Tag: link

Science can be sexy!

Being a wonk (as Brits would say) or a nerd/geek is usually a bad thing. If you’re too interested in science or (god forbid) you choose that as your profession, you can forget about ever being called hot or sexy. You’re more likely to be that boring person in stuffy clothes and glasses that stands in a corner at party and bore people to death whenever you open your mouth to talk.

Well guess what? That stereotype is going out the window! Not only do some women find geeks hot (yay!) but even a magazine like People rated a scientist (a geologist, yawn!) as one of the sexiest men alive in 2005! Dr. Michael Manga who is at the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at UC Berkeley rubs shoulders with Matt Damon, Johnny Depp, Viggo Mortenson and Matthew McConaughey among others in the latest issue of People.

While idly browsing the net for any other articles on Dr. Manga, I also came across inkycircus, life in the nerd girl world, a blog by three women science journalists which categorises their blog-post about Dr. Manga under “men whose babies we want to bear!”

Blog crawl

That’s what my posting frequency has slowed down to. So, to fill in the silence, here’s a couple of entries from my friends’ blogs.

First up, from Heidi‘s blog, Katya’s cooking show!

Next, a link I have shamelessly stolen from James at Nomen Luni.

And if that weren’t enough, I’m even stealing most of the text of his entry.

Field is comprised of 1,300 unwired fluorescent tubes in a grassy field in Bristol. The piece, by artist Richard Box, warns of the dangers of living in proximity to electricity pylons: the tubes glow from the power of the electromagnetic field created by 400kV overhead cables. More worrying, were you to approach a tube, you’d find that its glow fades because the human body is the more efficient conductor. The resulting installation has an unreal quality—so much so that photographs of Box’s work look almost as though they have been fabricated.

I found this idea incredibly cool and not really worrying. It would be interesting to to see the patterns of glow fading or brightening up if, for instance, a few people were dancing amongst the tubes. How’s that for changing this installation art to performance art? 🙂

On a totally unrelated note, I’d gotten very tired of hearing people arguing needlessly over the Presidential Daily Brief (WashingtonPost.com, free registration required I think.) Tom Tomorrow has an interesting point to make on that.

And now to more mundane and not so fun things. I have deleted my orkut and LiveJournal accounts as they seemed to be more troublesome than necessary. Abrupt yes, but what has to be done has to be done.

Add-ons to the blog… or How I love the free services on the Internet

So while spending time chatting on flickr, I came across this website called AllConsuming, mostly because the guy behind AllConsuming, Erik Benson, created a service tied into your contact list on flickr called Connectr. I’ll let you go to those sites and see what they’re all about. What I do want to tell you here, is that AllConsuming allows me to put in a snazzy “currently reading” list into my blog with minimal fuss and with all working links to Amazon and whatnot.

To coin a phrase… “That totally rocks, duuuude!!”

The next thing, HaloScan, the service I have been using for commenting, has now implemented trackback too. More power to them! (More power to us bloggers too!)

And if I hadn’t mentioned this before, both these services are totally free. No strings attached. No pop-up ads, no spyware installed on your computer, no… oh well you get the point.

Let’s tally up a few things that go into this blog: I create it using blogger, that’s free. I host it at webspace my school gives me, that’s free. I use DynDns‘s WebHop service to cloak and redirect requests from oook.blogsite.org to the actual url, that’s free too (with one single small pop-up), and, using HaloScan, I have commenting and trackback, all free. I Love the Internet!! 😉

Back in the USA

Yes, yes, I know… It’s been almost two months since I posted here. Not like anyone is reading this actually. But whatever…

Well going from the comments I see, at least a couple of people are reading the blog and so I should be writing more often… if only not to disappoint the raving crowds of fans I have! 😉

So let me start it off with one really interesting site I came across today by my usual random “follow-links-everywhere” approach to surfing.

The Wooden Periodic Table Table is a site about, well, a wooden table… and it has every element of the periodic table. Piqued? Go ahead and take a look at the site. I guarantee you will spend quite a bit of time perusing it!