Adventures in Ethics and Science

Taking a very brief break in the dungeon of grading to partake of this meme, with which I have been hoping to be tagged for months. (Indeed, I wasn't really officially tagged -- Julie was, but she's busy writing papers and stuff, so I'm helping her out by pinch-hitting for her on the meme.)

No mere time-waster, this meme was started by PZ Myers at Pharyngula as a means of demonstrating evolution in cyberspace.

The rules:

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...".

Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

• You can leave them exactly as is.
• You can delete any one question.
• You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question.

  For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is..." to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is...", or "The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is...", or "The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is...".



• You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is..."


• You must have at least one question in your set, or you've gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you're not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions. Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

My ancestry:

My (great)^10-grandparent is Pharyngula.
My (great)^9-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My (great)^8-grandparent is Flying Trilobite.
My (great)^7-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock.
My (great)^6-grandparent is Primate Diaries.
My (great)^5-grandparent is Thus Spake Zuska.
My (great)^4-grandparent is a k8, a cat, a mission.
My (great)^3-grandparent is Monkeygirl.
My (great)^2-grandparent is DancingFish.
My great-grandparent is "No One".
My grandparent is Field Notes.
My parent is The Clutter Museum.

The best children's novel in SF/Fantasy is: The Children of Morrow
The best recent movie in comedy is: The Simpsons Movie
The best karaoke song in country music is: the theme to "Rawhide"
The best cult novel in classic fiction is: Moby-Dick
The best high-fat food in Mexican cooking is: chiles rellenos
The best dissertation-related words I ever received from a scholar are: "Persuading four people on your committee is reasonably close to being right."
The best syndicated column in free weekly newspapers is: The Straight Dope by Cecil Adams.

I am propagating this meme on to:

evolgen
Hope for Pandora
DrugMonkey
Rants of a feminist engineer
The Splintered Mind
Lab Cat

and to anyone else who wants to play along.