Romancing the Blogosphere, or Congratulations to a Now Happily Engaged Jennifer Ouellette and Sean Carroll

We at 3QD want to cheer the engagement of our friend Sean Carroll of Cosmic Variance and our friend and contributor Jennifer Ouellette of Cocktail Party Physics and offer them our congratulations! If you feel so inclined, you can congratulate them here and here. In their own words:

[Sean] How in the world is one expected to find such a person, in a world full of interesting but flawed characters? Well, there’s always the blogosphere. Two kindred spirits, tapping away at their matching MacBook Pros, could find each other across thousands of miles in a way that was heretofore impossible.

All of which, in a fumbling and hopefully-charming way, is to say that it’s happened. I’ve fallen hopelessly for the beautiful and talented Jennifer Ouellette, science writer extraordinaire and proprietess of Cocktail Party Physics. I first plugged her blog (completely innocently! honestly!) back in March, and we met in person at an APS meeting, of all places. Best conference ever.

And, various cross-country jaunts and countless emails later, we’re engaged to be married. If it’s clear that you’ve found the perfect person with whom you want nothing more than to spend the rest of your life, you might was well get the presents, right?

And Jennifer:

Some may wonder: why Sean Carroll, and not some other bloggy physicist or science type? I could provide a laundry list of reasons stretching into infinity, since one rarely needs an excuse to sing the praises of one's beloved. But I'll spare my readers. Let's just say that the man has his very own bag of plush plagues, stuffed toys that represent the biblical ten plagues of Egypt. There's even a tiny black cube of darkness. With eyes. I covet Sean's bag of plagues, and figure the best way of sneakily appropriating them for my own is to enter into the bonds of matrimony. Community property and all that.

But the real reason is best illustrated by this: On Wednesday, after I'd finished my blogging duties at the Industrial Physics Forum in San Francisco, we drove to his new home in Los Angeles via the "scenic route" along the coast. At sunset, we stopped briefly to refuel and to admire the brilliant orange, red and purple hues stretching across the horizon, and savor the peaceful sound of waves lapping against the shore. It was the perfect romantic setting to cap off a long and tiring several days. Sean is nothing if not romantic. So he put his arms around me and whispered, "Wouldn't it be fascinating to take a Fourier transform of those waves?"

I will never listen to ocean waves or view a beautiful sunset in quite the same way again.