Dulce et decorum est pro patria lavi

With all apologies to Wilfred Owen, I must herein celebrate the newest addition to our household: a dishwasher. It is sweet and right to wash for one's country, with a portable Whirlpool dishwasher that's nearly 2/3 the size of your refrigerator. I tried to say "It is sweet and right to wash dishes with a machine" but I couldn't find the appropriate vocabulary. No wonder latin is a dead language, you can't use it to describe anything cool. That's almost as bad as not being able to create acronyms in ideogrammatic languages (which is apparently a big hurdle on the road to brevity for communications within the Chinese space agency).

In other news, I' m heading off to an academic conference for the next couple of days, where I'll be presenting a short 15 minute talk on my research and hobnobbing with other scientists from around the state. I plan to use lots of feeding films and expansive hand gestures to distract the audience from the fact that I don't have any quantified data to talk about. Wish me luck.