Don’t let the sight ruin your breakfast, but you can catch me babbling on bloggingheads right now. Don’t try to compare it to Sean Carroll’s star turn, OK?
Also note the traditional misspelling of my name. I’m thinking of doing a Prince or Madonna and getting it legally changed to just “PZ”.
This is irrational, an intrusion into my privacy, rude, and beneath me, but I have been tagged with another meme by the behavioral ecology blog. I am to take this test of my personality defects, post the results, and pass it on.
These are not personality defects. How can you call perfection “defective”?
Haughty Intellectual
You are 100% Rational, 14% Extroverted, 0% Brutal, and 57% Arrogant.You are the Haughty Intellectual. You are a very rational person, emphasizing logic over emotion, and you are also rather arrogant and self-aggrandizing. You probably think of yourself as an intellectual, and you would like everyone to know it. Not only that, but you also tend to look down on others, thinking yourself better than them. You could possibly have an unhealthy obsession with yourself as well, thus causing everyone to hate you for being such an elitist twat. On top of all that, you are also introverted and gentle. This means that you are just a quiet thinker who wants fame and recognition, in all likelihood. Like so many countless pseudo-intellectuals swarming around vacuous internet forums to discuss worthless political issues, your kind is a scourge upon humanity, blathering and blathering on and on about all kinds of boring crap. If your personality could be sculpted, the resulting piece would be Rodin’s “The Thinker”–although I am absolutely positive that you are not nearly as muscular or naked as that statue. Rather lacking in emotion, introspective, gentle, and arrogant, you are most certainly a Haughty Intellectual! And, most likely, you will never achieve the recognition or fame you so desire! But no worries!
To put it less negatively:
1. You are more RATIONAL than intuitive.
2. You are more INTROVERTED than extroverted.
3. You are more GENTLE than brutal.
4. You are more ARROGANT than humble.Compatibility:
Your exact opposite is the Schoolyard Bully. (Bullies like to beat up nerds, after all.)
Other personalities you would probably get along with are the Braggart, the Hand-Raiser, and the Robot.
Although the “brutal” score is a filthy lie. Just to prove it, I will gladly torment others with this pointless exercise.
CultureCat – Rhetoric and Feminism
I’ve mentioned before that I grew up in Kent, Washington. It was a middling-sized town of 15,000 people way back then, and I rather like small town living, but I didn’t like Kent, and I can trace my dislike to one specific event.
Some of you may noticed that someone on scienceblogs is going out of their way to say untrue things about me … it’s a transparent ploy to get me to link to them, I think, and an attempt to ruin my reputation. It’s not going to work, I tell you. No links! I’m not going to reward them with my attention! Don’t believe a word they say!
David Ng is asking if biologists have physics envy, which is both a common and a peculiar question (short answer: no, physicists should have biology envy). Then he follows up with a few brief questions to determine if scientists are actually pining away, wishing they’d gone into some different field … and here are my answers.
1. What’s your current scientific specialty?
Developmental biology.
2. Were you originally pursuing a different academic course? If so, what was it?
I started my undergraduate career with a general interest in marine biology, but quickly focused on neurobiology and development as more interesting problems (but not more interesting environments or organisms!) I went into graduate school thinking neuroscience was the bee’s knees, but again shifted focus to more development — starting from a developmental perspective was the practical way to approach the complexity of the nervous system. Now I also think it is the practical way to approach the complexity of metazoan evolution. Actually, I’m with D’Arcy Thompson that “everything is the way it is because it got that way” and that development is the lens we should use to examine everything. The process is all.
3. Do you happen to wish you were involved in another scientific field? If so, what one?
Yes, all of them.
Well, all of the biological disciplines, anyway. The problem is that I tend to think of mathematics, physics, and chemistry as subsets of biology, so they all tend to get sucked into my domain of desired knowledge.
On the other hand, maybe my answer should be “no.” My interests are my interests, and I’m currently free to pursue them exactly as I will, so I can’t quite imagine changing who I am. If I were to switch to another scientific field it would only be because I saw it as a useful tool to better understand the process of development.
Go ahead, everyone, answer the questions yourselves. If you aren’t a scientist, you can still always answer questions 2 and 3 (hint: the correct answer to #3 will always be some variant of evo-devo. Different answers will be marked down accordingly.)
Skatje has posted photos from our zoo trip yesterday, and they include the scariest butterfly you’ll ever see. It’ll give you nightmares.
We also visited the Pike Place Market, among other things. We have now discovered the secret way to Skatje’s heart, for all of you fanbois out there: “bright orange pants up to his nipples”. I was wondering how he talked her into actually trying some smoked salmon.
Here are our goals for today:
We’re going to spend the morning screwing around downtown, and are going to be at the Seattle Center International Fountain around noon.
Skatje wants to go to the zoo, so we’ll do that in the afternoon. Then around sixish we’ll be peckish and I tried to find a place not far from Woodland Park, and could not resist the idea of the Jolly Roger Taproom in Ballard. So that’s where we’ll try to be.
Keep in mind we’ll be stumbling about in an unfamiliar city and struggling to find parking, so timeliness is unlikely to be one of our virtues.
Oh, no…of all the blue-nosed asinine laws. We showed up at the pub, and unfortunately, absolutely no minors are even allowed inside, lest they might see an adult consuming a beverage that contains 3% alcohol. This put us in a spot, and I’m sorry, but I couldn’t quite persuade myself that I could sit inside and meet a few nice people while my daughter (who is chronologically only almost 17) sat outside on the sidewalk. So my apologies to any of you who might have showed up earlier this evening.
We’re scatter-brained touristas on vacation, so pinning us down to specific times and places is hard. However, we are going to be puttering about in downtown Seattle on Friday, and I think we can commit to one thing: lunch! We’re going to pop into the Food Court at Seattle Center House around noon, and since it promises to be a gorgeous sunny day, we’ll then hang out around the International Fountain, where I will practice calling spirits from the vasty deep.
I still have to get the family to agree to evening plans, and some of my party absolutely refuse to have anything to do with heaping platters of marine invertebrates, which complicates matters. If we can agree on something ahead of time (feel free to make suggestions), I’ll mention our Friday evening plans here, too.
Whoa…there were a lot of people at Drinking Liberally last night, and I was rather overwhelmed with all of the introductions. How about if attendees use this thread to tell everyone and remind me of who you are—pass along links to your Seattle blog, too, or give us links to pictures.
It was a great evening, and the only blemish is that there are now about 50 more people who know that I’m not ten feet tall and that I don’t breathe fire.
You’re all going to be jealous as you learn who I met last night — the accounts (and photos) are trickling in. Other people at DL were:
We made a visit to my boyhood home, the small town of Kent, Washington. It’s changed — it’s been commercialized and yuppified and embiggened beyond all recognition — but I thought everyone would appreciate seeing the shrines erected in my hometown to me.
