Chat chat chatty chat

This easy chat room I tried out a while back is still idling along. It’s mostly rather quiet, but now and then conversations get going.

Anyway, just as another experiment, I’ll be online tomorrow (Saturday) evening at 5pm Central time (that is, right around an hour ago, if you’re reading this right around the time I posted it). I wonder if it would be an added attraction if I tried to convince Skatje or my wife Mary to be online at the same time—should I try?

Also, I know that IRC would be much better, and that there is a #pharyngula channel on DALnet. That would be better in the long run, but just for these little forays into the world of babble, let’s stick with the simple web-based widget for a while.

Gum disintegration syndrome

Here’s a weird and trivial phenomenon to consider: gum disintegration syndrome.

I’m not much of a gum-chewer, and never have been…but I remember gum from when I was a kid, and you could chew and chew and maintain a flavorless wad for a long time. Recently, I thought I’d try gum as an appetite suppressant, and I got some of the sugarless stuff. To my surprise, I’d chew on it for a few minutes, and shortly I’d feel it losing its texture and getting runny, and then it would dissolve into small fragments that I’d just swallow. I thought it was those dang cheap confectionery companies, that the formulas for gum base had changed since I was a kid, or maybe it was the sugarless kind that was just different. I tried a couple of different brands—same result. I would have abandoned it there and chalked it up to yet another example of the evils of creeping capitalism and Things Were Better in the Good Old Days, but I mentioned it to my wife, who thought I was nuts. She’s been dipping into my gum, and noticed no difference—it lasts as long as she wants to chew it.

Weird. My wife sent me this Straight Dope article on it, but it’s not very helpful. There’s some speculation that it’s a result of secretions during arousal (unlikely in my case; I can be reading, or driving the car, and it happens…unless perhaps I have a remarkable libido) or temperature (I tried taking the gum out every once in a while to cool, but no difference, it still breaks down. Besides, my body temperature isn’t unusual enough that my doctor has noticed.) At this point it’s simply a mystery. Maybe I’ve acquired some novel new digestive enzymes, but I don’t think I’ve been in any teleporter accidents—if I graduate from dissolving Wrigley’s to novel ways of eating donuts, I’ll let you know.

I’m not concerned about it*—maybe it’s just as well this is a vice I won’t be pursuing—but now I’m curious. Anyone else have the power to reduce gum to soup? Does it only happen in moments of passion? Details!

*Although…if everyone gets a mutant superpower in their life, and mine is the ability to digest gum instead of acquiring laser eyeballs or telepathy or super-regeneration, I’m going to feel ripped off.

How common!

Here’s a good reason why I prefer to go by the name “PZ”:

HowManyOfMe.com
Logo There are:
1,184
people with my name
in the U.S.A.

How many have your name?

Too dang many “Pauls,” and an awful lot of “Myers,” too.

(I shall mention that there are almost 5 times as many people named “Myers” as “Meyers,” so why does everyone spell my last name wrong?)

Home again

I’m back!

Well, sorta. I spent 22 hours traveling from London to Morris yesterday, and didn’t get home until 1am. I got about 3 hours sleep before the circadian rhythms kicked in, and my suprachiasmatic nucleus started kicking the reticular formation into high alert, trying to convince it I was dawdling in bed far too long. I tried fighting it until 6am, when there was no more hope—the SCN was now telling my whole body it was lunch time. So I’m awake and physiologically confused, a state that will probably worsen over the day.

I have noticed that while I was off frolicking in the UK, traffic to Pharyngula has dropped off precipitously to less than two thirds it’s previous level. This will not do. Who would have thought you’d all be so fickle that you’d stop reading the site merely because there was a dearth of fresh content? I’ll try to ramp up the new material as well as I can, so come back! You know, some people, like the Neurophilosopher and Simon Middlemiss and the guy at Darwin Building went so far as to track me down and see me in person, so I don’t think asking you all to visit my site 20 or 30 times a day even when there’s nothing new to read is too much to ask.

Speaking of “tracking down” and “snark”, you may recall that we pestered Dawkins in his lair. One of the things we talked about is his upcoming appearance on American television: Dawkins was on the Colbert Report. You can watch it now (in that horribly ugly, clumsy Windows Media Player format), or better yet, here it is on YouTube:

(By the way, the UK cover is not shiny and silver, it’s black and red.)

I know he was a little nervous about the show, just because Colbert is such a weirdly inverted parody of a right-wing talk show, but I think he did well. He got in a few of his main points—that you can’t disprove the existence of gods, but that they are highly improbable, evolution is not solely random, science is not determined democratically—which is good enough, considering the way that show usually ravages its guests in such a sneaky way. I thought Dawkins zinged Colbert as well as can be expected when he pointed out that Colbert’s rationalizing that “god just did us” was the simplest explanation was defeated by the question “Who did god?”

Now…must get coffee.

A visit to Downe

You want to see a few more of my travel pictures, don’t you? Yesterday, we got on the Seven Oaks line leaving Victoria Station, and ended up at Bromley South, where we were met by our faithful native guide, Robin Levett. He drove us through narrow, winding country roads to the tiny town of Downe. Downe is very picturesque and old country English, but we left it (after refreshing ourselves at the pub, which seems to be a mandatory tradition here, and after meeting Louis, another gentleman who joined us on our journey) to walk a mile or so down another narrow, tree- and hedge-lined road to end up at a certain country squire’s fine old home.

Here, Larry Moran and I stopped at the entrance, to pose with a picture of the prior owner.

i-e02af8eb44c42aaac75e5e1791602cb5-pz_larry_at_down.jpg

[Read more…]

London Howlerfest

We had a big crowd yesterday—20 or more people showed up at the Natural History Museum for our London Howlerfest. We spent a few hours strolling through the museum, a few more hours at a nearby pub (I don’t recall the name of the pub, but I do remember London Pride, Wildcat, and Wicked Witch), and few hours at a nearby restaurant. I don’t recall the names of all the people that I met there (which makes the fact that I only remember what I was drinking even more embarrassing), but I did take pictures. Browse the collection below the fold, and do me a favor—if you were there, name the people, and ‘fess up if you were one of them. I apologize if you aren’t in any of these, and should be; Larry Moran also took pictures, so I’m hoping that between us we’ll have everyone.

[Read more…]