Atomic Nerds

We sneezy and sleepy. Read the previous post. Come back tomorrow.

To borrow a concept from Roberta, and also to give myself a little reminder list about things I plan to do, the current state of the to-do list.

- How stuff works: your metabolism and you. No diet and exercise and this-is-healthy stuff, just the nuts and bolts of what the food is made of, what hardware and software you have to process it with and where it goes and how it’s used. Rather boring for me to write due to density, but evidently there is a desire for this sort of bare bones written readably without a sales pitch on the side.

- Evolution, yay: Why on earth do human women go through menopause, otherwise known as “This is probably not the end of the question you should be starting from”.

- Game review: Mass Effect 2. May not bother with this one, as it’s fairly similar to the Mass Effect review except they fixed most of the annoyances. Will consist mainly of “SQUEE I LOVE THIS GAME” if written.

- Fiction rant: the Sherlock Holmes universe and certain consistent trends in adaptation decay. If I’m fortunate will turn into a longer discussion on how we as a culture handle cerebral characters.

- Fiction rant: the scarcity of normal, stable relationships in mainstream fiction. Intense and lifelong bonds of friendship are not only permissible but admirable, but in romantic pairings couples who somehow remain in relationships despite apparently neither liking nor trusting one another are the norm. (Yes, I know the basic reason why this is- easy and continuously milked source of conflict to move the plot along or create B-plot fireworks- but it’s still lazy writing and lots of other forms of similarly motivated lazy writing are less common.)

On Mick Jagger’s side, allegedly. Not so much mine today. Sorry.

In the comments to my previous post, commenter Justin gave a link to an Insane Clown Posse music video discussing the wonder of the universe and asked for our comment. It’s a nice day and I’m feeling much more like having a beer and playing some Warcraft than banging my head on the wall trying to get thinky, so I’m happy to oblige him. The video is here:

It’s fairly cool- although I could have lived without the pregnant-belly shot- though I note that once they get into the magnets and such there’s pretty much a statement to scientists to fuck right off and not ruin the wonder of it all by explaining. (Hint: if you had been paying attention in high school physics, they should have gotten into magnetism. It’s not actually the complicated.)

I don’t really get that attitude. I find magic and miracles boring in concept; they may be zazzy, but they’re also an explanation that goes “an inexplicable entity decided to do it, the end”. The bare bones of science and the simplified lies-to-children explanations of natural law can indeed be boring and wonder-killing, but once you get far enough into learning those bare bones, you begin to understand enough of it that the wonder comes rushing back and then some, because it only gets more elegant and lovely the further in you get.

One of the things I’ve never been able to understand about the literalist variety of creationists is that they don’t seem to understand how very little glory their version affords the creator compared to the story that physics, chemistry, and evolutionary biology tell. The literalist creator zapped some lights in the sky and animals into existence with an act of fiat; if you assume a creator is the author of natural law, that intelligence managed to write a short book of rules from which the entirety of the cosmos formed by cascading effect, with minute differences in values of atomic weights and physical constants making the difference between a lot of heat and rocks and planets with life.

I don’t believe in such a creator, but I do know which version I find more impressive- and which attitude to life I find more of a source of awe.

I promised a contrast in the title of the post; here’s the first video from the wonderful Symphony of Science series, perhaps the best use ever found for the autotuner and a very good source of the encapsulation of that sense of scientific wonder. I’ll grant ICP have more musical talent than Carl Sagan (WOOP!), but I’d rather watch Carl.

In honor of Boobquake, which surprisingly enough seems to have produced results contra to hypothesis, I’m reposting probably the first thing here to ever get widely linked, from just about exactly two years ago. Stingray’s contribution repost can be found below.

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It seems that if I’m going to go with the will of the people, I have no choice but to write about the all-time most popular search string we ever get. So be it.

Although they have been a truly enduring fixation of humanity, the presence and purpose of the female breasts remain something of a puzzle and a source of speculation to evolutionary biologists and anthropologists. While all mammals have mammary glands and most of them have nipples that swell into teats when there are nursing young, the female human is the only one that has permanently swollen teats from puberty on. There are plenty of reasons for women NOT to have breasts; they’re unwieldly, metabolically expensive (as completely unnecessary fatty tissue), and when they’re particularly large, they cost their owners a good deal of pain due to the back strain of having what amounts to a pair of weights up front day in and out. They don’t even need to be larger than average to make running more problematic for a woman than they are for the average man. What’s even worse, they’re prone to cancer- and there isn’t even a nursing advantage for offspring in large breasts; it makes things only more awkward for the infant and mother alike. The question of why we’re saddled with them is therefore more compelling than it would be for a feature with fewer costs. It’s trivially obvious that breasts carry a large sexual selection advantage for the female, but why?

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Did the actual cooking for the next Cooking Noob this afternoon, for something that needs to sit for a day before the eating, then went out to dinner and consumed excellent sushi immediately afterward. Just got back.

No post for you!

Turkey day went fine, including the actual turkey, which was deliciously tender and flavorful. That “BB” ale, for those who remember it from Blogorado, may not be much to drink but makes one hell of an addition to a brine.

We ourselves are generally thankful for family, friends, and the metric ton of leftovers about the house, on which we graze like particularly plump Eloi.

Actual content when the Thanksgiving Weekend case of extreme laziness wears off, which will happen who knows when?

This “total lack of anything to say” thing is starting to get severely old.

Anyway, have some linkage: Lunch, With Hawk. Exactly what it says on the tin: a man with a camera stops to have some nice barbecued chicken, only to have his lunch perched in by a hawk. If I had to make a wild-ass guess, I’d say it was a juvenile redtail- thus explaining the disorganized plumage, the presence in New York, and the cluelessness- but truth be told I’m not *that* great at hawk identification unless it’s presenting some nice clear collection of field marks to me. The commenters seem to think it’s a Cooper’s, though everyone seems to agree that’s a confused young thing.

Neat photos and the cook in the end is general proof of the badassness of cooks.

…Because we didn’t, but one was shipped here anyway. It’s made content generation a bit tougher than usual; Stingray’s spent the week chewing on the walls and I’m fresh out of ideas.

So, for my readers with an interest in very early human history, a question: what colors would be available to a stone age or just plain primitive artist who wished to mark up a cave wall or rock with some nice paintings or petroglyphs, assuming he had pretty much any naturally possible to work with?

Also, for those who participated in last week’s meme, I haven’t forgotten about you- it’s just that coming up with five questions for everybody takes more creative energy than I thought it would, and that’s what llamas feed on before they get to your sanity.

So in my last Cooking Noob post, the majority of the comments I got about from friends later was not so much about the food but about an aside I had made while slicing mushrooms about how they’re a bit phallic and coincidentally also the sexual organ of the fungus and not actually the main fungal body itself.

Field biologists, who deserve their reputation within biology for being the most, ah, eccentric group, have one-upped me this week.

One of the more venerable models of field biology, if you’re not going to go sit on your ass following a group of social animals for nine months out of the year and write about them for the other three (like being a soap opera writer, except much less comfortable), is getting a whole pack of them together, begging your respective parent institutions for some money, and going off somewhere remote where the species are barely known at all and spending all your time on expense on discovery and collection- finding things no one else has seen, sticking them in jars or rough and ready taxidermy jobs, and once verifying their newness upon returning home, reporting the basic details of their existence to the world and then the best part, giving it a name.

Well, a herpetologist named Robert Drewes who is apparently well experienced in this sort of expeditionary science, having already gotten a frog and a snake named after him, made what was either the serendipitous or unfortunate choice to include a mycologist friend of his on his next trip to Remote Island No One That Speaks Latin Ever Goes, Africa. As hoped for, they netted some new species, including the mycologist, who discovered a new species of stinkhorn.

Now, when I say table mushrooms are phallic, you need a little bit of imagination. However, stinkhorns look like this:

The new species looks like this:

Given a world of possibilities, the mycologist opted not to name it after himself (although so far as I know he might already have half a dozen mushrooms named after him), but after his esteemed friend, colleague, and expedition leader: thus the newest species to join Dr. Drewes’ list of conquests is Phallus Drewesii. The genus name actually isn’t new- Phallus is a pre-existing and well-known genus, the one to which the common stinkhorn belongs. Dr. Drewes got the honor partly because he is the esteemed expedition leader, fearless leader, and all-father, but mostly because it’s one of the smallest representatives of the genus ever discovered.

And thus, by the hallowed rules of taxonomy, will be how a camp dick joke became immortalized in the Linnean system forever. I love science so much right now I think I may cry.

*sniff*

Tonight was spent recording the latest Vicious Circle, which I can report adheres to all previous standards of production values, decorum, and topicality. Which means it’s more of the same group of friends delivering snark on which your mileage may seriously vary. Given that I’ve spent the entire weekend catching up on what was apparently a large sleep deficit, that’s left, once again, little room for serious organized content production.

So, instead I’ll answer a question that’s clearly burning in the minds of Americans, given that it came up on said podcast.

“Will eating ants hurt my cat?”

No. No it will not. Eating ant POISON will hurt your cat, which is why there are a number of sources out there for dealing with ants when you have pets you don’t want eating poison. (Short version: borax probably won’t cause any problems as long as your cat isn’t a total retard, diamotaceous earth is totally safe, and something brand-named as “Terro” also works.) Ants contain hard shells and formic acid, which may eventually upset your cat’s stomach if he has a sensitive gut, but no real harm will be done.

Keep your cats the hell away from fire ant mounds, though- a swarm of pissed off fire ants can kill kitty with no ingestion required.

This has been your Burning Question of the Day.

Upcoming: gossip about others, pictures, R. Lee Ermey, and we troll H.S. Precision, which is apparently really sensitive still about the Lon Horiuchi thing, though not in the way they should be.

In the meantime, this is the first space we’ve had to breathe since ten this morning, so. To bed.

The good news is I finally found something of some substance to write about. The bad news is it’s not getting finished tonight. In the meantime, have a sci fi short story. I promise it’s actually short, and it’s part of what I’m writing about: BLIT.

For those of you that don’t like sci fi and don’t care that I’m going to spoil it, go watch Zero Punctuation for awhile. It’s probably more fun if you’ve not actually played the game in question, because then you aren’t going “YAHTZEE YOU PRICK”.

Good fucking god it’s been a long weekend, and not in the nice, lying-around-with-a-drink-and-a-book kind of way.

You are a Social Liberal (76% permissive) and an… Economic Conservative (81% permissive) You are best described as a: Libertarian Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid Also : The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

Yeah, I don’t expect anyone is surprised. I’m certainly not.

Once again, I have absolutely no context for this, as the furthest back I was able to trace the link was to a blog post with no other commentary. So I don’t know where this is, or who these people are, I only know that this looks like the most fun you can have at the opera without a paintball gun. It’s the audience participation that really makes it.

Original Numa Numa Guy lives here, for anyone that needs a refresher on YouTube Videos That Became Inexplicable Crazes.

I finally woke up today feeling more or less human again, although thanks to the ravages of whatever bug I’ve been fighting off, I SOUND as though my voicebox has been removed and replaced with the squeaker from one of the dogs’ favorite toys- “favorite” in that said squeaker has been chewed mostly to death. Given that all my efforts to communicate vocally are being met with a mixture of hilarity and confusion, I considered riding around in a giant metal chair with a blinking light for “yes” and “no”, but I was told that construction would take a bit longer than just waiting for my voice to come back would. Oh well.

I’ve been trying to work up something good to say for Memorial Day, but I find I’m suffering a Critical Eloquence Failure. Go here and here for the words of people who suffer no such difficulties and can make the words stand up and show what we should remember along with “mustard, no ketchup, and could you pass me another beer?”

Just what the title says. Garry Kasparov giving a speech in Moscow for which I have no other context, except that it’s the speech where someone piloted in a dildo with helicopter rotors on it to buzz the speaker until a Russian man who clearly regards all of it as Very Serious Business swats it mercilessly down.

Yeah. I’m pretty sure I’m catching Stingray’s cold, so unless my immune system rallies tonight and turns back my scratchy throat and mild cough before it sets up trenches in my lungs, y’all can probably expect light updates.. in both senses of the word.

That didn’t take long. George Takei is getting married.

The original Star Trek, it’s been harped on by every Vulcan-ear wearing, Klingon-gargling nerdoid on the planet, was very revolutionary for its time in having characters of multiple races and ethnicities- including a RUSSIAN and a BLACK CHICK- as part of its primary cast. Okay, sure, so all the female characters were plastic-wrapped into teeny miniskirts, and all the most interesting parts and lines were saved for the three white dudes (even if one of them did have prosthetic ears and an unflattering haircut), but for the times, it was pretty brave.

Star Trek was considered way too valuable a prospective property to take that kind of risks again when they started making new series. Roddenberry promised gay characters or at least references, but they never materalized- reading about it makes for quite the entertaining account of sci-fi and network skullduggery. Instead, about once a series they put out a leadenly heavy-handed episode that always allegorized homosexuality (sometimes rather offensively), but never made an explicit reference to it except in the background.

The social proselytizing was one of the most annoying features of any incarnation of the show, but that very pushiness made that really stand out. So it’s damn funny to me to see that Takei got there first in the real world, when they never had the guts to do it in their future utopia.