Mike made me do it:
You are a Reality-Based Intellectualist, also known as the liberal elite. You are a proud member of what’s known as the reality-based community, where science, reason, and non-Jesus-based thought reign supreme.
Take the quiz at www.FightConservatives.com
Food-shaped USB flash drives. Pizza for me…. [Via]
Under The Effluence. Human sewage used for cereals?!
Great Opening Sentences From Science Fiction. Any other suggestions?
Another surgical liveblogging experience: Which Is the Safe Side?
I finally found some time to go and see a movie theater from the inside. My daughter and I went and saw Wall-E tonight.
Like everyone says, it is a beautiful movie.
Get some popcorn and sit back.
Take in the fantastic graphic design.
Play the “spot the cultural reference” game.
Enjoy the sweet love story.
Laugh.
Leave the social analysis for later, if you insist on doing one at all.
Posted in Fun
These are adorable!
This one for PZ.
This one for Amanda and the Thumb crew.
My kids are getting one each, right now!
Periodic Table of Videos on YouTube:
This channel has a video about each element on the periodic table.
With help from some clever chemists, I’ve done all 118, but I’m not stopping here.
Now I’m updating and improving all the videos with new stories, better samples and bigger experiments.
Please subscribe to follow my progress.
Or visit the main website at Periodic Table of Videos
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Posted in Fun, Science Education
Everyone is posting these movies and e-mailing me the URL – so here it is (is there a way to enbed these?) for your enjoyment (btw, geeky me, Doogie Howser, M.D. was my favourite show when I was a kid)
Posted in Fun
I am currently reading – and enjoying very much – The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat by Eric Roston.
He was recently interviewed for DC Examiner and they ran a picture of him wearing a familiar t-shirt 😉
Recently, Eric was quoted in TIME and lambasted by Rush Limbaugh, which, as Tom notes, means that Eric made it Big Time!
Antony Williams, who I had a great time with over coffee yesterday, alerted me to his blog post about a new chemical with some amazing properties – shining UV light onto the solution turns the liquid green instantaneously, and removal of the UV source results in instant change of color from green back to transparent.
Aaron Rowe and Kyle Finchsigmate also blogged about it.
You can see the chemical structure here:
See those two rings with nitrogens highlighted in blue? See the bond that connects those two rings? That bond is broken by UV light and immediately rebinds once the light is gone.
Think of the applications for this!
And here is a video so you can observe the color changes for yourself:
Posted in Fun, Science News, Technology
Posted in Basic Biology, Fun, Science Education
Last night I thought I had fun, hearing both thunder and fireworks, but these guys could not just hear but also see not two but three spectacular things simultaneously – fireworks (left), comet McNaught (center) and lightning (right). And this was all captured in one of the most exciting photos I have seen recently, bound to win all sorts of “Picture of the Year” contests come December:
Comet Between Fireworks and Lightning, picture taken by Antti Kemppainen:
Click here to see it really big!
Explanation:
In January 2007, people from Perth, Australia gathered on a local beach to watch a sky light up with delights near and far. Nearby, fireworks exploded as part of Australia Day celebrations. On the far right, lightning from a thunderstorm flashed in the distance. Near the image center, though, seen through clouds, was the most unusual sight of all: Comet McNaught. The photogenic comet was so bright that it even remained visible though the din of Earthly flashes. Comet McNaught has now returned to the outer Solar System and is now only visible with a large telescope. The above image is actually a three photograph panorama digitally processed to reduce red reflections from the exploding firework.
Yes, this is me, Bora Borg, at least parts of it. Ably photoshopped by McDawg:
Posted in Fun
The long awaited game Spore is coming out soon. The Creature Creator is now available, but a bunch of us got it in advance (see PZ, Brian, erv, Chad, Brian….) and got to play a little bit.
I can’t wait for the game itself, although, as others have pointed out, the game is not really about evolution. It is, like Pokemon, using the term ‘evolution’ to describe ‘metamorphosis’. All the changes happen to a single individual during an enormously long lifetime. This is one of the basic misunderstandings of evolution by creationists – they missed the memo that evolution operates at the level of populations, not individuals. Perhaps Spore will have that population level added once there are thousands of players on there – let the best adapted players survive and leave offspring, etc….
Anyway, here is my first attempt at making a creature – a huge, ferocious CHICKEN!
Also from Miriam, not the famous old (and beloved by my kids) rote memorization of elements – but you will never forget these few basic facts about a few major elements, because it is presented in a viscerally fun way:
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Posted in Fun, Science Education
Last night, my daughter and I went to hear the NC Symphony at the Green here in Southern Village. The entire square was packed (a couple of thousand people?). It was very enjoyable and an interesting choice of pieces. What was more interesting, and I am not sure I liked it, is the chosen ORDER of the pieces. The first half was filled with classics, the second half with pop stuff, including some not-well-known pieces. I am not sure that worked very well….
The concert started with Johann Strauss Sr.’s Radetzky March – a very powerful piece of music. But there is a reason why that is traditionally the very last piece to be played at the annual New Year’s concert in Vienna – it takes some time to build up, through the duration of the concert, one’s emotional response to music. The early parts of the concert are there to gradually break down your defenses. Then, at the end, there is nothing you can do to resist the powerful emotional effect of the Radetzky March – you nod, you clap, your foot keeps the beat, you cry…but you cannot watch and listen without passion unless you are a heartless, soulless corpse.
It is similar to “Hair” – I hate it when local radio stations play the hybrid combo of ‘Aquairus’ and ‘Let The Sunshine In’ for this same reason. The finale of ‘Let The Sunshine In’ means nothing on its own, without the intro. The crucial part is the slow crescendo, the gradual build-up of emotion during the first 2/3 of the song. Then, when the finale comes along, full-throated, open-airway, than it is one of the most powerful pieces of music ever – it moves you, makes you shake and cry and sing along out loud.
So, if I were a conductor of the NC Symphony I would have reversed the order – I would have played Irving Berlin’s Patriotic Overture, the Circus theme and pop-song medley first, followed by John William’s movie music from “Midway” and “Star Wars” (Yoda’s Theme), followed by Terry Mizesko’s Little Dance Suite (which is actually quite nice) and only then, once the brains of the people in the audience are already softened and captured and tuned in to emotion, start hammering with the powerful pieces like Tchaikovsky’s ‘Cossack Dance’ from “Mazzepa” and a couple of scenes from “Swan Lake”, Weber’s overture to “Abu Hassan”, and finally make the audience cry with Grieg’s ‘Morning Mood’ and “In the Hall of the Mountain Kind” from Peer Gynt – one of the most powerful pieces of music ever (interesting that he did not choose ‘Solveyg’s Song’ as part of this), and drive the last nail in your emotional coffin with the Radetzky March.
But those are quibbles. It was great fun and I am happy to see so many people show up. Not to mention that the execution of all pieces was absolutely perfect.
Posted in Fun, North Carolina, Personal
After reading this thread I was really nervous about going to see Kung Fu Panda, but my daughter insisted (ever since the first posters and trailers came out months ago), so we went last night. And…..
…the movie is really not what Melissa expected. If anything, it is the opposite – in one moment it uses a fat joke to make you laugh (which sometimes you manage to supress, sometimes not), but then in the next moment it shames you for laughing at the previous joke. What the movie parodies the best are old martial arts movie, from Bruce Lee movies, through Karate Kid, to Crouching tiger…, and even Tampopo! As I have seen loads of such movies in my life, I could recognize the way they poked fun at the genre cliches, but some others in the audience may have missed those references.
The movie is packed with action and humor at all times and was really fun to watch. Poe, the panda, is made fun more for his lack of ability coming from lack of training, than for his shape ands size. He is chosen to save the valley from a particularly nasty character not because of his prowess, but because an old, wise turtle said so (which is making fun of the Chinese movie cliches). There is no time for years of classical training, and he is really not suited for it anyway. But he is willing – he has been dreaming all his life of becoming a kung-fu master yet facing the reality that his upbringing could never make that dream come true. And his master has to do something – and quickly!
So, the master thought and realized that, just like with his other students, he needs NOT to train Poe in kung-fu but to adopt kung-fu to fit Poe. He realized that the kid is easily distracted and that he fares worst when he thinks too much about fighting (paralysis by analysis), but can fight just fine when motivated by something else. Poe, a son of a soup chef, is motivated by food, and the ‘catch the dumpling’ scene in the middle of the movie is absolutely awesome as, over a span of several minutes, Poe transforms from a clumsy fat panda into a nimble, fast, fighting machine. Sorta like Taiji Kase (I got my brown belt at a Kase seminar and my black at a Shirai seminar, so I have seen them both in action: Kase is amazingly strong and fast even after a huge meal and lots of beer!). His natural body shape becomes a part of his fighting style, which he uses to defeat the enemy at the end. And remains humble. And loses his self-consciousness about his body size in the process.
So, the movie uses fat jokes in order to shame us for laughing. It is a fat-acceptance movie throughout, not just at the end. Two of the five awesome fighters are women, one of which, the tigress, is the best of them all, and two of them chastize the others whenever they mention something about Poe’s weight. My daugher loved it and wants to see it again.
Posted in Fun
That’s me. My Hobbit name. Generated with the The Hobbit Name Generator, provided by Graham Steel in the comments of this poetically frustulous post. And my elvish name is Inglor Tinuviel.
Posted in Fun
First LOL PLoS images are now on Flickr and Facebook. If you use the correct tag in Flickr, yours will be added to the set. Please link to the original paper when you do this.
Posted in A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words, Fun, Humor, PLoS
Every now and then I have some fun and LOL-cat-ize an image from a PLoS ONE paper. See, for instance, LOLdinosaur, LOLtortoise, LOLtasmaniantiger and LOLpterosaur. Folks at the mothership love these. So, if a number of you are up to this I’ll make a Flickr set or Facebook group, or a linkfest. Pick your favourite PLoS papers, grab images, LOLcatize them (here) and send them to me, or give me the links. Ideally, if you post these on your blogs, provide also a link to the paper itself or at least let me know which paper they came from.
This is not what I have in mind, but it is a LOL and a PLoS and a cat….
Or 3.5 Albatross wingspans, or 8.1 Alaskan moose antler spans, or 7.6 standard railway gauges, or 5.5 Kobe Bryants, or 2.5 London buses stacked one on top of another. That is how this site converts 12 yards. Try your own measures….
Posted in Fun
Our governor agrees. At least in the print version of this article which has a somehwat different title: “Easley supports college for aliens”. I wonder why they changed it for the Web version – is the editorial position that having green or purple skin disqualifies one from higher education?
Posted in Academia, Fun, Humor, North Carolina, Politics
Yup, watch the press conference announcing Tom Waits’ tour.
My daughter collects snowglobes. Or, to be precise, we collect snowglobes for her when we travel. She has a few from New York City, one from San Francisco, one from Murtle Beach, one from Milwaukee. I badly messed up when I went to Boston last year and did not get one. Last year, the TSA made a rule that snowglobes cannot be in the carry-on luggage (and I prefer to travel light and not check in any bags), but the lax security at Milwaukee airport let me smuggle one in.
Now, traveling around Europe provided me with the opportunity to greatly add to her collection: snowglobes from London, Cambridge, Cromer, Trieste, Belgrade and Berlin. Carrying them on European airlines was easy, but I checked in the suitcase on the last flight back to the USA:
Posted in EuroTrip '08, Fun, Personal
You really think I am going to put this above the fold? No way – you have to click (First posted on July 7, 2006):
I wish I could have this clock:
See a series of images and the sped-up animation to see how it works.
Posted in Fun
This is the MySpace page of the band named Plos. They sing in German, so I do not understand a word, but somehow I doubt it has much to do with science or Open Access…
What does ‘Plos’ mean in German anyway?
Posted in Fun
From paper airplanes to IBM Typewriters, from cold war calculators to cereal boxes, from condoms to condiments, and many, many more strange collections, all found at the Museum of Online Museums, thanks to Anne-Marie.
Of course, after watching them do this for a year, I find this picture (found in a number of places around the internet) particularly funny
While I don’t think there is such a thing as Internet Addiction, doing this quick test is fun:
“Your Internet usage is causing significant problems in your life. You should evaluate the impact of the Internet on your life and address the problems directly caused by your Internet usage.”
…with a new comic strip – introducing Pucker and Bloat!
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Posted in Fun
Here we go again! Who is cooler, Echinoderms or Molluscs? You decide for yourself, but I have decided a long time ago:
Sea Cucumber
Sea Cucumber
Sea Cucumber
Sea Cucumber
Sea Cucumber
Sea Cucumber
Sea Cucumber
Sea Cucumber
Sea Cucumber
Sea Cucumber
Posted in Fun
Remember this study from last month? Well, apparently NYTimes picked up on it and now all the bloggers are picking it apart – see what Dave Bacon, Jake Young and Mark Hoofnagle have to say. I think this study, started as a joke, is about to be revisited seriously with a huge data-set and various strict controls. As long as someone manages to get NIH to pay for all the beer.
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Posted in Fun
….this on the opening night!
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Posted in Fun
Go here, click to change color, press Space to erase and start anew:
You may remember a few days ago I posted a link to the list of Obsolete skills (the links were to this post, this wiki and this wiki). The growing list is certainly fun to read and check off your own skills against it. Archy adds some more.
But, what I really liked, especially since this is a science blog, was this comment by Barn Owl, suggesting we list our science-related and laboratory skills that are either useless outside of the lab or now obsolete even in a science lab.
For instance, Anna has developed strength in in the muscles used in vial opening as well as the ability to eye-ball minute volumes of liquid.
Well, I can use, if you wake me up in the middle of the night, the 1982 program called Circadia. It is to this day the best software for analysis of circadian data, but the latest Mac OS’s cannot run it as it is so old. It is Open Source now and I would love to see someone do an upgrade on it and make it more modern.
I hope I never have to do an RPA (RNase Protection Assay) again – it takes back-breaking 3-5 days to do three of those in parallel for just a few data-points. There are better techniques these days.
The way IACUCs are going these days, I doubt I will ever again be allowed to put my surgical skills to use – if you want your quail’s ovaries or pineals removed, optic nerves severed, or radiotransmitters implanted, I can do it, but only if you get the IACUC approval for it first.
Some of the old melatonin radioimmunoassays are a pain in the behind. I hope someone’s developed something simpler and more reliable lately.
Catching a runaway quail in a pitch-dark isolation room using sound only.
Changing food, water and paper in complete darkness.
Giving i/m injections into the birds’ breastmeat in complete darkness.
Taking blood samples from miniature wing-veins of quail using military infrared goggles.
OK, your turn: what are some of the lab skills that are either useless outside of the lab or so outdated to be useless in the lab today?
Posted in Fun, Science Reporting
What is the difference between Free Access Beer and Open Access Beer?
You go to a bar to get your Free Access Beer. You sit down. You show your ID. The barista gives you a bottle. You don’t need to pay anything for it – it’s free, after all. You take your own bottle-opener from your pocket and open the bottle. You drink the beer from the bottle. You return the empty bottle to the barista. You go home.
You order you Open Access Beer online or by phone. You pick what kind of beer you want. It gets delivered to your door really fast. The delivery man opens the bottle for you. You are not carded, nor do you have to pay. That beer is now yours to do whatever you want with it – you can drink it out of the bottle, or pour it into a glass. You can use it for cooking or you can use it to water your plants. You can do a chemical analysis of it in your lab and use the knowledge to produce an even better homebrew.
See the difference?
Unfortunately, there is no such thing as Open Access Beer, or even Free Access Beer. Which, it turns out, may be a Good Thing. For science, at least. Especially if you are Bohemian kind of guy. You need to read this very Grim report (from Emmett, via Kevin):
A possible role of social activity to explain differences in publication output among ecologists:
Publication output is the standard by which scientific productivity is evaluated. Despite a plethora of papers on the issue of publication and citation biases, no study has so far considered a possible effect of social activities on publication output. One of the most frequent social activities in the world is drinking alcohol. In Europe, most alcohol is consumed as beer and, based on well known negative effects of alcohol consumption on cognitive performance, I predicted negative correlations between beer consumption and several measures of scientific performance. Using a survey from the Czech Republic, that has the highest per capita beer consumption rate in the world, I show that increasing per capita beer consumption is associated with lower numbers of papers, total citations, and citations per paper (a surrogate measure of paper quality). In addition I found the same predicted trends in comparison of two separate geographic areas within the Czech Republic that are also known to differ in beer consumption rates. These correlations are consistent with the possibility that leisure time social activities might influence the quality and quantity of scientific work and may be potential sources of publication and citation biases.
Generally, inhabitants of Bohemia (western region of
the Czech Republic) are known to drink more beer than
people from Moravia (eastern region of the country). This
difference was confirmed for my sample of researchers:
researchers from Bohemia drank significantly more beer
per capita per year (median 200.0 litres) than those from
Moravia (median 37.5 litres; Mann-Whitney test: U17,17
2.84, p0.005). Therefore I predicted lower measures of
publication output for the former in comparison to latter
group of researchers (I could not include nominal variable
”region” in regression models because of its significant
interdependence with another effect variable, the beer
consumption). Indeed, researchers from Bohemia published
fewer papers per year (U17,172.32, p0.02), were less
cited per year (U17,172.99, p0.003), and showed lower
citation rate per paper per year (U17,172.30, p0.02).
The question is: do you do less science because you drink too much, or do you drink too much because your science sucks? And, is 200 liters of beer per year too much? Who’s to judge? Moravians? Is there a similar correlation with wine and other drinks? Other non-alcoholic social activities?
Or is beer-drinking one of the possible symptoms of the Impostor Syndrome (see mrswhatsit’s series on it: Part I, Part II, Part III, also Zuska, Sciencewoman, Revere, Laelaps and DrugMonkey to learn more about it).
Posted in Academia, Food, Fun, Open Science, Science Practice
We have already covered, in quite some detail the problems of passing gas in space. Not so much a problem inside a spaceship, but potentially a problem on a space walk, especially if the said activity, if particularly powerful, produces a rip in the scafander. The air leaves and it’s all over for you. Perhaps those beans tasted too well last night, eh?
The holes in the hulls of spaceships and in space-suits are incompatible with human life.
Then, there is the perennial question about sex in space. Did they or didn’t they? Officially, nothing ever happened. Unofficially, sure it did. Between astronauts down on Earth and most likely on spaceships. But it is difficult.
And out on a space-walk, it is even more difficult. Again, there is the problem of holes. How do you design a spacesuit for this? One with a female condom and another with a male condom? And what if the condom breaks? Poof! You’re dead. Not to even mention the problem of action+reaction forces….
So, if holes are such sources of horror in space, why, oh why, is there a gun on the Space Station? To ward off aliens? To shoot an ex-sex-partner when he farts?
Posted in Fun, Sex, Technology
Talia is wondering what would happen to an astronaut who goes outside the spaceship in a spacesuit and lets one rip?!
Any physicists out there who can give her more information beyond the farting-is-funny cartoons?
And as far as Talia goes, as she will stay inside the ship, all she risks is blushing under the accusatory looks of her cabin mates wrinkling their noses….
Posted in Fun
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