For the last few weeks, I’ve been turning off my iPhone on Shabbat from the time Torah Study starts (about 9:30am) until services end (around noon). Today, I took it a step further, and kept the phone off through lunch, a play at San Jose Rep (God of Carnage, recommended), and even through dinner with Diane at Il Fornaio.

It was amazingly restful.

The phone is back on (I needed the GPS for our evening walk), but I intend to be more mindful in how I use it during the coming week. And it’s worth remembering that airplane mode works on the ground, too.

I was curious about the poster outside Amy’s lab in tonight’s episode of The Big Bang Theory. Thanks to the magic of HDTV and TiVo, I was able to read the title: “Quantized, spontaneous persisten activity in the entorhinal cortex in vivo”, the name of the lead author: James McFarland, and his institutional affiliation: Departments of Physics and Neuroscience, Brown University. From there, it was a short Google to his dissertation, and then to his page at the University of Maryland, where he is currently a postdoc.

I wonder how his poster got to the show.