Once upon a time, Livejournal was the place to be. Those days are gone. Almost none of my friends post anything on here anymore. Almost nobody does, period, and most of those who do crosspost to another site. There are a lot of reasons for that, but why it happened doesn't really matter so much as the fact that an empty social networking site isn't ( Read more... )

Update to my previous entryYou know what's freaking AWESOME about canine transmissible venereal tumor? I now have the best comeback ever to the creationist line that dogs are still a single species after thousands of years of human-directed selection. Dogs have totally undergone an absolutely spectacular speciation event that had nothing to do with ( Read more... )

I used to think prions were the creepiest pathogen ever, but I've stumbled across something even weirder: canine transmissible venereal tumor. It's a unicellular parasite whose genome diverged from dogs a few thousand years ago ( Read more... )

I realized I didn't really know what was coming out this year, so I did some research. Here are the ones I want to see, or at least want to keep an eye on as possibilities, over the next year.

Paul March 18 ( Read more... )

Does anyone know why the show Friends seems to be so popular with current undergrads? The poster store is full of Friends posters, I've had people in discussion sections mention it in introduction exercises, I see it pop-culture-referenced on the internet by college-aged and even younger folks ( Read more... )

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I got a bunch of neat things for Christmas. I'm very happy with most of them, but for now, I'm only going to tell you about the dumbest gift ever ( Read more... )

I always get really stressed around Christmas. Not necessarily because of the holiday itself, or because of the accompanying obligations, though those do contribute. It's never just one thing ( Read more... )

Well, I'm back from Thanksgiving with the family. Lots of good food; I think this was one of my parent's more successful turkey dinners. I got to see a bunch of cousins and other assorted relatives that I hadn't seen in a while, so there was some good catching up ( Read more... )