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Yes, April has been on of my busiest months in years, so I haven't had time to write as much as I would like.

May will be all kinds of awesome.

In the interim, here are some links I crafted, just for you.

Meet the Web's 10 most hated people.

That one should be pretty self explanatory.

I'm loving aliens instead

Robbie Williams disappeared from view at the end of 2006. Since then, he has become obsessed with UFOs and extraterrestrials. To gather evidence, he and Jon Ronson headed deep into the Nevada desert

On December 18 2006, Robbie Williams played the last of 59 stadium shows in a row, announced he was going to spend Christmas at his home in Los Angeles, and then basically disappeared. He was hardly seen at all in 2007. He briefly checked into rehab. He spent quite a bit of time hiking and playing football (he owns a football pitch on Mulholland Drive). Then he stopped hiking and playing football. His record company, EMI, announced he had no plans to release an album in 2008. Today he unexpectedly calls me to ask if I want to go with him to the desert in Nevada to meet UFO abductees.

Cognitive Dissonance in Monkeys - The Monty Hall Problem

The Monty Hall Problem has struck again, and this time it’s not merely embarrassing mathematicians. If the calculations of a Yale economist are correct, there’s a sneaky logical fallacy in some of the most famous experiments in psychology.

Visualizing Viruses

Most people want to avoid spam and viruses, which is exactly why MIT Media Lab's grad student Alex Dragulescu spins the net's detritus into art.

9 Common Idioms That Come from Technology

Again, straightforward.

The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out by Richard Phillips Feynman

I'm not a big audiobook guy, but I do drive to work, so it might not be a bad idea to occasionally flex my brain a little bit on the drive. Especially if it's Feynman doing the flexing. If he were around today literally everything he published would be dugg or reddited.

"Australian actresses are plagiarizing my quantum mechanics lecture to sell printers"

"I tried to think of a witty, ironic title for this post, but in the end, I simply couldn’t. The above title is a literal statement of fact."

Click the above for more on this humorous story. Here are the models in question:

From the out of left field department…

I went to the Harvard Museum of Natural History and while I was there I bought a piece of malachite. Why? Because it's crazy cool looking, that's why.

What's Malachite? Wikipedia describes it thusly:

Malachite is a carbonate mineral, copper(II) carbonate hydroxide Cu2CO3(OH)2. It crystallizes in the monoclinic crystal system, and most often forms botryoidal, fibrous, or stalagmitic masses. Individual crystals are rare, but do occur as slender to acicular prisms. Pseudomorphs after more tabular or blocky azurite crystals also occur.

In other words, minerals are cool.

There are plenty of skulls and teeth from just about every period of our nearly 5 million-year history as hominids, but the most exciting finds are the full skeletons. When there are arms, legs, a pelvis and some ribs, it's possible to reconstruct the whole person.

The crown jewel of these ancient full skeletons is Lucy, a woman found in the barren Afar region of Ethiopia in 1974 by Donald Johanson and his team.

…

And now Lucy is coming to a museum near you.

I did a presentation on evolution and Lucy when I was just a wee one, so, for me, the opportunity to see what's likely the most famous set of fossilized remains in the world is a real treat. The story (linked below) doesn't say whether or not it's coming to Boston, but it is going to Chicago, so if worse comes to worst I'll take a trip out there.

Lucy on Tour: See Evolution's Biggest Bones of Contention | LiveScience

Read about the glories of the Quatnum Cheneyverse

*to me at least. This makes me laugh.

Some very creative solutions to basic problems that millions of people around the world face every day:

Slide show: Socially reponsible design - style - International Herald Tribune

Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists

If I didn't pass some of these things along I think I would explode.

I saw Carl Sagan was on top of the Technorati popular search list today. I wondered why, and after a quick minute of searching I saw this post:

Joel's humanistic blog: Announcing the Carl Sagan memorial blog-a-thon

Sounds like a plan.

Here are five things I love about Carl Sagan:

1. Cosmos. What more is there to say, really? By any measure it's one of the great science shows of all time, and personally it's right up there with James Burke's Connections, as one of the really seminal TV watching experiences of my youth. My brain was so fired up by Cosmos it's not even funny. It's been on recently (on the Science Channel) and I still get wrapped up pretty easily when I catch it while channel surfing. I'm pretty sure my love of both the "Cosmic" Marvel Comics stories (think Thanos/Warlock/Captain Marvel/Galactus) and Physics both stem (at least partially) from my early viewing of Cosmos.
2. He smoked pot. You could kind of tell in books like The Dragons of Eden where he describes, with the knowledge of an insider, why people might experience music a little better when they're high, but it still brought a smile to my face when I read about it after his passing. It's just such a funny thing to see him, one of the country's true intellectual stars during his lifetime, outed as a pot smoker in the face of the sluggish, brain dead stoner image put forth in the popular culture (especially in the hands of the war on drugs crowd)
3. His book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark is easily one of my favorite books on science. That book rules the school.
4. He was a wildly accomplished man. Just check the list of awards he won at Wikipedia. The list is as long as my arm and the really cool thing about it is the balance between the scientific and popular worlds that it represents. While we're looking at it, there's one award that sums up his life to me: Joseph Priestley Award - "For distinguished contributions to the welfare of mankind." Sounds about right.
5. SETI. I've been a Seti@Home user since July 6, 1999 and Sagan was the impetus for me signing up. It's good, clean, passive fun.

SEFORA
"Today a group of scientists and concerned citizens launch a new organization, Scientists and Engineers for America, dedicated to electing public officials who respect evidence and understand the importance of using scientific and engineering advice in making public policy."

I'll poke around, check them out and then, if it's all kosher, send them a couple of bucks. Science is battered and bruised in this country and that's just got to stop.