She’s Judy Garland; I’m James Mason

My wife is one of those statistical people who analyzes data for a local college, and she spends much more time poking around figuring out website traffic than I do. I just kind of wing it and follow my urges, she casts a calculating eye on the whole thing. So the other day, she tells me I ought to bring back that old Sex in the MRI article; it will be hot, she says, it’ll draw in a lot of new traffic. So specifically at her urging, I did.

I’m getting about 20,000 visits per hour right now.

It feels a bit eery, being married to a prophetess…although I suppose anyone could tell you that sex is always a draw. I just found it striking that I obey her this once on the weblog thing, and boom, she’s dramatically correct. Fortunately, I’m not doing this for the big traffic numbers, or I’d have to be her slave forevermore.

If any big time corporate types are looking to hire a skilled web prognosticator and analyzer and statistician, she’ll settle for nothing less than $100K/year, and she must be able to work from home (OK, that last bit is my requirement; she might be willing to negotiate that).

GeekProm!

In the rural fastness of Western Minnesota, a legend grows. A man so nerdly that his infamy spreads far and wide; when people see shell-less molluscs, his name leaps to their lips; when geeks and nerds gather, they all whisper the same thing: “Pee-Zee” (or, as the Canadians and Dr Who fans would say, “Pee-Zed.”)

Yes, in yet another of a string of geek honors, I have been invited to the GeekProm, to be held in the Science Museum of Minnesota on 22 April. There will be spaz-dancing, cow-eye dissections, and a talent show, and some couple will be crowned King and Queen Geek.

Obviously, I deserve to go to this. What you may not realize, O Unsuspecting Readers, is that by reading this site you too are now fully certified Geeks and Nerds. Sorry about that, but it is infectious, and you have only yourselves to blame. I’m also afraid that there aren’t any scientists interested in working on a cure, so you’re just going to have to live with your punishment…and show up to out-spaz me on the dance floor.

See you all there.

I may have to sue

OK, that’s enough. This April Fool’s Day thing has gone too far when I am made the butt of the jokes. So far, I’ve been born again,
endorsed the Noah’s Ark story, and have been
hired as a GOP consultant. Norwegianity even found this hugely elaborate web site set up as a parody of Pharyngula. Jeez, people, you need to pick on someone with a sense of humor. Crooked Timber found a service with the right idea: this Rhyme Rank thing from ask.com invents amusing rhymes from your search terms, but go ahead, try and enter “pharyngula“—it just gives up. It knows better than to indulge in idle wastrel japery with such a deadly serious site.

Loooong day

The Café Scientifique was very well done and informative tonight—so where were all you guys? Of course, what the event really meant was that it’s nearly 9:00, I’ve been running around all day, the alarm goes off tomorrow morning at 5:45AM, I teach at 8:00, and somehow I’ve got to explain MHC and T-cell receptors to a class full of sleepy students…and I’ve scarcely cracked the textbook today. So I’m tuning out for a while, to return again after a brief night’s rest.

CotG #36

There are freethinkers frolicking over at Daniel Morgan’s place.

If you’ve been wondering where the heck I’ve been, it’s been one of those days. I had to drive #2 Son to Minneapolis to catch his bus back to Madison—it’s the end of his spring break—and then I had to wrestle with that ugly bloatware called WebCT Vista to take care of stuff my students find important (grades, that kind of thing) for my class. I’m feeling surly and tired, but have no fear: I’ll bounce back soon.

The SF fanboy stirs again

More SF indulgence, excuse me: Gary Farber has been reading Heinlein’s rediscovered “first” novel (brief summary: it’s very bad), and Kevin Drum raises the question of correlation between early SF preferences and later political biases, with Heinlein inspiring conservatives and Asimov motivating liberals (Drum says, “Well, I liked ’em both, but I liked Heinlein more and I turned into a liberal.” I’m not touching that straight line.)

I disliked Heinlein’s stuff intensely. It was badly written, with a patronizing tone, and always smugly assumed that his simplistic opinions were absolutely true. Even his juveniles were irritating in that way, but those self-indulgent later doorstops with old men waited on by nubile vixens? Gah.

I also wasn’t a big fan of Asimov. He was OK, but those gimmicky stories didn’t do much for me.

My favorites began with Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jules Verne—I was very old school. As I began to branch out in grade school looking for new stuff, after gagging over Heinlein and being bored by Asimov, I really got into Ray Bradbury. Later I favored a collection of British authors—Brunner, Wyndham, Moorcock—and then Harlan Ellison, Fritz Leiber, anybody who could actually write, a talent that eluded the old guard. Nowadays I lean towards Banks and Mieville.

I don’t know what that says about how my political inclinations were shaped. I think the stronger correlation is with my utter apathy towards engineering, not my politics.

Timeline: PZ + MG

Call it fate, destiny, synchronicity, or astounding cosmic coincidence, but I have to report a series of highly unlikely events, a whole collection of chance occurrences that, multiplied together, defy reason and point ineluctably to some kind of universal force. These events are spread out over decades, and millions, even billions, of alternatives could have generated a completely different conclusion.

The data are overwhelming.

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