If it’s Tuesday, it must be NY

Wheee, I’m going to zip into New York again next week. I’m flying in on Monday to talk at the Inspiration Festival on Tuesday. I’m on the Seed slate with:

Chris Mooney – Washington Correspondent, Seed Magazine
Lisa Randall – Professor of Physics, Harvard University
Natalie Jeremijenko – Design Engineer / Technoartist, Yale University
PZ Myers – Associate Professor of Biology, University of Minnesota
Randy Olson – Lecturer
Jonah Lehrer – Editor-at-Large, Seed magazine
Pardis Sabeti – Researcher, Broad Institute / Lead Singer, Thousand Days

And here’s my job, in one very short talk:

From Galileo to da Vinci, and, from Einstein to Lichtenstein, such paradoxical contemporaries of their respective ages defy opposition in principal by the very existence of their creative nature. When modern Science and Culture collide, what can we learn about ourselves and the way we see the world? A look at 10 trends set to reveal the future of the future.

I’ll have to leave before the session is over to catch my flight home, but it looks like a good line-up and I wish I could hear it all. I’ll be talking about developmental biology and what it says about us, and I don’t think any of the others will be competing with me on that subject, at least.

Happy Birthday, Mary!

What to do, what to do…usually I can pull out old photos from a stack of family members on their birthdays. I don’t have a stockpile of childhood photographs of my wife (note to self: next time I’m in Washington, raid the in-laws’ family albums). This means there’s a lack of easy material here.

Hmmm. A-ha—the high school yearbook!

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Nerds, rise up!

Smarting from her failure to crack the top 1000 in the science blogger hot-or-not contest, Janet has declared a Nerd-off, in which us geeks, dorks, nerds, and poindexters compete to see who is the King or Queen of the pocket-protector crowd.

I think I should get bonus points for bragging about it a whole year ahead of time.

This conflict could spill over elsewhere, I warn you. Already the fellows at Sadly, No have joined in…even if they aren’t science bloggers, their nerdiness has long been apparent. I bet they were in the A/V club in high school. Actually, most of the big-name bloggers are obviously nerdworthy: come on, Duncan Black has to be a major geek, right?

I also think I should be declared victor for this photo alone. Man, if we open up this competition to photographic documentation, Janet doesn’t stand a chance.

I am nerdier than 99% of all people. Are you nerdier? Click here to find out!

Yeah, got this Nerd Score without even breaking a sweat.

As long as James Kakalios is gloating about his nerdy comic book habit in the comments, I’ll have to document what’s on my desk right now:

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From back left to front right, that’s Darwin, Marx, and Freud; a naked mole rat; a bowl of cocktail squid and Fetopia beads; a nice springy squid; and the books are The Sandwalk Adventures(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), Five Fists of Science(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and The Prehistory of the Far Side(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)

It’ll be a warm February in Minnesota before I’m outnerded.

Aftermath

Just in case my wife happens to check out the internets this afternoon, I’m sure she’ll be interested in seeing the state of her yard.

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The plumbing crew came out this morning to repair our broken water main, and apparently to also plant a dead pagan king in a nice barrow outside our bathroom window, and imprint the rest of the lawn with interesting trackways. Oh, well, at least we now have fully restored water pressure.

I must also thank the kind reader who sent us the disaster preparedness and cleanup manuals. They’ll come in handy—as you might guess, there’s now a musty odor rising from our basement, and I don’t think it’s from the moldering dead king. His generosity was only exceeded by Governor Kathleen Blanco, who’s flying up from New Orleans to give us some advice tonight.

I must be famous now!

At least, I’m in the Wikipedia. Nobody will ever be able to find it, though, because for some reason the author actually spelled my name correctly. I look forward to further additions, however, as the creationist strive to make the entry more complete by documenting my evil and my atrocities.

(No, I don’t go fishing through Wikipedia and the internet looking for instances of my name—I was told about it in email. I’m vain enough to want to avoid having people think I’m that vain.)