Amy’s stuff

I have mixed feelings about purchasing a sweatshirt from this place.

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Chicken cordon bleu? Fish and chips? Deep fried hamsters? Merline is about to find out...

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The Big Chief has outdone herself this year... I think she's catching on to the Caltech undergraduate nonchalance about drowning in work...

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A lot of people in our office have November birthdays... Every year on my birthday I have to start thinking of a suitable gift for The Big Chief whose birthday was exactly 9 years and 358 days before mine...

So, what do you get for your boss, who has everything, including a Mackelwane medal from the AGU?

See below..... ;)

As a post-script on this, The Big Chief greatly enjoys the spider and has already used it to menace me several times.  This was received much better than my previous gift idea: a $20 gift certificate to Restoration Hardware so she can replace everything I broke (and hid the remains of) when I was at her house the last time.  

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Birthday Diet Coke is the best kind of diet coke!

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Hal purchased this over the weekend at a party supply place while shopping with his daughter... He won't be at work tomorrow but he's left instructions "with our boss" that I am supposed to wear this at all times in the office tomorrow.

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Thanks to everyone for the (early!) birthday presents. I will greatly enjoy wearing my Air Force One underarmor shorts while sitting on my couch eating ham, reading "The Theory of Dislocations", and watching "Heroes" in the background. A perfect way to spend the holiday season.

My gift from Traci this year was a poster of instructions on How to Imitate a Chicken (as illustrated by my four favorite characters from Arrested Development). This has been hung in a place of honor in my office...

The perfect end to the birthday would be to have select members of the office try it out (particularly those trained in ballet)... we may have to wait until after the office christmas party for that.

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I thought the holographic people on CNN last night were cool. Immediately, questions sprang to mind such as:

a) How do they do this

b) How long before I can "hologram" in to grant review panels instead of having to travel to St. Louis for a week?

c) Can they CGI-in a business suit and perfect bangs even though I'm in my jammies, or do I have to be wearing the business suit and have brushed my hair?

d) How much would it cost to have my parents' chocolate Lab, Bailey (The Enforcer), hologrammed into my house 24/7?

Gizmodo reveals how it works (the short answer, 44 HD cameras and a lot of computers)
http://gizmodo.com/5076663/how-the-cnn-holographic-interview-system-works

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Based on the popular vote statistics

OBAMA: 62,682,389
MCCAIN: 55,543,527

and the US population, 301 million, that's about a 40% voter turnout... and keep in mind, that's a LOWER bound because perhaps not all of those people are registered voters.

We learned in Political Science 1 at Caltech that a low voter turnout means that the people in a 2-party democracy are largely happy with how things are going. Only when people are worried or nervous or angry do you get voter turnouts this high.

Wow.

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