Click on the picture to see it all. Don’t ask me what Louka ate, I have no idea. You can see Lohan is quite aware of the camera. My wife is enjoying a good book.

Update: According to my wife, Louka was eating sand. Gross!

Louka kept us up last night. Ok. Louka is irritable. Quite a bit so.

As usual, medical knowledge is useless, all you can learn is this:

For some babies, teething is painless. Others may experience brief periods of irritability, and some may seem cranky for weeks, experiencing crying episodes and disrupted sleeping and eating patterns. (Source: kidshealth.org)

One of my colleague who started a blog, and then shut it down, is putting into question blogging as a useful activity. While he won’t deny that blogging can be fun, he is arguing that it is simply not very useful in a career. He is also making a comparison with real life meetings and how so much more useful the live meetings are.

Naturally, live meetings are tremendously useful because they are high bandwidth meetings where you are fully communicating with your body, face, voice, and so on. Blogging is very low bandwidth akin to email, so no comparison is possible. But it is also much more expensive for me to schedule a public talk than to blog!

For now, I still think that blogging is good for an academic career and a career in general, but I must say that I’m wavering. Many people tried blogging and backed out. Even famous academic bloggers like Sébastien Paquet and Stephen Downes have stopped or significantly reduced their blogging.

Let’s see what are some of the most tangible benefits.

• Bloggers are easier to find on the web: there is no question that I get more people to read what I write thanks to my blog, but the problem is that I don’t necessarily effectively promote my research, so it is not clear whether it really helps my research. Are bloggers more often cited in scientific publications? I don’t know.
• Blogging generates some networking: I know several smart people that I wouldn’t have known otherwise. This is a very tangible benefit, but almost any intellectual activity brings in some networking benefit. Also, I cannot point to an example in my life where this small amount of networking was benefitial.
• Blogging is good for knowledge management: I still search through my blog to find old ideas or old pointers. This alone might be worth blogging.

Finally, a picture of me with my new son, Louka, by my fireplace, no less. I had to remove red eyes using gimp.

Here’s a picture of my wife with Louka and her doula.

For more pictures, check out Louka’s page (in French)

A new, healthy baby! 11h34 on November 11^th 2005. Pictures should come later.

Antioxidant Values in Fruits And Vegetables (ORAC units per 100 grams):

Fruits:

Prunes — 5570
Raisins — 2830
Blueberries — 2400
Blackberries — 2036
Strawberries — 1540
Raspberries — 1220
Plums — 949
Oranges — 750
Red grapes — 739
Cherries — 670
Kiwi fruit — 602
Grapefruit, pink — 483

Vegetables:

Kale — 11770
Spinach — 11260
Brussels sprout — 1980
Alfalfa sprouts — 1930
Broccoli Flowers — 1890
Beets — 1840
Red bell pepper — 1710
Onion — 1450
Corn — 1400
Eggplant — 1390