There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is …”.

Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

• You can leave them exactly as is.
• You can delete any one question.
• You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…:, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”.
• You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.

You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, e.g. Science After Sunclipse to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.
Continue reading The Pharyngula Mutating Genre Meme →

Mollishka finds damning evidence that our nation’s elementary schools are a thoroughgoing failure.

Do people read to the end of fairy tales anymore?

I just found out that Monday is Columbus Day. My willingness to get any work done this afternoon just plummeted. Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow; yep, that’s the Stacey way.

UPDATE: It is, of course, also International Cephalopod Awareness Day. Shame on me for forgetting; I’ve really got ink all over me now, don’t I?

Joel Achenbach speculates about the possibility of having an “18th Century Weekend.” Disavow all knowledge of portable music players, television sets, automobiles (hybrid or otherwise) and the wireless telegraph, and return the neighborhood to the days when Western Civilization first tried out the Enlightenment. Syphilis and smallpox are optional.

But in reality we’re not trying to recreate the past, much of which was, let us state clearly, a grinding horror. This is not a costume party. [Nor are we trying to create our own little Earthaven, though being more energy conscious would be a good outcome.] [Nor would this be like living in the pre-luxury-hotel version of Biosphere 2.] We’re just trying to find ways to connect, be a bit more local, and neighborly, and maybe have more face-to-face conversations, and get a little exercise walking to the coffee shop rather than burning gasoline.

Of course, perhaps the 18th Century is a bit too far away:

Simply turning the clock back to 1990 — and quitting email for a couple of days — would be liberating and revelatory. Maybe it should just be 1980s weekend, performed to the soundtrack of Madonna, Michael Jackson and Duran Duran.

Quitting email?! Say wha?

Actually, I prefer to make every weekend “Not-So-Distant-Future Weekend.” I read the news on my portable Universal Computation Device, and every time I meet a revolving door, I pretend that it’s really an airlock.

After you’ve gotten your chuckles and inspiration from Revere’s Freethinker Sunday Sermonette, check out Russell Blackford’s most recent post on moral scepticism. A sample:

The plausible meta-ethical positions seem to be a group of sophisticated moral relativist theories — the sort of position I associate with Gilbert Harman, David Wong, Neil Levy, Max Hocutt, and others — and the error theories (moral scepticism) of people like JL Mackie, Richard Garner, Richard Joyce, and Joshua Greene. There are various other positions in the same ballpark, such as the sophisticated non-cognitivism of Simon Blackburn. I am sometimes irritated when other philosophers assume that the only theory in this sort of ballpark is the popular but vulgar kind of moral relativism that we are all taught to avoid in first-year ethics courses.

Rebecca Watson, Skepchick extraordinaire, has won the Public Radio Talent Quest contest. She joins Al Letson and Glynn Washington in the winners’ circle; each of them will receive ten thousand dollars and the chance to produce pilot episodes for new national public radio programs.

Yes, Rebecca is the one who declined to go out for a milkshake with me because my ESP remote-viewing powers were off by two tentacles. Scandalous, really, but I bear no ill will. Instead, I offer my most heartfelt congratulations! Best of luck to all three, and here’s hoping we’ll get some quality radio.

Just got back from the xkcd meetup. For those who hadn’t heard, Randall Munroe stuck a date, time and pair of coordinates into a comic strip, which turned out to be this afternoon at a park near Davis Square. Naturally, I had to go, at least to see who else would show up.

Imagine a county fair, infested with red spiders, a Wikipedian protester, people wearing T-shirts from several generations of Internet memes, at least one toy velociraptor, a tape measure extension contest and a jungle gym densely packed with people who unanimously declare that science works, bitches.

I forgot my camera.

I did meet Joshua, though, and he might have some pictures uploaded soon.

The New Humanist Blog has announced that it plans to poll its readers on topics of interest and/or importance. First up is — not much surprise here — the question, “Are Dawkins and Hitchens good for humanism?”

Now, I have to say that I’m never entirely sure what people mean by humanism, anymore. Back in the early 1990s, I thought it was the idea that human beings are responsible for the problems which afflict our species, and that human beings are going to have to solve them. (This line comes straight out of Isaac Asimov’s memoir.) Today, it sometimes sounds like a label people apply to themselves to distance their position, at least in their own eyes, from the Uppity Atheists. It can also be an umbrella term to include religious folk who like Asimov’s line about human responsibility (though they might be a little put off by the remarks in the same memoir about the history of religion being “the history of human misery and black times”).

I’m also curious why New Humanist has chosen to focus on Dawkins and Hitchens. Is it a straight-up question of book sales? (PZ, where’s your book? When all the Uppity Atheists meet in the South Pacific at the antipodal point of Nicaea, you’re going to get left out of the Godless Orthodoxy!)

Regrettably, other obligations prevented me from attending Congressman Pete Stark’s speech at Harvard last night. Fortunately, however, Joshua did, and he’s written a report for the rest of us.

Recommended reading.

He also links to the TV Tropes Wiki, which looks like a fantastic time-sink for a Friday afternoon. They’ve got extensive documentation on anime, for starters. The entry for Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex was clearly written by fans. “The Major’s clothes are too hot for espionage,” it says, and I agree. I might be indirectly responsible for part of the entry, too, since I recall putting an awful lot of work into the Wikipedia articles on “cyberpunk” and “postcyberpunk” back in 2005.

Apparently, I win the Internet.

Uh-oh — does that mean I’m now responsible for keeping the tubes flowing?

Dennis Preston quotes a column in State News, official student newspaper of Michigan State University:

Leftists have tried fervently since the 1960s to subvert American culture by promoting cultural heresies, which really only amount to a form of subversion. These cultural heresies include but are not limited to: Radical feminism, sexual deviancy, multilingualism and atheism.

Woot woot! Ding ding ding! We have a winner! I’d like to present this ceremonial, platinum-plated wingnut to Nate Sherman, “State News columnist and a member of MSU College Republicans and Young Americans for Freedom.” For his next trick, maybe he’ll accuse those subversive Leftists of eating sushi!
Continue reading Cultural Heresies →

Kurt Van Etten has the sixteenth Carnival of Mathematics ontube at Learning Computation. While everyone is busy reading that, and following it up with Encephalon 31, I think I’m going to play with my CSS files.