Jen has the full account, complete with a video, of my talk. I was a rude boy.

Right now, I’m in Bloomington, at the “Current Frontiers in Evolution, Development and Genomics” conference. I gave the keynote last night — which means I am now free to sit back and simply enjoy the meeting without fretting over a silly talk any more. I think I’ll be able to get online in the auditorium, so you may be subject to more live-blogging of evo-devo over the course of the day.

I see we’ve got events scheduled all day long, up to 11pm. I might die.

The mild nausea I mentioned earlier? Gone now, it seems to have vanished as soon as I disposed of the wretched rag Answers in Genesis sent me. It’s a good thing, too, because I have a frantic weekend ahead of me.

Today and tomorrow, I’m pounding the keyboard to prepare a couple of talks. At least one I can borrow liberally from the book-in-progress (yeah, I’m still working on that, too).

On Thursday, I’ll be giving a public lecture at Purdue University. I’m cutting it close on this one; my plane gets into Indianapolis a mere 2 hours before the talk, so if I’m late, feel free to leave scurrilous slanders on the blackboard for me. The talk is at 6:00 in the Class of 1950 Lecture Hall Room 224. It should be fun. My trip in is tricky in timing, but afterwards, my time is unrestrained, and I think we’re getting together to shoot the breeze that evening. If you’re somewhere near West Lafayette, Indiana, stop on by.

On Friday, I’ll be at this evo-devo meeting:

This is not a public event, but a serious science conference with registration fees and all that. It should be fabulous, even if it does have some nattering nobody for a keynote speaker. Expect heavy real-time science blogging all day Saturday and Sunday morning. I might get out for a wild night in Bloomington on Saturday, though, we’ll see.

Finally, on Monday, I’m lowering myself from the glories of real science to a debate with a flaming creationist on the St Paul campus at 7:30pm. Show up! I’m sure the creationists will be trundling in their bible-clutching faithful to boo, even though the subject is nothing about god or religion — it’s simply “Should intelligent design creationism be taught in the schools?” The answer is “no,” if you’re at all confused.

Tuesday I’m sleeping in late. Don’t bother me.

It’s another podcast, this time with Mother Jones magazine.

I just finished cleaning up something like 400 spam comments made here, so it’s with grim resignation that I notice the podcast already has a spam comment on it. Is there some reason my name should be associated with sanitary ball valves?

Since Jerry Coyne will never ever let me forget my modeling session with Ruse, I’ll counter it a little with a photo of the sensible people from the University of Northern Iowa.

Theresa Spradling, Peter Berendzen, Steve O’Kane, Marek Sliwinski, Neil Shubin (U. of Chicago) and Tiktaalik, Jim Demastes, and some guy.

I’ll be speaking at UNI on 10 February, too.

When I gave my talk at Minot, ND a few weeks ago, one of the things the Northwest Art Center (which hosted the talk) did was to have the audience evaluate me. This could be useful, I thought, but they actually mailed me copies of the forms, and…umm, no, they weren’t. As I rather expected, the evaluations are highly bimodal, with a majority giving me an enthusiastic thumbs up, and a substantial minority giving me a thumbs down. The negative reviews might have had some potential for helping me out, except, well, take a look at one example.

I’ve got a surprisingly consistent subset of reviews in which the listener seems to have spent most of their time doodling praise for Jebus on their forms.

That last one was an entirely positive review of the lecture, but still…I see signs that some people walked in with their brains firmly switched to the “off” position.

Don’t faint. I met some people at this meeting.

What did you think, I’d strip half-naked, paint myself blue, and start swinging a broadsword?