Recent additions to my blogroll:

At Tetrapod Zoology, Darren Naish writes fun and informative posts about what’s starting to emerge as one of my favourite areas of biology.

KafirGirl is reading the Quran, so I don’t have to. Also, there are LOLmuslims. Really can’t beat that.

a Nadder!, written by Michael Fridman, is a little difficult to describe. It’s got a certain something, but I can’t quite tell what it is that sets it apart from other atheist blogs. Just go there and find out for yourself.

blogs

Like many bloggers I keep an eye on what keywords people have been searching for when stumbling across this humble abode of mine. Understandably I get a lot of hits (well, I say a lot…) from death-related searches, as well as various queries about bees and honey (the former often coupled with death, for some reason). Here’s a few from the last couple of weeks:

are atheists afraid of death: No, we conquer death through meditation and … ah, I can’t do it. I can’t joke with such an innocently naive question. Are atheists afraid of death? I’ve no idea, I’m just one of them. In theory I’m not afraid of death, but in practice … well, I do my best to avoid it.

can get enough of death: Can, or can’t? I honestly am not sure what I’m hoping for here.

can you feel a bee sting when it gets you inside the throat?: Having never experienced it, I can’t say for sure, but my guess would be … yes. And even if you didn’t, you’d definitely notice it when you find you can’t breathe anymore.

epsilon cult dress code: HOW DID YOU FIND ME?! I have to kill you now…

evangelical christian beekeepers: This one’s just bizarre. Do evangelical christians keep their bees differently from the rest of us? Perhaps they bless their hives regularly. Or preach wearing bee beards.

newspaper articles that illustrate theological worldviews of atheism: … uh… I thought the point of atheism is that we reject any kind of theology…

preferences for gifts and guests in sweden: Chocolate always works! Mmmm, chocolate…

what do i do if the sugar in my honey crystallizes: You heat it carefully, stir and then let it cool.

stephen fry i wanna be a beekeeper: I got a load of hits within a short timespan from someone desperately trying to figure out what Stephen Fry said about bees or beekeeping. I suspect they got him confused with Eddie Izzard:

keywords, death, bees, izzard

I’m not apologising for who I am.

But I frequently feel like I should.

introspection, postsecret

Two things that are going on which everyone seems to be writing about, except me:

The Large Hadron Collider. This is freakishly cool and awakens the physics envy in me. Biology never gets this much attention. Except that when I think about it, I realise that it’s not actually physics that’s getting everyone’s attention, but engineering. People’s interest is only peaked when there are cool gadgets involved, such as mars rovers and particle accelerators. So while it might annoy me that not everyone thinks tardigrades surviving in space or bees chasing away predators by shaking their asses is as cool as I think it is, neither does the man on the street consider the finer points of quantum physics particularly interesting.

The US presidential election. I’m hopeful and terrified all at once. Need I really say more?

Now a picture of a tardigrade (taken by myself, no less), because they’re just so cute:

lhc, large hadron collider, physics envy, biology

…well ok, it’s an egg. But a decidedly bean-like one.

This was laid today by one of my parents’ hens. It’s quite possibly the first or second egg she’s ever produced and they can be a bit weird in the beginning. It’s like they have to practise a few times before they get it right.

eggs

Why is it that I always have my brightest flashes of inspiration when it’s impossible to write? Like when I’m in the shower. Once I get to a PC (or pen and paper, but… well), the inspiration and inclination to write is nearly always gone and I end up thinking, “Wow, that would have been a great blog post, and here I am feeling like the last thing I want to do right now is actually write it down.”

Is there a cure for this?

writers block

This is probably entirely unoriginal, but having just suffered through a long-ish subway journey with two men sporting two very elaborate combovers right in front of me I just have to make a few points. If you happen to be a man who is going somewhat bald and are thinking of trying to hide it, read carefully:

1. A combover does not hide your baldness. Everyone can see that it is a combover, and everyone knows what it’s for. Ergo, a combover does in fact enhance your baldness.
2. Combovers are not pretty. The hair is always pointing the wrong direction. Even if it’s not oily or waxy, it still looks unnatural. Combovers are ugly.
3. Sporting a combover tells other people that you are aware of your baldness, and that it bothers you. It makes you look ashamed of yourself, like you’re trying to hide who you are, and that in turn makes you look pathetic, because it’s so obvious.
4. Whereas bald men are a everywhere and no one cares if you’re thinning out on top and hence usually won’t even notice, a combover is about as subtle as those huge yellow exclamation marks hovering over quest-givers in World of Warcraft. It’s fair enough to want attention. But really, wouldn’t you prefer people to be staring at your amazing choice of clothes or stylish new glasses than an atrocious hairdo that doesn’t fool anyone?

Conclusion: If you’re bald or balding, pretend it doesn’t bother you, and it won’t bother anyone else.

combovers, hairstyles, hair, baldness

You know, that thing that some blogs have where if you mouse-over a link an image appear of the site you’re linking to? I can imagine it might be useful in some cases (such as if you’re linking to pictures, hence giving people a way to glimpse the pics before actually clicking it), but on a blog, in the actual text? Please, no. I tend to move my mouse about the screen a lot when I read, selecting blocks of text at random and just generally busying my idle hands, and those snapshots that keep turning up are really annoying.

Yes, I’ve turned them off. I’m just wondering, who likes them? What do they actually give you as a surfer of the interwebs? Are they there to do anything but making the owners of the sites that use them feel a little spiffier, a little cooler, more hip, movin’ with the times? Maybe they’re just there to annoy me. I can only imagine the irritation I would feel if I was on a dial-up connection (do those even exist anymore) as well…

I’m suffering a severe case of chronotype discrimination. I just missed the third lecture in a row on the course I’m currently taking because, for some reason, they’ve seen fit to schedule all the lectures at 9am. Now, I live one hour’s subway ride (plus a ten minute brisk walk) from the university and for me, getting up before 10:30 in the morning is hell. Hell, I tell you. So you can imagine getting to these lectures is … a little bit difficult, to say the least.

Why is it that our whole society is scheduled around morning people? If I get up at seven in the morning to go to a lecture, not only is it impossible to stay fully awake for the three hours they normally take, but the rest of my day has been ruined. There may be about two hours worth of productivity left in me by the time I get home - if I’m lucky. As you no doubt have already surmised, three plus two hours does not equal a full day’s work. If I’m unlucky, I decide to nap, and then the evening is definitely ruined.

What’s worse, I recently discussed this with a fellow evening type, and he seemed to be of the opinion that we should just suck it up and deal with it. Why? I don’t get it. The scientific literature suggests we may be genetically disposed to have our sleep-cycle and productive peak later than other people. Why should we have to suffer? Would morning people suffer the same as we do if we had the lectures start at sometime between 11 and 14? I doubt it. Morning people suffer from evening lectures, evening people suffer from morning lectures, so the obvious solution that would make everyone happy is to have the lectures in the middle of the day.

I don’t want to miss lectures. It makes me upset because I feel like I’m a bad person who can’t keep appointments, it makes me fall behind in the course because I don’t know what information the teachers consider vital and hence have to flounder blindly through the literature, and it makes me lonely because I miss out on a lot of chances to socialise with my classmates. But when the alarm went off at seven this morning, I had had a shitty night’s sleep - yesterday I got up at noon, so how was I supposed to be able to sleep at midnight? - and getting up was simply out of the question.

And not even Sweden has an Ombudsman against discrimination of chronotypes.

chronotypes, evening people, b-types

Scarab is the name I’ve given my very newly acquired laptop. It (I’m still not entirely certain whether it’s a boy or a girl laptop) arrived today in a drab brown box belying the sleek shining treasure hiding inside… Ok so I’m a little bit infatuated with this pretty piece of technology. Who could blame me? Gadgets are a girl’s best friends, don’t you know?

Scarab is a HP Pavilion dv5-1090. If anyone has anything against this particular laptop brand or model, please don’t tell me, because let’s face it - I won’t listen anyway. Scarab will be my constant companion at lectures and seminars and, well, probably pretty much whenever I leave my apartment for an extended period of time. The name was chosen because of the beautiful, shiny black design which immediately reminded me of a beetle.

Now of course this doesn’t mean I’ll abandon Volyova, my trusty gaming rig (named after a character in a scifi trilogy - brownie points to those who can name which one). In fact, it’ll simply mean I can be online and game at the same time without having to alt-tab! *swoon* I’m so happy I could die. This is almost better than Ben & Jerry’s Cheescake Brownie icecream.

No mocking! If you mock me there shall be dire repercussions such as you could never even imagine.

laptops, hp pavilion dv5