The Morris Café Scientifique lurches to life again!

Once again this year, I’m setting up our Café Scientifique-Morris, which is going to be held on the last Tuesday of each month of the university school year. This time around, that means the first one falls on…Halloween! So we’re going to do something fun for that one: maybe some costumes, lots of clips from classic horror movies, I definitely think we’re going to need some bubbling retorts of colored fluids, and the chemistry department is tentatively going to provide some treats (ice cream made with liquid nitrogen—chemistry and treats don’t usually go together in people’s heads, I know.) This is the announcement for the first talk:

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I’ve been ripping a few DVDs from my collection with classic portrayals of scientists—the Universal Frankenstein series, Re-animator, the Bond movies, etc. (any suggestions? Pass ’em on)—which show us off as evil villains, and I’m going to show short clips from them to illustrate our poor image. Then I’m going to follow up with more but less exciting clips of people like Sagan and Wilson and Dawkins and, if I can track it down, Bronowski to illustrate the real humanism of good scientists. Suggestions for the latter part are also welcome, and that will be the heart of the talk, but face it: I don’t want to overdo the moralizing, and all the fun is going to be in the monster-makers.

I’ve also finalized our schedule. I’ve opened it up to a few people on the other side of campus, so we’re also going to hear about the legal standards for the admission of scientific evidence, and the economics of alternative power generation and transmission, in addition to a discussion of the chemistry we all use in our homes, a bit of astronomy, and a session of insect identification.

  • 31 October 2006 :: PZ Myers, Biology
  • 28 November 2006 :: Theodora Economou, Law
  • 30 January 2007 :: Panel discussion, Chemistry
  • 27 February 2007 :: Arne Kildegaard, Economics
  • 27 March 2007 :: Kristin Kearns, Physics
  • 24 April 2007 :: Tracey Anderson, Biology

It’s looking like a good year for this seminar series. If you’re in the neighborhood, stop on by!

House jumps the shark

True confession: I try to watch the medical drama House when I can. It’s lead character is an acerbic and brilliant atheist M.D. (played by Hugh Laurie, a comedic actor—which was a smart casting decision), and the humor is snarky and dark. That’s just the kind of thing I enjoy. It’s been going downhill, I think, because the episodes have gotten far too predictable—there’s always a weird illness which is handled via increasingly wild semi-random diagnoses that always, and I definitely mean always, ends with the complete cure of the patient. The infallibility is wearing a little thin.

Last season’s finale almost made me give up. They turned the gross-out factor up to 11 (exploding testicles and eyeballs popping out), and resolved everything with the lamest, laziest television cliche: it was just a dream. I hoped it was just an aberration.

Last night’s episode, though, blew it. I have lost faith in House. <spoilers below>

[Read more…]

Nerd music

The Scienceblogs Nerd–off contest should have this for a new theme song: Weird Al’s “White and Nerdy”.

First in my class here at MIT
Drop skills, I’m a champion at D&D
M.C. Escher, that’s my favorite MC
Keep your 40, I’ll just have an Earl Grey tea
My rims never spin, to the contrary
You’ll find that they’re quite stationary
All of my action figures are cherry
Stephen Hawking’s in my library
My MySpace page is all totally pimped out
Got people bangin’ for my top eight spaces
Yo, I know pi to a thousand places
Ain’t got grills but I still wear braces
I order all of my sandwiches with mayonnaise
I’m a whiz at Minesweeper, I could play for days
Once you see my sweet moves you’re gonna stay amazed
My fingers movin’ so fast they’ll set the place ablaze
There’s no killer app I haven’t run
At Pasqual, well, I’m number one
Do vector calculus just for fun
I ain’t got a gat but I got a soldering gun
“Happy Days” is my favorite theme song
I could sure kick your butt in a game of ping-pong
I’ll ace any trivia quiz you bring on
I’m fluent in Javascript as well as Klingon

(Here are the complete lyrics—it’ll make you weep, dawg.)

Getting ready for Halloween (already?)

Since I saw this meme at Dr Crazy’s place, I thought I’d toss it up here for the commenters to make suggestions.

” If I were designing a Pharyngula Halloween costume, it would consist of…”

It’s actually relevant. I just put out a call at my university for volunteers for Cafe Scientifique, which we will be holding on the last Tuesday of each month…and the October calendar puts that on Halloween. I’m going to be trying to organize a panel session on “Mad Scientists and Monsters” as the topic that day, and ask the panelists to show up in costume. So let’s see what suggestions you might come up with!

Wait—I’m in the same building with a bunch of chemists

I’m having second thoughts about the virtues of proximity to my colleagues of that other discipline after watching this video of people plunking alkali metals into water. Cesium looks…interesting.

Fortunately, my chemistry pals aren’t British, or I might have trouble understanding their comments. What the heck does “the dog’s nuts of the periodic table” mean, anyway?

Minnesota misogynists: vote!

The BIG fair, the Minnesota state fair, is going on right now, and Karina Hill is letting people vote on exactly which repellent Midwestern grease lump on a stick she should eat. Here’s the menu:

  1. Fried cheese puffs
  2. Cajun Season Alligator Sausage on-a-stick
  3. Deep Fried Cheese on a stick
  4. Jerk pork chop drummy
  5. Pancake wrapped around sausage on-a-stick
  6. Uffda Treat
  7. Belgium waffle on-a-stick
  8. Australian Battered Potatoes
  9. Cheese-burger calzones on-a-stick
  10. Wild Rice corndogs
  11. Key Lime Pie on-a-stick
  12. Dogzilla
  13. Egg-roll on-a-stick
  14. Fried-Egg Bagel Sandwich
  15. Pizza on-a-stick
  16. Political pop
  17. Deep-fried twinkies
  18. Chicken-chops
  19. Frozen Coffee on-a-stick
  20. Deep fried cheese curds
  21. Tater-tot hotdish on-a-stick
  22. Spaghetti and Meatball on-a-stick
  23. Deep-fried candy bar on-a-stick
  24. Deep fried oreos
  25. Deep-fried spudsters on-a-stick
  26. Spicy buffalo chicken filled wonton
  27. Blackened Cajun steak on-a-stick
  28. Bug juice
  29. Scotch Meatball on-a-stick
  30. Puff-daddy on-a-stick
  31. Pizza burgers
  32. Ice-cream on-a-stick
  33. Fresh chocolate dipped marshmallows on-a-stick
  34. Wall-Eye on-a-stick
  35. Mac-n-cheese on-a-stick
  36. Batter-dipped deep-fried chocolate chip cookies on-a-stick
  37. Fried ravioli garlic bread

If you’re the kind of wretched humanity-hating bastard who’d inflict any of those things on this poor woman’s digestive tract, circulatory system, kidneys, and brain, go ahead—vote at Minnesota Stories.

Warning: Tater-tot hotdish on-a-stick is disturbingly phallic.

What a werewolf!

I’ve been picking up some old movies on DVD lately to improve my education in the classics: specifically, an old favorite, the Hammer horror films. Yesterday, to take a break from class prep, I watched one I hadn’t seen before, Curse of the Werewolf. It has an interesting plot, a bit more thoughtful and melancholy than your usual monster movie, but what really wakes up the show is the actor in the lead: Oliver Reed.

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Whoa. I swear, I really am a boringly straight guy and wholeheartedly monogamous to boot, but Reed was one scarily, dangerously, manly fellow. He’s intense, tormented, and even when he’s with the woman he loves, he’s haunted. Lance Mannion also thinks highly of him:

To me, Reed always came across as the most dangerous man alive. This made him awfully difficult to cast well. He was too handsome and heroic looking to play your average movie villain, and too goddamn full of barely repressed violence and rage to play an appealing hero. His two best roles were, therefore, Sikes, the villain who could have been a hero, and Athos in The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, a hero who’s as callous, bloody-minded, and deadly as any villain, and who in one way goes even farther than Sikes in awfulness—Sikes beats the woman who loves him to death and then is haunted by his conscience; Athos coolly orders the woman he loves executed and then watches without a twinge as she’s rowed out into the middle of a lake, beheaded, and dumped into the water.

Those are better films than Curse of the Werewolf, but I’d have to say that this is also one of his best roles. Lon Chaney Jr is the guy that everyone thinks of when werewolf movies are brought up, but Chaney always looked like the sad ol’ hounddog, beaten down by his condition; Reed is always fierce and brutal and on edge, much more wolf-like. And look at him—he’s both feral and gorgeous.