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My friend Shawn just started a new blog, Models for Life, where he will discuss sports, climate, politics, and life from a scientific modeler’s point of view. Shawn and I also share many similar research interests, so I’m sure he’ll have some interesting astrobiological tidbits to share.
I enabled display of avatars for “recent comments” in the left sidebar. The folks at WordPress.com enabled global support for Gravatars (globally recognized avatars), so now you can all show off your stylized personal images next to your comments.
Gravatars are linked to your email address, so whenever you enter a comment on a blog (any blog with Gravatar support) your avatar is automatically linked to your comment. Pretty sleek–get your Gravatar if you already haven’t!
I’ve been tagged by Dan with a genetic algorithm meme of sorts! The rules are kind of interesting:
There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”. Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:
* You can leave them exactly as is.
* You can delete any one question.
* You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…”, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”.
* You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.
* You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.
Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.
Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.
Here we go! I’ve indicated Dan’s mutations in blue and mine in red.
1) The best romantic movie in independent film is: Secretary
2) The best inspirationally dramatic song from 80s hard rock is: Europe - The Final Countdown
3) The best anti-war song in working-class folk music is: Bob Marley - Get up, Stand up
4) The best educational TV show on science while growing up was: 3-2-1 Contact
And for my genealogy we have:
My great7-grandparent is Pharyngula.
My great6-grandparents are The Flying Trilobite and Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My great5-grandparents are Flying Trilobite and Leslie’s Blog.
My great4-grandparents are A Blog Around the Clock and The Meming of Life.
My great3-grandparents are From Archaea to Zeaxanthol and The Primate Diaries.
My great2-grandfather is The Other 95%.
My great-grandfather is Tangled Up in Blue Guy
My grandfather is Greg Laden.
My father is Migrations.
Of course, this wouldn’t be half as fun without tagging a few others as my progeny:
Action Allen
Jared Lee
Ralford.net
Dreaming Life
The Naked Galaxy
I just finished converting all the Livejournal content over to WordPress. Even though I am probably the only one who cares about my blog archives, those of you who put up with signing your name at the bottom of an anonymous Livejournal comment can rest assured that all these comments have been reformatted in the more sane WordPress style (yes, I’ve been busy). For archival purposes, my Livejournal will be available at: livejournal.gravityatwork.com.
I’ve decided to move this blog over to WordPress. Some of the designs look sleeker, but mostly it will allow for a cleaner, non-proprietary comment system that doesn’t require an account for non-anonymous commenting.
The permanent domain for the blog will remain at blog.gravityatwork.com, and the LiveJournal will remain for archival purposes. The new blog is functional, although I’ll be adding things and touching up over the weekend.
I didn’t realize how tired I was of white text on black until now. I might tweak things around a bit, but I think I’ll be sticking with black text from now on.
Yes, I’ve changed the name of this blog!
I think the change (which is really not all that spectacular) better captures the flavor of this blog–I do much more dreaming than scheming for the most part. Also, I’ve started a dream journal at Lucidipedia. I won’t be merging the dream journal with this one, but I’ve already learned a lot by recording my dreams, and this will probably influence my musings in the future.
At last the ladder which had been built slowly, slowly, one hope at a time, reached up to the clouds. And the dreamer began to climb.
Today marks the one year anniversary of this blog! In honor of this event, today’s entry features a selection of my favorite posts.
I know why the caged CH4 sings
Furry animals good, tubeworms bad
Baseball Stats: Cumulative Postseason Stochastic Indicator
Using a d20 to Estimate Any Rational Probability
Origins of Science / Universal Free Time
“Anthropogenic” / The Natural Watchmaker / Natural Climate Change / Mesopogenic
There are an infinite number of things you didn’t think about today.
I have been thinking about doing some sort of blog for awhile now, but I already post most of the personal things in my life on KarpAcrossAmerica. Instead, this is a place to write about the good/bad/strange ideas I get, often while working or walking to work. Maybe I’ll develop some of these ideas, and maybe I’ll forget about others, but at least I can try and keep them straight this way. And in the event that anyone actually reads this blog, it’s a way to bounce ideas off others, too.
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