One

So people have been blathering about the USDA's new dietary horoscope. I punched in my info and I'm a Grain with Beans Rising, with Mars in Vegetables and the Moon in Mac'n'Cheez. I must take care to eat extra grain-fed beef during the warm seasons to keep my Monsanto-ADM AgraVedic dosha from becoming aggravated. Since I was born in the Year of the Rooster, each week I will try to eat precisely three servings of purple-aura veggies (parsnips, swiss chard, eggplant, portobello mushrooms, seaweed).

I feel healthier already.

Two

Jeanne at Body and Soul has yet another post that hits you like a brick:

[I]n Joseph Ratzinger, standing by and watching people being herded into death camps without saying a word, I'm afraid I recognize myself. Very afraid. For me, it's essential to reiterate that this is wrong because I need to acknowledge that it would be as wrong for me as it was for Ratzinger. It's far more important, really, than my saying that it's wrong to take pleasure in other people's pain. That's a sin I have no inclination toward, so condemning it is more judgment of someone else's character than honesty about my own.

But this I also know about myself: If I had made the choice Ratzinger made, I would feel guilty about it for the rest of my life. I would ask myself over and over again how I could have done such a thing, and I would not accept easy answers. I would spend the rest of my life trying to atone for that. I know my conscience would not let me tell myself that everyone did the same thing and I had no real choice. It would be no comfort to me to know that other people had done worse things. And certainly if I later had the power to stop other people who were fighting oppression from doing so, I could not, in good conscience, use my power in that way.

For me to say that it's fine that Joseph Ratzinger co-operated with evil, because few did better and some did much worse, would be to grant myself dispensation, to say that as long as I don't personally torture anybody, for instance, I don't need to object when my country tortures people.

This was written in reference to discussion on an earlier post about the contrast between Joseph Ratzinger and Oscar Romero, which I also found resonant.

Many

My actual dietary guideline - "eat a fuckton of vegetables" - is working nicely now that I've discovered the yummiest salad dressing in the entire universe. If you've ever needed charts of domestic violence rates broken down by gender, Alas, A Blog is the place to go. Liberalism (with respect to domestic violence laws and funding) does indeed save lives.

Meanwhile back at Pharyngula, a discussion about ginormous trilobites probes the important issue of whether or not various extinct arthropods would've been delicious. To what extent can we generalize from yummy crustaceans? I was hoping for some professional insight on the matter, and maybe a cladogram color-coded for tastiness; alas, it looks like I'll have to pioneer the phylogenetics of tastiness all by my lonesome. If you've ever eaten weird bugs, you should go over there and add to the growing pool of anecdotes data. Also, trilobite cookies!

Kevin Drum notes that the Democrats have plans to fight dirty - In other words, they're going to introduce some bills and demand votes on them.

Gasp! Not a bill to ensure benefits for disabled veterans - the bastards! How could they?

I clocked 72 hours last week, and they were real hours, none of this namby-pamby half-working half-blogging crap in which I am sometimes able to indulge. In one way, it was nice, because I was worried about having grown soft on a steady diet of simple tasks and 40-hour weeks and now I am reassured that I can still maintain focus for thinking and research and writing. In all other ways, it sucked.

One of the things I wanted to write about last week was Andrea Dworkin's death, the discussion hos Hugo where a few men's rights folk argued that we ought to have kicked her out of the feminist tent, and Dr. Bitch's call to describe our feminisms. These were originally separate things (you can still see the seams) but time has smooshed them into a single meandering exercise in ideological boundarymaking.
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1. Lovely, but mundane, mottled granodiorite forms.
2. Equally lovely pale aplite (quartz+feldspar) muscles its way into a weak spot.
3. Stripe!
4. Broken stripe! Awesome!

Also Joe has a Thursday Rock Blog up. (Update: also Kim!) The bandwagon, she lumbers along...

It's Friday in many time zones! If someone wants to score this playlist (+1 for each Belgian, -5 for each album purchased at a yard sale or the $1.99 bin, +3 for each album you own and haven't listened to in ages, etc.) feel free.

1. Fairport Convention - Jewel in the Crown - The Islands
2. dEUS - In a Bar, Under the Sea - Serpentine
3. 2020 - Outside Looking In - Punk-O-Rama Vol. 7
4. W.A. Mozart - Requiem KV 626 - Offertorium, Domine Jesu
5. Fairport Convention - Jewel in the Crown - Naked Highwayman
   Statistics! Pfah!
6. Ben Folds Five - Whatever & Ever Amen - Brick
7. Pixies - Doolittle - There Goes My Gun
8. Cherish the Ladies - The Girls Won't Leave the Boys Alone - The Queen of Connemara / Carraroe Jig / The Lilting Fisherman
9. Flook - Rubai - G.D.'s / Hooper's Loop
10. Gustav Holst - BBC Philharmonic, The Planets - Uranus, the Magician

I should not have had that third cup of coffee. I feel a little ill. Why am I drinking a diet coke with lunch? I must secretly like the idea that my heart will explode and my veins will leak and my eyeballs will shoot out the back of my head at any moment. Not to mention my stomach oscillating around like an amœba.

• PZ Myers (and some French scientists writing in Nature) on public outreach in the sciences. Does Friday Rock Blogging count?
• RIP, awesome compost pile. Damn. [via]
• Even Microsoft fears the wingnuts. Bastards. Another reason to be glad I bought a Mac. [via, via I forget]
• Dr. Crazy and Dr. Schwyzer both weigh in on the lives of female grad students. Depressing! La Lubu offers practical advice:
  

  The best, most effective trick I had---the one I still recommend? Get "older". You can't increase your actual age, of course, but listen to the stories of the old timers, and become a minor historian of your Local. Talk freely about "when you were a kid". Get real "old school" on 'em. This was an effective strategy for me (I look young, so verbal "aging" techniques helped me gain that critical respect); I recommend that to young male apprentices that are having a hard time being taken seriously, too.

  I've also had some luck invoking Caltech's reputation to get people (drillers, etc.) to take me seriously as a smart person, but it's never done much to allay my worries about the kinds of sexualization problems Hugo and Crazy are talking about, and I don't expect it to work in grad school, either. I suppose one could always desexualize oneself by gaining a lot of weight, but I doubt it's a worthwhile tradeoff.

  Remind me sometime to write about Hoity-Toity School privilege vs. male privilege, it's a potentially interesting parallel.

• Awww, a kitten.

Who'd'a thunk I'd need to work so much overtime just to quit my stupid job? The money is nice but I'd really rather have the time. Blah.

One

Is not the loneliest number.

Two

Is also not the loneliest number.

Many

Is the loneliest number.

• Electromagneticistes will appreciate this one: instant physics problem solutions.
• Another old white man assumes power. Film at 11.

• Women and anger:
  

  Our culture has a huge problem with women who do not appear to be happy every hour of the day and night. I believe this is magnified with mothers, who are not only supposed to be Happy Smiling People constantly by virtue of their gender but also by virtue of their glorious state, the role of mother, which is supposed to be JOY. Right? Unhappy mother=bad mother.

  Unfortunately this does not reflect reality, as Bernadine P Healy says in the Journal of Women's Health, Vol 7(4), pp. 393-394: ".... studies have shown that within family life, women with or without children are actually angrier than men. As children arrive, and their numbers increase, women's anger increases even more.... Anger management strategies for women are suggested including biological and rational responses to anger stimuli and turning free-floating anger to constructive purposes."

  [via]

• Translating Wal-Martese into English:
  

  Dear Fornicating Harlot,

  Shut up about the birth control already. Your comments and concerns are so very important to us, that we responded to your questions about our policies with an uninformative form letter.

  To get a copy in the original Wal-Martese, sign this petition.

• Eco-poverty - one of these days Christy will convert me to Rhetorical Deism:
  

  In addition to being a profoundly beautiful story, I love the theological implications of God creating the earth. At every stage, God blessed it and hallowed it and said that it was good – all the plants and trees and birds and fish and animals. It was all growing and running and singing and swimming, and God liked it all. Then God played in the dirt and blew us full of the breath of God and thought that we were the best thing ever. The deepest truth is not that we are wounded. The deepest truth is that we’re good. We tend to forget that about ourselves – and each other.

• And finally, a kitten.

A few words of wisdom from Googletalk:

For millennia, man has been charged with a crime. You may be a mixed blessing for agriculture. A long-term care insurance quotes from multiple lenders, even if you don't know, can hurt you by accident. I was in the room! With the adjoining owner's property or the property of the University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA.

For millennia mankind has been given a second chance at life by the NUMBERS by the use of the site and the author of the book, of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Qumran community and the environment.

Finally, I'm going to enter this contest. We'll see if Google can accurately mimic the pathos of the procrastinating C student.

UPDATE: vote for me! UPDATE UPDATE: Plagiarism only sorta pays.
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So sand is just little weensy rocks, anyway. And this is a weensy volcano made of sand, in Peru. It's about a meter (0.33% of a football field) across.

Normally, layers of sand and silt and crap underground bear the weight of whatever's on top of them through a network of contacts between individual sand grains. During an earthquake, if the sand grains are loosely packed, this network is disrupted. But the stuff on top is still there, being all heavy and shit. Wacky hijinks ensue!

If the jiggling sand happens to be wet, all the overburden pressure is transferred to the water. Water, being incompressible, is not happy about being squeezed like this; if it finds a suitable weak spot, it will squirt out. And voilà, a pretty sand boil!