Ambivalent Engineer

It's 5:13pm, and I'm sitting in the shade in my back yard, tweaking some really neat flexure mounts, while keeping an eye on two ...

Just read "Wicked: the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West". This after we saw Wicked in London as part of our summer ...

Today my dad and I took my daughter Anya to an event hosted by the UC Berkeley Nuclear Engineering group. I got my BA at Berkeley, and my d...

Thursday was a big day for all of us. Any passers-by seeing the girls running around in bathing suits for a few days now may have guessed t...

Spoiler alert: I discuss the movie Avatar below. When I read the Pocohontas story to my kids (we have the Disney version), we usually have a...

It looks like one of the problems with the fountain is that I'm pushing slightly too much water through the flow straightener. At very l...

Belle, non ?  (1/80 sec exposure) Non . (1/4000 sec exposure) Here it is with Martha for a sense of scale: First, what went right? The ge...

I'm amazed by our hens' abilities to eat. I weigh 215 pounds, and eat something like 2700 calories a day, including about 150 grams ...

Anya just had a tooth pulled by the dentist.  She put it under her pillow but the Tooth Fairy seems to have not made it last night.  A few n...

I have summarized for your convenience the top 7 consumer killers in the United States in the year 2001 , and swimming pools, for comparison...

Martha and I are building a pool in the back yard. In that pool will be hot tub, and pouring into that hot tub will be a fountain. I want ...

We have a new puppy, Lady Jane. She's a black Lab, just like Iniki was. She's really cute and full of sharp teeth.

I took my daughter to the Ritz-Carlton's Teddy Bear Tea today. $184 for a few dried-out finger sandwiches and a bunch of chocolates, a ...

My daughter Anya is 4.5 years old. She likes to have me make line drawings of things and then paint them. Today she wanted a dinosaur. ...