fortunately, there is no reason to worry, because at&t’s managers (aka scabs) are being trained to take over all of those jobs in case of a strike. So if a strike occurs, you could have a computer science PhD digging ditches for the cable going to your house. While that would probably just be a minor inconvenience (we aren’t known for our hole digging prowess), it’s a little scary to put the control of nationwide networks in the hands of these folks who “in theory” know how they should all work. at&t’s goal is clearly to show the union that the managers are a credible threat, but it seems to me that the threat is really in the amount of damage they would do if they were actually let loose on that infrastructure.

I am only at at&t until December, and the potential strike is not until next spring, but apparently that is not sufficient excuse to get myself out of “strike duty”, and I was assigned a training session to learn how to become an air pressure technician at a center in Texas in case the worst should happen.  Fortunately, I’ve managed to weasel my way out of the assignment, so I will not be forced to learn a practical skill…. phew! Less lucky are the rest of the research employees here who get to spend many hours completing the training sessions for their new jobs, while being informed that their own jobs aren’t actually important for the company.

As you consider how much money at&t must be wasting by running training courses and sending people and supplies around for this charade, I leave you to gaze upon the ten pound stack of documents I received when I started my internship, most of them detailing the benefits plans which I am not eligible for.