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.

Global warming produces fucked up weather not necessarily just hot weather, no?

Snow in NOLA - totally a WTF situation. Email lister sent me the following from the National Weather Service in Lake Charles, LA:

...RECORD EARLIEST MEASURABLE SNOWFALL SET AT LAKE CHARLES...
...ALL TIME RECORD SNOWFALL SET FOR DECEMBER AT LAKE CHARLES...

A RECORD SNOWFALL OF 0.4 INCHES OF SNOW WAS MEASURED AT LAKE CHARLES. THIS SETS THE ALL TIME EARLIEST MEASURABLE SNOWFALL RECORD FOR LAKE CHARLES. THIS ALSO SETS THE ALL TIME RECORD SNOWFALL FOR THE MONTH OF DECEMBER AT LAKE CHARLES. THE PREVIOUS RECORDS WERE BOTH SET ON DECEMBER 22 1989 WHEN 0.2 INCHES OF SNOW WAS MEASURED.

NOTABLY...DECEMBER 11 2008 AND DECEMBER 22 1989 ARE THE ONLY TWO TIMES IN RECORDED HISTORY THAT MEASURABLE SNOWFALL HAS OCCURRED IN LAKE CHARLES DURING THE MONTH OF DECEMBER.

(Asscaps c/o NWS.)

Speaking of asscaps, I just discovered that they're slightly less annoying in Comic Sans. Who knew?