What I Made This Weekend

Friday evening I biked down with Cooper to Crunchy's,  and although we ended up leaving almost immediately to join up with Deon to celebrate her birthday, that bike ride was enough to inspire me to spend several hours at my sewing machine this weekend.
See, I was determined to ride my newly-repaired road bike, having been relegated to my old hybrid bike all week due to a flat on the Trek roadie (sorry, hybrid, I love you and all, but you're not a speed demon). However, riding the Trek requires that I bring along my giant U-lock. I don't have a rack on it, since that would be blasphemy, so I therefore need some sort of bag. However, I didn't feel like carrying a big old backpack around while bar-hopping, so I cast around my bedroom for a suitable messenger-type bag. The closest I could find was my SCA retaining bag, so I dumped my stuff in that and was off, only to find that the bag kept swinging around to hang most awkwardly in front of me. I quick fixed it by attaching the bag strap to a pants loop via a carabiner, but the whole scenario got me thinking that I could really use a more functional bag - function, of course, being the key to fashion and comfort, and those in turn being necessary to socialize properly on a Friday night in East Lansing.
So long story short, I designed and then put together a custom reversible messenger bag. Start to finish, I'd say it took me about 8 hours (not including, of course, the internet breaks, the beer break, the going-to-Schuler's-to-read-comics break, and sleeping).
The moral of the story is that, to paraphrase Saint Francis, once you own one thing, you find you need a whole bunch of other shit to go with it (which is why I have a houseful of stuff).
Voici les fotos:
The bag, completed:

Some close ups:
The front (note the personalized monogram! Which means it's MINE!)

The back (these are loops to attach the bag to a belt or something to keep it from slipping around while riding), and side:

The interior:

 
...which reverses into a total party bag! Woo!

The bag also received the official seal of approval from the household feline committee:

The end.

Life has been happening...

...while I have been failing to blog. Last week I was at the SAA meetings. I'd not been to Saint Louis before, and I enjoyed waking up to the arch every morning, even though a small part of my brain kept insisting that it would be funny in a horrible way if there were two arches right next to each other. Now THAT would be a monument to American expansion.
The weekend before that, I van-pooled with some MI friends to Milwaukee for the Kingdom of Northshield's Coronation, where my friends Tom and Siri were crowned King and Queen! That was a very happy day. I don't often get to see close friends wearing shiny gold hats and being addressed as "Your Majesty".
This has been a short and fluffy blog update. Stay tuned for more, once my life has returned to its normal insanity. Hopefully the next time I post, I will be ABD.

Citizen scientist

The above link is a blog post about why science is complicated, why non-experts like politicians shouldn't be trusted to relay scientific information accurately, and moreover what research really means. Translating scholarly work into a publicly accessible format as well as finding reliable sources of those translations continues to be an issue and a need. It is a real and crucial issue, since, as I mentioned, numerous versions of scholarly knowledge - some closer to the original facts than others - get used for a multitude of political, social, and economic initiatives every day. As voting citizens and as initiators, targets and recipients of these initiatives, we would do well to do what we can to bridge that gap from our end. I believe that the academic community also has a responsibility to shoulder its part of the bridge-building, and that educational systems and institutions, government ones included, fall somewhere in the middle. Learning more about what, and how, we all understand, citizens and scientists alike, can only help.