Author Archives: gmcdavid

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About gmcdavid

Retired IT professional with a wide range of interests. Married. Three sons, two with autistic-spectrum disorders and the third being transgender with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. From Chicago but now living in the Twin Cities metro, Minnesota. Episcopalian. Carleton College (BA 1972, physics) and Stanford University (MS 1974, Applied Physics; MS 1976 Statistics).

Bottled the stout

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After lunch today (possibly the best hamburger I have ever eaten in my life) mia_mcdavid and I went home. We both took a much needed nap, but not before I filled the dishwasher with beer bottles and started it.

When I got up I bottled the dry stout that I brewed back on St. Patrick’s Day. Final gravity was 1.013–higher than I would like, so it may not be as dry as all that. Still, it smelled good, and I expect it will be OK.

Brewed on St. Patrick’s Day and bottled on Pentecost, a very ecclesiastical beer.

Saturday

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mia_mcdavid and I went to the St. Paul Farmer’s market in the morning. A pleasant outing.

We spent the afternoon at a clothing workshop (“camp drill”) for colgaffneyis. It was held at the home of c_nocturnum. A lot of patterns by kass_rants were being used there. I spent most of the time working on a pair of period shoes that I had made last year–just maintenance, repairing some seams. I have a very similar pair of shoes I purchased, but I realized at last weekend’s Scottish Fair that while the workmanship on the commercial pair was better, the homemade shoes were perfectly useable, looked OK, and were more comfortable.

Really Long Term Thinking

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Cosmologists Predict A Static Universe In 3 Trillion Years

“When Dutch astronomer Willem de Sitter proposed a static model of the universe in the early 1900s, he was some 3 trillion years ahead of his time.”

Via Slashdot.

The de Sitter universe was one of the first cosmological models devised using General Relativity, and is widely discussed in Gen Rel textbooks–I have several in the basement. Nice to see the classics are still relevant :-)>

Poverty, Abortion, and Politics

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Abortion rate = 2.06 + 1.71 * Poverty rate (R2= 0.37)

Under that dry title you will read:

….abortion rates went down sharply during the Clinton administration, in spite of his pro-abortion stance. The change reversed in the current administration, in spite of Bush’s anti-abortion stance….

The single most effective anti-abortion activity in the last 23 years was the reduction of poverty

From Monastic Musings.

Connections at the Fair

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haddayr and I were pleased to see two of our friends from our Irish Class stop by colgaffneyis camp. We introduced them and showed them around. c_nocturnum showed one of them how to wear a greatkilt, and bullettheblue sold him a bonnet that twolodge had made.

Another visitor was a computer consultant I know from work and his wife. Recognition was delayed a second because of unfamiliar dress: I had never seen him in shorts and T-shirt, and he had never seen me in a kilt. One of those “he looks familiar…” moments, then I recognized the corporate logo on his shirt.

I also saw one of my Carleton folk dance connections, who came by with his wife and child. He works for the college now, but Farmington is at least as easy to reach from Northfield as from the Cities.