Science Project

Don’t know if anyone else has been following the fascinating body harvesting story out of New York/New Jersey. Today’s installment includes this choice bit:

"We know that they obtained these bodies in a fraudulent way and off the scale of acceptable practice," said FDA spokesman Stephen King.

What are the odds?

Fred Bernstein visits Alabama to look at some amazing buildings:

Music Man’s house, with colorful glass embedded in concrete floors and shelves that move on skateboard wheels, is one of about 40 buildings conceived and built by the Rural Studio, an ever-changing troupe of architecture students who bring their tools, tenacity and talent to impoverished western Alabama. The 13-year-old program, under the auspices of Auburn University, is sometimes called the "redneck Taliesin."

Like Frank Lloyd Wright, the master of Taliesin, Samuel Mockbee, the Rural Studio’s founder, was a larger-than-life figure. Born in Mississippi, Mr. Mockbee established the Rural Studio in dirt-poor Hale County, Ala., a place where trailers teetering on cinderblocks and disintegrating barns were two of the most common building types.

I highly recommend the amazing photo chronicle of some of the project’s best work, Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency.

An excellent article about Sean Stewart, one of my very favorite writers, and what he’s up to lately:

All of this may keep Stewart from writing novels for some time. As much as he loves them, novels will always be there.

ARGs, by contrast, are changing with each iteration.

"It’s like building airplanes" around the turn of the century, he said. "You know they haven’t reached their final form."

I may have to start playing these ARGs. They sound like tremendous fun. (Note to Maureen McHugh fans: She gets a mention and was a key writer on these projects too.) (Via Dave.) I was just recommending Sean’s work to someone yesterday, who was looking for something for a very precocious teenager who liked LOTR and Harry Potter — which, of course, Sean’s work has very little in common with, but I stick by my recommendation.

p.s. Sorry for the sucktastic content here this week. Swamped and C has the Martian Death Cold. Will try to shape up this weekend.

When weather people are wrong, they must commit seppuku. On the air.

Some people need different kinds of directions:

The church tried to persuade station KRQE not to air its report last week about the aerial signposts marking a Scientology compound that includes a huge vault "built into a mountainside," the station said on its Web site. The tunnel was constructed to protect the works of L. Ron Hubbard, the late science-fiction writer who founded the church in the 1950s.

The archiving project, which the church has acknowledged, includes engraving Hubbard’s writings on stainless steel tablets and encasing them in titanium capsules. It is overseen by a Scientology corporation called the Church of Spiritual Technology. Based in Los Angeles, the corporation dispatched an official named Jane McNairn and an attorney to visit the TV station in an effort to squelch the story, KRQE news director Michelle Donaldson said.

Oh, it gets better. Read the whole thing.

Chris McLaren (aka Big-Headed Canadian Whiskey Man) points to the Gender Genie, which analyzes writing samples and predicts whether the author is male or female. Somewhat concerningly, he said it thinks I’m a man. (Of course, it also thought Emma Bull was.) I decided to test it out with some longer samples.

Scores

The first 1,000 words and change of a new story I just finished called Cassie Says:

Female Score: 1883
Male Score: 1007
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!

So far, so good, but that’s a pretty tight score.

The first chapter of my YA novel Girl’s Gang:

Female Score: 2083
Male Score: 2137
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male! 

Wrongo!

A longer blog entry, From Two to Four:

Female Score: 1416
Male Score: 1776
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

Of course, according to the stats, the Genie seems to be running about 41 percent incorrect. Not knowing much about what this is based on (and being unable to see the Nature article), I’m not sure any conclusions can be drawn from this — except perhaps that this oversimplifies the algorithm or something. (Or it’s just stoopid.) Kind of interesting though.

Who knew?

Most people know him as the Minister for Silly Walks on "Monty Python" or as Q in James Bond films. But John Cleese will also go down in history for another reason: lemurs.

Researchers from the University of Zurich have named a newly discovered species of lemur – one of the most primitive and endangered primates in the world – after the British comedian in honor of his work with the animal.

The avahi cleesei, which weights less than two pounds and eats leaves, was discovered in Western Madagascar in 1990 by a team led by anthropologist Urs Thalmann and his colleague Thomas Geissman of Zurich University.

The name is a tribute to Cleese’s promotion of the plight of lemurs in the movie "Fierce Creatures" and documentary "Operation Lemur with John Cleese," the university said in a statement. A lemur even appears next to Cleese on his Web site.

The WaPo covers a little probe that could:

Like a hummingbird hovering over a tantalizing blossom, a small but virtuoso Japanese spacecraft is poised to touch down in the coming days on the surface of an asteroid 180 million miles away, stir up a small cloud of dust and gather in a sample.

Barring a mishap, Hayabusa, or "Falcon," is expected to make two and possibly three touch-and-goes on the asteroid Itokawa, then return to Earth with a tenth of an ounce of asteroid dust.

If it succeeds, Hayabusa will be the first spacecraft to land on a celestial body and bring something back from it since U.S. astronauts Eugene A. Cernan and Harrison H. Schmitt collected samples from the moon during the last Apollo lunar mission, in 1972.

Someone please arrange for Shonen Knife to do a song called "Hayabusa." Thank you.

Updated: Terrible Shonen Knife news. Drummer China Nishiura killed in a car accident. So very sad.

How Stuff Works on zombies:

Like a lot of monsters, zombies have their roots in folklore and — according to some researchers — in real events in Haiti. In this article, we’ll discuss Haitian zombies, explore depictions of zombies in films and video games and review the best course of action for surviving an attack.

Links to related topics here, such as vampires, mummies, bigfoot, chupacabras … cells and brains? If you say so.

(Via MorrowPlanet.)

The Washington Post has a pretty wonderful–if slightly depressing for the bird flu mentions–animal photo gallery up. The only photo I managed to grab features a one-month-old parrot from Bangkok ("One night in Bangkok makes a hard parrot humble… "), but number two is a beautiful shot of a hummingbird on the wing. No, really, it’s not like these; you can see it clear as if it’s stuck in time. There’s also a monkey drinking from a bottle and a cow moose.