Peep and the Big Wide World

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A reader conspires to make me feel old—I don’t have any little kids running around in my house anymore, so I’ve completely missed this new cartoon, Peep and the Big Wide World. It’s a science program for pre-schoolers! They’ve got sample videos online, and a list of science-related books. It looks like they do exactly the right thing, encouraging kids to observe and experiment and most importantly, ask questions.

Darn kids. Why’d they have to grow up and stop being my excuse to sit down and watch morning cartoons?

Friday Filtered Random 16, Commercialized Version

So this is a sorta random music list, but not quite. The new version of iTunes has this “iMix” feature where it will generate a web-based collection from any playlist, so I selected the first 10 from my randomized library, threw it into a new playlist, selected iMix, and…discovered it only builds a list from music it can find in the iTunes collection. Only 3 made it. So then I threw the next ten in—seven or so made the cut. A dozen more…suddenly it spits up 16. Bleh, I wasn’t going to fuss with it to get exactly ten.

So here it is, the subset of a random subset of my iTunes library that Apple thought they could make a few bucks off of. In theory, if you click on that link, it’s supposed to take you to your copy of iTunes with all these tracks listed, ready for you to play a preview or buy them from Apple.

This Devil’s Workday Modest Mouse
Wasteland of the Free Iris DeMent
Heart Shaped Box Nirvana
Come As You Are Nirvana
Fidelity Regina Spektor
Mylardatter Sorten Muld
Glory Bound Train #1 Roy Zimmerman
White & Nerdy (Parody of "Ridin’" By Chamillionaire featuring Krayzie Bone) "Weird Al" Yankovic
I’m Not Worried at All Moby
Suddenly I See KT Tunstall
Hot Hot Hot!!! The Cure
Captain Badass Songs: Ohia
Coming in from the Cold The Delgados
Blade of Grass Asylum Street Spankers
Guitar Flute & String Moby
Little Bird Annie Lennox

I don’t know that I’ll do this again. It also comes back with an html-formatted email that I could have just pasted in, but it was ugly code, so I had to strip out some of the gunk just to make it presentable. I don’t think it was really worth it.

A plug!

Coturnix finds a blog that is reviewing Seed magazine in a multi-part series. He seems pretty cool with it so far, but he hasn’t reached that review of mine at the end of the last issue yet, though.

I know it sounds so crass, since Seed Media is hosting this site, but it really is a good magazine—I eyeball it every month with some trepidation, for fear it might go the Omni/Wired route of hyping widgets, but it’s holding my interest every time. There’s a real kicker of a testimonial to it, that I just learned about the other day:

My Mom subscribes to it.

Whoa. You know it’s gotta be good. She’s an intelligent and discriminating lady, you know.

South Park…ho hum.

I caught most of South Park tonight, and it certainly was topical: it wasn’t so much about evolution as it was RIchard Dawkins and The God Delusion. Unfortunately, as South Park seems to do whenever I see it, there wasn’t much thought behind it at all. Richard Dawkins is made to have sex with Mr Garrison, there’s something about intelligent sea otters, and a future world where everyone is an atheist and different factions are having a war. Trey Parker and Matt Stone aren’t exactly masters of subtlety, I’m afraid, and it was their usual frenetic mish-mash.

Oh, well. It’s a two-parter, so there’ll be more gay/transexual sex-as-some-kind-of-satire next week. I didn’t see much to trigger either outrage or interest this time, so I suspect I’ll miss it.

The Halloween Cafe Scientifique: an evening of Mad Scientists

On Halloween, I gave a short presentation as our first Cafe Scientifique of the year. The main intent was to introduce our schedule for the year and to give an amusing introduction to the media image of scientists by showing a few movie clips…and to say a few things about how we really ought to be seen.

I’ve put most of the clips on youtube, so you can see what I was talking about below the fold.

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Will South Park teach the controversy?

South Park’s amusement factor has been up and down for me, but I may have to make an effort to catch this evening’s episode.

Cartman’s plan to propel himself into the future goes horribly wrong. South Park Elementary faces strong opposition to the topic of evolution being taught to the 4th graders, especially from Ms. Garrison who has to teach it. Eric Cartman can’t be bothered with what’s going on in class. He’s busy manipulating his own personal time-line to align with the precise release date of the newest, hottest game.

What’s on your desktop?

Female Science Professor is polling her readers on what’s on their computer desktop. It’s not a weird question pulled out of thin air: she noted that male professors may be more comfortable showing pictures of their families than females, who have to be more sensitive to the stereotypes.

It’s not a scientific poll in any sense of the word, but just out of curiousity, let’s see what emerges.

My answer was “Other.” My desktop image right now is of a hypothetical cephalopod-like alien swimming in a methane sea beneath an orange-red sky. What would fit her hypothesis, though, is that my desk has a keyboard drawer that I don’t use (my office computer is my laptop), and that’s filled to overflowing with…pictures of my family.