The New Floodgates of the Mind

slept like crap.

woke up angry.

now feeling nauseous.

this is NOT how a friday should be.

bleah.

Throw caution to the wind and let chaos rule supreme!

And let the lifeline of your port of call be the sign of beans! Magic beans? Aye! Magic indeed: COFFEE BEANS!

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we’re gonna have a tv party tonight… ALL RIGHT!
we’re gonna have a tv party all right… TONIGHT!

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I’m in a good mood. And hyper. Comes with meeting a good friend for lunch. Well, not FOR lunch, specifically, but during a typical lunch hour 🙂

And I ate the second half of my peanut butter and jelly sandwhich. MMmmmm! 🙂

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This post has been brought to you by the letters PB & J

Woo. Tired again. Energy, wherefore art thou, energy?

So I headed to the eye doc’s on Saturday morning. What with all the migraines, it was a possibility that I wanted to rule out. My last visit to them was in 2002 or so, after verifying that my previous prescription from 2000 was good and didn’t need adjustment. What did they find this year? That my eyesight has improved since 2002! Thus, my prescription was cut by almost half! yowtch. That’s a lot of money… 🙂 (new frames, new lenses, doc’s visit – insurance pays very minor).

Will this help resolve my headaches? Not entirely, no, but it will at least remove one other possible factor to it. We’ll see.

By the way, tried my first DECAF this morning… uhm… coffee with no kick? uhm… okay, it tastes fine… but I need my kick! 🙂

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Montreal, November 3, 2006

With great power comes great… physics
Author and physics professor James Kakalios swoops into McGill to talk about Superman, Spider-Man and the laws of thermodynamics

The Physics Department of McGill University is heroically proud to host The Uncanny Physics of Superhero Comic Books, a talk by Dr. James Kakalios, professor at the School of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Minnesota, and author of the bestselling non-fiction book The Physics of Superheroes (Gotham Books, 2006).

Kakalios has fused his academic expertise with his passion for the superhuman exploits of characters like Spider-Man, the Flash, Superman and the X-Men to illustrate principles like the conservation of energy and the three laws of thermodynamics.

Professor Kakalios will swoop into McGill and hit his audience with a laser blast of four-colour physics facts starting at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 9. Admission is free. Location: McGill’s Macdonald-Harrington Building, Room G10, 815 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, Quebec.

In the amazing world of superheroes, it’s uncanny how often comics get their science right (radioactive spiders and heroes the size of ants aside). Dr. Kakalios began using examples from comics to teach physics to his students in 2001 and soon discovered that many of the comics from his youth made good use of real-world scientific theories, once readers got past the unlikelihood of alien power rings or nuclear explosions turning meek physicists into destructive green monsters. In fact, he addresses science questions that have bedeviled comic book fans for decades, including:

· If Superman can leap tall buildings in a single bound, what was the gravity on his home planet Krypton like?

· Does the Fantastic Four’s Invisible Woman go blind when she becomes transparent, since light passes through her and her invisible eyes?

· How fast would the Flash need to be going to run across a body of water without sinking?

About the Faculty of Science

The Faculty of Science at McGill University bridges areas from cognitive science investigating how the brain works, to the galactic cosmology of multidimensional brane worlds, and all points in between. The faculty’s mission is to create new knowledge and understanding for the betterment of all.

Contact:
Mark Shainblum
Communications Officer
McGill University
Faculty of Science + University Relations Office
(514) 398-2189
mark.shainblum@mcgill.ca
www.mcgill.ca

Just wanted to post this up for the very-talented and always-entertaining Molly Crabapple:

Make dreams come true. 🙂

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In other news, I got confirmation that Johane Matte will be at ExpoZine this year (she’s got some special books she wants to give away 🙂 ) and Craig Taillefer will also be driving down for the event. It’ll be nice to see him again and talk a little faster than we do in email 😉

Other Project on the Horizon: Still can’t talk about it. Hope is on for some material before the end of the year… I’m being cautious on this but am really *really* hoping…