A very buffista stocking stuffer.

I need that, a lot.

Other way around. Alton Brown explains. With puppets!

Of course that makes sense! But how is it that my mother insists that my grandmother's crust is the flakiest, and yet she uses butter flavor Crisco? It's a mystery.

This is the neatest iPhone hack I've ever seen.

OMG, I don't think they missed a single fantasy cliche in this music video:

[link]

TNH says it's like a Harlequin Romance cover come to life. I agree, but not in a good way.

(It is completely SFW, except that I would have been snorking too loud to go unnoticed.)

Things always break on the day I have a meeting with the big kahuna. I love taking bad news to him.

Do not want.

I saw Steve Chu's presentation on global warming. He said we're going to hit the iceberg (likening earth to the titanic), there's no way to stop it at this point. But how hard we hit depends on what we do RIGHT THE FUCK NOW.

But he didn't say fuck. I think it was implied.

He was just magical in how he explained everything, and was very gentle with data (sometimes scientists throw an assload of numbers and squiggly lines at an audience and are all, BEHOLD THE GIRTH OF MY DATA) and it all sort of looks like a jackson Pollock and no one cares.

He was really mindful that the audience weren't sciencey, and so went with metaphor on the data slides so the audience could easily understand what was being presented.

Plus! He won his nobel with atom trapping, which is what my lab at JPL worked on. We loves us some Chu. He's just a phenomenally kind man.

And you can always tell when kids (grad students and post-docs, not really kids, but they always seem so little to me) come out of a great lab. They're very well behaved and present well at symposia and such. When they come visit a lab they're always respectful of everyone.

Kids that come out of assholes' labs? Poorly behaved. Entitlement whores. Chu's labkids were just charming and gracious and grateful and that tends to be a top-down thing.

I'm just ridiculously pleased.

OMG, I don't think they missed a single fantasy cliche in this music video:

It's like bad 80s music videos, except WORSE. It's... oh GOD.

I saw Steve Chu's presentation on global warming. He said we're going to hit the iceberg (likening earth to the titanic), there's no way to stop it at this point. But how hard we hit depends on what we do RIGHT THE FUCK NOW.

Yeah, pretty much everything on global warming is turning out worse than scientists' worst-case scenarios of years back. There's a tipping point for global warming (once we're past it, massive bad things are unavoidable) and many climate scientists now believe we're gonna' just barrel right past that tipping point.

I wonder how many people are going to start dismissing global warming because it snowed in NOLA.

It's just unbelievably frustrating to me that we still have to debate whether the problem is manmade at all...like we have a huge amount of time to sit back with some cognac and cigars and debate the problem for a few years.