The Oyster’s Garter

I had all kinds of intelligent things to write, but I’m somewhat under the weather today, so I’ll just link lazily instead.

• Is there too much doom and gloom in conservation outreach? Mark Powell says yes, Rick MacPherson says no, Mark says YES NEENER NEENER, Rick says NO PBBBT. Me, I try to enjoy the gloom as much as possible - all those beautiful opportunities for black humor that my ancestors never even dreamed of. In fact, maybe this discussion can be settled with a klezmer danceoff!

• The New York Times Magazine has a feature on trash in the ocean. It focuses on Alaska, which has the same trash accumulation problem as the Northwest Hawaiian Islands - it’s getting trash from the North Pacific Gyre. Volunteers in the Kenai Fjords picked 30 tons of trash off just one beach.

• Carl Zimmer ponders octopus intelligence in Slate. Come for the high-brow discussion, stay for the  flounder impersonation.

Did anyone else hatch baby chickens in preschool? I always thought the chicks, no matter how fluffy, had an evil gleam in their eye, and was kind of relieved when they were packed off to the farm. Relive those halcyon days with this photoseries on chicken development. Also check out the development of a Cecropia silkmoth from egg to caterpillar to full-fledged moth.

Via Boing Boing

What if the periodic table had a party? The European Research Commission investigates - and brings the sexy like only Europeans can. Damn, I want the NSF to sponsor parties like this! And that’s not just because I want to be electricity.

Carnival of the Blue is one year old! Check out Carnival of the Blue #13 hosted by its daddy, blogfish. (Somehow TOG got scorned, but it’s ok. I have a voodoo doll of Mark Powell riiiight here.)

Greg F, quite fairly, called me out for criticizing “The Big Bang Theory” before seeing an episode. Last night, I finally had the time and internet speed to watch two full episodes. In an utterly unsurprising turn of events - DO NOT WANT. The nerds are the standard nerd-stereotypes: there’s a horny nerd, a lovelorn nerd, a socially aloof nerd, and a South Asian nerd. (Notice that the South Asian character needs no actual personality traits other than a funny accent.)

The hot blonde neighbor character is hot! She has boobies! She likes parties and fun! She bribes the horny nerd by telling him how to get into her “easy” friends’ pants. Every girl needs a friend who will sell her insecurities (in the show, the friends were a formerly overweight girl and a girl who hated her father) to the highest bidder!

There is a brief and actually funny scene with a female grad student (played by Sara Gilbert from “Roseanne”), but all in all the show is indeed about nerdboys drooling awkwardly over unattainably hot women. In other words, having seen the show, I stand by my former opinion. Two episodes (yes, yes, df=1) may not be a good sample size, but I really cannot bear to waste more of my life being mildly irritated and very, very bored. As Ny said on the last post: “I was going to give it a Revise & Rewrite, but no, this is just a Rejection.”

I’m back in the augmented bosom of southern California, at least for a grand total of one day before heading to New England for family events. In lieu of actual blogging:

• Please enjoy enormous blue Australian earthworms from Zooillogix. Mess with them and they’ll put YOU on a fishhook.
• For those of you interested in trash in the North Pacific Gyre, the Algalita Foundation is sailing a boat made out of trash to Hawaii. It’s like the Life of Pi with more trash and less maneating tiger.
• Make your boobs bionic with a solar-powered bra. The energy can be used to a) keep those delicate lady parts warm; or b) charge your cellphone or ipod. The only catch is that the solar panel needs to be exposed to sunlight for a few hours a day - so unless sunbathing is a required part of your job, it’s not so useful. (But I have all these required surface intervals between dives! Could the bra charge my underwater drill or suction sampler? Sweet!)

And I’m going to a Dresden Dolls concert tonight! Brechtian punk cabaret and crossdressing and their new album! In honor of my return, this is their “Shores of California” video.

UPDATE: I saw two episodes.

Catching up on my journals, this Science Magazine fluff interview (sorry, subscription only) with experimental particle physicist David Saltzberg caught my eye. Dr. Saltzberg is the science advisor to the TV show The Big Bang Theory, in which *gasp* nerdy male physicists nerdily woo *double gasp* their sexy and unattainble blond bombshell neighbor. He’s pretty defensive about criticism that the show is sexist:

Most of the show’s detractors, he notes, have never seen a whole episode. Prady stresses that The Big Bang Theory means no ill will. “If the scientific community is concerned with how we depict them, be gentle and be patient,” he says. “We are you; we love you.”

Ok, I’ve never seen an episode, but I might just based on this challenge. Still, no matter how he spins it, there’s nothing new about the male-geek-chases-popular-hot-girl trope. And I, for one, am really sick of it. Clearly, Saltzberg does not understand how condescending this is:

Saltzberg views the show as a tool for science education: PBS’s NOVA with rim shots. During an awkward date, Leonard gets an olive to rotate inside a glass–and corrects Penny, and likely most viewers, that centripetal, not centrifugal, force explains the trick.

This may say “physics is cool,” but it also strongly says that “men do the science, women are the pretty.” There’s just as much gender indoctrination as science education in that scene. In the words of the inimitable Zuska, I puke on The Big Bang Theory’s shoes.

I am bit raw on this, having just been accosted by a drunk American tourist who accused me of computing on my vacation. When I explained that I was, in fact, a (baby) marine biologist at work, he laughed uproariously and said, “Yeah, and I’m a NASA rocket scientist!” while walking away.

So many of our problems would be solved (and our lives made more interesting) if people were sequential hermaphrodites. (Much credit to Ursula Le Guin for that idea, of course.)

It’s 90 degrees in this godforsaken desert and I’m stuck in my blistering apartment writing a grant. Isn’t marine science glamorous? To sooth my parched and empty soul, here is an assortment of amusing links that have been kicking around my Google Reader for a while.

Richard Dawkins is going to guest star on Dr. Who! I am pretty apathetic about the atheism issue, but I still get a little nerdgasm at the thought of a scientist getting to be on Dr. Who. Dawkins is married to Lalla Ward, an actress who played one of the Fourth Doctor’s companions in the late 70s-early 80s.

Sciencey crafts: These greeting cards are embedded with viable seeds - read & plant. And scientific embroidery is pretty.

A collection of awesome science toys from Middlesex University in the UK. I especially like the Shape Memory Polymer and the Magic Snow

You might think you know how pregnancy happens, but I bet you haven’t seen it explained by animated anthropomorphized talking genitals!

Carnival of the Blue #11 is up at Zooillogix. This month’s informal theme is Hot Molluscan Action! Also enjoy a fine selection of posts on fishing, deep sea drilling, great white shark tracking, and even tasty whale steaks, erm, indictments of Japanese “scientific” whaling.

Kevin Z, already overwrought by the sheer concentration of invertebrate perfidy, was driven completely over the edge by my sordid selection of slug sluttery. Thus was born the very first LOLMim!

At least giant slugs don’t have tentacles…oh NOES, they DO have tentacles! And I appear to be having a wardrobe malfunction! HALP! I AM TRAPPED IN A SLUG HENTAI! At least I need not fear the Dread Slug Apophallation….but those with the appropriate equipment should beware…

This Nature News profile of whale anatomist Joy Reidenberg has it all: how to get your dead dolphin into Manhattan (through the Lincoln Tunnel, of course), how to move a table-sized pharynx (a forklift) and bit of an elegy for the dying art of anatomy (hard to publish, no support). Reidenberg’s scientific work is on cetacean voice evolution and mammalian pharynx anatomy, but the amazing part of this profile is her utter joy in dissecting rotting bus-sized cetaceans. Please enjoy selected quotes:

“I had to fold the front seat over on the passenger’s side and shove the bottlenose dolphin’s face out of the front passenger window to fit the thing in the car,” says Joy Reidenberg, almost losing her breath in laughter at the memory. “And so coming in through the Lincoln Tunnel, they’re saying ‘What do you have as a passenger?’”

—–

“To bring back a larynx the size of this table,” she says, thumping on a conference room table, “takes six people, a tug-of-war, and maybe a backhoe and a crane.”

—–

“The two words that have usually sent me into near heart attack have been the words ‘mass stranding’. To her, this is one of the greatest excitements in the world,” he [the department chair] says. “I, on the other hand, have the wonders of explaining to the institutions, the boards, the loading dock, the security people the wonderful material that comes in — trying to stand there with a straight face and say, ‘Odour? What odour?’

And anyone else who loves roadkill gets a double-A+ awesomeness rating in my book:

Once, at about age eight, she decided one of her few dolls needed a fur coat. Rather than asking her mother for one, she went out and found a dead chipmunk. She flayed it and was drying the hide when, to her horror, a raccoon took her prize.

Go read the full profile before Nature takes it out of the free zone.