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grrlscientist | December 22, 2007I'm tempting the fates by putting my words above the fold this time.
death (15x) dangerous (11x) sex (8x) crap (7x) hell (6x) dead (5x) murder (4x) bitch (3x)
It seems that the naughty word sensor on that site gets burned out rather quickly, because it didn't pick up "whore" or "sexy" this time, and further, I didn't beat Rana at all, although we are tied at this point.
my evil word list;
death death death death death death death death death death death death death death
dangerous dangerous dangerous dangerous dangerous dangerous dangerous dangerous dangerous dangerous
sex sex sex sex sex…
grrlscientist | December 22, 2007Rana was bragging in comments to the previous entry about his blog movie rating. Naturally, being the competitive sort, I had to try to beat his score by using even more naughty words than he did. But did I succeed in my quest? No, I did not.
whore (3x) sexy (2x)
One way to game the system; put your naughty words above the fold ...
... Because it doesn't pick up words that are below the fold, apparently;
death death death death death death death death death death death death death death
dangerous dangerous dangerous dangerous dangerous dangerous dangerous dangerous dangerous dangerous
sex…
grrlscientist | December 21, 2007
I've done this before, but thought I'd try it again. This time, my blog is rated "PG" for parental guidance. The reason? I used the word "whore" three times, and the word "sexy" once.
gregladen | December 21, 2007I'll just show you some of the reviews of this product, and then give you the link, and I'm sure you will purchase one instantly!!!!
I was stuck for a present this christmas, so promptly ordered 5 of these ... for my child after reading the positive reviews.
Great for gouging my ex boyfriend's left eyeball out when I caught him cheating with my best friend.
Me Tarzan, This is incredible, I have been burning the end of sticks ... for years, then for my last Christmas Jane bought me this! Me love Jane.
This product is not edible.
Do not make the same mistake I did and with the lack of warning…
sb admin | December 21, 2007The Pump Handle will be on hiatus for the remainder of the year.
We wish all of our readers and friends a healthy, peaceful 2008.
grrlscientist | December 21, 2007tags: citation, book reviews
Wow, one of my book reviews was cited on the authors' webpage. It's nice to see that my writing is appreciated outside of the blogosphere, even if it is only a book review. I never would have thought that anything I wrote would be cited alongside Nature, Neuron, New Scientist, Psychology Today and the Washington Post.
grrlscientist | December 21, 2007tags: Just Write, blog carnivals
The fourth edition of the blog carnival, Just Write is now available for you to enjoy. This carnival focuses on all aspects of the writing game.
gregladen | December 21, 2007No, no, she didn't die. My past-tensing of the verb "to live" (sorry about the verbing of the noun "tense") is a clever trick. But today is a big day in British History.
You see, today is the very first day that Queen Elizabeth of England becomes the oldest person to ever sit on the throne of England. Today, the Queen is 81 yars and 244 days old, one day more than Queen Victoria on her last day on the big ugly chair. She is expected to live many more years.
The Throne:
[source]
petnoyer | December 21, 2007
Here's an old favorite from April 2006.
An enormous sea anemone from 2500m depth on the East Pacific Rise was reported in in the journal Marine Biology. The monstrous actiniarian Boloceroides daphneae is abundant on boulders, cliffs, and rocky outcrops near hydrothermal vent sites but not on them, writes author Marymegan Daly from Ohio State University. The largest living specimen she found had a column diameter of 1m, a tentacle crown of 2m diameter, and tentacles trailing an estimated 3m and more. That's just downright dangerous. B. daphneae's closest living relative is the comparatively…
blue_expo | December 20, 2007The Effect of Spinal Cord Severing in Zebrafish
Blue Expo
ABSTRACT
Previous research indicates that nervous and cardiac tissue regeneration occurs in zebrafish because they lack some inhibitory characteristics found in mammals. The purpose of this project was to observe spinal cord regeneration in zebrafish of various stages of development. Zebrafish spinal cords were severed and the surviving groups were observed for visible signs of neural regeneration at that site. Revascularization was visible in zebrafish from later trials but no neural regeneration was observed in this experiment.…
pharyngula | December 20, 2007Someone did—they lost it on an airplane, and the information on it hints that it is someone from the University of Minnesota Morris. If you think it's yours, go here: the WaltzingRhino Weblog might be able to return it to you.
The owner, a UMM student, has been found, and the iPod is coming home. I think WaltzingRhino must be one of the good guys.
petnoyer | December 20, 2007We have a new state in this country! Welcome number 53. It's called "The State of Deep Coral Ecosystems of the United States"
Of course, it's not a state, really, in the Nunavut sense of the word. This is a federal deep-sea coral report prepared by NOAA's Coral Reef Conservation Program to address the status of our knowledge about deep corals and the capacity of our federal government to manage deep coral habitat.
The "State of Deep Coral Ecosystems..." report was commissioned, in effect, by the President's Ocean Action Plan, so we take it seriously here at DSN. Seriously. It's a…
cortex | December 20, 2007I always assumed that the best race horses simply had the best genes. It seemed like the kind of domain where nature trumped nurture, where the genetics of fast twitch fibers and heart size was more important than the details of training. But my assumptions were exactly backwards:
The offspring of expensive stallions owe their success more to how they are reared, trained and ridden than good genes, a study has found.
Only 10% of a horse's lifetime winnings can be attributed to their bloodline, research in Biology Letters shows.
By far the biggest factor was the horse's environment - the way…
cortex | December 20, 2007Since it's supposed to be the season of charity, that time of year when we remember those who are less fortunate than we are, I thought I'd post on altruism and the brain, since there have recently been a few interesting studies. The basic moral of these experiments is that we are built to be altruistic. We are social animals that have evolved the ability to care about each other.
Consider a paper recently published in Nature Neuroscience. Scientists at Duke University imaged the brains of people as they observed a computer play a simple video game. Because the subjects were told that the…
petnoyer | December 20, 2007There is so much happening in the field of deep-sea coral research right now that there is no way to cover everything in detail without cheating you out of some of the excitement, so I'll list it all in a couple posts and let you pick through it over the holidays. This assumes you're interested, of course.
I really hope you are interested, because Craig tells me he's going away for a week over Christmas, leaving me to "let it snow, let it snow," so as far as I am concerned, it's Instant Anthozoa here at DSN. If that makes you uneasy, Craig has a few ghost-posts in store, so please don't flee…
cmcclain | December 20, 2007This is a notice that DSN has changed names to The Davy Jones News Report. Kidding...Because of the slowness of end-o-year, deep-sea related news, I decided to end the week with a discussion, with the thanks of Wikipedia, of the origins of Davy Jones and his deadly locker, Arrgh!
NOUN: The bottom of the sea, especially as the grave of all who perish at sea.
The phrase actually goes back at least two centuries, the first known reference comes from Tobias Smollett, author of The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle in 1751:
This same Davy Jones, according to the mythology of sailors, is the fiend…
pharyngula | December 19, 2007You know how I mentioned the other day that a snowblower was a romantic gift? Don't look if you're squeamish, but here's an x-ray of a snow-blower related injury. Actually, the x-ray isn't so bad, but the picture below it, in which the fingertip was yanked off, pulling the whole tendon with it like pulling the laces out of a boot, might really ruin the romance for you.
Ouch.