Back off man, I'm a scientist.

3:34pm: I might like Joe Biden after all
"How many small businessmen are making one million, four hundred thousand--average in the top 1 percent. Give me a break. I remind my friend, John McCain, what he said--when Bush called for war and tax cuts--he said, it was immoral, immoral, to take a nation to war and not have anybody pay for it. I am so sick and tired of this phoniness. The truth of the matter is that we are in trouble. And the people who do not need a new tax cut should be willing, as patriotic Americans, to understand the way to get this economy back up on their feet is to give middle class taxpayers a break. We take the tax cut they're getting and we give it to the middle class."

2:24pm: Jon Stewart - Sarah Palin Gender Card

2:08pm: Why the hell is Ron Paul having his own convention? YOU LOST, DUDE.

2:07pm: A good boyfriend is a wonderful thing

12:17pm: It sounds like an Onion headline
Transsexual Girl Way More Successful at Being a Girl Than Regular Girls

http://www.observer.com/2008/arts-culture/second-most-beautiful-girl-new-york

1:38pm: Women's Sportbike Rally FTW
In short, it was great. I needed a weekend of riding so badly, and the weather was great, and the people were great, and I came home with two tshirts, two pint glasses, and an awesome Desmo hat.



I'm also pretty proud of myself for riding with the fast group for group rides on Saturday (the slow part of the fast group, but still not shabby).

( The pictures: )

8:57pm: Ode to mango


Somewhere along my west coast vacation, I decided that the mango is my new favorite fruit, overtaking the strawberry. Since one of the four major california food groups is smoothie*, I did a lot of comparison fruiting, and nothing beats a mango smoothie. The best mango smoothie comes from Jamba Juice, which has actual! chunks! of fresh! mango! and is awesome for a hangover, but pretty decent varieties can be had at Blenders in the Grass or some place in Irvine whose name I can't remember. The mango smoothie from Starbucks was, unsurprisngly, a disappointment.

So happy was I when, finally back home, I was browsing my new favorite cookbook and found an intriguing recipe for mango-black bean-quinoa salad. Wow, mangos can be non-smoothie food too! And then as if by marital mind-meld, the husband came home from work with...wait for it...a perfectly ripe beautiful mango! Apparently some fellow geek had way too many mangoes (I know, too many mangoes?!) (and how does someone end up with too many mangoes anyway?) and was begging his cubicle-mates to take some.

And here, since you asked, is my dinner. The hole is the part I ate already.




*The other three being nachos/burritos, sushi, and beer.

7:16pm: I haz new helmutt!
Finally got it back from the painter, who put the cool stripes to match my bike. Now I look all cool for the rally this weekend!

10:36am:

5:10pm: Science advertising of the day
I am dying over this. I thought it was a joke, but it's an actual ad from eppendorf featuring a boy band singing about some kind of automated pipetter thing (laugh if you will, but I have gotten blisters from repetitive pipetting, and I'm not even a molecular biologist).

It won't embed, so click for epimotion.

4:31pm: FLOATILLA ALERT


I formally invite all my readers to the fourth (ish?) annual Floatilla, to take place on our lovely local Chattahoochee River (the slow part) on Saturday, July 26. On this festive and boisterous occasion, numerous inflatable rafts will be lashed together in a great phalanx of river-going kegs, water cannons, and likely nudity. Should you wish to take part, be advised that your $65 fee will include beer (as much as you can drink!), dinner, and some kind of improvised sport with a volleyball at the landing. Click on the baner to sign up (soon, so we can retain our deposits)!

4:15pm: Random cuteness
This is my niece Emily, who just got her first bike.

1:10pm: Just damn
How many days have we got left again?


Via Huffington Post:

The interview took place almost four years ago, but is the perfect illustration of a man elected purely on name recognition, dirty money, and no discernible talent....The interview with Coleman should go down on record as definitive proof of Bush's utter incompetence, a priceless picture of a madman who had no business occupying the highest office of the land.

10:49am: Weirdest safe sex ads ever

6:46pm: Me last weekend
I kid - it's just an extra cool shot from killboy. I'd buy titanium sliders if my knee ever got anywhere close to pavement.

5:50pm: Somebody
buy me this tshirt.

2:59pm: More science of the day
This is a bit old, but I just got around to watching it. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist, describes the change in her brain functions during a stroke. I am a bit skeptical of her grand characterizations of left vs right hemisphere functions, which is a theory that has been run to ridiculous extremes in the land of new age pseudoscience without having all that much (that I am aware of) experimental support. In Taylor's case, she presents her story as having her whole left hemipshere shut down, allowing her to listen to the right hemisphere, when really what was interrupted was just one piece of left cortex (I'm assuming it's cortex, although she didn't specify the location). As the comments say, what she describes is a state of consciousness that would take a great deal of meditative practice to attain, so it's interesting to hear someone's reaction to being dropped into it with no preparation. She takes it to mean the world would be a much better place if we all used meditation to realized our interconnectedness, but I've had very similar experiences on LSD. ;)



ps all these ted talks are really good.

2:08pm: Science of the day
Human ovulation on film, caught serendipitously at at the time of a hysterectomy.

New Scientist article.

11:46am: albums i wouldn't like to live without
copied from schlemaggle:

a few off the top of my head before i have to kill the rats

- liz phair, exile in guyville
- pulp, common people
- modest mouse, this is a long drive for someone with nothing to think about
- the cure, disintegration
- green day, ameican idiot
- hedwig and the angry inch, soundtrack
- ben folds five, whatever and ever amen
- garbage, version 2.0
- gorillaz, demon days
- sublime, 40 oz to freedom
- interpol, turn on the bright lights
- pixies, doolittle AND surfer rosa

edit, with shit i can't believe i forgot.

- weezer, blue album and pinkerton
- the arcade fire, funeral
- the yeah yeah yeahs, fever to tell
- the white stripes, elephant
- fiona apple, extraordinary machine
- bjork, post and homogenic
- poe, haunted
- radiohead, the bends

10:55am: Valentino Rossi's new helmet design




I love this kid.

12:25pm: I'm a Socialist :)

You are a Social Liberal (81% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (10% permissive) You are best described as a: Socialist Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid Also : The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

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1:36pm: Science of the week (about three weeks ago)
Case Closed for Free Will? is Science News's title, but really it's a case of conscious vs unconscious. In this study, people in an fMRI were continuously scanned while they made a free decision resulting in pushing a button with either the left or right hand. This choice can be obviously distinguished by the image of primary motor cortex at the time of the action, activated either on one side or the other, but it can also be distinguished before subjects report having made the decision, in the frontopolar cortex and precuneus/posterior cingulate cortex. (I always suspect these imaging studies of just making up new names for their regions of interest, because nobody ever looked at that particular tiny bit of cortex before this latest experiment where they saw it doing something interesting.) Anyway, information predicting the decision outcome can be found in these two regions up to 10 seconds before the subjects report having made a decision, which tells us that our decisions are made unconsciously long before we are consciously aware of it. Now, these are simple motor reponses; I would like to see the same experiment performed when the decision is more cognitively complex - something that has consequences and that needs conscious deliberation of at least a few seconds.

Original article here although not sure if you can get there from outside a subscribing institution.

11:05pm: My theme song
I read on a blog today (Shakesville? Pandagon? One of the ones I read a lot, can't remember) an open question about what your theme song would be if you had one. Tonight I got it:

10:24am: In my future dream house...
there will be a staircase library.

6:06pm: Guinness cupcakes
This post is mostly a reminder to myself so I don't lose the recipe in the internets. Unless some nice person would like to make the cupcakes and then bring them to me.



( recipe )