Geek nostalgia ((And we’re talking 25-30 years here.)) is encountering a blog entry in rot13…

Yesterday evening I made my way to Jon and Laura’s party, up on Capitol Hill, and there was good conversation accompanied by copious libations. Just before midnight we took glasses and a couple of bottles of champagne up on to the roof of their apartment block. I should have brought a decent camera and tripod, but I had to make do with my iPhone to capture the skyline and the fireworks on the Space Needle. Pictures here.
And yes, the fireworks stopped after a few seconds due to “a computer glitch”. ((There’s widespread speculation about the operating system involved…)) We headed back down to the apartment, and watched the delayed – and manually controlled – display from indoors. The Quantum Pontiff has a great picture of the fireworks on his blog.

I just heard from Massachusetts: my daughter, Katherine, has had a baby girl. More details anon. (Meanwhile here are some pictures of Tommy and a – very pregnant – Katherine!)
UPDATE: Victoria Elizabeth (“Torri“) Gallagher, 9 lbs. 8oz. Mother and baby doing fine. Here’s the first photograph, from Mark’s cellphone:

Mark’s posted some more pictures, here.

A suggestion: pop over to the no-man page at Myspace and listen to four of their tracks. Then click through to Tim Bowness and listen to some of his solo work (especially “last year’s tattoo”) (and there’s a downloadable track here).
Enjoy.

On Saturday, Alec, Adriana and I spent the day with Laureen Hudson and her family, first having lunch aboard their catamaran and then cruising San Francisco bay on a friend’s powerboat. Photos coming soon; in the meantime you can read about Laureen, her work, and her causes here, here, here, here, here and here!
UPDATE: Laureen has documented the whole thing here, so I don’t have to!

If you have 10-15 minutes to spare, click through to this beautiful piece by P. Z. Myers entitled “Pycnogonid tagmosis and echoes of the Cambrian”. Sounds terribly esoteric and dry, doesn’t it? But it’s not: it’s a delightful example of how science is done. It begins:

The evolutionary foundation for the organization of many animal body plans is segmental—we are made of rings of similar stuff, repeated over and over again along our body length. That’s sufficient to make a creature like a tapeworm or a leech (well, almost—leeches have sophisticated specializations), but there are further steps involved in making a fly or a spider or a human. There is an arrangement of positional information along the length of an animal, so one segment can recognize whether it is near the head or the tail, and the acquisition of new patterns of gene expression based on that positional information that cause the development of specialized structures in different segments. That process of specializing segments is called tagmosis. It’s how a fly forms mouthparts in head segments, legs and wings in thoracic segments, and no limbs at all in abdominal segments.

And then he dives into an account of the pycnogonids or sea spiders, and how their heads are structured, and how we know (hint: it involves enervation), and how this structure evolved. Even if (like me) you’re not familiar with all of the terms or concepts, that’s OK: Myers’ writing is accessible, satisfying, surprising, funny, and really elegant. If you enjoyed Dawkins’ The Ancestors’ Tale, you’ll love this.