undecided

Some pictures from last trip to Florida.

“Hi.  I’m Laura, and I’m here to entertain you.”  

Elle and I saw Laura Marling last week at the Mercury Lounge.  The cherubic 18 year old stoically sang her impassioned lyrics, but the supporting Marcus Mumford of Mumford and Sons (playing countless instruments) may have stolen the show.

I recently got back from Rwanda and Kenya. I’ll try to post some stories soon, but here are some of the pictures in the meantime.

See also my flickr page.

In preparation for my upcoming trip, I’ve been practicing taking pictures of animals.  Unfortunately, they (or I) won’t hold still long enough to make super crisp pictures at long zooms.  Hopefully I’ll get better soon with practice.

Graduation with mom, dad, caitlin, elle, marios, and dan.

The new camera seems to generate nice images independent of the quality of the photographer or the attractiveness of the subject.

Apparently a natural diet doesn’t extend to electrolytes:

It’s been three weeks already so all the motivation’s gone, but the least I could do is post some pictures.

Elle likes seesaws:

Bellagio:

Prague:

(Flat Stanley came along for the ride.)

My advisor’s advisor was trained as a musician.  As such, I can’t trace my academic genealogy back to early mathematicians or scientists like some of my friends.  My lineage can, however, be traced back to some very famous musicians.  Paris Smaragdis, my academic uncle, traced his musical lineage back to the 1600s (see [here]).  According to Paris, I’m 9 steps removed from Beethoven, 7 steps from Liszt, 10 steps from Haydn, and 13 steps from Bach!

Although if you consider that Thomas Quatieri supervised my advisor’s masters thesis, my genealogy becomes a who’s who of signal processing, and my lineage can be traced to Kant in 9 steps.

Pride is a very funny thing, and the whole exercise reminds me of the Sesame Street song “One of these things is not like the other.”