Oh drums, you never steer me wrong. After years of neglect, I have started spending time during the week working on my drum technique. I’ve also met several people here in Dallas who seem interested in jamming. This has only made me more interested in having fun with drumming. I’ve […]
Life
490 posts
It finally happened: I setup a Facebook page. http://www.facebook.com/stephen.sekula Don’t get excited. My primary means of communication, listed in order of their important to me, are still: face-to-face, phone, IM, e-mail, and social networking. That means that I won’t be spending every waking hour on Facebook, so please don’t get […]
This was my first week as a faculty member at Southern Methodist University. It was pretty low-key, full of paperwork and unpacking. I was excited to choose anoffice and start moving in – that makes a place feel more like a home than a job. Let me step back and […]
Global climate change, war, the economy – progress in all three of these things depend on innovating America’s energy demand to sustainable and acceptable levels, then exporting that innovation to the world before somebody else beats us to it. Tied to this is water conservation, and the need integrate stellar […]
When Galileo Galilei composed his treatise on cosmology, collecting his own many observations of the natural world into a coherent argument, he chose to present the work as a dialogue among three men. One of them, Salviati, spoke for Galileo, and the other two (Sagredo and Simplicio) represented the voices […]
(Written on July 20-21) The folks at the Honda dealership were quite nice, and were fairly fast in diagnosing the problem with the air conditioning. The bottom line: we’ll be in debter’s prison by tomorrow, but our air conditioning will work, by God. The parts won’t arrive until tomorrow morning, […]
(Written on July 19, 2009) We started our second day with a decent breakfast and a quick and early departure from Bakersfield. Jodi chatted with the desk attendant, and noted how long we had to wait for the cold tap water to actually get cold. We had postulated that this […]
(Written on July 18, 2009) After days of preparations for the move to Texas (weeks, really, including selling and eventually giving away furniture), we were finally on our way. We watched as the last of our belongings were loaded into a moving truck before we said goodbye to friends and […]
Michael Pollan’s name keeps popping up. This past week, I listened to his excellent discussion on one of the local radio forum programs. As the author of several popular books on our relationship with food, including “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” [1] and “In Defense of Food”, he has become the de […]
This was a very fun 4th of July. I started the day with birthday wishes from my mother-in-law. I was happy she called, but I was also very tired and realized that I was up, and that making it through the day would be no fun until I got more […]
I’ve spent the last three days of this week in an “undisclosed location”, and now that I’m returning home in preparation for my trip to Spain I’m happy to disclose my little vacation spot. I’ve been at Caltech with Jodi, who has been commuting here for a month now for […]
It occurred to me several months ago that my plans for a quiet summer, leading up to the move to Dallas, were in terrible danger. A number of things have been delayed or added to the pile. As a result, my vision of a whole week off (or even a […]