I'm teaching an environmental science class this semester, which means that I'm up to my ears in utterly depressing stories of destroyed ecosystems and hopeless futures. I'm trying to keep things chipper, and focus on functional ecosystems as much as dysfunctional ones, and to emphasize possible solutions to our problems....but, man, there's not ( Read more... )

I’m almost finished with Christopher Hitchens’s “god is not Great,” the latest of the slew of atheist bestsellers. It's a good read, and while he doesn't advance many slam-dunk intellectual arguments against faith, on a visceral level he does a great job of making religion seem ludicrous and offensive. (This may prove the most effective possible ( Read more... )

http://store.mcsweeneys.net/Read more... )

You can turn up some odd stuff by Googling yourself with the right combination of search terms ( Read more... )

The Intermedia undergraduate open house was interesting. I stuck my hand in a giant bowl of Jello, washed it with slime from a giant cube of soap, watched the spin-the-wheel girl eat two spoonfuls of horseradish (her least favorite food in the world), and wrote "Peak Oil" on my slip of paper that went in the Fear Box. Some random girl stuck an " ( Read more... )

Crawling crinoid: http://www.palaeo-electronica.org/

If you don't know what a crinoid is, take this as an invitation to read up on echinoderms of all kinds, because they're fascinating and weird.

I recently Netflixed my favorite quickly canceled 80's toy tie-in cartoon, Inhumanoids. It features a team of heroic geologists fighting semi-Lovecraftian monsters who live underground. The geology is a bit unrealistic, to put it nicely. Examples ( Read more... )

Boy, I wish it was as still as easy to get published as it was in 1875. Out of curiosity, I checked out the library's bound copy of the Proceedings of the State Academy of Science for 1875-1880. The articles are beautiful. There's lots of short abstracts about corn smut, local snail populations, what kind of yeast is best for making bread, and ( Read more... )

I recently inherited a copy of the Star Wars Holiday Special, which is apparently revered in some circles for its sheer ineptitude but despised in others for staining the Star Wars canon. I will say this for it: it makes you appreciate the subtle shadings of “The Phantom Menace.” I only watched the first forty-five minutes or so of the two-hour ( Read more... )

Aren't I just the cutest thing?




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