fun
clock | January 12, 2007Tagged by Josh:
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Compared to my brother and to my lab-buddy Chris who have travelled to, like, every continent, I have been pretty stationary in…
clock | December 22, 2006Below the fold are the pictures of me, Prof. Steve Steve and Rev.Big Dumb Chimp taken immediately after the Ken Miller talk in Raleigh. If we look a little drunk or high, it is because we were just subjected to an overdose of theistic evolution and religious apologetics!
stoat | December 21, 2006Today is the solstice, hurrah, days get longer from now on. And we've just come through our first hard frosts of the winter into Fog. So here is a joke, told to me by Daniel from his friend Adam:
One night, a butcher, a baker and a candlemaker are together in a locked room with barred windows and so on. Next morning there are four people in the room. How come?
Answer: put a k in front of the night... it works better if you're told it verbally.
Happy Christmas all!
clock | December 20, 2006Somehow I feel that I've been tagged by Janet for this meme, because it is public that we celebrate Hannukkah. But we really make it low-key, family-only, and have only been doing it for about a dozen years so far. Actually, this is the first time that we had guests for the first night.
1. Latkes or Sufganiyot?
Latkes. Mrs.Coturnix is a superb Latke-Meister.
2. Multi-colored candles or blue-and-white?
Coturnix Jr. lights the blue-and-white candles, Coturnietta lights the multicolored.
3. Do you place the Hanukiah by the window or away from the window?
In this house, away from the window…
clock | December 20, 2006OK, everyone is doing this (Janet was the last one I saw), so I'll do it, too. Instead of writing a creative year in review, just copy the first sentence of the first blogpost of each month in 2006. Until June 9th I had three blogs, so I have to pick the first sentence from the first post on each! Since then, this is the only one. Here are mine (I skipped quick shout-outs to carnivals and such):
JanuaryI am obviously using the extended holidays to recharge my blogging batteries.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute which funds a number of researchers in the field, has made, a couple of years…
clock | December 19, 2006This is my favourite album of all times. The best holiday present I can get. It is not available on tape, CD or mp3 - only an LP. But I can find a way to make a copy somewhere around here.
Also, does anyone know if she has ever recorded anything else?
clock | December 19, 2006I can't wait for Night at the Museum! What a perfect movie to take the kids to during the holidays. My son is quite hyped about it - he only nees to decide if he'll go with me or ask a girl out.
clock | December 16, 2006Next issue of the Seed Magazine will have an article about scienceblogs.com. You can see a composite cartoon of all of us (without, unfortunately, our most recent additions) here. We look funny, don't we? Quiz: find Grrrl and Orac in the picture - how long did it take you? It took me forever!
clock | December 15, 2006
December 15th. Officially. Fire away. Via - via - via (read thos "vias" for more information about what it all means).
clock | December 13, 2006It came to me so naturally - no big thinking involved, no tweaking the results, this is who I am:
Which Historical Lunatic Are You?From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.
clock | December 12, 2006There have been some explanations before about the ability of Santa Claus to deliver all the presents during a single night, but this explanation is new to me:
Santa Science:
"Based on his advanced knowledge of the theory of relativity, Santa recognizes that time can be stretched like a rubber band, that space can be squeezed like an orange and that light can be bent," Silverberg says. "Relativity clouds are controllable domains - rips in time - that allow him months to deliver presents while only a few minutes pass on Earth. The presents are truly delivered in a wink of an eye."
Hat-tip:…
clock | December 12, 2006A paper in CMAJ on the medical ethics of muggles just came out:Duty of care to the undiagnosed patient: Ethical imperative, or just a load of Hogwarts?
Here is the abstract - the entire paper is freely available:
With the restoration of You-Know-Who to full corporeal form, the practice of the dark arts may lead to multitudes being charmed, befuddled and confounded. At present, muggle ethics dictate that aid may be rendered in a life-or limb-threatening situation, but the margins are blurred when neither is at stake. Muggle and wizard healers, fearful of being labelled ambulance chasers, may…
clock | December 11, 2006The guy who prvided the initial audio file of his amazing conversations with Verizon reps has now set up a blog about it. You can read the transcript, check the comments, find new developments on the case, and discover new similar cases.
Verizon is in trouble - see just how many blogs are covering this - bad publicity. They better invest into some basic arithmetics classes for their employees pronto. That will cost them about 0.002 million dollars, ...no, cents, ...no, dollars! Oh, whatever, it's just a matter of opinion anyway.
clock | December 10, 2006Thanks to The Science Pundit for alerting me to this amazing animation (now also for sale as screensaver):
Secret Worlds: The Universe Within:
View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe…
clock | December 10, 2006From Merriam-Webster:
Pecksniffian ⢠\pek-SNIFF-ee-un\ ⢠adjective
: unctuously hypocritical : sanctimonious
Example Sentence:
"His book suffers from excessively long harangues against Pecksniffian prigs and temperance types who, he claims, are still trying to ruin our fun." (Mark D. Fefer, Seattle Weekly, January 22, 2003)
Did you know?
Seth Pecksniff, a character with a holier-than-thou attitude in Charles Dickens's 1844 novel Martin Chuzzlewit, was no angel, though he certainly tried to pass himself off as one. Pecksniff liked to preach morality and brag about his own virtue, but…
clock | December 9, 2006Drop Kick My Big Balls While She's Gettin' Nailed mixed by Jeff Hebert of A Nerd's Country Journal.
clock | November 29, 2006Made With Molecules online store is expanding its offerings. Sure serotonin earrings are cool, but nothing beats the familiar and soothing effects of theobromine and caffeine. Check them out!
(Hat-tip: Vaughan
clock | November 22, 2006My son wants Wii for Hannukkah and he will get it. According to Jonah, it's good for you in more ways than just training in spatial orientation. You get a physical workout and you get drawn deeper into the game which will, presumably, make violence, aggression, injuries and death more realistic and thus may have the opposite effect of cartoonish effects of older video games or even watching carnage on TV news. You may even start emphatizing and thinking about the meaning of life! Who knows - time will tell.
But, and I did not think of this, Wii may do something more. Brian Russell muses…