27 July 05
26 July 05
Aggie In Space
With today’s launch of the space shuttle Discovery, UC Davis has its very own astronaut orbiting the Earth. This would be Stephen Robinson, who got his bachelor’s degree from UC Davis in mechanical and aeronautical engineering in 1978. This is his third flight in space, and will be one of the two space walkers in this mission. He has made his way back to Davis in recent years. A few years ago, he was the grand marshal at the Picnic Day parade, and the year after that I heard him speak about being in space at the Davis Star Party.
25 July 05
Pseudogenes? I don't think so...
A paper published today in the Public Library of Science Genetics suggests that cats don’t have a taste receptor for sweet, unlike most if not all other mammals.
Charlie, at left here, comes running when he hears me crunch down on an apple, a pear, or even a peach. Not sure how this ultimately shakes down, but if it’s true, Charlie’s going on a sugar-free diet.
25 July 05
End Of An Era
As most know, Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France today, his seventh in a row, and has just retired from professional cycling. As much as one has to admire his accomplishments, it will be nice to have the Tour de France be a wide-open contest again. Meanwhile, there are rumors that Lance might someday run for governor of his home state. Or as Jay Leno puts it, “Well, finally Texas would have a governor who knew how to ride a bicycle.”
23 July 05
Blood, Gore, and Fegato
My class in uncial is winding down. It almost didn’t finish at all, but some quick footwork on the part of the teachers found us an alternative site for our class when the old one blew up (or rather was disconnected by a disgruntled computer person).
Uncial has many connotations. It’s invariably the script used around witchcraft, good or bad, on television or in shop windows. Given that the Irish variant was used for centuries (and still is) in Ireland, it often gives a Celtic flavor to whatever you’re writing. I’m not Irish though my accent sometimes leads people to think I might be—and I do have a kind of horror of piggy-backing on someone else’s culture.
I was going to do a quote from Beowulf, but I’d want to do it in the Old English as well as the translation, and that seemed cumbersome. Plus it’s translated by Famous Seamus, see horror in paragraph #2 above.
So instead I have been immersing myself in a piece written by Elck of the late lamented Vernacular Body. It concerns the liver, which seems an admirable subject for a hand as old and venerable and earthy and be-wormed as uncial. Here’s an excerpt:
4. Livered.
A bloody formless mass sitting in the inner dark. Brooding, suppurating, sweating like an injured animal. Prometheus on the Caucasus, delivered. Fava beans, Chianti.
(We have not eaten fava beans tonight but we did have lentils cooked in the solar cooker with tomatoes and capers, and cracked open a bottle of Fat Llama Chilean Cab, which is a lot chewier than Chianti. A la tienne, Elck.)
22 July 05
Charles Darwin Has A Posse
The author of this sticker concedes that as an effort to increase awareness of science and reason it is probably completely futile, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth a try.
For those of you who have no idea what the text is referring to, see here.
21 July 05
Freecycle
Thanks to a post by Chris of Sister Spirit, I’ve finally discovered Freecycle, an organization seeking to redistribute things (okay, junk) according to whoever wants them rather than have them all end up in a landfill. The rules? It’s free, and you pick it up. I’ve joined the Davis group mostly because it’s good to have things go where they’ll be appreciated when you’re decluttering. And you never know: somebody might just have the perfect teapot out there, not sure about what to do with it…
20 July 05
Catching Up
Upon a recommendation of PZ Myers, I’ve been reading Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom, by Sean B. Carroll. This is a new book about evolutionary developmental biology, a field which has undergone a revolution in the past couple of decades thanks to advances in molecular biology. Conveniently, it’s been almost that long since I was seriously studying evolutionary biology, and the book is helping me catch up to what we’ve learned since then. In the next two chapters I will learn about how the butterfly got its spots and the zebra its stripes. It’s great stuff.
19 July 05
Tomatoes
The tomatoes getting good here. Gazpacho time, cherry tomatoes in salad time, mozarella and basil time.
I’m amazed I like them. My mother tells of the time my father went to England for a week when we were tiny leaving her with no cash; the only thing there was to eat in the house was a box of tomatoes brought over by a neighbor. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. She says there might have been a little cereal, but no milk.
Right now, I can’t get enough of them.
19 July 05
Hurrying Through Harry
Not long after Pica finished the new Harry Potter book yesterday did I take it up, and finished it myself around 9 PM this evening. It’s a far better read than its predecessor, which was in need of about 200 pages worth of excisions. And lines are already forming, or at least should be, for the release of the seventh book. There are, as they say, major plot developments in need of resolution.
I also found today that Wikipedia has a great set of articles discussing the Harry Potter series. And yes, they’ve been updated in the past couple of days!