Arctic ice may melt within ten years, but don’t worry, other planets might have habitable zones! It’s all in the Philosophia Naturalis weekly roundup. Also, Tyler DiPietro has been seduced by the LaTeX side of the Force and has returned to WordPress.

“Yes, Virginia, there is a Flying Spaghetti Monster.”

Charles Daney has been trying some new things for the Philosophia Naturalis blog carnival. You should go and scope them out.

Kristjan Wager has Skeptic’s Circle #75 up and running at Pro-Science.

A growing number of older children are rejecting the doctrine of “parentism,” the idea that gifts could be left under the Christmas tree by Mom and Dad. Now, at ED The Future, Lacie Cuskin takes us into the new, alternative paradigm of “External Delivery.” Can gifts be arranged under a tree by random chance alone? Is “parentism” merely another tool in the War Against Christmas? Only Lacie Cuskin tells it like it is!

Sigh! One day, I too will be famous enough to have a Wikipedia article which is attacked by vandals and quickly reverted.

You know, once I had a dream about a wiki. If you edited the wiki, you changed the world, and not just the way the world is now, but the way the world was and has always been. And I was the only one with access to the revision history. . . .

No more Borges before bed!

A famous example of the troubles involved in Biblical translation is the expression “lamb of God.” How do you convey the idea — the cute animal which gets killed to sate bloodlust — to a culture which doesn’t know about lambs? If you were trying to translate the New Testament for the Inuit, to cash in on the lucrative Nunavut market, you might go with “seal of God” instead.

I don’t think anybody has yet gone with “squid of God,” however. So, to provide at least a partial remedy, I give you Squidtivity!

I wonder why Sunday school forgot to mention that the wise men came from R’lyeh.

Tip o’ the Magi’s crown to Retrokatze.

Dave Bacon mentions a possible instance of NSA chicanery, which reminds me of a story. First, I should relate a little background:

At MIT, each undergraduate has a few different “advisers” during their stay. You have a “freshman adviser” during your first year; after you declare a major, you get an adviser within your department who basically signs paperwork for you once or twice a term. If you survive a few years at the Institute, you’ll also work with a “thesis adviser,” who probably won’t be the same person as your departmental adviser. This story concerns my paperwork-signing adviser, Edward Farhi. Since Krishna Rajagopal told our entire quantum class about this incident, I figure it’s OK to repeat the tale here.

Prof. Farhi works in quantum computation, it so happens, and in the course of this work, he had cause to use some pretty hefty computer power. The details don’t matter so much, but doing the simulations he had to do required so many computrons that eventually his research hit a bottleneck.

This was the situation when he gave a presentation to a roomful of funding-agency representatives, describing his research. After his talk, a man from the NSA approached him and said, “That is very interesting work you do.”

Farhi replied, “Thank you. Of course, as I mentioned, we’re stalled at the moment, since we’ve gone as far as we can go with the computers we have. If we could use your computers. . .”

[This is where Rajagopal interpolated, “Eddie is pretty gutsy.”]

The man from the NSA stared blankly at him. “I can neither confirm nor deny,” he said, “that the National Security Agency has computers.”

Brown Sharpie:

I also like “Love Is…“

OK, it’s Saturday afternoon, I’ve spent most of the day doing a literature hunt (giving myself a crash course on immunology — don’t ask why, just yet) and it’s time for some silliness. Brian Switek informs me that the Internet can tell how smart I am, or at least how smart I look.

Don’t ask how that judgment was made. It’s the Internet. The Internet knows all.

According to the Internet, in fact, John Armstrong is writing for high-school kids. You were in ninth grade when you first developed topology with category theory, weren’t you?

News from the home town, actually:

“I know God is in control,” she said. “And that in everything we’re to give thanks to Him. I don’t know why our house is sinking but there’s a reason so we’re trying to be thankful.”

Personally, I think God is just a little peeved that somebody named a suburban subdivision “Cambridge at Heritage Plantation.”

When my mother saw MIT’s Stata Center, also known as Building 32, she said, “My God that’s an ugly building.” Are you gonna call my mother a liar?

Now, for some fascinating news. “The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is suing renowned architect Frank Gehry,” says the AP newswire, “alleging serious design flaws in the Stata Center, a building celebrated for its unconventional walls and radical angles.”

Let’s see that again: “The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is suing renowned architect Frank Gehry, alleging serious design flaws in the Stata Center, a building celebrated for its unconventional walls and radical angles.”

No, the suit isn’t over the building’s looks:

Instead, “The school asserts that the center, completed in spring 2004, has persistent leaks, drainage problems and mold growing on its brick exterior. It says accumulations of snow and ice have fallen dangerously from window boxes and other areas of its roofs, blocking emergency exits and causing damage.” Also, at one point, it had skunks living in the main air intake (or so I’m told). The amount of damages sought by the suit is as yet unspecified; the building cost $283.5 million in all, $15 million of which went to Gehry’s firm.

Scott Aaronson says that he first thought the headline “MIT Sues Architect Frank Gehry” had to come from The Onion or, more likely, an MIT publication like Voo Doo. Actually, Voo Doo did once have a headline about the Stata Center (I know because I wrote it): “Building 32 morphs into battle droid; saves Cambridge from Mothra, Megalon.”

Later, of course, Doonesbury covered the same territory.

Greg Laden, formerly of gregladen.com, has moved to ScienceBlogs. Don’t let the champagne fountain and the Tokamak-fueled plasma screen TV go to your head, Greg.

While I try to figure out how to upload all the pictures I’ve taken at ICCS to the NECSI website, my deci-PZ of readers might enjoy this story. As a Prom King myself (no, really) I take a special pleasure in announcing that Davis Senior High School of Davis, California has elected a gay couple to homecoming royalty.

“People were so excited for us,” [Kiernan] Gatewood said of the couple’s victory, announced a few weeks ago. “We were a little surprised, but Davis …”

“Is a liberal town,” interrupts his boyfriend of four months, [Brandon] Raphael. “Go 10 miles in any other direction and you’ll get some other feeling.”

Unlike my high school, Davis does not put names on its homecoming ballots; the two princes won in a purely write-in election.

(Tip o’ the felt-and-sequin crown to The Greenbelt.)