Posts Tagged ‘bakken’

Xenophobia is neither the fear of Xeni, nor of Xena. Rather, it’s more about knee-jerk mistrust, dislike, and hatred for people who aren’t part of your group. We’ve come to associate it with not liking people from other countries, but it applies to smaller-scale, less formal tribalism, as well.

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The benefits of xenophobia

Remember how scientists discovered alien-esque life forms in California and the Internet was all, “Oh, sheeeet!” But then other scientists started critiquing the research and there was a giant debate about whether one scientist could call out another scientist for bad data on a blog, rather than in a peer-reviewed journal, except that the peer

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Scientists aren’t always right

Last January, at the Science Online conference, I noticed that there was a research group collecting swabs taken from the bellybuttons of scientists, science bloggers, and science journalists. That culture above? It’s made from the bellybutton of Anton Zuiker, one of the organizers of that conference. Beyond personalized petri dishes, what is the point of

Originally posted here:
You are your bellybutton lint

Well, it’s been a quiet week in Minneapolis, Minnesota, my hometown. The heatwave broke. There was a giant tomato fight downtown. And the Gonzo Group Theater is performing Aristophanes in the middle of the lightrail construction zone.

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Minneapolis: Home of the first (annual?) Internet cat video film festival

One of the things I loved about the two years I lived in Birmingham, AL: Being in a place where people openly and un-ironically fired guns into the air in order to celebrate things. This was something new to me, despite being raised a good country family with high levels of gun ownership. But that

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More than 1000 shots fired in happiness in Birmingham, AL

In North Carolina, a legislator accidentally pushed the wrong button on her vote-making machine and now the state will be open to fracking operations. Even though Rep. Becky Carney realized she’d hit the wrong button almost immediately, she was not allowed to change her crucial, outcome-changing vote. Suddenly, I feel a bit better about my

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A political typo of epic proportions

Longtime readers will remember my morbid affection for Scutigera coleoptrata—aka, the house centipede—a species of oddly adorable, 30-legged, mostly harmless arthropods that frequently set up housekeeping in bathrooms and basements*. Originally native to the Mediterranean, they now live … everywhere. (And please, feel free to imagine these buggers speaking in comic, stereotypical Italiano-Greek accents from

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Ballad of the Scutigera coleoptrata

Four years ago, Jana Mackey, one of my college roommates at The University of Kansas, was killed by her ex-boyfriend. When I lived with Jana, I knew her as a music major and a really fun person. But she had a serious side that came to the forefront over the next few years.

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Domestic violence can happen to anyone

Neatorama is offering two signed copies of my new book, Before the Lights Go Out, as part of a contest drawing. To enter: Go read the interview Neatorama did with me about energy, infrastructure, and my writing process. Then answer a couple of quick questions in the comments.

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Win a signed copy of Before the Lights Go Out

I recently had what I am pretty sure was foodborne illness. It arrived in the middle of a friend’s birthday party, a sudden onslaught of misery that lasted for the next 8 hours, reminding me, horribly, of a similar scene in The Mask of the Red Death. It was followed by two days of pretty

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How long does food poisoning last?

Here is a horrifying concept few of us want to contemplate: Peak chocolate. (Via Steve Portigal)

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Bad news for the Big Rock Candy Mountain

This photo comes from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. It show a school (?) of nautiluses devouring some chicken. Allen owns a large yacht called the Octopus, which has a couple of ROVs on board. This photo was taken by one of the ROVs at a depth of 876 feet, near the Pacific island of Palau.

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Nautiluses eating