Smart TV, Smarter World...

...MAYBE.

So I've had this LOLCATS on my office door for I don't know, a gazillion years now, because it cracks me up, which is why most of the things on my office door are there, although some of the things on my door are there because Revolution!

Anyway!

This afternoon, as I came back to my office after our annual Undergraduate Research Day, our maintenance guy stops me in the hallway. "Hey. That cat in a box on your door. You know?"

"Right," I said.

"Is that what they were talking about on The Big Bang Theory last night?"

"Um...probably?"

BBT being a show I do not follow.

We walked down the hallway together, him relating to me the bit of the show with the characters talking about the cat in the box, and sure enough it was the right cat.

"Yep," I said. "That's it."

"Right," he said. "Soon as I heard it, I said that's what that cat's about."

So now if we can just make some TV about revolutions...

Okay, I surrender

Here's proof that English majors are idiots.

111 Male Characters from English Literature in Order of Bangability.

Nothing is said about the methodology, but I am assuming the list was compiled by English majors or English professors, because who else would have read all those books?

But here is my issue -- issues --

• Will Ladislaw at 84? My Will? The love of my (fictional) life? Are you people high?



• James Steerforth beats out Will Ladislaw? Really?



• Why is Casaubon on the list at all? The whole point was that he was not bangable -- could not do the bang, as it were. Did none of you actually read Middlemarch?



• Algernon Moncrieff at 14? Are you fucking kidding me?



• Randolph Henry Ash, from Possession, is on this list, but Jackson Brodie is not? Aren't you people paying attention?



• And Mr. Rochester at #1. Le Sigh.

Why I Love Science

Here.

Via Language Log: ...[scan shows that]certain areas in the brain of mature Atlantic Salmon "light up" when the animal is asked to categorize the emotions expressed by a set of (human) faces...

Look!

Martin's War gets mentioned on Karynthia's blog!

Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!

I just heard that Martin's War, the first book of my SF Trilogy er Quintology er series well whatever has been accepted by Verb Noire Press!

This is so cool.

This is the Big SF Trilogy (Yeah, no kidding, that's what I have it saved under in my Word File) I have been working on for the past three, um, four years? Obsessing over might be a better term for it. I have been living these books.  The kid thinks the characters in these books are real, I sometimes think.  She helped me invent the biology for Julian, the world the series is set on.  (Lots of venomous reptiles and insects.)  

Well, I'm babbling.  But I am just so pleased!

Wow

I don't know if this is frightening or poetry or utterly cool.

why am i so tired
why am i always tired
why am i always cold
why am i not losing weight
why am i always hungry
why am i here
why am i tired all the time
why am i still single
why am i single
why am i depressed

Right-Wing Whining

Okay, I like Cheerios as much as the next Leftist Mama; I like them mainly because they are one of the few breakfast cereals on the shelf in your mainstream market which do not contain high fructose  corn syrup (as regular readers know, the kid has a corn syrup allergy).

But the FDA sending them a warning letter concerning their practice of placing claims on the box about how eating their cereal for six weeks would lower someone's cholesterol level, given that no scientific study exists to back that claim?  Well, that's the FDA's job.

So this conservative outrage over the incident? (Rush Limbaugh called it "irritating, intrusive nonsense," and claimed Obama was behind the letter, since he knew babies loved Cheerios more than they loved the President.)  More anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-reality -- well, yeah, I am being redundant, I suppose: more conservative behavior, that's all I need to say.

Which brings me to what I've been doing over the past week or so: reading about Charles Darwin, who, I have to tell you, is so cool.

This started because the kid is doing a project at school on Natural Selection.  We made a trip to the public library, hunting resources, somewhat dispiritedly -- we'd been there last year, when the kid was first interested in evolution, so I knew not much was available.

But! Surprise!  Darwin Day had, apparently, made a difference: half dozen new books had been added, which is quite a few for this library, including an excellent short biography, Tim Berra's Charles Darwin; and a couple new kids' books, including a graphic novel about Darwin's life.  I also found a big fat biography on Darwin, from the 80s, which I hadn't noticed before.

Anyway, the kid did her research, but I've also been reading quite happily.   The Berra book, though short, was quite good; the big fat biography, Ronald Clark's The Survival of Charles Darwin, though old, is also entrancing.  My favorite bits include Darwin and Captain FitzRoy's row while in Brazil.  You'll remember that FitzRoy was the captain of the Beagle.  Anyway, they had visited a plantation in Brazil, and the FitzRoy asked a slave, in front of his owner, if he was happy as a slave.  The slave said indeed, he loved being a slave.  (FitzRoy, a conservative, supported slavery, thought black people were natural slaves, and white people natural owners, due to their superior natures.)  There, he told Darwin, see?  Darwin scoffed at this "evidence," pointing out that what a slave said in front of his owner could hardly be taken at face value; FitzRoy flew into a rage and banished him from the Captain's mess.

But the gunroom officers let him eat with them until FitzRoy got over his snit and apologized.

(This is from Berra's text: When Huxley and Wilberforce held their famous debate over Darwin's Theory at Oxford, Captain FitzRoy was in the audience.  Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, demanded to know, if Darwin's theory was true, which of Huxley's grandparents was an ape, his grandfather or his grandmother.  Huxley replied that, given a choice between having an ape for an anscestor or having someone like Wilberforce, who would introduce mockery into a scientific debate, he would certainly choose an ape.  The audience erupted, with students shouting "Monkey, monkey!" and women, so the story goes, fainting.  My favorite bit, though, is how FitzRoy stalked from the room, brandishing a Bible and shouting, "The Book! the Book!")

(30 years after the voyage of the Beagle, while governor of New Zealand, FitzRoy would shoot himself.)

Also: seeking evidence to back up his theory of evolution (as most people know, Darwin wasn't the first to come up with the notion; however, he was determined not to publish without plenty of evidence) Darwin studied barnacles, both fossil barnacles and actual barnacles, for nine years, amassing details for change through the eons and centuries.  At one point during these nine years, he wrote in his famous notebooks the line, "I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before."

He also hated slavery, people who hurt animals, that he had to send his children off to boarding school, and rudeness to servants.

He was bad at math, and did not do well in the 19th century equivalent of grammar school.

He was an atheist (though he called himself an agnostic) and said he did not see why anyone would even wish to be a Christian, calling it a "damnable doctrine."  This distressed his wife Emma (herself a Christian) so much that she edited it out of his autobiography, though some years after her death it was edited back in.

He discovered the role earthworms play in creating soil, and established the method of scientific controls.

On the occasions when he got things wrong - which did happen -- he admitted it.  Right up front and straight out.

The more I read, the more I like this guy.

Spring

TNX to Global Climate change, we're having an interesting spring here in the Ozarks -- first it rained for what must have been a solid month, so every field is solid bog, but green like you would not believe, as it has not been since I moved here in 2002, at the start of a 4 year drought.

Now we're having a cool sunny spell, very pretty, with nights in the 50s and days in the 70s, which goes nicely with all the green.

Pollen, too, which is very sad for those with allergies.  Zelda is down for the count, for instance, and the kid's art teacher could not stop sneezing the other night.

Also! Frogs, toads, possums, mosquitos, squirrels, hawks, blue herons, other critters, more than I have ever seen.  A possum trotted across the road in front of me when I was out for my nightly stroll the other evening, and we spot the hawk that hunts the patch of field on the way to the kid's school almost daily (hunting mice, I suppose -- it's always cruising that field, low and golden in the morning sun).

In about two weeks, I know, we'll have the evil blasting furnace heat of an Arkansas summer here again.  I'm enjoying it while I can.

Yeah, Okay!

Iowa, like Sweden, has ruled that Gay Marriage is legal.

Supreme Court Justice Mark Cady, who wrote the unanimous decision, at one point invoked the court’s first-ever decision, in 1839, which struck down slavery laws 17 years before the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of a slave owner to treat a person as property.

Iowa’s gay marriage ban “is unconstitutional, because the county has been unable to identify a constitutionally adequate justification for excluding plaintiffs from the institution of civil marriage,” Cady wrote in the 69-page opinion that seemed to dismiss the concept of civil unions as an option for gay couples.

When the kid was weeping in my arms yesterday because everything was so terrible, this was one of the things I pointed to, to show her that we were, in fact, winning: gay people were being treated like humans in Sweden and Vermont and Mass. (and now Iowa!), thanks to Science (it works, bitches!), we have saved the ozone layer, dolphins are winning, the ACLU is on the case,
and who, who, WHO won in November?

Yeah, you rite!

But You Can Call Me delagar

Went in to pick up some papers at the office, even if it is spring break, and found a letter in my box from the provost, notifying me that my promotion had been confirmed.

Oh yes, that's me: Associate Professor Delagar.

Though it's not official until August, mind you.

Back from Tulsa

The kid and mr. delagar and I took an overnight to Tulsa, both to buy Passover supplies (which are not available in Fuck Smith) and to take the kid to the zoo, a trip we have been promising her since her last birthday (May 2008).  We told her it was for this birthday (May 2009) and she seems to have bought the story.  Sucker!*

We also went to the Philbrook, where we saw one of my favorite paintings, the Little Shepardess, and several Moran landscapes, as well as a photography exhibit (this last made mr. delagar very happy) and found a used bookstore and had lunch at a Chinese restaurant and stayed in a motel: the first vacation-like event we've had in, I believe, two years -- since the last time we went to Tulsa.  "Oh, I'm so happy!" the kid said at one point.

Then! We returned to find Tonks finally hatched! Yay Tonks!  And what a great kid! Hop over there and have a look.  He's huge!  And sharp!  Check out that gaze!  Don't mess with that kid.  He's got your number.

So a fine few days, I have to say.

*Kidding, Kid!

This is Interesting

Over here. (Warning: the title is stupid, and the second half of the article is disturbing.)

I knew the first bit, how straight guys like to watch M/F and F/F -- but this bit is a tiny surprise:

All was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the strolling man...

Addressing the question of why women are into more sorts of sex than men are, we get this:

Are men simply more inhibited, more constrained by the bounds of culture? Chivers has tried to eliminate this explanation by including male-to-female transsexuals as subjects in one of her series of experiments (one that showed only human sex). These trans women, both those who were heterosexual and those who were homosexual, responded genitally and subjectively in categorical ways. They responded like men.

The researcher adds, though, that we can't eliminate nurture as a cause -- though I don't remember being encouraged to find gay guys hot, frankly.

And this part is disturbing:

Chivers, like a handful of other sexologists, has arrived at an evolutionary hypothesis that stresses the difference between reflexive sexual readiness and desire. Genital lubrication, she writes in her upcoming paper in Archives of Sexual Behavior, is necessary “to reduce discomfort, and the possibility of injury, during vaginal penetration. . . . Ancestral women who did not show an automatic vaginal response to sexual cues may have been more likely to experience injuries during unwanted vaginal penetration that resulted in illness, infertility or even death, and thus would be less likely to have passed on this trait to their offspring.”

Evolution’s legacy, according to this theory, is that women are prone to lubricate, if only protectively, to hints of sex in their surroundings.

That's my bold there, of course. During unwanted vaginal penetration would be evolutionary biologist-speak for rape, I reckon. We're turned on by M/M sex because that way we won't get injured when we're raped. Hmm.

Then the second half of the article is all about how much women want to be raped, that's just....not to mention the woman who's doing the research for that bit is all, "I'm a feminist, but PC is so not sexy," which sure you're feminist. Tool.

How We Die

Hey, y'all, I'm back --

I've been suffering from blackboard shoulder -- anyway, that's my diagnosis. Week before last, my right shoulder started hurting like the dickens, as we say in these here parts, and it kept on hurting worse. Muscles, not the joints, and by Tuesday it was hurting badly enough that I gave in and called my PCP (which I never do and especially not now, given that she's out on maternity leave, meaning I won't get her, I'll get the other guy, who I cannot STAND) and anyway I couldn't get even the other guy, the clinic was too booked up. Go see the doc-in-the-box, they advised me.

Yeah, nothing wrong our health care system.

Well, I was not going to the doc-in-the-box, excuse me, urgent care center at five in the afternoon, since I knew that meant I would be there until eight or nine at night. I waited and went at seven the next morning, which put me second in line (eleven other people were waiting at seven a.m. as well), which meant I was out of the clinic by 8:30, yay, and the doc there told me I had hurt my shoulder "somehow" (No! Ya think?) and that I should take these drugs and the week off.

Good drugs, at least. They helped some.

Anyway, that's where I have been -- zoned out -- and that's why I'm going to steal a link from Unfogged instead of writing a post for you on my own.

It's a cool link, though -- about how Americans die. What I like best is the homicide rate. Look how it rises and falls and then disappears. After 45, it's negligible, apparently. And look at the accidental death rate -- your chances of getting killed through "unintentional injury," that is, by accident, are higher than any other cause of death right up through age 44. Crossing the street or getting into a car or slipping in the tub -- that's what does us in. But what are we worried about? Murderers and pesticides.