Heptadecagon

I'm playing in an adult baseball league this season. It's been just about ten years since I've played hardball, so my goal is to avoid embarrassing myself or my teammates. We had a scrimmage tonight against one of the other teams in our league. The directions to the ball park were along the lines of: Drive north until the highway ends. Follow that road through a few towns. Go past the grain silo, and park on the other side of the street. The air smelled of manure, but we had a baseball diamond, two teams, and an umpire. My first at-bat was in the second inning. We had a runner on, and nobody out. As soon as I walked up to the plate, the umpire sent me back to our dugout because I forgot to put a helmet on. Yeah, that's too many years of slow-pitch softball. Ok, so we'll try again, this time with a helmet on my head. The catcher was kind enough to tell me about a soft spot in the dirt right outside the batters box. If he only knew that I didn't really

Unfortunately, this didn't happen when I was home, but Chris told me all about it. My sister got Aaron a Rubik's Cube for Christmas, and he enjoys messing around with it. The cube was in one of its 4.3 x 10 19 configurations , and, according to Chris, sufficiently randomized. Well, Aaron looked over the cube and then he started twisting. Then he'd stop, look at it a little more, and start twisting again. After six or seven minutes of effort, he had the cube looking like this. He handed the cube to Chris and told her to finish it because he couldn't figure out how to do it himself. I wish I had been there to see the look on her face. She told Aaron that she didn't know how to do it either, so they'd have to wait until I got home. When I got home, they showed me the cube. I took the pictures and then finished it for him. Is my boy a mathematical genius? Could be, but that has nothing to do with nearly solving the cube. Cue up my inner skeptic: the cube

To wrap up a little unfinished business, here are some photographs from the heart dissection. There was no squeamishness from Z&T about touching the heart, putting their fingers inside the chambers, and even about cutting parts of it open by themselves. On the contrary, they were almost as excited about this as Chris was. But they did ask if the cow from which the heart came was still alive.

This happened around Halloween 2007. The recounting below is from an email message I sent to a few friends. Warning: this is what happens when you marry a physiologist. I've pieced together the dialogue as best as I recall. As many of you know, Chris teaches anatomy and physiology part-time at the Community College. On Wednesday night, she came home from class with a large paper bag from Dorothy Lane Market --- sort of the equivalent of Merchant of Vino, for the Ann Arborites in the audience --- and was abundantly excited about the contents of the bag. She told me to guess what she had. I was thinking brownies, cake, or cookies. Maybe sushi. Hopefully something with chocolate. Chris reached inside the paper bag, and pulled out a large zip-lock plastic bag containing something about the size and shape of a football, except that it had blood vessels transversing its surface, and one region near the bottom was covered in yellow fatty tissue. You didn't have to be a bi

So, we were supposed to go to Michigan last weekend for our niece's first birthday. On Tuesday evening, Zoe came down with a case of the pukes. The all-night long pukes. We kept her home from school on Wednesday, but sent Talia, and told Chris's family that as long as everyone else stayed healthy, we'd see them on Saturday. Zoe seemed fine by Wednesday evening, so she went back to school on Thursday. Little did Chris and I know that Zoe actually threw up again Wednesday night, but got it entirely in the bowl we'd left by her bed. Clever little thing that she is, she hid the bowl because she didn't want to miss school again. When we found it on Friday, the girls tried to claim that the cats did it. Nevertheless, we were still thinking that we'd be able to make the trip to Michigan. And then Friday night happened. Around 11 pm, we heard Aaron start to puke. I ran into his room and cupped my hands in front of his mouth to try to catch the vomit. Because