I'm thankful I don't have to live with these people

Well, this is just awesomeness incarnate. Go 1950s!



"You'd never credit her with thinking beyond her dolls." Ha! This keeps getting better and better!

Two further thoughts:

Is it just me, or is the eagle's eye a Communist sickle?

Also, it appears to have been produced in Lawrence, KS. The Lawrence, KS where I went to college. Where I got my degree in evolution. From Kansas.

I like legs...

...I use them all the time.

This lecture is all about legs--Neil Shubin discusses his recent discovery of missing-link Tiktaalik fossils in the Arctic. If nothing else, it's cool to hear words "Tiktaalik," "Nunavut," and "Devonian" used a bunch--make a drinking game out of it!

Dawkins being Dawkins

Here's another awesome video of Richard Dawkins being Richard Dawkins: Kicking ass, taking names, and discussing The God Delusion. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be embedable, and the video on the site is pretty small. Fortunately, iTunes has the video freely available in a larger format (just search for "Richard Dawkins"). Unfortunately, both versions annoyingly neglect to include shots of the slide presentation going on over his head, so one gets to play "guess what is pictured that the audience thinks is so funny." Fortunately, it comes with a free frogurt! Unfortunately, the frogurt is also cursed.

Reef protection

This clever lady is a former student of my advisor:

Thirsty in the fourth dimension

Well, this guy is a whole new kind of crazy. But in a good way.



I've seen his Klein bottles around for years--xmas is coming; who knows, maybe someone'll get me one!

Mmm...sea biscuits

Some pr0n for the evo-devo crowd. Here's a really cool video of the development of a young echinoderm. (Warning: Copious amounts of invertebrate sperm present.)

A Sea Biscuit's Life from Bruno Vellutini on Vimeo.

Complicated life

I suppose that the complexity of intracellular mechanics should be apparent from the fact that it took three billion years for life to evolve multicellularity, but only half a billion years to get from the simplest animals to humans (and its arguable that animals haven't gotten significantly more complicated in 100 million years, or more). Still, images like this very simplified cell map never fail to impress me:


Of course, this image knocks that into a cocked hat:


There's a lot of shit going on inside cells! Genome Projector is a cool program that, among many other things, allows one to explore these pathways.

I always liked archery...

...but I'm pretty sure this is impossible.

Cantor, Boltzmann, Gödel, and Turing

Oh my.

A BBC documentary on four of the greatest mathematicians of the last 150 years (well, three mathematicians and a physicist--Boltzmann seems kinda strangely shoehorned into this group; his work doesn't seem particularly attached to the others). It's actually a little light on content--it doesn't describe the Continuum Hypothesis, entropy, or the halting problem other than superficially. And it seems to fall prey to the common fallacious canard that entropy suggests that "all things must pass away," "all life must end," blah blah yada yada. Still, typically impressive BBC production: Interesting content, nice locations, good interviews. It's no Cosmos, but it's pretty good.



Also, we've got asylum, suicide, starvation, and suicide. Plus a jailing, chemical castration, and I lost count of how many breakdowns--apparently, being a great mathematician turns one into a raving nutter and/or leads to a life of suffering.

Yet another snarky anti-religion video

Yet another one, but it is pretty funny. I posted it because the Flying Spaghetti Monster makes an appearance towards the end, and I happen to recognize the photo as having been taken in the Atlanta Hyatt lobby during Dragon*Con, probably this last Labor Day. Go FSM! Go D*Con!

Infinite books

If only I had all the time in the world to read, this is the bookcase I would want:

Stellar software

Just downloaded Stellarium to my Mac (on the recommendation of Astronomycast). So far, it looks amazing! The interface is a little buggy, but not in any way that hampers use. The implementation, however, is smooth and beautiful.

Happy brithday, Carl

Carl Sagan would have been 74 yesterday. Happy birthday, Carl; we need more like you.



Carl Sagan's life and legacy.

Now this is important

OK, now we're getting to some important science: To hell with cancer research, artificial hearts, and the Large Hadron Collider, someone has scientifically determined the maximum amount of alcohol one can put into a Jell-O shot. The result? A standard 3oz sugar-free Jell-O packet can hold 24oz of vodka before falling apart (regular Jell-O can only hold 19oz of vodka, for some reason).


In other cool home science news, measuring the speed of light using chocolate chips and a microwave.

My god, it's full of stars

The European Southern Observatory just released a remarkable image: a deep field view of a speck of the sky (one half-millionth of the total sky).

So count every spot of light in the image, multiply by 500,000 for an approximation of the total number of galaxies in the observable universe, and multiply for another 100,000,000,000 for the total number of stars.

As Arthur C. Clarke said, “Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”

And, as Douglas Adams said, "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."

The original photo is huge--some 79MB and 27 million pixels--but there smaller versions available. Phil Plait's take on it is excellent, as always.

Summing up

Well, this about sums it all up: The complete history of the Universe in one image.

Purple's majesty

I've seen purple-shaded maps of the recent election, where areas are shaded according to percentage Rep/Dem, rather than strictly red/blue--specifically here, and PZ Myers discussion of them.

But I haven't seen one colored by state, which, granted, isn't as neatly nuanced as the one colored by county, or as impressive of the population-scaled version, but I figured it would be easy enough to calculate RGB values and do 50 fill areas in Photoshop, so here's my version:


The maximum difference between candidates was in Hawaii, so that's set to pure blue, and the rest are scaled accordingly. (DC was overwhelmingly for Obama, to the tune of 93%, so I ignored it so as not to squash the scale.)

Also, just because I keep crying every time I hear it, here's will.i.am et al.'s video "Yes We Can,"



which is also the new background music for palinaspresident.us, which movingly has the Oval Office restored to its former dignity. And now I'm crying again; this is ridiculous.

Make your voice heard during the transition; contact change.gov.

Well polled

fivethirtyeight.com has done an excellent job over the last several months of election season. Basically, they've been accumulating every poll that's conducted and aggregating them into one poll of polls.

How accurate were they? Well the last map they generated before the election was only wrong on Indiana (which had the third-smallest margin after MO and NC), with Missouri and North Carolina still too close to call at this point, but leaning the way predicted. They predicted the national popular vote to go Obama by 6.1%. Actual result (thusfar)? 63,244,187 Obama, 55,896,601 John McCain. Margin: 6.167%.

Good job, guys!

Steel and hot dogs

I don't know which is more awesome: using the sun to melt steel, or catching a hot dog on fire.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOT!!!!!!!!

Presumably I am not the only one breaking into tears at my desk every few minutes today. Our long national nightmare is (almost) over.