Adomancy

In case you were wondering, GrrlScientist has a link to Billboard’s list of number one songs, so you can find out what people were listening to on important dates in recent history.

For instance, in the month when I was conceived, the number one song in the US was “Teddy Bear” by Elvis Presley, and on the day I was born it was “Young Love” by Tab Hunter. Mom does like Elvis, and those songs are so appropriate that this might beat astrology as a signifier of prospective character.

Unfortunately, the number one song on the day I was married was “Another Brick in the Wall” by Pink Floyd. Never mind.

Koufax Award voting is open

Ummm, well…seven eight Koufax nominations is rather flattering. These are the semi-finals, though, so it may well be that none of them make it to the finals, and to then actually win one is an even more unlikely eventuality, but hey, here I am.

If you want to vote, all you have to do is follow the link and mention the entry or blog you like in a comment. This is a sensible left-wing blog, so unlike those weird wingers, you only vote once in each category, and all votes will be tallied manually and accurately by the hard-working team at Wampum. (and don’t be tempted to cheat—they know what they are doing.)

Now the point of this award isn’t for everyone who reads a high-traffic blog to stampede over there and vote automatically for said high-traffic blog—it’s to expose the range of talent out there in the liberal blogosphere. So even if you are certain you want to vote for Pharyngula, like because you’re married to the guy (hint, hint, Mary) or gave birth to him (Hi, Mom!), you should feel obligated to also check out the competition. Click around at least some of those links at Wampum before casting your vote. I promise I won’t get mad if you decide to vote for someone else.

Dr Free-Ride has a list of the science-relevant worthy competition. I could mention all the other great blogs and articles listed over there, but the quality of the competition depresses me. I’ll just list the Pharyngula nominations (but don’t forget to look over all the others!):

Best Blog (non-professional): Hah, yeah, right. I think Pharyngula may have been nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, too.

Best Expert Blog: Oh, I’ve been here before. Expect Juan Cole and Informed Comment to kick my butt again, unless some of the other great nominees decide to turn it into a tag-team butt-kicking.

Best Single Issue Blog: and the issue is ME.

Best Post: I’ve got three nominations for this category. Name the one post you like best of these (I’m pushing for “The proper reverence…”, myself).

Best Series: My infatuation with the bizarre sexual practices of invertebrates pays off. Vote for “Pharyngula invertebrate sex series” if you like this one, which includes this set of posts:

Most Humorous Post: An awful lot of people did not think this post was funny at all. If it makes it to the finals, expect mass rioting in middle America.

It’s nice to get all those nominations, but we must also have balance. So here, as a counterweight, is some email I got today. It was titled “Probably the Worst Site of All Time”, which is rather impressive, actually.

Your Blog, or whatever it is, is not scientific. It is pure delusion, masking itself as reasoning, and scientific.

The fact that you portray yourself as a “Liberal” simply adds to the unscientific thinking that masks your ideological psuedoscientific nonsense.

Perhaps a good shot of bourbon is all you need, to bring you into reality.

The wonders of the modern “university” are amazing. And since when was ignorance a point of view?

Uh-oh. I bet he’s going to vote for Juan Cole, isn’t he?

Aww, heck. I’m getting a lot of hate mail this morning (weird correlation: any time I criticize Powerline, I get a spike in the angry mail for a week or two afterwards.) Here’s a classic; this one is titled, “Read this azz”.

if you people think that eveything you see in the world was from evaluation then you are the dumbist mother fucker out there. live to complex to just have evolved from a single cell.and if the dna code is wrighten to that animal then you can not get highter life forms from that code wrighen for that animal .i got lots more if you wanna get in to a debat

No, not the debat! I fear the great skills of this typically knowledgeable and literate creationist—I hope he doesn’t hit me with another one from his vast store of deep arguments.

Shiny

Unlike Orac, I’m happy with the ship I’ve been assigned; I suspect Chris wouldn’t mind ending up on the good ship Serenity, either, although Chad might have some gripes (oddly, I’m less bothered by the wacky physics of the Firefly universe than I am by the abominable biology of Trek).

We science bloggers really are a bunch of geeks, aren’t we?

i-27c5ba1f7740e32636630b694860f696-serenity.jpg
You scored as Serenity (Firefly). You like to live your own way and don’t enjoy when anyone but a friend tries to tell you should do different. Now if only the Reavers would quit trying to skin you.

Serenity (Firefly)
88%

Deep Space Nine (Star Trek)
81%

Moya (Farscape)
75%

Babylon 5 (Babylon 5)
69%

Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix)
69%

Enterprise D (Star Trek)
69%

Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda)
63%

Millennium Falcon (Star Wars)
63%

SG-1 (Stargate)
44%

Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica)
38%

Bebop (Cowboy Bebop)
31%

FBI’s X-Files Division (The X-Files)
19%

Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics)
created with QuizFarm.com

A great loss to caninity

Sad news: Carl Buell and Hank Fox have lost a good friend, Tito.

Dogs are easy animals to get to know, sometimes too easy. I haven’t been able to bear the thought of having a dog again since the day, when I was 12, that I stepped off the school bus one afternoon to find my dog, Snoop, crushed and broken by the side of the road. At least it sounds like Tito had a good life and a dignified end.

Carl has put up a short photo essay and testament to Tito.

Spore

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A reader sent me a link to this video of Spore by Will Wright—it’s the new simulation/god game/tinker toy by the maker of SimCity and the Sims. It looks very, very cool, and I think I’m going to want a copy when it’s available for my computer—but one thing has to be cleared up.

This is not a game about evolution.

It’s highly teleological, with a preset goal of achieving high intelligence—which is a painfully unrealistic and skewed perspective. Why shouldn’t we be able to play to become the very best squid we can be? I guess it’s necessary to constrain the advancement path of the game to something manageable, but I hope they’re crystal clear about the fact that they’re modeling something that does not resemble evolution much at all.

It still looks fun. It looks like they’ve overcome some of the limitations that made the old SimLife and SimEarth such bores, but there’s always the risk that every game here will also end up being the same, with just some more elaborate cosmetics.

Friday Random Ten…really

OK, I should balance my non-random ten with a random ten, so here they are:

Somewhere In Texas The Raveonettes
Strange Fruit Billy Holiday
Three Bikes in the Sky Tangerine Dream
Woman Of Heart And Mind Joni Mitchell
Us Regina Spektor
Black Milk Eighth From The Egg
Tanaka Sound Saian Supa
Truth is (featuring Robert Smith) Tweaker
O Skeewiff where art thou? (man of constant sorrow) Skeewiff
All Apologies Nirvana
Sacala Don Omar, Wisin Y Yandel & Hector
You Don’t Know What Love Is Chucho Valdez

Friday Semi-Non-Random Ten

These things have a way of snowballing…Luis kindly sends me a couple of Roy Zimmerman CDs, I make a comment about it, and next thing you know, the friendly people at Meta4Records send me the other albums he has made. I’ve got the complete collection now! So I created a Zimmerman playlist in iTunes, set it to shuffle, and present to you the first ten.

“Acid On Picture Day…” Roy Zimmerman Comic Sutra
You’re Pretty Roy Zimmerman Comic Sutra
Hula Yule Roy Zimmerman Peacenick
My TV Roy Zimmerman Homeland
Dick Cheney Roy Zimmerman Security
T.M.I. Roy Zimmerman Comic Sutra
Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung Roy Zimmerman Security
Saddam Shame Roy Zimmerman Security
Think Different Roy Zimmerman Homeland
Nothing But The Best Roy Zimmerman Peacenick

These CDs are incredibly healthy. You know how, when you read the news about the latest atrocities from the Republicans, and your blood pressure starts to rise, and you’re turning purple, and you’re starting to shred the newspaper or scream at the TV? That’s probably not good for you. What you can do instead is play a little Zimmerman, and he’ll make fun of the Bushites for you—you’ll still feel peevish and have a desire to do something about it, but the humor will take the edge off. It’s going to add years to my life.

As an added bonus, playing liberal folkie music like this around Republicans makes them turn a choleric purple and grind their teeth—if it doesn’t kill them slowly, at the least you’ll know they’re going to spend their declining years with inflamed gums and a diet they have to suck through a straw.

A grim start to Spring Break

Spring break starts…NOW. I’m done with classes for the day, and just have to make a trip out to St. Cloud to pick up my son for the weekend and my obligations are temporarily over, sort of.

Way back at the beginning of the term when spring break seemed far, far away, I scheduled an exam for my physiology course (75 students) and my introductory biology course (35 students) for this week; I also had my intro students turn in a writing assignment this week, and because they had done poorly on one rather important exercise, had also assigned an extra paper, also due now. There is a rather terrifyingly full box of papers sitting on my desk, growling softly to remind me of its existence now and then. I know that if I neglect it it will glare more ferociously and grow claws and fangs and get increasingly vicious; if I wait until the last weekend of the break to deal with it, it will try to kill me. So I’m going to take it out early. I swear, I will annihilate the contents of that evil box this weekend, splattering every page with red.

That box is evil. I hate it. I will gut it soon, one page at a time.

Swamps are lovely

Darksyde’s latest Science Friday is an interview with Michael Grunwald on the subject of the Florida Everglades. It’s a mostly bad news with threads of forlorn hope scattered throughout, like most environmental news.

The bad news is that the ecosystem is in a state of near-collapse. Lake Okeechobee is going to hell; it’s the color of espresso. The Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries are just gross. And CERP is already way over budget, behind schedule, and off track; Congress is losing interest in funding it. The good news is that there are signs that Floridians are beginning to recognize that their way of life is not sustainable. Posh towns like Fort Myers, Sanibel, Stuart and Jupiter are in revolt over the decline of the estuaries; retirees are having trouble breathing at the beach. Governor Bush shocked enviros by taking their side in a battle over sprawl in Miami-Dade County. A plan to build a massive biotech campus at the edge of the Everglades–maybe the biggest project in Florida since Disney–was blocked by an environmental lawsuit; now it looks like it’s going to move to a more sensible location. And remember: several million acres of the Everglades ecosystem is already in public ownership. So there’s hope.