fun
clock | October 26, 2007Oh-oh! I got tagged by another meme - the Happy HalloMeme! - by Rick. The idea is to highlight a scary marine or SF film!
I was very young, probably around 7 or 8, when TV Belgrade decided to air a weekly series of old Jack Arnold movies, including It Came from Outer Space, Tarantula, and The Incredible Shrinking Man. But the one that really scared me (I could not sleep that night and had scary moments for quite a while afterwards) was the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Some decades later it may look silly and naive, but for a little boy at the time, it was horrifying! See for yourself…
retrospectacle | October 26, 2007The Society for Neuroscience meeting is coming up, taking place in San Diego in the midst of all the furor and flames. While I'm not going to the meeting, I was reminded of a funny fake science poster I saw at SFN back in 2004: "Joint Encoding of Motion and Music in a Neuron in the Sea Monkey Artemia Salina - An Evolutionary Antecedent of Trouba Du?" (PDF here) by Kai Schreiber.
Figure 1
Why is this an awesome poster? Check out the abstract:
When we see an unfamiliar person in a parking lot, sporting a guitar and dressed in quaint clothing, we instantly are overcome with an intense feeling…
clock | October 24, 2007David Ng started it. This was a quick and easy one for me - let me know if other queries bring up one of my blogs to the 1st spot on Google searches:
'I want this job''open laboratory 2008'femiphobiafemiphobicBora Zivkovic
clock | October 17, 2007My little panda friend is becoming really famous. He was mentioned in a House hearing on global warming yesterday.
clock | October 13, 2007I started teaching my BIO101 Lab this morning again. But this was the first: two of the students said: "Hey Mr.Z, we looked around the Web and learned a lot about you - A Blog Around The Clock, The Magic School Bus and now we have all the dirt on you!"
It was bound to happen - and it was fun, actually, a good ice-breaker for the beginning of the new class. Perhaps they will post comments here (please do). And I also pointed them to my classroom blog, as they are also taking the lecture portion with another faculty member at the same time.
clock | October 13, 2007I got tagged with this cool meme, demonstrating evolution in cyberspace:
There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...". Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:
* You can leave them exactly as is.
* You can delete any one question.
* You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is..." to "The best time travel…
retrospectacle | October 11, 2007This is one that we had at my Pirates Vs. Ninja's party, which was a going away party for my badgerific friend Lisa. She's defending her thesis on Monday, good luck Lisa! This might fit in well with the rest of the geeky cakes...
Let see what we got going on here. First, pirate-speak ("We'll miss you matey! Yarrrrrr!"). A ship with a ship's wheel, and a couple of knarly pirate-types. A tentacle reaching up from the depths, for those so inclined to that type of thing. Several ninjas sneaking around, including not one but two ninja penguins (Lisa hearts the penguins). There are two small…
clock | October 11, 2007What is this? A Tevye day on science blogs? Attila mentions him. Jason mentions him. I guess, I've been remiss for a while and should do something about it now.
Well, I just discovered that big chunks of the movie can be found on YouTube, but the greatest clip is this one, "Tradition" in Japanese:
stoat | October 6, 2007I'm still pondering doom but in the meantime, via Wolfgang via CIP, three blind elephants and a man may amuse.
clock | October 6, 2007
The folks at the Journal of Improbable Research have announced this years winners!
This is the first time I have ever blogged about a study before it won an IgNobel!
So cool!
clock | October 3, 2007Karl of Inoculated Mind blog just got a new set of plates for his truck and, of course, the plates read: INOCUL8.
Karl now wants to collect examples of nerdy, sciency licence plates and perhaps make a set on Flickr (similar to Carl Zimmer's Science Tatoo Gallery), so send him the picture of yours (of course you have one!) or your lab mates' plates.
Some time ago, when I used to park at the Genetics/Entomology parking lot at NCSU, there were several regulars there with plates that read RNA, FRUITFLY, ILUVBUGS, PHEROMON, etc. I actually do not have a vanity plate, although the NC limit of 8…
stoat | September 21, 2007Ethon is in danger of deletion. As it says "Google for "ethon + prometheus -wikipedia" gives a handful of hits from nonreliable sources". Eli unreliable? But at least I now know what all that liver stuff was about.
clock | September 9, 2007Today on Quotes of the Day:
Harland David Sanders was born at Henryville, Indiana on this day in 1890. His father's death six years later led to Harland doing all the cooking for the family. He left school early and led a varied career including street-car conductor, a soldier in China at sixteen, a railroad fireman, justice of the peace (after a correspondence course in law), he operated an Ohio River ferry line, sold insurance, and operated a service station. At the service station, he fed hungry travelers in his quarters above the station. When the food proved more popular than auto…
stoat | September 5, 2007For light relief, look at the pic at CM's latest h post, and if nothing springs to mind, check the comments :-)