Bored with zombie movies, but…

I’ve given up on certain movie genres: superheroes and zombies leave me cold. The Walking Dead killed zombies for me — just drove them right into the ground — and the coup de grâce was that terrible Zack Snyder (sorry, the adjective is redundant) zombie mess. It would take a lot to get me to turn on a zombie movie anymore, even though they’ve become ubiquitous.

Then people were raving about this new zombie movie based on a video game (that’s really the kiss of death right there), The Last of Us. I sort of half-watched the first couple of episodes this weekend. It starts off with a pedestrian zombie plot, the twist being that it’s a fungal infection based on Cordyceps, and then it makes it clear that the overall story is about a girl who has a natural resistance to the fungus, and is the key to saving humanity.

Ho hum.

Then the third episode rolled, and was effectively distracting me from my work. Dang it, that’s a love story, a very human love story, and it was beautifully done.

It wasn’t at all what I expected from a zombie-video-game movie, and now I’m all confused. I’m going to have to watch the next episode on Sunday night. Will it collapse into the usual kill-the-humanoid-monster story, or is it going to keep going with human-centered tales of love and struggle? No spoilers, please. I haven’t played the video game, some of you may have.

Strategies for teaching math

Every year, I start teaching genetics by having the students do lots of math, and statistics, and probability calculations. It’s the most difficult part of the class for many of the students. But look! SMBC has a new pedagogical method!

If this works, it’ll revolutionize my classes. Hire a stripper to walk around lamenting that she doesn’t understand Poisson distributions or how to get a p value from that set of data, and presto, we’re done!

Except for one catch. I just checked my class list, and 71% of my students are young women, maybe some are lesbians, but that isn’t recorded in the class data.

Would it work if I traipsed around the classroom in a unitard?

Undergraduates: xkcd is not a good source for career advising

I must object to the methodology and the conclusions of this comic.

The choice of prefixes to sample is arbitrary and shows a bias towards common physics terms. Why not use “evolutionary” or “genome” or “analytic” or “necro-” or “chrono-“, to name just a few more. The sample space has hardly been touched.

The idea that low Google scholar counts is an opportunity is ludicrous and confuses cause and effect. “Clown” is a prefix that doesn’t show up for either physics or biology or engineering (curiously, there are 3 entries for “clown chemistry”, 5 for “clown psychology”, 1 for “clown dentistry”, and 13 for “clown theology”). I don’t think this implies there is a hot market for clown physicists.

Although, I do think that high-energy clown physics might be a fun field.

None of these spider pants make sense

OK, I’m trying to parse these images, but any spider limb diagram that incorporates the abdomen doesn’t work. The coxa (the proximate segment of the limb) attaches to the cephalothorax, not the abdomen, so the first two images simply do not fit. The third, maybe, but only if the pants hang so low they don’t cover the coxa, trochanter, and femur.

Maybe this diagram of the ventral cephalothorax will help.

I’m sorry if my pedantry ruins the joke, but spiders wouldn’t wear pants.

Au contraire!

I have to disagree with xkcd a little bit.

The problem with learning about biology is that everyone you meet is it

The problem is with not learning enough about biology. Once you know enough, you appreciate that the whole of your existence is wallowing in a cloud of everything and you might as well accept it — we’re all interconnected and part of the whole. Then, once you know too much, you find yourself wondering if your wife would mind if we invited a swarm of spiders to join us for a dinner date.

I made a graph.