If it’s Wednesday, this must be Santa Barbara

Hey, I’m in sodden, stormy California! Just in case you hadn’t heard, I’ll be speaking at the University of California Santa Barbara tonight at 7, in Embarcadero Hall. It should work…I’m still a little bit skewed towards Midwestern time, but 7PST isn’t that bad. The fun will start afterwards when someone hands me a beer at an hour way past my usual bedtime, and I pass out in public. You don’t want to miss that!

Massachusetts: NON-pointless poll alert!

Today is the day of a special election in Massachusetts, and it’s important — it could weaken the Democratic majority in the senate, and derail what little hope we have for sensible health care. Get out and vote for the Democrat, Coakley, even if you think she is a little yellow dog.

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A pointless poll in a new medium

You’ll need a Twitter account to crash this poll. There are these things called Shorty Awards being given to popular twitter users in various categories, like health. Unfortunately, as you can imagine, a medium with almost no content, restricted to 140 character brief comments, is easily dominated by the shallow and the superficial, so alt med quacks are having a grand time running up the score.

Let’s see if we can do a little readjustment. A skeptic, Dr. Rachel Dunlop, is also in the running, currently at #16 (she’s being beaten by Dr House). All you have to do is get onto Twitter and enter this string: “I nominate @DrRachie for a Shorty Award in #health because…” and fill in your own brief reason.

There are also lots of other categories that you can tinker with — I notice that @pzmyers is in the lead in the awesome category of #squid right now, with one vote. The numbers in most of the categories are actually so small that we could pharyngulate just about anything, if I were a cruel and capricious leader who wanted to organize a coordinated skewing of #religion or #bacon or whatever. But I shall content myself with sending my legions marching off to #health…this time.

Another one! While you’re on twitter, also vote “I nominate @maddow for a Shorty Award in #journalist because…”.

The Leap into Insanity Tour begins today!

It’s kind of like stage diving into a mosh pit, I think. I’m leaving for Santa Barbara this afternoon, beginning a week-long tour of a big chunk of California. Zeno has cruelly pointed out that my itinerary is a bit convoluted, but I say you take the tour you’ve got, not the one you wish you had.

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The amazing thing is that I scarcely know what I’m doing. I show up in Santa Barbara tonight, and I’m hoping I’ll be caught by the locals (you know who you are: you should get in touch with Lyz at the SSA, who’ll give you my secret cell phone number), who’ll show me a couch or a bed or something, and then each day afterwards I’m just sort of expecting someone will show up or contact me and guide me to the next event in the schedule. Zeno is right that the tour leads me all over the place, but from my perspective, it’s all pretty much Brownian. I shall be buffeted by the impact of chaos, and I shall enjoy it, unless I get dropped and end up spending a night sleeping on a sidewalk in Fresno or something.

I’ll be back in Minneapolis on the 29th of January, where the Trophy Wife™ will meet me with a pile of clean underwear so I can repack for my trip to Ireland and the Affront to God tour, leaving on the 30th. I’m still juggling a few of the details on that one, so I’m not going to put up a map just yet…but I will note that when I sketched out the preliminary route there, Dublin to Galway to Cork to Belfast, my son snarkily pointed out that I’ll be making the sign of the cross over the island. I may have to rejigger something, since that would be blasphemous, and we can’t have that, no sir.

A lot of people are asking about social hours after the talks. I HAVE NO PLANS. I am but a feather in the wind. However, I’m also really easy, so if anyone wants to drag me away and ease my parched throat with local brews, I’ll be amenable.

Just stay home, scientologists

Poor Haiti. First the earthquake, and now the cult vultures are descending on them. It’s not just talking bibles: now the scientologists are coming.

Seriously, people. When a region suffers a disaster and the infrastructure is falling down in ruins and people need real help now, when the pipeline is limited and access is difficult, send in the experts (doctors and engineers, for instance) and immediately useful aid (medicine, food, drinking water), and all the peddlers of frivolous non-essentials should just stay out of the way. A box of e-meters is taking up space better spent on a box of antibiotics; a scientology auditor is displacing a doctor.

Pokemon, revisited

It was tough being a biologist during my kids’ brief Pokemon craze. What kind of animals were those? What was this business of stuffing them into balls? And what a horrible mangling of evolution was portrayed in those transformations! Ick, ick, ick. The game just annoyed me in principle.

Those wild and crazy guys at the World’s Fair have had an idea: redo the whole Pokemon concept with real animals. It’s going to be called Phylomon. They’ve just started assembling a few bits and pieces — not only do they need to flesh out a game, but they also need to gather user-submitted illustrations. If you’ve got ideas for game design, or are an artist, check out their site and send in ideas.

Right now, they’ve got a simple request: Name your five favorite organisms and why, and pass it on to the Phylomon art community. Easy.

  • Vampyroteuthis infernalis
  • Architeuthis dux
  • Dosidicus gigas
  • Sepia latimanus
  • Enteroctopus dofleini

Why? Because they’re awesome. And anything would be better than Squirtle and Pikachu.

Maybe they should send them to the moon, then

I guess we’ve been outdone. While the godless are raising money for the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders, a Christian group is sending boxloads of solar-powered digital Bibles to Haiti — just what they need, I’m sure.

Called the “Proclaimer,” the audio Bible delivers “digital quality” and is designed for “poor and illiterate people”, the Faith Comes By Hearing group said.

According to their website, the Proclaimer is “self-powered and can play the Bible in the jungle, desert or … even on the moon!”

I’m trying to imagine an audio speaker that works in a vacuum. And why you would need a moon-ready Bible reader for poor lunar illiterates, anyway.

What really has me stumped, though, is trying to imagine something more useless than sending a bunch of electronic junk to people trying to recover from a disaster.