The Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above-Average Physique is a group of scientists founded “for the propagation of an ideal where science communicators can meet firstly, for drinks; secondly, for communicating; and ultimately, for networking.”
And they have all kinds of cool “merit badges” they have made up.
It’s pretty funny stuff and makes me wish I was a scientist so I could join. 🙂
From Pharyngula:
The Wellcome Trust has published a short pamphlet to inform young students about evolution. I haven’t had a chance to look at it carefully yet, but it looks like an interesting combination of a fairly wordy presentation and lots of color and flash. You can download a pdf of Evolution: The Big Picture for yourself; would it be a useful tool to catch student’s eyes and get the basics across to them?
Like PZ, I haven’t yet read the whole thing, but I think it’s a pretty good introduction to Evolution.
Everyone knows that cats love yarn, right?
Well last night my cats decided to prove it.
Last night Liz was knitting a pair of socks and the cats were very interested in what she was doing. The yarn was hanging down to the floor and Terra decided that she needed to eat it. She chewed almost all the way through it before Liz stopped her, so Liz had to undo her knitting and start over.
When we went to bed Liz left her knitting on the dining room table.
I woke up about 12:45 to go to the bathroom and I found a ball of yarn in the upstairs hallway with the end running down the stairs. So I picked it up and went downstairs to put it away.
When I got downstairs I discovered two very guilty looking cats had managed to unwind another ball of yarn all over the living room.
The yarn was wound around chair legs, under tables, and all around the room. It was hilarious. It looked like something from a cartoon.
It took me about 5 minutes to untangle and wind up the yarn and all the while the cats were giving me dirty looks.
Then I put the knitting away where they couldn’t get it. I’m such a meanie.
Stop, Look, and Listen is a wonderfully imaginative stop-action live movie from 1967 about aggressive driving that is so valid in today’s modern age of road rage!
h/t to BoingBoing (where they have a list of other stop motion movies.)
I found a new Web Comic today that’s pretty interesting.
I followed a link from Girls With Slingshots over to Nothing Better.
So far I have only read the first book/installment/chapter of Nothing Better, but it’s off to a good start. The main characters are a pair of young women just starting school at a Lutheran college (40 minutes from Minneapolis – St. Olaf?)
They don’t know each other and end up as roommates.
What makes it very interesting is that one is pretty religious and the other is an atheist.
So far Jane, the religious one, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink and I’d be willing to bet she’s a virgin. She’s pretty naive.
Katt, the atheist, drinks, smokes, likes to party and seems pretty worldly.
I’m not sure where the comic is going to go, and that’s half the fun, but I hope it doesn’t get bogged down in stereotyping the atheist.
I sure hope the comic doesn’t become preachy about religion.
Update: Okay, now this is too funny. They are driving to the bike shop – and they drive past the Walker Library in Uptown (the Uptown movie theatre is even in the background) and end up at the Flynn Brothers bicycle shop. It’s so obviously Flanders Brothers (except there is no parking lot in front of Flanders Brothers) – just up the street from my house!
According to Boing Boing, Jenni Engebretsen, the RIAA’s Director of Communications, has been put in charge of PR for the Democratic National Convention.
Boing Boing also has a list of her “Greatest Hits“.
If this is true, then I would guess that the Dems may have just lost a bunch of youth and techie votes, as the RIAA has been voted the most hated company in the world by that demographic. (An opinion I hold also.)
I had a Windows 2000 Server running in my basement acting as an AD controller and print server. That’s pretty much all it did.
Okay, it also ran my JBidWatcher program for sniping eBay auctions… As much as I dislike Windows I have to admit that it’s useful to have a Windows box running all the time at home.
About a week ago we started talking about VMware at work and I thought it would be interesting to install the free version on my CentOS server that runs this web site (and several others, and my email, etc.)
So I installed it and propped up a Windows 2000 Server on it. Man, that’s slick.
The virtualized Win2K server runs faster than the one running on the discrete hardware (a PII 500 I think)! And I see no appreciable load added to the host CentOS server (a Xeon 2.4GHz with 2GB RAM).
So I added the virtualized Win2K server as an AD controller in the existing domain, setup the DHCP, DNS and print services to match what was on the old server and then shutdown the old server.
All I had to do next was change the printer definitions on the client machines to point to the new server and away we go!
I also have a Solaris 10 virtual machine running on the same box, but I haven’t really started to play with it yet.
Man that VMware stuff is cool.
I think I’ll take the old Win2K box and use it to replace my firewall (currently a 133MHz Pentium) – but not run Win2K on it.
CMT makes some nice tools.
I have a pretty good collection of CMT router bits and I’m pretty happy with them. They have nice profiles and they cut really smooth.
I recently replaced the Oldham 10″ thin kerf blade on my table saw with a CMT 10″ 50 tooth ATBR thin kerf blade.
The difference is night and day!
The Oldham blade was loud, it bogged down and burned in the cut, it vibrated, and it tore up the veneer on plywood something terrible.
The CMT blade is quiet, it cuts as fast as I can push the wood through it with no burning, and it makes nice clean cuts in veneer plywood. I wish I had bought this blade a long time ago.
I bought an 8″ JET professional stacking dado set recently and I just wasn’t happy with it. The bottom of the dado wasn’t clean and it ripped up the veneer on plywood something bad. (Sound familiar?)
Yesterday I returned it and went home with the 8″ CMT Precision Cut stacking dado set.
More night and day action.
The CMT Dado set is very nice and there is very little veneer splintering. I’m going to experiment with my technique a bit and I think I can reduce the splintering to almost none.
In any case, I think all my saw blades are going to be Orange from now on! They aren’t the cheapest option, but man they cut nice.
According to Pandagon, they managed to force the hotel that was going to display the Chocolate Jesus to take it down. :'(
But Auguste at Pandagon did find a YouTube video of Tom Waits singing “Chocolate Jesus”.
