I know this is sad, but...

read this article from CNN. It's sad to some extent, but it's also quite funny when it's not something you have to deal with personally. I think people should just leave well enough alone when God says no more sex for you.

technology is crazy...

Lindsay and I were at PayLess (a local grocery store owned by Kroger) so that we could buy roses for some high school students from our church who were performing in a production of Wizard of Oz...man that was a long sentence. We decided to go to the DIY check-out lane where you scan everything yourself. Lindsay scanned her Crunch bar then we wondered how to ring up the roses without barcodes. The directions were to simply place the items on the scanner and to "wait". So, Lindsay put the two roses and plastic wrap surrounding them onto the scanner. About 15-20 seconds later, the system rang it up as two freaking roses!!! I couldn't believe it. Our technology these days is crazy. It's amazing that a scanner at a grocery store can accurately identify two roses simply by their weight. You figure that each rose must weigh a slightly different amount, and the amount of plastic wrap adds in another uncertainty in mass. Yet the machine was able to figure it out regardless. I couldn't believe it!

If only mass spectrometers could determine masses with such certainty ( :

Flickr

There's a fairly new website called Flickr that allows you to share your photos online. Rather than using this blog to show one picture at a time, I think that we will give a link to a Flickr gallery. For example, here's the gallery for Me and Marc's birthday party.

If you want to join Flickr and share your pictures in a fairly easy way, feel free. We'd be happy to be one of your "Contacts". If you're from our church, you can join our church's group once you join. We're currently the only members, but hopefully that will change with time.

Happy Birthday Marc and Mike

We just got back from having dinner with Mike and Marc's family, Lindsay's family, and Stephanie's family at Pizza Hut in Indianapolis. We had a GREAT time with them all. We are blessed with such a great family, all around!

More pics will come soon.

Second Article

My second research article will soon be published in the journal Analytical Chemistry, but for now it has been published online. This is a much more prestigious journal than the first one, but it's still nothing like Science or Nature by any means. It's titled "Multiplexed Rectilinear Ion Trap Mass Spectrometer for High Throughput Analysis." It is essentially a full report about the design, construction and use of an instrument in our lab by Amy Tabert. The first article was just a short little blurb about something interesting that the instrument did, whereas this article tells the full story. As with the last one, I didn't write virtually any of this paper, but it's still nice to have my name on it ( :

You can attempt to read it here, but as I learned with the first article, mass spectrometry and chemistry have a whole lingo of their own that makes understanding them much more difficult than it really needs to be. Enjoy!

Peyton & Molly

Yesterday we told our family that we'd post a picture of our two dogs, Peyton and Molly. Molly has already outgrown Peyton, even though she's only 9 months old and Peyton's somewhere around 18 months old. She's not extremely huge in comparison, and she's definitely nowhere near the size of my Mom and Dad's dog Riley. She's much more well behaved and calm than Peyton ever has been, which is a welcome change ( :

Congratulations, Megan!

We don't have any pictures to post yet, but we'd like to congratulate Megan on her high school graduation! During her four years at Lawrence Central, Megan has been an exemplary student, virtuous athlete, and highly talented performer. As she heads to Ball State next fall, we wish her the absolute best. We know she'll do great things and make both God and her family proud.

Way to go, Megan! We love you!