This is a fine example of how Liza will sometimes say “I dunno!” reflexively.

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Turtle is a small plastic turtle who “swims” in a tiny bowl thanks to magnets and a small child’s belief in magic. Liza likes Turtle a lot.

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Despite her loud protests, though, Turtle isn’t really her best friend.

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Liza is a big fan of bugs. She likes beetles.

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She likes butterflies.

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She likes ladybugs and bees, though with some reservations about bees.

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In fact, she liked the dragonfly on Misty’s necklace.

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When she’s not obsessed about bugs, Liza likes to sing. She sings Happy Birthday.

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She sings Jingle Bells for hours at a time. Jingle Bells is the toddler song version of water torture. Imagine putting this next clip on repeat all day and you’ll have a terrifying glimpse into my life!

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The best part about Liza singing Mary Had a Little Lamb is how quickly she dives into the final consonant in “lamb”.

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One night when I was bathing her, Liza suddenly launched into “Yellow Submarine”. “Where did you learn that?” I asked, surprised. “Pop taught me,” she replied.

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Liza is willing to go anywhere we want to take her.

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Hey, Liza, did you have fun talking into the microphone?

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Yesterday NASA started releasing pictures from their latest orbital telescope, WISE. WISE is an infrared telescope that’s doing a whole-sky survey. It’s also looking for near-earth objects, asteroids, and comets. This thing is extremely sensitive — it’s about 100 times more sensitive than previous infrared telescopes — and it’s taking a lot of pictures. A lot of pictures, more than new parents who’ve just bought a DSLR. It’s taking a picture every 11 seconds, and will end up with some 1.5 million pictures over its ten month life.

So how do the pictures look?

That’s the Andromeda galaxy, some 2,500,000 light years away. And there’s plenty more space porn where that came from.

It’s been a snowy mess here lately. I jokingly said at Christmas that it snowed all the time here, so I think the universe decided to prove me right.

While it’s been too cold to even stick my toe outside, I’ve been stitching and listening to podcasts. I blame Alex at The Gearheart for addicting me both to his story (which is made of pure awesome) and to podcasts in general.

From Gearheart, I got hooked on Craftypod and I’ve been completely grooving to the fabulous big name crafty guests Sister Diane interviews as well as her informative shows on various crafts. Her website is a treasure trove of links, crafts and fun stuff. She’s also writing at theMake and Meaning site and I’m super excited about the conversations happening there. Now, not only can I nerd out about the crafts I do, I can nerd out reading about other people nerding out about them as well.

Just see what I’ve accomplished listening to The Gearheart and Craftypod since I started working on Starry Night:

And because I haven’t posted since before Eli’s birthday:

You can read more about the awesome cake that Reneé made for Eli at The Domestic Scientist.

I can’t post about Eli and not Liza, so here’s Liza and Lola:

Thanks, Google Buzz. Without you, however would people reach me online?

I understand this makes me something of a shill for Old Spice, but I don’t care. “We’re not saying this body wash will make your man smell into a romantic millionaire jet fighter pilot, but we are insinuating it”, says the ad’s description, and if that doesn’t make you want to watch it right now, then I don’t know who you are any more.

Meanwhile, Rhett and Link created an awesome stop-motion animation video involving a whole lot of t-shirts.

A quick follow-up to one of the talks I gave at Dragon*Con last year. The Pioneer Anomaly refers to how the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes were pulled more strongly towards the sun than they should have been, making them slow down more than expected. Scientists have been trying to explain what’s going on for about fifteen years. Wikipedia has a pretty good rundown on possible explanations. But to date we still don’t know what’s really causing the Pioneer acceleration.

One theory was that our knowledge of gravity is wrong. There might be higher-order effects that only happen at very long distances, so that we don’t normally see the effect. However, any gravity weirdness like that would affect not only Pioneer 10 and 11 but also the outermost planets in the solar system. A recent paper looked at the orbits of some of Neptune’s moons. They didn’t find any evidence of the Pioneer Anomaly, which means some of the tweaks to gravity like MOND can’t explain the anomaly.

Caution: you may want to skip the comments at the bottom of the linked article, as there’s some crankpotulous discussions going on.

I’ve been writing a text adventure!

Fragile Shells is a short, puzzle-centered game. I wrote it for the Jay Is Games 7th Casual Game Design Competition. This 7th CGDC is an all-interactive fiction competition, so how could I resist?

You don’t know how long you’ve been hammering against the station’s wall, but you stop as soon as you realize what you’ve been doing.

If you head to the competition’s page you can play my game through the power of Flash or Javascript and rate it. There are also twenty-nine other games you can play. Why not give them a try and rate them as well?

Amazon and Macmillan have been in a pissing match recently over ebook pricing. On Friday, as part of their continuing battle, Amazon removed the “Buy It Now” button from all Macmillan titles in their catalog, even the print ones. The only way you could buy a Macmillan title through Amazon was through one of the Amazon Marketplace sellers.

As you can imagine, authors weren’t happy.

By Monday Amazon had given in and started re-instating the “Buy It Now” button on Macmillan titles, though they’re taking their time doing so. Meanwhile, lots of people on the internet are happily choosing to be on Team Amazon or Team Macmillan, since you want to choose which giant company will crush your dreams instead of having one forced on you. They’re also parsing the meaning of words like monopoly, monopsony, and collusion. It’s very exciting!

In the wake of what was a pretty stupid attempt by Amazon to muscle Macmillan, some have said that they don’t want to buy books from Amazon, but they bought a Kindle. What are they to do?

Since I’m a physicist and thus have a technical answer to any question, even “Who should I date?” (answer: the robot, for he is programmed to love you always), let me explain how you too can put non-Amazon ebooks on your Kindle.

The big thing you’ll need is a copy of Calibre. Calibre is free software that runs on Windows, Macs, and Linux. It’s the Swiss Army knife of ebook software. It’ll manage your entire library if you want, but the most important feature in this case is that it can convert ebooks from one format to another. The Kindle uses a modified version of the Mobipocket format (files that end in .mobi or .prc), so that’s the format you’ll convert to. (Calibre’s frequently-asked questions has an entire section on converting an ebook to different formats.

The big question when buying an ebook is: Does it have DRM? DRM, or Digital Rights Management, is a scheme where the ebooks are locked so that they can only be opened by a specific ebook reader or piece of software.

No DRM: you can buy the book in nearly any format you want, though Mobipocket is best. If you buy the book in a different format (such as ePub or HTML), use Calibre to convert it to Mobipocket format. Once you’ve done that, you can plug your Kindle up to your computer and drag the files onto your Kindle.

DRM: Ooh, now it’s going to get tricky. You need to buy your ebook in Mobipocket format, and you have to jump through some hoops to make it readable on your Kindle.

Mobipocket DRM uses something called a PID key. The PID is a unique string that identifies a specific reader. Your Kindle has one that’s based on its serial number. You can find out your serial number by looking on the back of your Kindle (for some models), checking the box it came in (it should have a sticker on it with your serial number), or going to your Kindle’s “Settings” screen and typing “411” (without quote marks). To turn that serial number into a PID, you can use this online tool. (Alternatively, you can download a python script called Kindlepid.py to find out what your PID is, if you’re a Python kind of person.)

When you buy a DRM-protected Mobibook, you’ll be asked for your PID. Enter your Kindle’s PID and download the file. What happens next depends on your operating system and whether you want to get rid of the DRM entirely.

Are you on a Mac? If so, you can use Mobi2Kindle to convert your ebook to a protected format that your Kindle will read. This won’t get rid of the DRM, but it will make the book readable on your Kindle.

Are you running Windows? If so, you can use the unswindle package (as described here) to remove the DRM and create an unprotected Mobipocket book that your Kindle will read with no problem.

Are you on Linux, or on a Mac and want to get rid of the DRM altogether? If so, you’re going to have to do some Python hacking! You’ll need a copy of mobidedrm.py to remove the DRM so that you can read the book on your Kindle. The process is a bit complicated; fortunately, there’s a guide to help you out.

How can I tell if it has DRM or not? The best way is to try to purchase a Mobipocket format book. If you need to enter a PID to do so, you’re buying a DRM-protected book. Chances are, you’re going to be buying a book with DRM on it.

There you go. You now can read non-Amazon ebooks on your Kindle.

Huh. So that’s how Dollhouse ended: with a jumbled, unfocused episode that epitomized many of the show’s shortcomings.

It didn’t help that Misty and I watched Epitaph One right before the finale. Epitaph One was the first season episode that only showed up on the DVD release, at least in the US. It was set ten years after Dollhouse’s main timeline, at a point where the mindwipe and imprinting technology had become widespread and readily abused. People could be erased remotely and have new personalities imprinted on them. Everyone was paranoid, and with good reason. How did you know that you were still you? What was to keep someone from wiping you and hijacking your body? How do you live in a world where one nation can phone the citizens of another, wipe them, and turn them into an instant fifth column? Epitaph One reminded me of Philip K. Dick’s stories where people’s identities were fluid and no one was sure who they were any more. It was smart, it was engaging, and it hinted at a show that I very much would have enjoyed watching.

Epitaph Two, the series finale, failed to live up to Epitaph One’s promise. A lot of that is probably due to how rushed the show was. Credit Whedon and his writing team for wrapping everything up, but the lack of time meant that there was no time to build the sense of dread that the show really needed. Here’s this world-changing technology that in the end brings down civilization, and instead of seeing it happen, we get a “meanwhile, ten years later”. It was a classic case of story events being far too exciting to be shown.

Character beats were rushed, making the finale feel like someone’s fanfic, as if someone said, “Hey, what if it were ten years later?” and immediately fired up their copy of Wordpad. Alpha reappears, only now he’s a good guy and is about as dangerous as Bertie Wooster! Anthony loves that the technology lets him pick up new skills instantly, while Priya hates the technology! They’ve split; I wonder if they’ll get back together! Will Paul and Caroline get back together? Only time and cliché tropes will tell!

There was no time to establish how the characters moved from point A to point Ten Years Later, so their choices in Epitaph Two had very little emotional impact. Topher’s crazy, see, because he’s destroyed the world, but it’s okay, because he’ll get redemption. He’s going to push a giant reset button that would make the Simpsons proud, and it’ll kill him in the process. Meanwhile Adelle gets to wring her hands in the background because she now loves Topher. Underlying it all is a weird cavalier attitude to killing off people’s copies, even by the copies themselves. Caroline’s personality ends up in a young girl, and that splinter of Caroline is quite happy to be erased at the end? Really? Even though that’s effectively the death of an individual? Would you be willing to die if you knew a copy made of you several years ago was going to go on living? We’re who we are in part because of our continuous memories. Cut that thread, and the person made up of those memories is gone. They’ve bobbled something that even a forty-year-old Star Trek novel got right.

The finale also relied heavily on Whedon’s established narrative kinks. You’d think Whedon would develop new ones, or at least outgrow his old tricks, but no. It’s like seeing a forty-year-old man dressed in his childhood sailor suit. Paul is killed surprisingly and unexpectedly because that’s how Whedon likes to generate pathos. Much of the population is insane after being mind-wiped and imprinted and are called Butchers because Reavers had already been taken.

In the end, the series really was Rapehouse. Caroline, the strong woman who was the series’ center, realizes she loves Paul the stalker only after he’s dead, so she puts his personality in her brain. I cannot summon enough words to explain how creepy that is.

Once upon a time, Joss Whedon did some truly amazing, ground-breaking work. Maybe he’ll go back to doing that again now that Dollhouse has been put out of its misery.