Gwenda Bond

Secret Shames (updated)

This morning Mr. Rowe took off for the Sycamore Hill Writer's Workshop to spend a week in the North Carolina mountains critiquing stories and all the other stuff writers do when they're in an isolated spot together (gossip, drink, generate funny anecdotes for later, etc.). For those of you not from the Land of Science Fiction and Fantasy (and, according to Wikipedia, Slipstream, which I think in this context probably just means psst, literary), there are several peer workshops in the field that have been going on for long enough that history and reputation accumulates around them--Syc Hill is one, Rio Hondo in Taos is another, Turkey City down in Austin and, created especially for novels, Blue Heaven in Ohio. Many fine writers go to these workshops (and lots of other workshops and retreats, of course). I've been to all these except Syc Hill, but this week I'm declaring myself an official Workshop Widow.

While Christopher's gone my big plans seem to be of the virtuous variety. I plan to write LOTS--in fact, I already got in 1400+ words on my new novel and finished a proofing project today--and make sure the dogs are relatively happy. That's about it.

I bring all this up because recently I identified a phenomenon. I first cottoned to the possible existence of said phenom in grad school, where I would depart for 10 day residencies. I would come home and find things like charge slips from Wing Zone and TGI FRIDAY'S (apparently, it's next to the Barnes and Noble, open late for paperback fantasy cravings). Perhaps The Da Vinci Code movie or The 300 would have been watched. Sub par beer in the recycling bin... I think you get the picture. Clearly, the mister felt the need to indulge cravings he doesn't even really have (except for the wings) while I was out of town.

I wondered if this was true of other guys when their wives/significant others are out of range. So I did an informal survey at Wiscon and turned up some unsurprising but hilarious data to suggest this is A THING. One friend, an acclaimed novelist and short story writer, confessed that he'd purchased BLIZZARD-FLAVORED Oreos* and a pound of bacon while his wife was at one of the workshops mentioned above. Another confessed that wings sounded very familiar indeed. The confessions kept on coming. 

None of the women I asked said they fit this pattern, though, because the stuff they did was stuff they'd also do normally.

Which brings me to the point of this post. I'm thinking I should strike a blow for the fairer sex and indulge in one SHAMEFUL, materially irredeemable activity per day. Things like going to see the new Twilight movie on opening night**, maybe? ... I'm going to need to suggestions. They should probably be of the baby steps variety, as it just feels so ... unseemly. (NO WINGS.)

Updated: See addendum below. Also, I am loving your suggestions and your confessions. It seems the ladies *do* indulge in such behavior, but I think the guys are still winning. Clearly, however, I need to feel MORE shame for my regular activities.

*So, after posting I remembered that he didn't actually buy the Blizzard Oreos, because they were too wrong. (Too wrong to exist, but that's another post--seriously, they taste like ice cream flavored with Oreos? What is this product? Who is it for?) He bought another variety of Oreos instead. And while I usually would come down on the thoughts don't equal actions side, for the purposes of this post I'm saying, contemplating the Blizzard Oreos alone is evidence! Plus, the bacon.

**These are not value judgments, but totally subjective. My SHAMEFUL materially irredeemable is someone else's Reason For Living.

Evolved?

My favorite bit from National Book Award finalist (and rightly so) and YA nonfiction title Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith:

They borrowed some novels from the library, starting a lifelong tradition of reading together--usually Emma read to Charles while he rested from his work. Charles liked novels with happy endings, and he once wrote, "I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me . . . and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily--against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if it be a pretty woman all the better."

I say this book is not just a book for Darwinophiles, but for anyone who has ever been in the throes of a bookish romance.

Updated: A new report looks at the possible health repercussions of Charles and Emma being first cousins on their children.

Still Remembering Ada

Er, I signed up to blog about women and science for Ada Lovelace Day and then ... put the reminder on the wrong day on my calendar. Woe, it was yesterday. I have failed Ada utterly. AND I'm even too busy to compensate with a suitable entry today.

But, when all else fails, links. These two are shiny: Women in Science: 16 Significant Contributors, brought to your monitor by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (with a name like that, how can its world domination not be imminent?), and Yesterday and Today: The Top Women Scientists. Those pointed out, I only wish I could point you to speedy resources about today's awesome women in science. I know they are many, and hope that one day there are even more.

Don't Sneeze!

Aliens may already be among us! Britain's Royal Society is on the case:

One astrobiologist says the best place to look for aliens may be right here on Earth. Paul Davies of Arizona State University said Tuesday that extraterrestrial life may have found its way to this planet at several different times.

If so, Davies says, the aliens could be "right under or noses — or even in our noses."

Boy, how much do you think they hate that this story is on the wire*? Will no one take the nose ETs seriously?!

*Suspected conversation: "Why do we keep inviting Yanks to our events?" "Because they know how to say crazy enough things to ensure a wire story?"

Weird Science

An article in today's WaPo says the Kepler telescope is detecting all kinds of fascinating things, including new "exoplanets":

For example, Kepler found a star with a small orbiting object that is hotter than the star itself. The object is too hot to be a planet but is the wrong size and density to fit any known profile for a dwarf star.

One of the five planets announced by William J. Borucki, the top scientist for the telescope, is so fluffy that "it has the density of Styrofoam," he said.

Fluffy planet!

What About Carhenge?

A new study has found that for centuries Stonehenge was a burial ground (perhaps also home to a drum circle or two?):

"Stonehenge was a place of burial from its beginning to its zenith in the mid third millennium B.C. The cremation burial dating to Stonehenge's sarsen stones phase is likely just one of many from this later period of the monument's use and demonstrates that it was still very much a domain of the dead," Parker Pearson said in a statement.

The researchers also excavated homes nearby at Durrington Walls, which they said appeared to be seasonal homes related to Stonehenge.

Okay, I know I'm just in a goofy mood today, but I'm cracking myself up over here with seasonal homes of the dead stuff.

Nice Digs

I could totally live in this house. Although I bet the plumbing repair isn't cheap there either.

Actually, I could live in most of these (this one's for Richard though).

(Via Ellen Datlow.)

The Future is Now

Can this really be a good idea?*

A "doomsday" seed vault built to protect millions of food crops from climate change, wars and natural disasters opened Tuesday deep within an Arctic mountain in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.

"The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is our insurance policy," Norway's Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told delegates at the opening ceremony. "It is the Noah's Ark for securing biological diversity for future generations."

Someone needs to do some more watching of post-apocalyptic horror movies.

*I kid. Of course, it's a good idea. I mean, I personally have always wanted to be ruled by a WHEAT-BASED ROBOT OVERLORD.

Shaky Hand, Many Moons

  Shaky Hand, Many Moons 
  Originally uploaded by gwenda

I like the moon, but I'm not much of a photographer. You can always head over to NASA for that though.

(Amusingly, I can hear a couple of Transy students trying to "find the eclipse" out on the street.)

Two Links

For Christopher:

• The Battle of Pelennor Fields in candy (amazing!). (Via.)
• Gaslight Justice League custom figures (likewise!). (Via.)

Cybugs

The Washington Post has a big package on efforts -- rumored by some to already be successful -- to develop next-generation flying "bugs" modeled on insects:

"I'd never seen anything like it in my life," the Washington lawyer said. "They were large for dragonflies. I thought, 'Is that mechanical, or is that alive?' "

That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some suspect the insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security.

Others think they are, well, dragonflies -- an ancient order of insects that even biologists concede look about as robotic as a living creature can look.

No agency admits to having deployed insect-size spy drones. But a number of U.S. government and private entities acknowledge they are trying. Some federally funded teams are even growing live insects with computer chips in them, with the goal of mounting spyware on their bodies and controlling their flight muscles remotely.

Yes, it's all a bit Scary Creepy OMG Our Government Is Evil, but it's impossible to pretend there's not some geek squee as well.

Sometimes I'm Easy

The description of this one link in the Daily Loper nearly did me in:

• Put a robot on moon, win up to  million
  But for gods sakes, either a) get the robot’s permission first, or b) split the prize with the robot. Otherwise, the robot is going to be pissed, and that’s how it starts.

Thank you, universe.

Sleight of Fact

There's a fascinating story in the NYT about the science of how magic works and what that says about consciousness. Teller and some other magicians are included in the article (and the study in question apparently):

As he ran through the trick a second time, annotating each step, we saw how we had been led to mismatch cause and effect, to form one false hypothesis after another. Sometimes the coins were coming from his right hand, and sometimes from his left, hidden beneath the fingers holding the bucket.

He left us with his definition of magic: “The theatrical linking of a cause with an effect that has no basis in physical reality, but that — in our hearts — ought to.”

Yeah, I'm a sucker for this stuff, in every possible sense. (The magic, the science, the theory, etc.)

Happy Words

I love the phrase piscatorial couturier.

Literary Devices of the Mind

Researchers can't find any examples of repressed memory in literary works going back further than 200 years:

In an unusual study, a group of psychiatrists and literary scholars, led by Harrison Pope of Harvard Medical School, recently argued that the psychiatric disorder known as dissociative amnesia (often called repressed memory) is a "culture-bound syndrome" -- a creation of Western culture sometime in the 19th century.

Pope pointed out that Shakespeare, Homer and other pre-19th-century writers show numerous characters suffering from other psychiatric disorders: the disjointed thinking that we call schizophrenia, or the persistent sadness that marks depression. Because art draws its inspiration from life, Pope said, this shows that those disorders have been around forever.

Yes!

It's always nice to wake up on a Monday morning and find out that the best town in which to survive the coming apocalypse* may be forty minutes from where I grew up:

This is not a new theory, but there is a new book out that backs the premise with all kinds of sleep-killing stuff like that we're a million years overdue for a good mass extinction. And that the Earth's magnetic field is developing a crack. And that the Yellowstone supervolcano is about to catapult those tiny 10 percent of us who survive it into nuclear winter.

A planet holds its collective breath. But wait, the author thinks there might be one place on Earth that can just survive the whole shebang intact.

Berea.

*Mayan, of course.

Historical Models

Scientists have reconstructed Dante's face:

Italian scientists have made a reconstruction of the face of the poet Dante some 700 years after he died and have found some surprises, particularly about the supposed shape of his famous aquiline nose.

You think?

(Stolen from Jeff.)

Busted

An article in the NYT about why messiness and clutter are golden, in which my neatness strategy is revealed as a sham:

It’s also nice to remember, as Mr. Freedman pointed out, that almost anything looks pretty neat if it’s shuffled into a pile.

Ouch. There's a glossary o terms. In addition to the vertical mess, I may also be guilty of the cyclical mess, the minimess, the heaped mess, and the satellite mess. In other words: all of them. And, yet, our place is always fairly inhabitably tidy-ish. Go figure. Maybe if it were Even Messier, we would be Even More Productive.

Friday Pictorial

Baby pangolin! Cutest animal ever.

(Via Fusenumber8.)

Odd, Even for an Obituary

Esther Lederberg, an important microbiologist, has her death noted in what appears to be some sort of AP round-up of notable (dead) women of the week. So, we go from microbiologist to sculptor to preservationist to woman who lost a tremendous amount of weight. One of these things isn't like the others...

Ouch.

Venomous fish have been tricking us for years with their cute spines and big fangs.

Fuzzy dwarf lionfish would be a great band name. Don't you think? (That's a firefish over there, not an FDL.)

Making Mummies

Now that's a crappy day job:

DALIAN, China — Tucked away in the back of this coastal city’s export-oriented manufacturing zone is a place that can only be described as a modern mummification factory.

Inside a series of unmarked buildings, hundreds of Chinese workers, some seated in assembly line formations, are cleaning, cutting, dissecting, preserving and re-engineering human corpses, preparing them for the international museum exhibition market.

“Pull the cover off; pull it off,” one Chinese manager says as a team of workers begin to lift a blanket from the head of a cadaver stored in a stainless steel container filled with formalin, a chemical preservative. “Let’s see the face; show the face.”

The mastermind behind this operation is Gunther von Hagens, a 61-year-old German scientist whose show, “Body Worlds,” has attracted 20 million people worldwide over the past decade and has taken in over $200 million by displaying preserved, skinless human corpses with their well-defined muscles and sinewy tissues.

Strange Brew

The NYT covers a recent meeting of science historians about the role of alchemists in advancing various fields, particularly chemistry:

But in the revival of scholarship on the field, historians are finding reasons to give at least some alchemists their due. Even though they were secretive and self-deluded and their practices closer to magic than modern scientific methods, historians say, alchemists contributed to the emergence of modern chemistry as a science and an agent of commerce.

“Experimentalism was one of alchemy’s hallmarks,” said Lawrence M. Principe, a historian of science at Johns Hopkins University and a trained chemist. “You have to get your hands dirty, and in this way alchemists forged some early ideas about matter.”

Stubborn Science

I completely forgot to point to this bizarre story I happened across in the Blood-Horse the other day when I was looking for some Barbaro news. The headline says it all, really: "Cloned Mules to Square Off in California Fair Race". Now, I didn't know there even was competitive mule racing, let alone with cloned mules. Actually, the headline doesn't even come close on this one, since it neglects to get across that these mules are cloned from the same genetic material, that of retired world champion Taz. Um, yeah.

But the best part is the article's ominousish closing:

Jacklin said he has had "quite a few confidential inquiries" from Thoroughbred horsemen interested in the cloning process. "There has been a lot of interest," he said. "I predict we'll see significant changes in the next few years as organizations begin to address clones. But wouldn't it be great to see a cloned Cigar race a cloned Funny Cide or another John Henry? I believe it will happen in the future."

Monkey See, Monkey You

Fascinating new data from the Human Genome Project:

According to the new theory, chimps and humans shared a common apelike ancestor much more recently than was thought. Furthermore, when the two emerging species split from each other, it was not a clean break. Some members of the two groups seem to have interbred about 1.2 million years after they first diverged -- before going their separate ways for good.

If this theory proves correct, it will mean modern people are descended from something akin to chimp-human hybrids. That is a new idea, and it challenges the prevailing view that hybrids tend to die out.

It also strongly suggests that some of the oldest bones of "proto-humans" -- including the 7 million-year-old Toumai skull unearthed in Chad in 2001 -- may have belonged to a line of non-hybrids that died out, and were not human ancestors at all.

Look out Kansas.

On Definitional Fisticuffs

From Bruce Sterling's State of the World 2006:

Adam Greenfield is trying to speak and think very clearly, and to avoid internecine definitional struggles. As a literary guy, though, I think these definitional struggles are a positive force for good. It's a sign of creative health to be bogged down in internecine definitional struggles. It means we have escaped a previous definitional box. For a technologist, the bog is a rather bad place, because it makes it harder to sell the product. In literature, the bog of definitional struggle is the most fertile area. That is what literature IS, in some sense: it's taming reality with words. Literature means that we are trying to use words to figure out what things mean, and how we should feel about that.

I'll be linking this one again later in a different context, but it's worth going there and reading the whole thing.

(p.s. If I linksnatched this from you, I'm sorry -- it's been an open tab for days and I can't remember where I spotted it.)

One More Thing

Claire Light's new blog on maps and taxonomy and things related is completely fabulous. I especially love this entry.

archy says goodnight

A so-so piece in the WaPo about the death of Addwaita, a very old turtle:

One of the world's oldest living creatures died last week in Calcutta.

Addwaita, a tortoise believed to be 250 years old, died at the local zoo. The tortoise arrived there in 1875. Zoo officials, who have yet to definitively prove Addwaita's age, say he was one of four tortoises that had been brought to India more than a century earlier by British sailors from the Seychelles islands as a gift for Lord Robert Clive of the East India Co. Clive, who kept the turtle in his garden, was instrumental in establishing British colonial rule in India before he returned to England in 1767.

Mostly, what this piece has to recommend it is its continued reliance on the words of Don Marquis' archy. Everybody loves archy.

Snake, I Think I Love You.

Meet the ACM-R5 Amphibious Snake-Like Robot. (Via William Gibson.)

Also, I join the rest of the world in drooling over Google Mars. And hey, I'm still sweet on Google Moon.

Do Not Awaken the Ancient Evil.

I'm just saying there are rules when things like this happen:

A team of scientists has discovered a lost world of rare plants, giant flowers and bizarre animals -- including a new species of honeyeater bird, a tree kangaroo and an egg-laying mammal -- on a mist-shrouded mountaintop in a remote province of Indonesia on New Guinea island.

There's a photo gallery.

Alternate Cadavers

Don't know if anyone else has been following the fascinating body harvesting story out of New York/New Jersey. Today's installment includes this choice bit:

"We know that they obtained these bodies in a fraudulent way and off the scale of acceptable practice," said FDA spokesman Stephen King.

What are the odds?

Mockbee, I Love Thee

Fred Bernstein visits Alabama to look at some amazing buildings:

Music Man's house, with colorful glass embedded in concrete floors and shelves that move on skateboard wheels, is one of about 40 buildings conceived and built by the Rural Studio, an ever-changing troupe of architecture students who bring their tools, tenacity and talent to impoverished western Alabama. The 13-year-old program, under the auspices of Auburn University, is sometimes called the "redneck Taliesin."

Like Frank Lloyd Wright, the master of Taliesin, Samuel Mockbee, the Rural Studio's founder, was a larger-than-life figure. Born in Mississippi, Mr. Mockbee established the Rural Studio in dirt-poor Hale County, Ala., a place where trailers teetering on cinderblocks and disintegrating barns were two of the most common building types.

I highly recommend the amazing photo chronicle of some of the project's best work, Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency.

NOOOO!!!!

An excellent article about Sean Stewart, one of my very favorite writers, and what he's up to lately:

All of this may keep Stewart from writing novels for some time. As much as he loves them, novels will always be there.

ARGs, by contrast, are changing with each iteration.

"It's like building airplanes" around the turn of the century, he said. "You know they haven't reached their final form."

I may have to start playing these ARGs. They sound like tremendous fun. (Note to Maureen McHugh fans: She gets a mention and was a key writer on these projects too.) (Via Dave.) I was just recommending Sean's work to someone yesterday, who was looking for something for a very precocious teenager who liked LOTR and Harry Potter -- which, of course, Sean's work has very little in common with, but I stick by my recommendation.

p.s. Sorry for the sucktastic content here this week. Swamped and C has the Martian Death Cold. Will try to shape up this weekend.

Suggestions For Improvement

When weather people are wrong, they must commit seppuku. On the air.

Is It April First?

Some people need different kinds of directions:

The church tried to persuade station KRQE not to air its report last week about the aerial signposts marking a Scientology compound that includes a huge vault "built into a mountainside," the station said on its Web site. The tunnel was constructed to protect the works of L. Ron Hubbard, the late science-fiction writer who founded the church in the 1950s.

The archiving project, which the church has acknowledged, includes engraving Hubbard's writings on stainless steel tablets and encasing them in titanium capsules. It is overseen by a Scientology corporation called the Church of Spiritual Technology. Based in Los Angeles, the corporation dispatched an official named Jane McNairn and an attorney to visit the TV station in an effort to squelch the story, KRQE news director Michelle Donaldson said.

Oh, it gets better. Read the whole thing.

Bad Guesser

Chris McLaren (aka Big-Headed Canadian Whiskey Man) points to the Gender Genie, which analyzes writing samples and predicts whether the author is male or female. Somewhat concerningly, he said it thinks I'm a man. (Of course, it also thought Emma Bull was.) I decided to test it out with some longer samples.

Scores

The first 1,000 words and change of a new story I just finished called Cassie Says:

Female Score: 1883
Male Score: 1007
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!

So far, so good, but that's a pretty tight score.

The first chapter of my YA novel Girl's Gang:

Female Score: 2083
Male Score: 2137
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male! 

Wrongo!

A longer blog entry, From Two to Four:

Female Score: 1416
Male Score: 1776
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

Of course, according to the stats, the Genie seems to be running about 41 percent incorrect. Not knowing much about what this is based on (and being unable to see the Nature article), I'm not sure any conclusions can be drawn from this -- except perhaps that this oversimplifies the algorithm or something. (Or it's just stoopid.) Kind of interesting though.

How to Get a Lemur Named After You

Who knew?

Most people know him as the Minister for Silly Walks on "Monty Python" or as Q in James Bond films. But John Cleese will also go down in history for another reason: lemurs.

Researchers from the University of Zurich have named a newly discovered species of lemur - one of the most primitive and endangered primates in the world - after the British comedian in honor of his work with the animal.

The avahi cleesei, which weights less than two pounds and eats leaves, was discovered in Western Madagascar in 1990 by a team led by anthropologist Urs Thalmann and his colleague Thomas Geissman of Zurich University.

The name is a tribute to Cleese's promotion of the plight of lemurs in the movie "Fierce Creatures" and documentary "Operation Lemur with John Cleese," the university said in a statement. A lemur even appears next to Cleese on his Web site.

Space Dust!

The WaPo covers a little probe that could:

Like a hummingbird hovering over a tantalizing blossom, a small but virtuoso Japanese spacecraft is poised to touch down in the coming days on the surface of an asteroid 180 million miles away, stir up a small cloud of dust and gather in a sample.

Barring a mishap, Hayabusa, or "Falcon," is expected to make two and possibly three touch-and-goes on the asteroid Itokawa, then return to Earth with a tenth of an ounce of asteroid dust.

If it succeeds, Hayabusa will be the first spacecraft to land on a celestial body and bring something back from it since U.S. astronauts Eugene A. Cernan and Harrison H. Schmitt collected samples from the moon during the last Apollo lunar mission, in 1972.

Someone please arrange for Shonen Knife to do a song called "Hayabusa." Thank you.

Updated: Terrible Shonen Knife news. Drummer China Nishiura killed in a car accident. So very sad.

Know Your Opponents

How Stuff Works on zombies:

Like a lot of monsters, zombies have their roots in folklore and -- according to some researchers -- in real events in Haiti. In this article, we'll discuss Haitian zombies, explore depictions of zombies in films and video games and review the best course of action for surviving an attack.

Links to related topics here, such as vampires, mummies, bigfoot, chupacabras ... cells and brains? If you say so.

(Via MorrowPlanet.)

Hummingbirds of the Mind

The Washington Post has a pretty wonderful--if slightly depressing for the bird flu mentions--animal photo gallery up. The only photo I managed to grab features a one-month-old parrot from Bangkok ("One night in Bangkok makes a hard parrot humble... "), but number two is a beautiful shot of a hummingbird on the wing. No, really, it's not like these; you can see it clear as if it's stuck in time. There's also a monkey drinking from a bottle and a cow moose.

All the Pretty Little Skulls

The Mütter Museum's former curator Gretchen Worden, remembered in the NYT and with a new room at the museum.

There's also a slide show (example at left).

Mad? Mad Genius?

Who can say for sure?

The Saturday night show was set against a backdrop that called to mind the confluence of a carnival sideshow and a burlesque theater. There was a Thumbelina-size woman in jeans and a nearly transparent blouse and a gentleman in yard-long, auburn dreadlocks who looked like a Rastafarian Rumpelstiltskin. Redheaded twin girls wore complementary gold party dresses. The models, as always, were chosen for their unusual physical attributes. But instead of selecting only aberrantly tall young women who weigh 110 pounds, there were beanpole men, tiny old folks, models with jet-black skin and others almost as pale as an albino. The extremes of humanity were drawn together in a celebration of diversity. It was fashion taking on some of its worse biases: fat, old and ugly.

And it was uncomfortable.

The audience laughed. One woman in the audience jerked fitfully back and forth, she was so overwhelmed with amusement. Some people pointed and howled in hysterics. Others applauded appreciatively, offering the models encouragement for stepping into the spotlight -- a daunting task even for those who do it five or six times a day.

A single-page handout left on each seat underscored Galliano's intention, printed with the lyrics to a song familiar to anyone who'd ever been to Sunday school: "Jesus loves the little children / All the children of the world. / Red and yellow, black and white, / They are precious in His sight. / Jesus loves the little children of the world."

Regardless, Galliano will never be accused of subtlety.

Possum Trot Triangle* Boy Makes Good

Don't you just love it when your sister tells funny stories about almost killing you when you were kids? Especially if you just won a Nobel prize? The AP picks up a localized story from Paducah:

"We made mud pies, and I remember one time I almost killed him," she said. "We were playing in a sandbox and he made me eat some sand. So I then made him eat it, and he almost choked."

Berry didn't detect anything special about her brother, Robert Grubbs, or have any hint that he'd win a Nobel Prize.

But, Grubbs did just that. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Wednesday awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry to Grubbs and two others for their development of the metathesis method in organic synthesis.

*Grubbs was born in the Howard's Grove community of Marshall County, which he described as part of the Gilbertsville-Calvert City-Possum Trot triangle.

Honest Abe Lincoln's Zombie Contingency Plan

From the NYT story on the recreation of the Great Influenza pandemic strain:

But Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger, chief of the molecular pathology department at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, had an idea for finding that ancient virus. He recalled that his institute had a warehouse of autopsy tissue, established by President Lincoln.

Dr. Taubenberger investigated and found tissue from two soldiers who died of the 1918 flu, one in Massachusetts, one on Long Island. The tissue was snips of lung soaked in formalin and encased in little blocks of wax. In that tissue was the virus, broken and degraded, but there, untouched for nearly 80 years.

This just in: Lincoln planned to raise army of zombies.

 

To Planet or Not a Planet

From a story in today's NYT on evolving definitions of planethood:

Not only did the panel members disagree on the definition of a planet, at last report they could not even agree, it seemed, on whether they were making progress. Within the space of a few minutes the other week, I received one e-mail message from Dr. Marsden saying he was optimistic and another from Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Washington complaining that his morning e-mail gave him no sense that they were close to bringing the issue to a close.

In another e-mail message, Dr. Boss described the process as "like trying to shovel frogs into a wheelbarrow - they keep jumping out again."

Scientists are so cute when they bicker.

THEY ARE COMING FOR YOU, Pt. 2 (updated)

First giant squids, now zombies:

There has been a small outbreak of “zombism” in a small town near the border of Laos in North-Eastern Cambodia.

The culprit was discovered to be mosquitoes native to that region carrying a new strain of Malaria which thus far has a 100 percent mortality rate and kills victims in fewer than 2 days.

After death, this parasite is able to restart the heart of its victim for up to two hours after the initial demise of the person where the individual behaves in extremely violent ways from what is believed to be a combination of brain damage and a chemical released into blood during “resurrection.”

(Thanks, Melissa!)

Updated: By the way, April Fool's! I got you early this year. (Actually, I'm completely gullible and believe anything that looks vaguely like a news story that is emailed to me. But I still love this story.)

?*&!

Natalie Angier weighs in on the human proclivity for cursing in a lengthy essay in the NYT:

"The Jacobean dramatist Ben Jonson peppered his plays with fackings and "peremptorie Asses," and Shakespeare could hardly quill a stanza without inserting profanities of the day like "zounds" or "sblood" - offensive contractions of "God's wounds" and "God's blood" - or some wondrous sexual pun.

The title "Much Ado About Nothing," Dr. McWhorter said, is a word play on "Much Ado About an O Thing," the O thing being a reference to female genitalia.

Even the quintessential Good Book abounds in naughty passages like the men in II Kings 18:27 who, as the comparatively tame King James translation puts it, "eat their own dung, and drink their own piss."