The Power of Fun-Noodles

So I was just walking past Walgreen's on Middlefield Road, and I noticed several large open boxes of fun-noodles (i.e., funnoodles --- or, apparently, "pool noodles" if one wants to use the official name) outside of the store. They appear like they might be on bulk sale (fingers crossed!), and the Techer in my soul screams "Opportunity!"

And there is a university nearby to whom we could demonstrate some Techer ingenuity...

So, who's with me?

(Honestly, I suspect that even in bulk, this is probably a several-hundred-dollar purchase. Where is the prank fund when I need it? And I'm doing work right now instead of actually trying to get this to work. But I have to admit that my heart and soul are both calling me...)

MIT Technology Review's Young Investigators (TR35) for 2009

MIT Technology Review has released its list of 35 investigators under 35 for 2009. Among the list is a very familiar name: Ellis Meng, a Lloydie from the class of 1997. Congrats!

Another familiar name is a Santa Fe Institute postdoc (Nathan Eagle), who I have either met or seen speak. (I don't remember whether I talked to him.) He's one of the people doing interesting things with mobile phone data.

What happens in Estes Park stays in Estes Park

Tomorrow morning, I have a flight to Denver (I know, right when the March Meeting is ending) followed by ground transportation to Estes Park, Colorado. I will be attending the wedding of Lloydies Sam Bench '01 and Matt Reese '01 and a lot of Techers I haven't seen in many years (and some friends I have seen more recently than that) will be there. It should be very fun.

The timing of the wedding was purposely aligned with the end of the March Meeting in order to maximize the number of physicists attending it. (Matt is a physicist and was responsible in part for the Lloydie-Scurve dinner at last year's March Meeting becoming a Lloydie-Scurve-Yalee [how does one spell Yalee?] dinner.) In fact, the first formal e-mail announcement was titled something like "March Meeting and wedding" and was timed to be just before the abstract submission deadline for the March Meeting (and included a reminder about that). It was really quite classy.

There is a small chance I'll run into one of my friends at the airport (given the relative timing of my flight in and her flight out), though I don't know about relative airlines, so I'm guessing that won't happen. I'll hazard a guess, however, that I will see some meeting attendees that I know who are not people attending the wedding. It's just a matter of whom.

I almost forgot: this will be my first flight in which I am not taking a laptop with me since March 1998, when I was visiting grad schools.