Which Muppet, which soda?

Thanks to Grrlsci­en­tist for help­ing me learn that:

You Are Dr. Bun­sen Honeydew

You take the title “mad sci­en­tist” to the extreme ‑with very scary things com­ing out of your lab. And you’ve invent­ed some pret­ty cool things, from a banana sharp­en­er to a robot politician. But while you’re busy turn­ing gold into cot­tage cheese, you need to watch out for poor lit­tle Beaker! “Oh, that’s very naughty, Beaker! Now you eat these paper clips this minute.”

Click through for my secret soda identity.
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Hurray for being eaten by a bear!

In response to this week’s Ask a Sci­ence­blog­ger and an essay from the Nation­al Review, I’m post­ing a guest response from Jim. Jim is cur­rent­ly being eat­en by a bear. My only request is that you con­sid­er the pos­si­bil­i­ty that bears, not pirates, are the cause of glob­al warm­ing. The data speak for them­selves.

Every time a bear starts attack­ing me, peo­ple go crazy with talk about not build­ing homes in the wilder­ness, and not smear­ing our­selves with hon­ey. You would think they would get used to the phe­nom­e­non of bear attacks by now. But it makes great news footage, and since bear attacks are on every­one’s mind, you might as well go with a seg­ment on how I got eat­en by a bear. It’s a nice respite from the real prob­lems of the world.

Per­son­al­ly, I don’t know what all the shout­ing is about. Bear attacks are great. I’m not say­ing that I’m con­vinced there’s actu­al­ly a bear gnaw­ing on me right now, or that it’s any­one’s fault if it is. But if I’m actu­al­ly being con­sumed by a griz­zly bear, I say “bra­vo.” Peo­ple in most parts of the world should have no objec­tion to spend­ing more time in nature, and these fuzzy lunks are the most help­ful ever.

Con­sid­er my left leg. It used to be that when­ev­er I’d walk, my thighs just rubbed togeth­er. My hair got worn off, peo­ple point­ed and laughed. If a bear were to take a big bite out of that leg (and I’m not say­ing that’s nec­es­sar­i­ly why my leg feels that way), that’d real­ly solve my prob­lems. True, there’s some blood loss, and I can’t actu­al­ly feel my toes. If this bear attack is real, it’s cre­at­ing all sorts of oppor­tu­ni­ties for me to explore prosthetics.

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Kansas Guild of Bloggers

Last week the week­ly car­ni­val of the best Kansasish blog­ging got one sub­mis­sion. Yers tru­ly was mov­ing between sites, but I don’t know what any­one else’s excuse is. Kansans, Kansas Citians or any­one who has ever been to Kansas or seen it on a map should sub­mit their entries now, now, now.

Which programming language?

Via Bill, I dis­cov­er that I am:

Which Pro­gram­ming Lan­guage are You?

It took some tweak­ing to get this result. I start­ed out as bina­ry, then became Lisp, then Java, before set­tling down on C++. I have nev­er pro­grammed bina­ry, have only tweaked Emacs files (and don’t know exact­ly what I did), and Java bugs me. Chang­ing my choice of name for cof­fee dra­mat­i­cal­ly altered my results, and giv­en that I don’t drink the stuff, that isn’t real­ly a sound basis for mak­ing that assessment.

Put your results in the comments.

Jealousy

Dr. Myers was pro­filed by a cre­ation­ist jour­nal. The rest of us have to be con­tent with that sort of atten­tion from trolls.

About comments

The new digs here are tak­ing some get­ting used to. The biggest change is the com­ment sys­tem. I don’t require Type­Key authen­ti­ca­tion, but if you use a Type­Key, you relieve me of hav­ing to man­u­al­ly approve com­ments. I know the sys­tem says your com­ment is being held for approval oth­er­wise, but that’s pure­ly an anti-spam thing. Sign in with Type­Key and your posts will appear immediately.

Maybe the whole Type­Key thing is worth­less. Let me know what you think.

Update: It was worth­less. If spam becomes an issue, I’ll change this, but for now, com­ments will just go up.

Welcome to Thoughts from Kansas

Wel­come to the new Thoughts from Kansas. I’ve moved a few of the posts I’m most proud of across from the old Blog­ger site, and I encour­age you to check them out, that’s prob­a­bly the eas­i­est way to get to know me, and don’t be afraid to dig into all the archives back there.
By way of quick intro­duc­tion, I’m a grad­u­ate stu­dent fin­ish­ing my dis­ser­ta­tion at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Kansas. That explains the sec­ond part of the title. I am not a native Kansan and nev­er claimed to be, but this is where my thoughts originate.

My research is on the spa­tial dis­tri­b­u­tions of species, and the ways that com­pe­ti­tion can restrict species from uti­liz­ing all the areas they could poten­tial­ly occu­py. Along the way I’ve spent a lot of time learn­ing about ways that peo­ple pre­dict species ranges using GIS sys­tems and var­i­ous sta­tis­ti­cal methods.

Much of which is prob­a­bly news to long-time read­ers. I do that work for a liv­ing, and blog­ging is how I let off steam. You’ll see a fair­ly diverse range of top­ics here, with an empha­sis on local pol­i­tics, analy­sis of nation­al and inter­na­tion­al cur­rent events, and a wide range of sci­en­tif­ic top­ics, his­tor­i­cal­ly most­ly from beyond my own field. 

I expect that, once the Kansas school board elec­tions final­ly set­tle down with a pro-sci­ence Board, I’ll be able to refo­cus this site on sci­ence, rather than the polit­i­cal sci­ence the Board has turned biol­o­gy into. One fea­ture I’ll prob­a­bly try to revive is some ver­sion of the now-defunct Evo­lu­tion Project. That site has fall­en into senes­cence because it just takes too much to keep track of even a small frac­tion of the research that comes out which relies on or demon­strates evo­lu­tion at work. It was a wor­thy effort, and the move to Sci­ence­blogs has inspired me to find some bet­ter way to demon­strate the same phenomenon.

So wel­come to the new home here at Sb. Kick the tires, point out any house­keep­ing I for­got to under­take, and ask me about all the things I should have told you when I intro­duced myself.

I’ve tucked a few notes for long-time read­ers under the fold.
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