I got called out about insinuating in an earlier post that Romney would institute an ultrapatriarchal dystopia should he become POTUS. Listing my justifications for this hyperbole, I came to the realization that, while he is famously anti-abortion and anti-teh-gay[1], I wasn't able to name his stances on the big political-scientific issues. So let' ( Read more... )

Don Herbert, TV's Mr. Wizard, has passed away. LA Times obit, with photo gallery.I mist up a little, not of sadness but of good memories from my childhood. I watched him on Nickelodeon in the mid 1980s, and his show was a bright spot during a very patchy time. He didn't make me into a scientist, but he did help wedge me onto a trajectory of ( Read more... )

From rserocki: Biologists are making progress in isolating why calorie restriction extends animals' lifespans. This is encouraging news ( Read more... )

Righto, I'm starting to see why all my friends were getting tweaked by season 2 of the new Who ( Read more... )

I need a life-extension icon. I'll use Shatner for now because he's a rather spritely 75-year-old, isn't he. (Yes, he's only 50 in this picture, but do you deny that he's still got it?)

From BoingBoing, some Aubrey de Grey stuff: a brief text interview, where he interestingly pooh-poohs the effectiveness of CR in humans, and the full video of a ( Read more... )

Story from New York Magazine about a Calorie Restriction diet subculture. That is, people who eat as few calories per day as they can, carefully measuring out exactly the nutrient quantities their body needs and not a scrap more, with the hope that it will add (all things being equal) decades to their lifespan ( Read more... )

Today's Wikipedia article of the day is about the number 0.999... and its equality to 1. I did not know this!! What a fine thing to think about.

Went to hear Richard Dawkins read from his new book The God Delusion at the, uh, church that Church Street (I assume) is named after at Harvard Square. With dougo and the dictator555Ha ha ha... I just now discovered that the introduction that the introducey person introduced him with was taken word-for-word from his Wikipedia page ( Read more... )

People who voted to declassify Pluto are the same sorts of people as Americans who wanted to ditch their constitution as soon as they realized that it's 200 years old and was written by squares besides. Wevowution, Vivian!!

I really want to not care about this but I'm finding that I can't not.

Here is me lighting a candle for the untold numbers of people the president doomed today in order to please his unevolved base. For all I know, I'm one of those doomed. For all I know, so is he ( Read more... )