We went for a walk on the beach in Spanish River Park yesterday afternoon. I saw several of these washed up on shore.

You can’t really get that much scale from the sand and seaweed, but the body was about the size of my hand. I’ve heard they can get larger, but I’ve never seen any much bigger than this one around here.

It makes one a little nervous, walking barelegged through the surf, because the surging waters could deliver one unto your legs and wrap the tentacles around them without your even being able to see it coming. Fortunately, there were no incidents. This one was still alive, but probably not for long. And I wasn’t going to try to pick it up and toss it back. Particularly given the almost certain futility of it.

We went for a walk on the beach in Spanish River Park yesterday afternoon. I saw several of these washed up on shore.

You can’t really get that much scale from the sand and seaweed, but the body was about the size of my hand. I’ve heard they can get larger, but I’ve never seen any much bigger than this one around here.

It makes one a little nervous, walking barelegged through the surf, because the surging waters could deliver one unto your legs and wrap the tentacles around them without your even being able to see it coming. Fortunately, there were no incidents. This one was still alive, but probably not for long. And I wasn’t going to try to pick it up and toss it back. Particularly given the almost certain futility of it.

On defending yourself.

Professor Chris Hall, former aerospace engineering blogger, but now department head at VPI and too busy to blog, checks in with a message:

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I have heard from many of you throughout the last 24 hours. I’m sure I speak for the entire department, when I say that we thank you for thinking of us and for your many thoughtful notes. It means a lot to us.

As far as I know there were no casualties from the department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering. We won’t really know that until the names are released though. My son is a sophomore in Engineering Science and Mechanics, which is the department that Occupies most of Norris Hall. He is safe, but his undergraduate research advisor was one of the fatalities.

The departments of Engineering Science and Mechanics and Civil and Environmental Engineering lost three good men, and there are several folks in the hospital. The three fallen professors are Liviu Lebrescu, Kevin Granata, and
G.V. Loganathan.

Liviu was an internationally known mechanician and was teaching a junior-level course on Solid Mechanics yesterday morning in Norris Hall. I did not know him well, but occasionally chatted with him about his home country of Romania.

Kevin was a young professor with a young family. His field was biomechanics, and my oldest son chose to major in ESM because he wanted to work in Kevin’s lab. My son, Duncan, a sophomore, has worked in Kevin’s biomechanics
lab for the past year. I thoroughly enjoyed Duncan’s stories of how Professor Granata was teaching him how to program nonlinear controllers for inverted pendula. I know Duncan will miss those lessons.

G.V. was an award-winning professor of environmental engineering, whose expertise was in water resources. Most recently he won the university’s prestigious Wine Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching.

Again, I thank you all for your kind messages. I will let you know more when I know more. Please feel free to forward this email to friends and colleagues.

Eric Scheie has the same attitude toward haircuts as I do:

I’m definitely into minimizing my disutility, especially if it saves time, plus I’m lazy about these things. I end up having my hair cut too short with relatively long intervals between haircuts. Of course, there’s a very noticeable contrast between what I look like right after a haircut and what I look like after six weeks without one, but it’s a gradual process interrupted only by sudden contrasts in my appearance. I realize politicians need to look the same all the time, but I don’t.

It’s not just the cost of the haircut. It’s the irritation of it, in terms of time out of my life, and having to interact with the haircutters.

Eric Scheie has the same attitude toward haircuts as I do:

I’m definitely into minimizing my disutility, especially if it saves time, plus I’m lazy about these things. I end up having my hair cut too short with relatively long intervals between haircuts. Of course, there’s a very noticeable contrast between what I look like right after a haircut and what I look like after six weeks without one, but it’s a gradual process interrupted only by sudden contrasts in my appearance. I realize politicians need to look the same all the time, but I don’t.

It’s not just the cost of the haircut. It’s the irritation of it, in terms of time out of my life, and having to interact with the haircutters.

Eric Scheie has the same attitude toward haircuts as I do:

I’m definitely into minimizing my disutility, especially if it saves time, plus I’m lazy about these things. I end up having my hair cut too short with relatively long intervals between haircuts. Of course, there’s a very noticeable contrast between what I look like right after a haircut and what I look like after six weeks without one, but it’s a gradual process interrupted only by sudden contrasts in my appearance. I realize politicians need to look the same all the time, but I don’t.

It’s not just the cost of the haircut. It’s the irritation of it, in terms of time out of my life, and having to interact with the haircutters.

I’m certainly no fan of Governor Corzine, but I also certainly hope that he recovers fully and soon from his auto accident. And if he really wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, that was dumb, and should be a lesson taken from the incident for all. I’m always amazed at people who don’t wear one. My grandmother hated to–she claimed that it was more dangerous to do so because she might get trapped in the car in it, completely misjudging the relative odds of this happening versus getting her face plastered into a dash or through a windshield.

[Update on Friday evening]

I just heard the Lieutenant Governor say that “business in New Jersey would continue to take place as usual.” If I were a Garden State resident, I’d take small comfort in those words. One would like an improvement, I think…

Gerard Vanderleun doesn’t think much of O’Reilly’s proposal for a blogger code of conduct. Or of James Woolcott:

The balding little metro-sexual neuter who dispatches his hard-core unemployed in this direction is meanwhile at his home suckling his cats and writing yet another scroll of infinite dullness on “the theater in our time,” or denigrating the endless Yahoos that come to NYC to get in his way when he wants to go. (No matter that it is only because of these Yahoos that New York has a theater still. Then again what sort of grown man of any talent at all makes his living reviewing plays in this day and age anyway?) That Wolcott has no comments on his own page is enough to tell anyone that his decades of playing a beard have indeed left him the blogosphere’s leading white man possessed of an inverted if uninhabited penis.

[Update in the afternoon]

OK, maybe I’ll implement Frank J.’s comment policy.

Gerard Vanderleun doesn’t think much of O’Reilly’s proposal for a blogger code of conduct. Or of James Woolcott:

The balding little metro-sexual neuter who dispatches his hard-core unemployed in this direction is meanwhile at his home suckling his cats and writing yet another scroll of infinite dullness on “the theater in our time,” or denigrating the endless Yahoos that come to NYC to get in his way when he wants to go. (No matter that it is only because of these Yahoos that New York has a theater still. Then again what sort of grown man of any talent at all makes his living reviewing plays in this day and age anyway?) That Wolcott has no comments on his own page is enough to tell anyone that his decades of playing a beard have indeed left him the blogosphere’s leading white man possessed of an inverted if uninhabited penis.

[Update in the afternoon]

OK, maybe I’ll implement Frank J.’s comment policy.