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Current RanTom Thought
 Foil Seals we received from R&D Magazine Just a quick wrap-up: I'm one of the winners of an R&D 100 award this year. There has been a ton of press about it. (The PR department timed our main Argonne press release to coincide with 9/11 since our research was in the anti-terror field.) Sami has been interviewed on the radio, we have been in the newspaper (twice), and we were the featured article on the Argonne homepage for two weeks. We have shown up in news from China to Iran, from Yahoo! News to Forbes.
It's been an exciting ride! :)
Jana has bought her tickets to come over, and our awards banquet tickets are confirmed. Yesterday I finally picked up my tuxedo, so everything is ready to go! (Except for transportation.) (I even got my Argonne business cards today!)
Now R&D Magazine has finally put their official list of 2007 R&D 100 Award Winners online and the magazine has gone to press. (We're under Environmental -- right across the page from Lego Mindstorms NXT -- how cool is that?)
15 days and counting down until the dinner at the Grand Ballroom at Navy Pier (That's the big green-roofed section at the end of the pier [1].). Now it's time to get really nervous!
-- Tometheus (talk) 15:07, 3 October 2007 (CDT)
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Recent RanTom Thoughts
 Guess who's a winner of an R&D100 award for 2007? Argonne has now released their press release, so the embargo is lifted and I can now officially announce this. -- Tometheus (talk) 10:33, 8 August 2007 (CDT)
R&D 100 Award!
OK, today's July 4th, a red-letter day on the calendar, but it's been a red-letter week for me this week. I've been stumbling around in a daze all week since I found out what I'm going to share today. This is huge! I mean, gigantic, enormous, so incredible terribly huge in my life that I've been scared to share it in case it wasn't true or I was dreaming. However, now I have a copy of the fax and it's finally starting to sink in on me that it's really happening. Now I can share it with everyone else. (Also I've been holding off due to something else that happened this week.. see below.)
I am one of the winners of an R&D 100 award!
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-- Tometheus (talk) 20:42, 4 July 2007 (CDT)
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 They're swarming the planet by the BILLIONS! They've been burrowing unnoticed beneath our feet for YEARS! It's the Invasion of Brood XIII and they only have MATING on their minds. Can humanity survive the invasion?!? Coming soon to a webpage near you. This morning was another one of those magical overcast days like I talked about last time. However, this time, the nymphs I'm seeing aren't mosquitoes, but cicadas.
I've long been fascinated by cicadas. I first experienced an emergence in Oklahoma when I was a kid in first grade, (Brood IV in 1981). It's certainly an interesting survival mechanism they have evolved -- overwhelm your predators all at once and most of you will survive. Also, the absolute predictability of the emergence is astounding each time I experience it. In the past, I was impressed by the predictability of the year and month, now there's even a formula to predict the exact date.
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-- Tometheus (talk) 11:21, 25 May 2007 (CDT)
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 Tiptoe through the tulips with me! Winter has finally decided to concede to Spring.
Today's Thought is not so much of a Rant as a Ramble. I'm just excited that Spring is here and everything's turning green, and I can take off my jacket, and the breasts are in bloom and... um... where was I?
Green is an interesting color. There's something magical about when the woods start turning green. It's no wonder Spring is so important to so many of the (earth) magic traditions in the world. On an slightly overcast day, with everything coming alive around you, there is sort of a mystical feel and one can almost believe in fairies.
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-- Tometheus (talk) 11:35, 2 May 2007 (CDT)
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Winter has decided that Spring was being presumptuous.
There are some days when you step out your door and the wind striking ice crystals against your jacket sounds like Rice Crispies on speed. On days like that you really want to forgo the rest of the day and just turn around, go back inside, curl up next to the <insert heat source here> and just read a book. Today is one of those days.
Now for the rant part. (And so it begins)
I'm really tired of Hollywood over-pimping the whole Green Agenda. [edit: I'm specifically addressing Global Warming in this article, not the whole "Green Agenda". Perhaps some day in the future I'll comment on a couple of other issues.]
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-- Tometheus (talk) 10:26, 11 April 2007 (CDT)
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This is for all my Adventist friends out there... Other people may not be interested in reading it, since it deals with Ellen White, which really has no meaning for people who never grew up in the Adventist church.
[quote in extended version]
So basically, this direct vision from GOD said that telling other people to abstain from pork was Satanic.
Apparently when 1T was written, God didn't know what he was going to show EGW 5 years into the future... Specifically calling this an "Error in Diet".
So, what is the test... that God will reveal the policy on swine to the entire church, not to two or three. So what changed the policy, creating the Adventist prohibition on pork? ONE person's vision! You may tell me "oh, but Ellen White was human, she makes mistakes", but remember, this is claimed to be a direct vision from God himself.
Talk about someone on a power trip. When someone else comes up with an idea, it's evil, but when she comes up with it later, it's DIVINE LAW.
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-- Tometheus (talk) 05:59, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
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I took my Physics GRE Subject Test yesterday. Reviewing classes you took over a decade ago is not a fun task, so I took a few weeks off of work to prepare. Last time I took the test I had just come out to Chicago, so I didn't have any of my textbooks, all I had was GRE Physics - The Best Test Preparation for the Graduate Record Examination Subject Test by REA. This time I bought a new copy of the book to see if they corrected the two mistakes I found last time.
After the test, I discuss my adventures in Chicagoland on a CTA day pass, including such wonders as the Lucky Platter, and the Bahá'í House of Worship.
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-- Tometheus (talk) 00:08, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
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