J. Michael Andresen

Today is an important day for me, being my 10th leap day. My first February 29th was when I was a month old in 1972. I found out today that February 29 is not the ultimate in leap day-ness. Once (and once only in human history) February 29 gave way to February 30. That was in Sweden in 1712. It's a strange but interesting story . I was reading a bit about Sweden in The Economist today, as well. In 2006, Sweden accepted 90% of refugees from Iraq that applied for asylum. Compare that to 12% for Britain, 2% for Denmark, and 0% for Greece. Overall, Sweden has accepted 90,000 Iraqi refugees into their total population of 9 million. It seems like a friendly country. It also tops The Economist's list as the world's most free democracy, trouncing the U.S., which is far behind in 17th place. One of Katie's law school friends (Jenny) is from Sweden and tells stories about her home, noting that although Swedish society is very politically free, peer pressure and other social pr

This is sad in a different way than my first Valentine's Day story . The lab I work in is eleven people, split into three "bays." Mine is the middle bay and is comprised of Kristin, Sam, and Shaojuan in addition to myself. Someone was distributing white carnations on Valentine's Day this year (I'm still a bit confused as to who it was or for what purpose), and both Kristin and Shaojuan ended up with one. Somehow the conversation turned to what dorky science projects one could perform using white carnations. We decided to perform a demonstration of capillary action and carnation physiology. Here are the two carnations. The one on the left (in the graduated cylinder) is in a dilute solution of Orange G, while the flower on the right (in the Erlenmeyer flask) is in a solution of Bromphenyl Blue: Here are the same two carnations after three days: And here are the same flowers after two weeks: The blue flower is my favorite. Here's a close-up so you can see the vei

And the Oscar goes to . . . No Country for Old Men . Katie and I saw this on Friday with Laura, and I was certainly impressed (though Katie and Laura absolutely hated it). I found myself pulling for it to win, even though I voted for Atonement like a naif. (I'm not going to believe Golden Globe results anymore.) Seven people picked the best picture Oscar correctly: Ekrem, Matthew B., Jeff, Chris, Grant, Oraldo, and Megan. They join Liz and Missy with a score of 1 to everyone else's zero. No one has a score of two yet. A few internecine rivalries are almost certainly forming amongst the leaders. The most rancorous will undoubtedly be Liz and Jeff, who live together and thus have ample opportunity to talk trash with each other now that Jeff has pulled even with Liz. But don't discount the heated battles likely arising amongst my wedding party (Missy and Ekrem), from Epsilon Theta, my MIT fraternity (Chris, Grant, and Ekrem), or from attendees of Eric's New Year Event, wh

Rachel's comment on my post about my reading list made me feel very narrow-minded to focus so exclusively on 20th century novels written in English. Jane Austen wrote some nice stories, after all (or so Rachel tells me). I have thus attempted a new method of coming up with a good reading list that will keep me busy in my new bridge-free (and Katie-ful) life. I am still working on the list (I'll share it eventually), but I have already started reading books from it. I've also decided to blog book reports about the books I'm reading. I delight in lots of things as I read, and I think some of them might be interesting to a general readership. I'm going to try to avoid being very didactic. (I might have gone a bit overboard in talking about my recent art viewing expidition , for example.) Robinson Crusoe was written by Daniel Defoe in 1719. The book is heralded by some scholars as the very first novel ever written, but that seems subject to much debate and does not gr

Katie and I had a disagreement last night about which character from Sex and the City she most resembles. She thinks she looks most like Kim Cattrall, while I think she more closely resembles Sarah Jessica Parker. Please let us know in the comments who you think is correct! Here's Sarah Jessica Parker: Here's Katie: Here's Kim Cattrall:

I like to surprise Katie. My proposal of marriage , for example, completely floored her. Last year for Valentine's day, I acquired a massive and very fuzzy stuffed dog with a Valentine's heart in its mouth. I put it into her car so that she would have a surprise as she went off to work for the day. My joy was not diminished by the fact that the unexpected intruder so resembled roadkill as to completely creep her out when she first approached the car. Katie traveled to Arizona for work on Wednesday and Thursday, so I didn't know how (or if) I should try to top my performance from last year. I thought about hiding another large stuffed animal in her luggage to discover, but that had the flaw of being discovered on the wrong day (i.e. on Wednesday, February 13). It also had the flaw of interfering with Katie's recent obsession with packing as lightly as possible. This is beside the point, but Katie is really very funny about packing. Ever since escaping the penury of gradu

Katie's been working a ton of late, which has led to lots of dinners out. We're going out tonight for the sixth night in a row! Last night we tried Solera, a fancy tapas restaurant. Here's Katie posing for the camera at our table: Katie took a goofy-looking picture of me drinking some sherry: After dinner we went to see a touring company perform a stage version of Sweeney Todd . This particular production was interesting, in that the actors were also the musicians. This made for a very intimate performance, but I walked away very disappointed. Although it was a nice idea, the talent they were able to procure suffered from the much narrower talent pool of singers/actors also able to play an instrument. One would think that the producers could have overcome this issue by paying the actors a double salary (since no additional musicians were needed), but now I doubt that was done. Everything suffered, essentially: the ones who were better at playing their instrument were worse

The first event of the 2008 quiz has taken place! In the biggest Super Bowl upset since 2002 , Tom Brady and the undefeated Patriots lost to Eli Manning and his upstart New York Giants. Of the 27 people who are playing along this year's quiz, nearly everyone picked the Patriots. I thought it was fun that my question answers nearly predicted the actual betting line for the game, too: the Patriots were 14 point favorites to win. 21 picked the Patriots to win, with a or b. Jorge alone picked the Cowboys, and three people picked the Colts, but it was Liz and Missy who won the first question by picking the underdog "none of the above." Liz was hoping that Brett Favre might lead the Packers to victory. Missy didn't have a particular team in mind: she chose "f" for every question. Now they're each leading the rest of us by a score of 1-0. Alert readers may recall that the Super Bowl question was actually second in the quiz. The first question asked about the