Zeke is gone.

…is to go say Happy Birdday to GrrlScientist.

Molly Ivins has died.

I’m surprised at how this affects me. She was a wonderful woman, wise and funny, and this is a great loss to the nation. Whenever I’m tempted to just write off the whole state of Texas (thanks to a few of its rather prominent representatives), I just remind myself, “Molly Ivins,” and know that I’m being unfair.

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Kevin Hayden has put together a sweet tribute to Molly Ivins. We’re all going to miss her.

Since I got ribbed a bit for my antique D&D lore in a previous comment, I have to defend myself from charges of extreme nerdlitude by distracting you all with a real nerdfest: a discussion of who would win in hand-to-hand combat between a first level magic-user and a housecat, complete with computer simulations.

The answer: under the modern rules, the cat usually wins. (When I played, if you said something like “I whack the cat with my staff”, there might be a quick check to see if the cat dodged, and otherwise, we’d just say, “OK, you killed the cat. Now what?” Dang rules lawyers and proliferating nit-pickery.)

Everyone should congratulate ScienceWoman—she manage to land a 7 pound minnow.

Read Twisty and Amanda for an encouraging story about how community activism can shut down a sleazebag operation, “Girls Gone Wild”. It’s a good lesson that I hope gets spread far and wide, and leads more people to cut off exploiters like Joe Francis.

Here’s another account of Phil Plait’s talk at TAM5, with more details. I think he threw in a little bit of snark there.

I won’t complain, though—I can afford to be magnanimous after my overwhelming victory over Bad Astronomy.

A strange map—it gives an equivalent nation in GNP for each state in the US:

Some are weirdly appropriate: Minnesota compares with Norway, France and California are mates, and Dick Cheney’s home state shares something else in common with Uzbekistan. Texas and Canada, though…hey, do you think if we tell them that it will double their GNP, that they’ll take Texas off our hands?

Really. This is painfully sad: a young woman enters a water-drinking contest to win a video game console for her kids, and ends up dying of water intoxication.

Gary Farber of Amygdala is in a crisis, both financially and in his health. This is such a waste: Gary is one of the all time great online raconteurs with a long history of bloggy productivity and the respect of swarms of other internet personalities. If someone were setting up a weblog franchise similar to scienceblogs, they ought to snap him up to anchor their site—he’s that good. And at this point, the tiny amount he’s asking for means he’ll work for cheap.

Help him out however you can. And if you’re looking for an interesting and provocative commentator, hire him!