Category Archives: Fun

I 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] 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 novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…”, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”.
* You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] in [genre] is…”.
* You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.
Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.
Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

My great-grandparent is Pharyngula.
My grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My parent is Flying Trilobite
The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is:
“To Say Nothing Of The Dog” by Connie Willis
The best scary movie in scientific dystopias is:
“Soylent Green”
The best sexy song in rock is:
“Fever” in many renditions.
The best cult novel in ex-Yugoslav fiction is:
Rabies by Borislav Pekic
Let not this lineage go extinct! I am asking the following to go forth and multiply:
Sheril
Kate
John
Danica
Anne-Marie
Eric
Sarah
Melissa
My children (so far):
Anne-Marie
Sheril
John
Kate
Melissa
Eric

OK, this will be the last series of pictures of my Sciblings from the shindig of the past weekend. As you may have noticed, several others have posted their recollections and pictures on their blogs. You can also see some pictures on Flickr and Facebook and please add and tag more if you have them.
I have noticed it several times before, but this is something that really came out in full force at the Meetup as we really feel like an online family – meeting people online can produce real freindships. Then, when you meet offline for the first time after years of cyberchatter, there is nothing else to do but hug and continue the conversation over a beer as if you personally have known each other for year. There is no need to spend any time ‘getting to know’ each other.
In many ways, I know some of my blogfriends better than I know some of my real-life colleagues and acquaintances, as personality and some deeper secrets come out in people’s writings, even if they are really good at concealing those in person. The good thing is that I actually really like all of my Sciblings and meeting them all in person just reinforced this feeling – what a fantastic bunch of people!
And, in addition to them, we got to meet a couple of our readers/commenters on Saturday night which was just so great! Pictures under the fold.

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OK, so a bunch of us sciencebloggers went to New York City this weekend. This is something that we were trying to do for almost a year now. Sure, many of us Sciblings have met one-on-one on occasion, but this was an opportunity to get many of us together all in the same place at the same time, to have fun together and see what happens.
So, on Friday, most of us managed to meet at Seed magazine’s (and scienceblogs.com) offices. That is where we started on our first beers….(see my pictures from the event posted on Saturday, as well as other people’s pictures)
Then we went to a Brewery on Union Square…and had some more beer…
Then we went to Adam Bly’s House (he is the Editor-in-Chief of Seed), where we had, you guessed it, some more beer (or wine, plus some great food). A number of Seed editors and staffers were there as well. A few more Sciblings managed to arrive by that time. I realize I have no pictures of Carl Zimmer, Dr.Signout and Orli van Mourik (perhaps some other people do, so look around).
Then, we went to a karaoke bar, where we had more beer…and yes, several of us sang….
On Saturday, we went together for breakfast in smaller groups (see my pictures I posted earlier today), followed by a brunch (pictures under the fold), where they filmed us (actually, about two thirds of us sitting at two tables, there was another non-camera table for the anonymous third, staffers and significant others). We talked about sciencey stuff and hopefully some clips of that will appear on the Seed site in the near future. That was also a good opportunity (while we were waiting for the cameras to get set up) for me to go around and promote PLoS and to promote the Science Blogging Conference.
That afternoon, a group of us went to the AMNH and saw two special exhibits – Galactic Collisions and Frogs (pictures still to come).
In the evening we went to BBar for dinner and beer for about 3.5 hours, followed by much more (and much cheaper) beer at a place called Colliseum. A few of our readers joined us for the occasion (pictures to follow, here, on Facebook and on Flickr).

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Under the fold, Saturday morning pictures from New York City Sciblings meetup, at Union Square Inn and a pastry/coffee place where we had breakfast

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Come and meet the Sciblings
About 30 or so of us Seed sciencebloggers are in New York City this weekend (many, many pictures to come), but if you want to see for yourself that we actually exist and our blogs are not written by robots, meet us at BBar and Grill at the corner of Bowery and 3rd starting around 7pm until they kick us out.