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February 27, 2005

DJ Jazzy Denver!

So the big news that I haven't mentioned here yet is that a couple weekends ago I went out to denver to meet my nephew, who is the most adorablest human being to ever grace this diverse earth! Here's the scoop:

Getting lost on the way from the airport to my sister's house
Lunch at Little Anita's (son of Vienna-based Anita's)
Baby Bouncing and oogling
Homemade Beer (thanks Ted!)
Some beer with fellow Madison Alumni's who I'd never met before in my life
Snowscooting
Tented Lasagna (well done Billy)
Hot tubs as the snow falls
Empire Burgers and Dairy King
Skiing of course!
Coors Brewery Tour
And of course more Baby bouncing and oogling

All in all an extremely successful trip, I had such a great time that I made a video using iMovie (one of my favorite programs that comes with all Macs) you can see it here on a page my cousin Rick made for it (thanks!). I used that particular song cause Vicki and I had it in our heads the entire weekend and made Rick play it over and over again on the carride back to Denver.

February 25, 2005

Dare Mo Shiranai (Nobody Knows)

This film looks really interesting to me (I have to admit that it's mostly because I'm currently trying to learn Japanese). There was an article about it in today's Weekend section of the Washington Post. It's only playing at the Landmark E St Theatre. Let me know if any of you are interested in seeing it with me, possibly Sunday afternoon?

Red Planet?

From Reuters a little SciFi come to life. They discovered a bacteria that was frozen for about 30,000 years in Alaska and lived. Couple this with the newly discovered frozen ice plateus on Mars and you get a SciFi writer's fantasy come true. The mere possibility that even unicellular life could exist as close to home as Mars is, I think, rather extrordinary, but then I'm a SciFi geek myself. However, the chances are slim at best. According to the article in Reuters it seems that the Mars atmosphere is so light that liquid water currently can't really exist. Ice sublimates straight to gas without even passing through a liquid phase. Think of that cool dry ice that they used for the spooky scene in your high school play. The only reason that the remaining ice plateus are still around is because of an ashy covering they've somehow acquired along the way. The theory is that if Martian bacterial life were to be found that it would have had to have evolved with access to liquid water. At one point it's believed that Mars was able to support liquid water otherwise how did the ice plateus get there in the first place. But, what happened exactly to create such a change in atmospheric pressure? Could life continue frozen even with this catasrophic change? If the same event caused the change in pressure as caused the entire ocean to freeze possibly not. If they were independant events or enough removed in time maybe. Don't forget though this involves a lot of other 'ifs'. If the ice is actually water ice and not some other substance, if life ever did evolve on Mars, if even one species evolved like the new species found in Alaska with the ability to live through a 30,000 frozen period.

February 23, 2005

Wind Burn goes straight through spandex

Oh look at me go! I'm crazy blogger today. Anyway, So I finally did it! Something I've been talking about since last summer. I rode my bike the 12 miles from my house in Arlington to my work in Reston. I'd been meaning to do it since one of my coworkers graciously gave me a bike in about May. Mostly I'd been slacking off and then winter came and it was getting dark too soon for me to get home before sunset. But now the sun is visible til almost 6 and I ran out of excuses. So here I am at work without a car, my bike locked to a tree in the back of the parking lot cause my stupid suburban office doesn't have a bike rack, and I'm thinking, thank God the snow isn't supposed to start until tomorrow.

Mobius Shirt

Ok so Naomi hasn't written about it yet, so I will.

On Monday, Na and I went in search of the unfindable, that's right, the perfect dress for a black tie wedding. Needless to say, neither of us found it, but we did find several shirts, belts, mongolian bbq, etc. While at LVL X (a great place for clubbing tops) Na found this shirt that was just daring her to try it on, both by it's cuteness and it's complete unfathomability. I have dubed it the Mobius Shirt, since both inside and outside are in actuality one side. It is so confusing to get into that one of the girls at the store confessed that they had a half hour tutorial just on this shirt, and she still couldn't tell Na and I how to put it on. In the end we had three of the four women working in the store in the back changing room area all trying to figure it out. Finally, they did figure it out after going to the forth woman to ask her. And it looked just as cute on Na as it did on the dummy, so Na bought it and if you're lucky she might model it for you next time she goes out.

Who needs a breathalyzer? When you're at our party on MARCH 4TH!!! we'll know you're too drunk to drive home if you can't put the Mobius Shirt on, then what will you do?

German Fraud

From Dienekes' I find that yet another fraud has been exposed in the field of PaleoAnthropology. The Guardian has the full story on a German anthropologist who apparently is a compulsive liar. Not only has he faked the dates of several pivitol paleo finds, it seems that the man couldn't even work his dating machine so he just guessed at the dating of artifacts and remains. Because of this scandal Anthropologists are being forced to rework there entire understanding of early human history, from 40,000 to 10,000 years ago. Because of Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten's dates anthropologists have believed that Neanderthals coexisted with anatomically modern humans and were even able to mate. Now, this theory is being thrown out the window. The official view of early europe is going to have to be completely rewritten.

Other lies of Professor Protsch include:
That he once examined the bones of Hitler and Eva Braun.
His aristocratic title (von Zieten)
That he has an apartment in California and hangs out with Arnold and Steffi Graf

Also, apparently the man ordered the distruction of "thousands of documents lodged in the anthropology department relating to the Nazis' gruesome scientific experiments in the 1930s". His father was a Nazi MP, which may or may not have something to do with it.

This man is insane, if you ask me. But it also shows that the validation process of big finds in PaleoAnthropology needs a lot of work. To be forced to rewrite tens of thousands of years of prehistory because of one compulsive liar seems ridiculous. And this is not the first time a fraud of this magnitude has been discovered. The Piltdown man was hailed as the missing link for fifty years before they discovered that it was really the skull of a man only 600 years old and the jaw of an orangutan. The worst part about these frauds is that they just add ammunition to the evangelical Christian anti-Evolution stockpile.

February 22, 2005

Big Heads

It seems that the age old question of whether or not having a bigger head makes you smarter, has been solved. There is a scientific correlation between IQ and the living size of human brians. Does this mean that all of those massively cranial blowhards are going to get it any easier? Probably not. But I was curious about the whole thing so I googled "measuring size brain" and came up with this link which is more than a little scary for my bleeding heart liberal leanings. The author is pooh-poohing a rather well known popular science writer, Stephen Jay Gould. I haven't personally read any of his books but I've thought real hard about it, that is, until the latest Harry Potter book catches my attention. Anyway, the guy who wrote it, J. Philippe Rushton, maintains that there is a correlation between IQ and brain size and indicates a study done with both whites and blacks to show that it crosses racial boundries. He then cites several studies which have examined the difference in brain size between races using several different measurements from MRI scans to size of the external head. He finds that Asians consistently have larger brains than Caucasians who consistently have larger brains than those of African decent. I can understand that this seems to be a clear cut case for a resurgence of eugenic ideas, especially in a time when we are able to learn more and more about the role of genetics in our lives. However, I maintain that this evidence does not in fact have any bearing on society whatsoever. The entire arguement is based on the assumption that higher IQ's is what everyone should be striving for which, as far as I know, has no evidence to support it. As far as I can tell, IQ tests only indicate one sort of intellegence which in turn has no connection with quality of life. Does higher IQ make you a happier person? Does it make those around you happier? Does it mean that you'll be a more productive employee? Or a more productive member of society? Does it affect ambition? Is this what we humans should be striving for? The fact is that we don't know. Science Fiction writers have been playing with the idea since the genre's inception and judging by the number of Distopian novels out there it seems they haven't found the answer yet.

So are we going to have to include our hat sizes on our resumes in the future? I don't think so, but the thought does sort of scare me since, frankly, I have a small head.

Sidenote: For those with trans species interests here is a link to an article about Dolphin brain size.

February 07, 2005

Jalapeno Wine and Valentines Day Ducks

I'm here at my parents house. I walked in and my parents are now inundated in bubbling vats of wine and beer. A normal day in the Sargeant household. A lovely quote from dinner as we ate surrounded on all sides by burbling-soon-to-be-alcohol:
Dad: Hear that? That's my beer!
Mom and Me: Yes, we hear it.
Dad: It's making indecent noises in the corner!

The tour de force, however, of my parents newly resurrected hobby is the result of my father curiously browsing wine recipe's on the internet (he originally wanted to make sweet potato wine). His eye's lit up and he promptly dragged my mother to the wine makers store to buy the instrumentation and yeast. A day and 3/4 lbs of Jalapenos later I walk in the door to a gallon of Jalapeno Wine in the sink. It had been moved there as the amount of jalapenos and the diminutive size of the bottle were working against each other. They had awoken this morning to jalapenos everywhere and the grapes not far behind. My parents had decided to rekindle their love affair with wine and beer making after their recent trip out to Colorado to welcome their new grandson into the world, where my brother-in-law has his own home brewery set up. Here is a picture of the Jalapeno Wine as proof. It took us a couple minutes to come up with the perfect backdrop but we decided that my mom's Valentine's Day Ducks were best.

Here is the Jalapeno Wine and my mom's ducks

Twelve Angry Men

This from Hawks:

Decision-making ability is maximized in human groups when the number of decision-makers is around six (Johnson 1978; Reynolds 1984).


There seems to be a fundamental problem with how our judicial system is set up, not to mention the entire Legistlative Branch.

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