personal
pharyngula | October 10, 2008Richard Carrier and I will be speaking in Springfield on Saturday afternoon, in an event that has been blessed by the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. If you're in the neighborhood, you won't want to miss it!
And now I get to spend my afternoon sitting in an airplane. Ho hum.
sa smith | October 3, 2008So while you all were having fun watching the VP debate last night, I was at (am at) Viral Evolution 2008 listening to Marco Vignuzzi and Susanna Manrubia and Evilutionary Biologist talk about viral evolution. We are also drinking beer.
Im.
So.
Happy.
BRB!
jstemwedel | October 2, 2008You already know that we're working with DonorsChoose to raise some money for public school teachers who are trying to give their students the engaging educational experiences they deserve. You also know that our benevolent overlords at Seed will be randomly selecting some donors to receive nifty prizes (details about this to be posted as soon as I get them).
As I did last year, I'm going sweeten the deal by offering some incentive to everyone who donates to my challenge. And I'm adding a few new options this time around. Here's what you can get:
An original (and probably nerdy) poem,…
pharyngula | October 2, 2008Here are the details people wanted; there's more in the Facebook announcement. I understand it's scheduled for the same time as their homecoming football game, but you can always get the score to that later…come on around, we'll have a good time.
I'm looking forward to meeting Carrier, finally, and of course, all the Missourians. We should plan a Pharyngufest for that evening (it's a Saturday), so even if you do choose to go to a boring old football game, we can meet up later. Leave suggestions in the comments for good locations.
jstemwedel | September 30, 2008As promised, we had a party on Friday night.
Some highlights:
The venue, Tonic, is a lovely bar, very clean, full of comfy seating and open space, and adorned with three flatscreen TVs to add visual interest. Seeing as how this is now a Bleiman bar, the screens were utilized to show Blue Planet. After the eerily beautiful sea creatures, the next movie in the background was Gidget. Sadly, Gidget did not do battle with a giant squid.
But the point of the party wasn't video viewing, nor expertly muddled mojitos. It was hanging out in the three dimensional world, which we did.
I got to…
pharyngula | September 29, 2008I just received a big ol' mailing tube in the division office. The office staff made a little joke about how they'd rather I didn't open it there, just in case (the Catholics will be so happy — they've managed to instill fear in uninvolved innocents), so they missed out — it was a beautiful print, all for me.
Thank you!
I also received another present, a wonderfully warm hoodie with an exceptionally cute bit of art on the front. He's squinking hearts! And aren't I adorable in it?
No name was on the package, and there was just a note that revealed that the source was from France. C'est…
pharyngula | September 29, 2008This is a very simple, lucid video of Spencer Wells talking about his work on the Genographic Project, the effort to accumulate lots of individual genetic data to map out where we all came from.
I've also submitted a test tube full of cheek epithelial cells to this project, and Lynn Fellman is going to be doing a DNA portrait of me. I had my Y chromosome analyzed just because my paternal ancestry was a bit murky and messy and potentially more surprising, and my mother's family was many generations of stay-at-home Scandinavian peasantry, so I knew what to expect there. Dad turned out to be…
pharyngula | September 29, 2008I motored into my driveway at 1am last night, after a long day and a long flight from LA. And now you expect me to start blogging again? You people are so demanding.
Oh, well, it was a fun weekend, and you can see some of it already on the web. That wild man Scooter was there, and he made an audio recording of my talk at Libros Revolución. There was a good crowd there, including lots of Pharyngula regulars, and it wasn't your usual 'guy lectures at mob' sort of thing — it was more like a comment thread here. People kept interrupting me and throwing out their own ideas. I'd come with a fairly…
pharyngula | September 27, 2008I'm at the big Atheist Alliance conference, and this has been the very busy day, so I thought I'd just mention a few of the fun things going on.
Last night at Libros Revolución was a blast, and thanks especially to Keith for driving us around. Lots of familiar people from the threads here were present, as well as many new people. I do have to comment on one fellow (who can volunteer his identity if he wants):
Awesome tattoo.
At lunch, I got to sit next to Jill Sobule. She reads Pharyngula! Everyone say hello to Jill now. Of course, she also 'fessed up to reading WorldNutDaily for the…
pharyngula | September 26, 2008I'm getting some email from local people wanting to get together while I'm here in LA. The best opportunity is tonight (Friday, 26 September), when I'll be speaking downtown at Libros Revolución, at 312 W. 8th St (between Broadway & Hill streets). We're scheduled to start at 7:00pm, but due to the curiously static nature of evening traffic in LA, we'll probably offer a little leeway and may start a little later than that…and of course, if you can't make even our delayed starting time, I'll be hanging about afterwards, probably seeking out some nearby watering hole. So come whenever!
pharyngula | September 26, 2008Unfortunately, I left my red-green glasses at home, on the arm of my comfy chair, I think, so I had to settle for watching me looking flat. I was interviewed by 3D Science News, and they've just put the video of the first part online. Don't get your hopes up, Vincent Price was much better in the 3D House of Wax movie.
jstemwedel | September 25, 2008Just a quick reminder that the San Francisco party to celebrate one million comments on ScienceBlogs is tomorrow, Friday, September 26, starting at 9:00 PM at Tonic, 2360 Polk Street (at the corner of Union). I'll be there, as will the brothers Bleiman, Craig McClain, Josh Rosenau, and Razib. If you show up, you'll be there, too!
Also, don't forget that until the end of September you can still enter the drawing for a fabulous trip to New York City, including a dinner with your favorite ScienceBlogger.
pharyngula | September 25, 2008Uh-oh. I'm at the Atheist Alliance International conference, and I've just discovered the Klingons for Jesus site…and it's convinced me. I've converted. Should I cancel my talk, or should I go ahead and preach in Klingon to an audience of atheists?
P.S. If you're at the conference, too, and you'd like to get together for dinner, drop me a line, I'm free.
jstemwedel | September 23, 2008Actually, this might just be a question about my typing habits.
So, I'm typing along and I notice that I've hit a bad key at the beginning of a longish word (maybe even a longish word that's a few words before the word I'm in the middle of typing).
Having seen the typo, I want to fix it before I go on. So, I hit the delete key until I'm all the way back to the typo, then I retype it all correctly.
Now, it strikes me that this is a pretty inefficient way to correct the typo. Surely I would be better off moving the cursor and fixing the one faulty keystroke rather than doing all that deleting…
pharyngula | September 23, 2008This weekend, I'm going to be speaking at the Atheist Alliance International Convention, along with a team of secular luminaries. I'll be spending most of my time on a big boat, the Queen Mary, in Long Beach, but I will be creeping out to foment revolution at Libros Revolución on Friday, 26 September, at 7 pm. So even if you aren't going to the big conference, you can probably catch me saying rude things about dogma at the bookstore.
I'm planning an informal talk for this one, but I'll definitely be explaining the value of science in eroding belief, the importance of activism and protest,…
jstemwedel | September 22, 2008Another installment of the ongoing saga of the raised garden beds I planted back in July, in which we get to start enjoying the fruits (and vegetables) of our labors.
Those are soybean pods. In theory, if it looks like we'll have a big enough harvest, we might take a crack at making our own tofu. If not, we'll eat some as edamame and try to dry some for use later.
The purple beans are the first of the bush beans to maturity (although some yellow wax beans are on their way). Tragically, when cooked, these deep purple beans turn to a dark green color. (I'm tempted to try barely cooking…
edyong | September 22, 2008Well this is exciting... A year ago, I was asked to contribute to a book that would detail 1000 awesome scientific thinkers, discoveries and events over the last century, to be called the Little Black Book of Science. And after a long silence, it's finally out, albeit under the much less good title of "Defining Moments in Science".
I wrote 20 of the 1000 articles (2%, for the percentage-inclined) and in total, the book represents the combined efforts of 60 or so of the UK's finest science writers, including one of my co-bloggers at Cancer Research UK, Kat Arney. Many thanks to Hayley Birch…
pharyngula | September 22, 2008How is this for an intro?
The "magnificent P-Zed Myers," as he's known by Richard Dawkins, is a fearless heathen. The tagline of his blog Pharyngula reads: "Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal." He's publicly desecrated the Eucharist and been chastised by the Catholic League's Bill Donohue, bucked down libel suits, received countless death threats from religious kooks and he can kick God's old, white ass with nothing but his mind. Myers teaches biology at the University of Minnesota, Morris. We decided to give him a call.
The rest of the…
edyong | September 22, 2008Soooo... I have good news, bad news and good news.
The good news (well for me anyway) is that as of Friday I will be away for month of blissful holiday. If you listen closely, you will probably hear the sound of me exhaling loudly and cheering even more loudly as my wife and I head off to Australia for four weeks of wildlife, snorkelling, vineyards, really big rocks, and even a wedding in the middle.
The bad news, therefore, is that as of Friday, I will be unable to blog about new science for a month, as I give my precious, weary metacarpals a chance to rest. I may get dragged into action…
terrasig | September 20, 2008Dr Ernest Eliel, a past-president of the American Chemical Society, passed away in Chapel Hill, NC, on Thursday evening. Dr Eliel was 86.
His obituary notes:
Born December 28, 1921, in Cologne, Germany, Dr. Eliel was the son of the late Oskar and Luise Tietz Eliel. He moved to the United States in 1946, and received a Ph.D degree from the University of IL at Urbana-Champaign in 1948. Dr. Eliel lived in South Bend, IN, where he taught at the University of Notre Dame from 1948 until 1972, at which time he moved to Chapel Hill, where he was the W.R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Chemistry at the…