Last night, I had a nightmare about trying to reach ScienceOnline '09: our plane landed, and for some reason dismissed by everybody else as charming local colour, it had to taxi through the Appalachian foothills for five hours. It's probably for the best that ScienceBlogs.com will be undergoing a software upgrade starting tomorrow, causing posting and commenting to be temporarily disabled. I mean, my subconscious could probably use the vacation.
So, while I won't be saying anything here, there are good essays into life and learning elsewhere on the Blogohedron:
So, there's this video. It's apparently for a German electronics retailer whose motto is, roughly translated, "We hate expensive".
Phil thought it looked really kewl. P-Zed agreed, but he said that it portrayed evolution as a linear progression along a Great Chain of Being, and that this is the sort of bad media which fosters misconceptions about evolution.
All of that was somewhere in my head when I first watched it, but I must confess my initial reaction was more like the following: "Cyborg women? Robots? Evolving robots? Misconceptions about evolution? At the risk of sounding all Denyse O'Leary — I wrote about that in my book!"
Tomorrow evening I will be attending Boston's First Night festivities, which involve things like illuminated ice sculptures and whatnot outside and various artistic performances indoors. Joshua successfully inveigled me into attending a theatrical performance in the Orpheum, on the rationale that he would be in it. All that time I could have spent arguing on the Internet — gone! Forever! SIWOTI Cat would be displeased.
And speaking of the Internet, this blag had some spam issues over the holidays (comments were posted linking to Turkish prison pornography, and such). Consequently, I will be realigning the dilithium crystals, drawing new pentagrams in undergrads' blood and whatnot behind the scenes. If any of the Gentle Reader's comments are delayed in appearance, that's just me, trying to find a workable balance.
Coming from the perspective of an individual who conducts medical research in evolutionary genetics, I have found that very few people outside of the world I work have been exposed to all of the ways evolutionary biology interfaces with medicine. My hope is that with this edition of Grand Rounds those who have not yet been exposed to this topic become, at the very least, sufficiently intrigued.
I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more.
Vladimir Nabokov
The other day after brunch, my friend Rebecca Watson said to me, "Skepchick is still getting nine hundred hits per day for Maria's review of Twilight." Yes, she and I both spend so much time on the damn Internet that we basically speak in hyperlinks. What's more, Rebecca said, the comments attracted by Maria's review — published the better part of a month before — were reaching new lows, descending to abyssal domains more familiar from YouTube. Shortly thereafter, Elles at Teen Skepchick got into the game by asking, if I may paraphrase, "Why is a 106-year-old vampire stalking a teenage girl any less creepy than Humbert Humbert stalking a nymphet?"
This is, I should think, a genuinely non-rhetorical question — loosely speaking, perhaps even a scientific one — about human behaviour. Why is it that readers of Lolita (1955) took the events described therein in one way, while readers of Twilight (2005) cast an analogous series of events in a remarkably different light? Where are the Humbert Humbert fans shouting into the Intertubes, "But it was OK because HE LOVED HER!"?
1. Insist on calling modern biology "Darwinism", despite perennially repeated explanations that science has advanced since 1859, and thus that calling evolution "Darwinism" is like calling all modern music "Brahmsism".
2. Complain that "Darwinism" is still mired in the 19th century.
On the evening of the twenty-fifth, my family and I were watching the DVD I'd given my mother for Christmas, All The President's Men (1976). This was, she told me, the movie which got everybody to go to journalism school; some time thereafter, they were all disappointed by, among other things, the fact that Woodward and Bernstein did not look like the young Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford. Midway through the film, I thought to myself, "This would make the perfect lead-in anecdote for a post on that argument currently bubbling on the Blogohedron about the relative roles of bloggers and journalists!"
Indeed, a theme of science communication ran through the gifts exchanged this year, even if it was a theme inaudible to anybody except me. What's more, the thoughts provoked by these gifts go off in directions largely orthogonal to the standard, tediously cyclic arguments which people in these parts like to have. Consequently, I can indulge myself in that most subtle of blogospheric pleasures: being ignored!
I got a copy of Phil Plait's Death From The Skies! (2008), for example. While reading it, I had the distinct impression, "This would make a great TV show!" I may have had this impression because I fell ill before the holidays and thus had the choice to spend Christmas either feeling feverish or feeling medicated, but in my congested delirium, Death From The Skies! was perfect for TV.
If I like what I see, I'll receive 5 more issues (6 in all) for just $19.95. If I'm not completely satisfied, I'll simply write "cancel" on the invoice and owe nothing. The free issue is mine to keep.
![[sex and science]](http://www.sunclipse.org/downloads/sexandscience3.png)
