Jessica Meir graduated from the International Space University (not to self .. look up) has a PhD from Scripps and is currently an Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology at Harvard Medical School. Last but not least is Andrew Morgan. He is a doctor and serves in the Army and has previously served as a emergency doctor for special operations.

Photos are below. I'm waiting on my trading cards.

I recently reviewed a book, that I said would meet your needs if you were in a Lifetime movie kind of a mood. Well today I've got one for you for more of a soap opera day. Its got orphans, Texas high school football, a love triangle, sex,  murder, paternity confusion, and a catholic priest. Seriously, what more could you ask for?!

Given all that, Tubleweeds was much better than I expected. Sure its melodramatic and overly detailed, but I was invested in the characters and it moved along and kept me reading. It is the story of three orphans, two boys and a girl, growing up together in the Texas panhandle. Sappy me like them and wanted them to succeed. I wanted the girl to fall for the good guy even though I knew she wouldn't. etc etc. It lost me a bit towards the end with all the murder mystery stuff, but hey, its a soap opera. 

Long Story Short: I hear the ghost of some tween girl past screaming "DRA-MA"

XKCD is pretty much the best comic ever created for science nerds. The author, Randall Munroe, just nails the feeling and humor of the smart, moderately socially adept set. Sometimes he's funny, sometimes poignant, and from time to time busts out with a really cool science image. Take the one above comparing the thickness of ice sheets compared with modern skylines, which, hey, look pretty tall to me in real life. Neat.

What could not be thrilling about a book about writing a dictionary?! Right?

Well, OK, maybe its not everyone's thing. But if you stop to think for a minute about what a dictionary is, how many words are in it, its pretty astounding that they exist at all. And even more so that they were created prior to modern databases. To sit in a room, reading books, making words lists, and writing definitions for years or even decades.. you might just have to be a little bit mad.

The Professor and the Madman is the story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. Its a love story to words and how language evolves. Its also a story about the people involved, their lives, and idiosyncrasies. Its a story about what it means to be mad now and what it meant in the mid to late 1800s and early 1900s.

Long Story Short - For anyone who has ever had in interest that absorbs than more than what might be deemed healthy, you might find yourself in this story.

Its been a long time since we had a good science post! I've been volunteering with an environmental NGO here in Brno - Nadace Partnerstvi. They have a community garden outside their building that includes elements to teach ecological concepts to kids. One of them is about the age of the universe. There are bronze plaques on the ground and distances separating them illustrated the time gaps between events (creation of universe, creation of earth, single celled organisms, etc) as you walk through the garden. Its of of several really great hands on educational tools in the garden.

For the more technologically inclined, check out here is today. :)

Believe it or not, The Magician's Assistant is not my normal fantasy fare involving magic and fairies (although for full disclosure there is some magical realism in there). It is the story of Sabine who was in fact a magician's assistant performing in Vegas, on Johnny Carson, at the Magic Castle in LA, etc. She falls in love with her magician, Percival, but he is gay. He finds a life partner, but she is never able to move on, preferring to keep Percival as a friend/co-dependent. When Percival's life partner dies of AIDs, Sabine and Percival marry so that she can inherit their possessions when he dies as well. But then he has an aneurysm and ends up dying sooner rather than later. That is the beginning of the story.

Percival had always said he had no living family, but it turns out that he has a mother and two sisters living in Nebraska. Sabine is depressed and reeling from his death, and she decides to get to know this family to try to understand him better and feel closer to him even though he is gone.

So. The book is just watching a moment of this woman's life as she gets to know the family. If you're looking for action, keep looking. If you want emotion and melodrama, you have found it. I found the book tolerable. I finished it; I wanted Sabine to get better; I wanted her and her new family to learn from each other. That said, I often wanted to slap her upside the head - never the magician, only the assistant. Lover? No, just companion. Budding career as an architect? Nah, better to quit and just build architectural models of someone else's design. Certainly I could be accused of being too achievement focused in life, not able to just relax and enjoy things. But I really wanted Sabine to find a way to take ownership of something in her life and really go for it, but no.

Long Story Short: If you're in the mood for a Lifetime movie but your cable's out, you have found your novel.

A worthy place to spend eternity.

A town or a confectionery? In any case, approaching perfection.

The water was such a beautiful color it is more deserving of a poet than a photographer. Layers and shades of intense blues.

La Rambla is swarming with people, mostly tourists, but this woman looked like a local. I even got a 'not another tourist' glare for taking her picture. Women of a certain age here in the Czech Republic dye their age the same shade of red/purple. Never saw it in the US, so I'm curious how the trend started.