90% True

Or
“‘E’ for Excellent”

.: Both Rick and Anonymoustache bestowed the same honor upon me earlier this week, and I’d be remiss in my duties as a blogger if I didn’t express my gratitude by perpetuating this meme. I must say I don’t read that many other blogs that aren’t already well known, and most of those are on the ScienceBlogs network. Still, finding 10 blogs to praise can’t be that hard, can it?

Rationally Speaking
.: Massimo Pigliucci wrote an online monthly column for a couple years, and I was lucky enough to find them hosted on a website which wasn’t blocked by my company’s web filter. Now he maintains a slightly more informal blog, but if you’re interested he’s just released a pdf of every Rationally Speaking column.

Vegetables Are Friends
.: Only a few posts in, but already addicting. If you ever run across people who refuse to eat vegetables, point them to this blog — it’s written by one of them, but one who recognizes their deficiency and is working to correct it (though they might not word it exactly like that). It’s actually run by a friend of mine whose name I cannot reveal, because, “when vegetablesarefriends takes off and becomes the new ‘it’ blog, I do want to maintain some anonymity.”

bbstucco
.: This one might be a bad choice, since the author announced he won’t be updating as often. That said, there is a wealth of great posts by this man. The Time I Almost Got Laid is a good place to start.

The Bronze Dog
.: Worth it for the Doggerel series alone. “Welcome back to ‘Doggerel,’ where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.” Indeed. There’s always at least one doggerel entry on the main page.

Skeptico
.: If you read Pretty Soon… and aren’t immediately impressed, you’ll probably not like this blog.

perotheus
.: The man has a word-a-lizer, what more could you want?

Overwhelming Evidence
.: This one might seem like an odd choice, but bear with me. Yes, it’s run by arch-cdesign proponentsist Bill Dembski, and one of the moderators is my unofficial nemesis, the unteachable Sam Chen. Sure, Denyse O’Leary has turned the site into a incestuous link farm of stupidity. And yeah, they banned me for having the temerity to correct Chen’s egregious quotemines. All of these are valid reasons to eschew this dark, sticky pit of internet stupidity. So why give it an ‘E’ for Excellence? I happen to know four or five of the regular bloggers are actually dedicated parodists. I’d post some samples of their writings, but that’d give the game away, wouldn’t it? If you can’t find them, don’t fret — neither can the moderators.

.: Dang, I still have three blogs left, don’t I? I really need to pick up on this internet thing. Who should I read, Internet?

*<5b>*

Or
f”This.Fost.Took.Way.Too.Long.To.Tyfe”**
f
f.:.I.logged.onto.a.fu5blic.co7mfuter.in.the.student.union
f5building.here.at.%Baylor..At.first.I.was.confused8,.since
fthe.screen.wasn’t.resfonding.to.the.7mouse8,.5but.I
fcould.still.7move.the.cursor..I.tried.to.tyfe.7my.na7me
f5but.a.five.keft.affearing.5before.the.”5b”..I.hit.the
fleft.arrow.key.and.deleted.the.five8,.5but.I.found.I
fcouldn’t.use.the.right.arrow.key.at.all.
f
f.:.I.turned.off.nu7m5ber.lock.and.used.the.nu7m5ber
ffad.keys.instead..That.solved.one.fro5ble7m8,.5but.as
fyou.can.clearly.see8,.there.were.others..You’ll.notice
fother.nu7m5bers.5before.letters8,.like.the.seven.in.front
fof.”7m”.and.the.eight.in.front.of.the.co7m7ma..I.haven’t
fused.it.yet8,.5but.there.is.also.an.afostrofhe.in.front.of
fthe.”`z”.key..The.characters.also.carry.over.when.I.try
fto.cafitali`ze.the7m..~Zoiks!
f
f.:.You’ll.also.notice.a.letter.7missing.fro7m.the.following
fsequence.:a5bcdefghijkl7mnoqrstuvwxy`z..That.is
f5because.I.cannot.tyfe.that.letter.at.all..No.dou5bt
fyou’ve.notice.how.the.letter.”f”.has.see7med.to.show.uf
fin.the.oddest.flaces..This.is.5because.it.looks.7most.like
fthe.letter.5between.”o”.and.”q”8,.5but.also.5because
feveryti7me.I.hit.the.enter.key8,.an.f.affears.
f
f.:.See?
f
f.:.I.have.had.to.5be.very.careful.not.to.hit.the.return
fkey.while.writing.this..If.I.do8,.the.fage.will.refresh.and
fI.will.have.lost.all.that.I’ve.written..Also8,.the.right-click
fstill.works.on.the.7mouse8,.5but.the.left.click.does.not8,
fso.there.has.5been.7much.ctrl-ta5b5bing.and.shift-
fta5b5bing.
f
f.:.One.other.thing.you.7might.5be.wondering.is.how.I
fgot.to.90fercenttrue.co7m.to.fost.this..That.was.a
ffarticularly.difficult.challenge8,.since.this.co7mfuter’s
fcharacter.7maf.is.nowhere.to.5be.found..I.couldn’t
fcofy.and.faste.the.letter.5between.”o”.and.”q”.5because
fI.couldn’t.highlight.any.text.with.7my.7mouse..%Being
fthe.genius.I.a7m8,.I.re7me7m5bered.the.server.na7me
ffor.7my.site.and.tyfed.that.into.the.address.5bar
finstead:.httf://0162da9.netsolhost.co7m.Fro5ble7m
fsolved.
f
f.:.Oh8,.5but.then.there.was.the.frocess.of.logging.in.
fEveryti7me.I.fress.the.enter.key8,.it.adds.an.”f”..So8,
fI.had.to.keef.entering.7my.fassword.and.hit.enter8,
ffraying.that.the.fassword.would.trans7mit.faster.than
fthe.enter.key.could.add.that.extra.”f”..After.several
ftries8,.it.finally.worked.
f
f.:.That’s.all.I.can.find.that’s.wrong.with.this.co7mfuter8,
fother.than.the.right.shift.key.not.working.and.the.left
fctrl.key.not.working..Oh8,.and.none.of.the.Fkeys.do.what
fthey.nor7mally.do8,.5but.I’7m.too.afraid.to.try.the7m.all8,
flest.I.lose.everything.I’ve.written.
f
f.:.I.guess.every.story.has.a.7moral8,.so.this.one.would
ffro5ba5bly.go.so7mething.like.this:
f
f”Don’t.sfill.your.drinks.on.a.fu5blic.key5board8,.you.ass.”

Or
“Giving Back to the Community, One Hastily Written Appraisal at a Time”

.: Last week a professor emailed me about the upcoming Central Texas Science and Engineering Fair and its need for volunteer judges. Those of us participating were asked to choose which subjects we’d like to judge. As someone who loves molecular biology, I asked to be placed in the Cellular physiology/Biochemistry sections. As someone who clearly doesn’t matter, they assigned me to physics.

.: Physics is the only class I’ve had to retake. It’s a shameful blight on my collegiate career. It’s a subject of which the difficulty is matched only by the intensity of my disinterest. (I’m not sure if one can be actively disinterested in something, but the correlation is there.)

.: Luckily, the science fair projects I judged all belonged to 6th and 8th grade students, so for the most part I was safe. Another safety net was my co-judge, Jay. If we ran across a student whose project dealt with physics beyond my caliber, he was to play the role of the person who knew what he was talking about.

.: My fear of physics was assuaged when we approached the first poster. She was a 6th grader, and her question was a simple one: “Does the number of megapixels on a camera affect picture quality?” I realized at that point I wasn’t going to be dealing with physics. My role was to ask leading questions that might lead to sudden epiphanies in basic experimental design and scientific thought.

“These two cameras have built-in flash, but this camera does not. How do you think that might have affected your results?”

.: When we were satisfied that the student had grasped the concept of controls, my co-judge Jay followed with an equally important question I had not thought to ask.

“Did you have fun?”

.: Jay had a gift for making the students excited. I’m sure most of them were nervous when we started, so he already had some form of energy to work with. Still, when we went to the next poster (”Is one pole of a magnet stronger than the other?”), he enchanted the student with a description of the magnet in his lab.

“It has a coil that goes about this high” — his hand came above his head — “and it has over a million loops. Isn’t that cool?”

.: To a kid, a million of anything is cool. That this particular million can, with several thousand amps running through it, pull a wrench from your hand is, to a 6th grader, about as cool as having Superman show up at your birthday party.

.: As with every science fair, however, there were some fairly obvious incidents of too much parental involvement. Last year I mentioned the case of the knockout muffins presented by a student who just happened to be the son of my molecular genetics professor. That kind of parental involvement is fine, because the student understood the relevance of the test. However, when a student had a beautifully constructed poster, an interesting problem, a well-written presentation, and no understanding of the basics of their project, we got suspicious.

.: Then there were cases where a complete lack of parental involvement was evident (or so we hoped). One student’s question was, “Do different types of lights produce different numbers of shadows?” As in, if you take a flashlight and shine it on an erect pencil, will you see more shadows than if you used, say, an LED microlight? She took pictures to document the different shadows. I questioned her about the use of flash in her pictures, and whether the multiple shadows might have been created by more than one light source. She did not understand the purpose of either question.

.: There was also at least one instance of adult input being completely wrong. We asked one student if she thought three trials was enough data. She said yes, because her science teacher told her it’s always best to have an odd number of trials so you don’t have symmetrical bias. I’m not sure what that means, but for all you people out there doing experiments with exactly 100 trials, you’re doing it wrong.

.: The first project we saw in the 8th grade section was simply amazing. This student wrote a program in Java to simulate the Ising model of ferromagnetism. If you are a physics major and even you do not know what that means, do not worry: you have simply not gone to grad school yet. Now think how a lowly biochemistry major might react to such a display. What could I say? I had to retake Physics I, I barely passed Physics II, and I have no familiarity with a coding language of any kind. Even Jay took a while to say anything. All our questions for the other kids were designed for their benefit; we already knew the answers in those cases. But any question we had for this student would be a genuine search for knowledge — how did he do that?

.: He told us exactly what he did and how he did it, but I didn’t have to take his word for it. “Everything he said was accurate,” said Jay, the experimental particle physicist. True, I just took someone else’s word for it, but I figured someone like Jay wouldn’t be a professor of physics if he had a habit of making statements that didn’t accord with reality.

.: Two students had projects that involved trips to the Meyer observatory. One of the students clearly knew a great deal about astronomy, but her hypothesis was a bit weak. It was basically, “I bet I can find Polaris with my sextant.” It wasn’t the kind of hypothesis which generates any knew knowledge when falsified, but how do you explain that to a middle-schooler — especially one who was kind enough to show how you can make a own homemade sextant with a straw, a protractor, and a fishing lure?

.: The other kid, however, made full use of his telescope time. I can’t remember the exact details of his hypothesis (it involved absorption of different wavelengths, I’m sure), but I did learn how to determine whether a star has an exoplanet orbiting around it. [FYI: a star dims slightly whenever a planet passes between it and an observer.] He also explained the importance of a check star and the effect our atmosphere and rotation has on the perceived brightness of stars — both topics which I, a mere manipulator of DNA sequences, did not know a thing about beforehand.

.: There were six projects each for both 6th and 8th grade physics. Awards were to be given to each subject for every grade. We were allowed to assign 1st and 2nd place, as well as up to three honorable mentions. The other judges wanted to give as many honorable mentions as possible to encourage the students, but I petitioned to limit them to two. My reasoning was that two people could shoulder failure a lot easier than one person, even is one student’s project failed spectacularly more than the other’s.

.: I guess I can end this post by explaining my one and only science fair project from the 6th grade. My problem was a simple one: “Which candy bar is the tastiest?” My hypothesis followed directly from my preferences: “I think butterfingers are the tastiest.” My methods were as simple as they were sound: “Several volunteers were asked to sample candy bars and note whichever one they thought was the tastiest.” My conclusion was controversial: “The data indicates that Reese’s peanut butter cups are the tastiest.” My proposal for further research was denied.

Or
“Stray Musing For The Day”

.: My professor just emailed me a dozen articles that cover what he’s currently doing in his lab. I’m looking towards the fun weekend I’ll have reading them all.

.: One thing I noticed was the steps Gmail took to protect me from any potential threats the pdf files might harbor. “Gmail is scanning for viruses…” I was told.

.: Apparently Gmail needs to step up its security, because it totally missed White Clover Mosaic Virus, Tobacco Mosaic Virus, Foxtail Mosaic Potexvirus, and the sinister sounding Potato Virus X.

.: I’m just glad I’m on a school computer and not my own.

Or
“Mathematicians Get All the Best Nerd Jokes”

.: Killing time during my Cell Fizzzz class the other day, I and the girl next to me gazed upwardly at the periodic table adorning the upper third of the wall. She wrote on her notebook “Xenon: Warrior Princess” and immediately the game was on.

.: I responded with the equally cringe-worthy “Jason and the Argon-auts” and followed it with “Yttrium: Helping nerds win at scrabble since 1794.” She fired back with “Einsteinium only got a 99.”

.: Most of my attempts were simply awful (”V for Vanadium” and “Don’t phase me, Br!”), but that didn’t stop me from appreciating them. I was particularly fond of the headline: “Plutonium Relegated to Dwarf Element Status.”

.: I couldn’t muster enough comic genius to make something out of Holnium and Halfnium, which is great because I later learned the actual elements names are Holmium and Hafnium. Then there was my pair of borderline racist jokes:

“Excuse me, senor, does this look like silicon to you?”
“Si!”

and

“Excuse me, senor, do you know what the symbol for potassium is?”
“Que?”

.: Were I a better artist, I could have drawn a king, queen, prince, and princess in the form of neon lights with the all too obvious subtitle below: The Noble Gases. However, I lack the effort to ever seriously develop an artistic talent. It is this same lack of effort that is responsible for my final joke: “Hey, do you know which element has atomic number 116?” “Uuh, I don’t know.”

.: My alternative title claims that mathematicians have all the best nerd jokes. If my post wasn’t enough to convince you, allow me to offer the following:

An Engineering, a Physicist, and a Mathematician are staying in a hotel. In the middle of the night, the fire alarm goes off. The Engineer is the first to wake. He runs out to the hall, sees a fire off in the distance, and gets to work. He runs back to his room, grabs his ice bucket, fills it with water, and runs quickly back to the hall to douse the flames. Later, the alarm goes off again, this time waking the Physicist. The Physicist sees another fire in the hallway, runs back to retrieve the ice bucket, patiently fills it with just enough water put out the fire (keeping in mind the rate at which the fire spreads while he’s filling the bucket), walks carefully to just the right distance from the fire, and gently tosses the water from the bucket, forming a perfect arc and putting out the fire without a drop of excess water. The fire alarm goes off a third time, and the Mathematician wakes up. He runs outside of his room, sees the fire in the hall, remembers the ice bucket in his room, thinks “Aha! A solution exists!” and goes back to sleep.

Or
“More Bad Oxymorons And Other Nonsense”

.: I have a bad habit of checking the Trib’s opinion pages for the occasional 300-word polemic against “Darwinism”. I have an equally bad habit of responding to those polemics with my own carefully researched and devastatingly concise rebuttals. Of course my letters to the editor are invariably altered to the point of incomprehensibility, but I try. Today I was served a nice treat: an entire guest column by John West, senior fellow of the Discovery Institute, titled “Worshiping at Darwin’s Altar.”

After years of accusing Darwin’s critics of trying to insert religion into biology classes on the sly, leading defenders of evolution are now campaigning to incorporate religion explicitly into classroom lessons on evolution.

.: What’s this now, religion in our classrooms, and from those dreaded Darwinists no less? I certainly don’t want religion anywhere near a science classroom. I’m equally opposed to teachers who would waste class time even addressing religious topics at all, whether pro or con. So what is the problem, exactly?

An educational Web site called “Understanding Evolution,” meanwhile, encourages teachers to debunk the “misconception” among students that evolution is incompatible with religion.

.: John West wants to argue that evolution sometimes is incompatible with religion (thus the scarequotes around “misconception”), so shouldn’t we see what the website actually says?

The misconception that one always has to choose between science and religion is incorrect. Of course, some religious beliefs explicitly contradict science (e.g., the belief that the world and all life on it was created in six literal days); however, most religious groups have no conflict with the theory of evolution or other scientific findings. [emphasis added]

.: So it seems evolution sometimes is incompatible with religious beliefs, at least according to the Understand Evolution website. This is an undeniable statement of fact, as is the final sentence which is backed up by a link to several statements on evolution by major religious organizations.

.: These are mere descriptive facts. The purpose of this website is to let students feel more comfortable learning state of the art science. Understand Evolution has made it clear that when certain religious beliefs contradict science the science should still be taught. Nobody is “using religion” to teach evolution. No teacher is going to start class by announcing, “Since the American Jewish Congress has given us their okay, today we’re going to learn about silent mutations.” The whole problem was started in the first place by odious creationists like West who’ve repeatedly disrupted science classes with their bogus, religiously-motivated and -derived objections to evolution.

.: As long as a vocal minority uses their ignorant superstitions to block science education, it will be expedient for educators to point out the more sophisticated belief systems that aren’t actively trying to undermine science.

.: With all that said, I do have some sympathy with his piece. If science teachers are allowed to point students to statements by religion organizations that support evolution, why can’t they point students to statements by religious organizations that condemn evolution? I, personally, would rather they do neither, since it’s irrelevant in the first place. If 95% of the world’s religious organizations didn’t support evolution, the science should still be taught. But that’s exactly the point: the religious statements that condemn evolution invariably use faulty science, and the prime objective of a science educator is to teach good, current, and accepted science. If there are religious organizations out there that accept proper science, great! Making students aware of this fact has a very real secular purpose of facilitating proper science education.