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bironicWhew, what a weekend.
Things I did do:
- Had a nice Restaurant Week seafood dinner Friday night with 11 (!) of the LJ fangirl brunch crew. With that many people, especially in a place as noisy as the restaurant we went to, it's impossible to talk to anyone more than two people down the table, but it was quite lovely down at my end with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
scribblinlenore, pun and scrunchy, with visits from linaerys and moonlash_cc between courses. Er, let me drop a few more names there. Point is, much fun conversation was had and much fish was consumed.
- Went to the first of this year's weekly astronomy lectures waaaay out east at the Custer Institute; so far that, even though the lectures are only an hour and a half and the observations afterward last less than 30 minutes because it's usually so cold, the whole outing takes about six hours. Anyway. This one was on the fundamental questions of cosmology, namely, determining the curvature of space-time to ascertain whether the universe will continue expanding indefinitely, collapse in on itself, or reach a point of equilibrium, all of which involves calculating the rate of expansion based on energy density, a combination of mass and energy, which in turn involved accurately calculating the Hubble constant, which took a century, which was only possible to measure if the two tenets of the cosmological principle were held to be true, and so on and so forth. The lecturer, a bespectacled professor wearing classic black-on-black-on-black and who reminded me a little bit of Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park, did a fairly good job of it, despite having an unfortunate verbal tic of tacking "right" onto the end of most sentences. I hadn't known most of the math behind the theories, so it was cool to see the equations written out and explained; and I hadn't realized cosmologists had actually reached a conclusion from among those three outcomes: Our universe, the three-dimensional equivalent of a plane (rather than of a sphere or hyperbolic curve like a saddle), will expand infinitely—and the rate of expansion is itself increasing, due to the influence of the almost entirely mysterious dark energy (even more mysterious than dark matter). Neat, huh?
- Saw Harold Pinter's The Homecoming today with a few friends, preceded by a delicious brunch and followed by some much-needed recovery at a pub. The acting was top-notch, with Ian McShane as a suitably horrible if too-vigorous Max, Raul Esparza doing a wonderfully dry Lenny and Eve Best playing Ruth with just the right amount of inscrutability. I'm glad I read the play last night so I knew what to expect and could concentrate on the way the lines were being delivered instead of on what they were saying. Really the only bad part was when some woman's cell phone rang in the left mezzanine, and kept ringing, and then she answered it, to resounding shhes. Moron. But the company made up for it. You have to love going places with people who hug you goodbye on the street and say, "I'll send you that porn!" as you part ways for the subway.
- Watched SGA. Fun episode. Reminded me of "Irresistable."
- Claimed a prompt for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
wilson_fest that provides an excuse to write young!Wilson sex. Ohhhh, yes.
- Signed up for a pass to a foreign/indie film thing at a sort-of-nearby college; six Fridays from February to April with a double feature each night, including Lust, Caution (Se, Jie), The Kite Runner, No Country for Old Men, some stuff from Turkey and Italy, and one from Israel called Jellyfish (d'you know it,roga?). I haven't rented foreign films -- or any films -- in a while, and I'm really looking forward to getting back into it, not to mention going to movie theaters again.
- Got about 150 pages further in Black Powder War on the train. Still like the first book best, but rumor has it the fourth is great, except for the cliffhanger.
Things I did not do:
- Write Dee a birthday fic
- Write more House vampire fic
- Write the nextgate_house post
- Finish my DVD commentary
- Memoryfest catch-up
Oh, well. Those will come soon. Meantime, tomorrow I've got to get some work done and train up the new guy who's coming in to replace my co-worker who was fired Friday (at laaaaast). And Tuesday is the new House, yay!
Things I did do:
- Had a nice Restaurant Week seafood dinner Friday night with 11 (!) of the LJ fangirl brunch crew. With that many people, especially in a place as noisy as the restaurant we went to, it's impossible to talk to anyone more than two people down the table, but it was quite lovely down at my end with
scribblinlenore, pun and scrunchy, with visits from linaerys and moonlash_cc between courses. Er, let me drop a few more names there. Point is, much fun conversation was had and much fish was consumed.- Went to the first of this year's weekly astronomy lectures waaaay out east at the Custer Institute; so far that, even though the lectures are only an hour and a half and the observations afterward last less than 30 minutes because it's usually so cold, the whole outing takes about six hours. Anyway. This one was on the fundamental questions of cosmology, namely, determining the curvature of space-time to ascertain whether the universe will continue expanding indefinitely, collapse in on itself, or reach a point of equilibrium, all of which involves calculating the rate of expansion based on energy density, a combination of mass and energy, which in turn involved accurately calculating the Hubble constant, which took a century, which was only possible to measure if the two tenets of the cosmological principle were held to be true, and so on and so forth. The lecturer, a bespectacled professor wearing classic black-on-black-on-black and who reminded me a little bit of Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park, did a fairly good job of it, despite having an unfortunate verbal tic of tacking "right" onto the end of most sentences. I hadn't known most of the math behind the theories, so it was cool to see the equations written out and explained; and I hadn't realized cosmologists had actually reached a conclusion from among those three outcomes: Our universe, the three-dimensional equivalent of a plane (rather than of a sphere or hyperbolic curve like a saddle), will expand infinitely—and the rate of expansion is itself increasing, due to the influence of the almost entirely mysterious dark energy (even more mysterious than dark matter). Neat, huh?
- Saw Harold Pinter's The Homecoming today with a few friends, preceded by a delicious brunch and followed by some much-needed recovery at a pub. The acting was top-notch, with Ian McShane as a suitably horrible if too-vigorous Max, Raul Esparza doing a wonderfully dry Lenny and Eve Best playing Ruth with just the right amount of inscrutability. I'm glad I read the play last night so I knew what to expect and could concentrate on the way the lines were being delivered instead of on what they were saying. Really the only bad part was when some woman's cell phone rang in the left mezzanine, and kept ringing, and then she answered it, to resounding shhes. Moron. But the company made up for it. You have to love going places with people who hug you goodbye on the street and say, "I'll send you that porn!" as you part ways for the subway.
- Watched SGA. Fun episode. Reminded me of "Irresistable."
- Claimed a prompt for
wilson_fest that provides an excuse to write young!Wilson sex. Ohhhh, yes.- Signed up for a pass to a foreign/indie film thing at a sort-of-nearby college; six Fridays from February to April with a double feature each night, including Lust, Caution (Se, Jie), The Kite Runner, No Country for Old Men, some stuff from Turkey and Italy, and one from Israel called Jellyfish (d'you know it,
roga?). I haven't rented foreign films -- or any films -- in a while, and I'm really looking forward to getting back into it, not to mention going to movie theaters again.- Got about 150 pages further in Black Powder War on the train. Still like the first book best, but rumor has it the fourth is great, except for the cliffhanger.
Things I did not do:
- Write Dee a birthday fic
- Write more House vampire fic
- Write the next
gate_house post- Finish my DVD commentary
- Memoryfest catch-up
Oh, well. Those will come soon. Meantime, tomorrow I've got to get some work done and train up the new guy who's coming in to replace my co-worker who was fired Friday (at laaaaast). And Tuesday is the new House, yay!
