fun
clock | September 6, 2008Jonathan describes, step by step.
I wonder if there are any palindromic sequences to be found?
awild | August 31, 2008This video clip looks like it is straight off cute overload, but the sweetness is offset by Of Montreal's dark sense of humour and heavy bass-line. This song is Wraith Pinned to the Mist (and Other Games), from the album The Sunlandic Twins.  I wonder if somewhere a student writing a thesis on their song titles...
Have a great weekend!
-J
stoat | August 31, 2008Best climate cartoon for a long time: http://xkcd.com/402/
Attached to some serious science via Nature.
clock | August 24, 2008Totally awesome: Dimensions:
Nine chapters, two hours of maths, that take you gradually up to the fourth dimension. Mathematical vertigo guaranteed!
Hat-tip: quixote
clock | August 24, 2008But, how many fonts are out there anyway?
Or perhaps Nature is secretly diversifying its operations ;-)
But what would be the formula for calculating Impact Factor of pet food?
d = maximal distance of projectile vomiting
t = time between the onset of feeding and onset of projectile vomiting
m = total mass of vomited material as percent of ingested food
k = coefficient that normalizes the pet size to 15kg regardless of the actual size of the animal.
So, how does one plug these values in?
clock | August 22, 2008
My favourite discipline is citation gymnastics! What is yours? Can you invent a new sport?
clock | August 21, 2008Remember when I wrote about Squishables?
They have arrived! Left to right: puppy, panda, penguin and hedgehog (guess what is whose):
clock | August 20, 2008There is this food meme going around everywhere, so I checked out what Chad, Archy, Mark CC and Rev. BigDumbChimp picked. I have to admit I had to use Google for a lot of these, often realizing that I have, indeed, tasted some of these but under a different name. Different people do it differently, i.e., adding comments, or bolding those they tried, perhaps also italicizing those that they tried and spit in disgust. Here is my list with comments:
1. Venison (deer and elk). Yes. Very tasty.
2. Nettle tea. Yes. Not very tasty, but OK.
3. Huevos rancheros. No. Mexican food is too new and…
awild | August 19, 2008I've always been fond of playful and irreverent scientific names, so imagine my delight when I discovered that Paul Marsh, the taxonomist I will be working with over the coming year, is the same Paul Marsh who brought us the classic wasp names Heerz tooya, Heerz lukenatcha, and Verae peculya.
I'll be supporting Paul's morphological studies in the taxonomically troublesome wasp genus Heterospilus with molecular genetic data, but be warned. There are several hundred species yet to be named in the genus, and who knows what sort of nomenclatural mischief awaits.
clock | August 13, 2008Do you think we can smuggle Juno into the movie theater to watch this with us:
clock | August 4, 2008There are lots of meetings and events this week....
The biggie this week is, of course, SciFoo, the third iteration of the most amazing meeting of scientists, techies and other interesting people who tend to think outside the box. I never hid my disappointment that my last year's participation did not lead to a repeat invitation this year. Perhaps next year....
For those in the Bay Area at the time, both those arriving a couple of days early for SciFoo and for those who live there, there is BioBarCamp which is described as an "unconference focused on life sciences, biotechnology, synthetic…
clock | July 31, 2008At Stripped Science. Here is one (I guess this is within the Fair Use principle, you'll have to click on the link and go there to see the other strips):
awild | July 30, 2008...documented in detail at the Photoshop Disasters Blog.
The number of major corporations guilty of egregious image manipulation errors is surprising.