Fun with Liquid Nitrogen

Hi, folks. Things are going to be a bit touch-and-go throughout the month of May. Right now I’m working on preparing for a 2-week trip through 15 states and Washington, DC starting in under two weeks from today. The good news is that I hope to be able to still blog at least a few days per week during that time but the bad news is that I will miss some days and right now when I’m occupied with prep work for the journey I occasionally get too busy to provide a full post. Today would be one such example. But fear not! I’ve got a plan to keep you amused, however temporarily!

About a month ago I noticed that YouTube has updated their site layout to shove comments with the highest rating to the top, out-of-context of the discussion. Of course, anyone who’s been on the Internet for more than 2 hours knows how notoriously non-sequitur and devoid of meaning YouTube comments are to begin with. Even 3 years ago XKCD placed YouTube on the more provincial end of the spectrum and it certainly hasn’t improved its reputation since then.

These days I couldn’t help but notice how laughably off-the-wall these highly-rated comments are, especially on music videos. So I decided to make a game out of it. I’ll list five songs available as videos on YouTube and five highly-rated comments. It’s your job to match them up in the comments section here. I’ll post the answer key later. Have fun!

SONGS

• 1) Andrew W.K. – Party Hard
• 2) Beck – Sexx Laws
• 3) Lady Gaga – Bad Romance
• 4) Meshuggah – Bleed
• 5) Naughty by Nature – O.P.P.

COMMENTS

• a) “Note to self: stay away from freaky looking lady and scary bald guy so as to avoid becoming a pale dog slave dude.”
• b) “this is fucking song ”
• c) “I’m Canadian and I’m proud of having less crime. Who cares if you are ‘hard’, that’s a pathetic thing to be proud of”
• d) “like hendrix or mozart…..most people aint gonna realize his genius til he’s dead and gone….at least a few of us know whats up”
• e) “he loves kids but he will kick your ass!”

Good luck with that. And for the record, I looked up the Lady Gaga video FOR SCIENCE.

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Hi folks.

Today I thought I’d roll out a new feature. Well, two, really. One – “Trial Tuesdays” – is establishing that on Tuesdays every now and then I’ll try out new features. So that’s sort of a tautology. The other, though, is the feature I’d like to try today and that is homework.

Yes, sounds like a horrible idea, doesn’t it? We’ll give it a try. The idea is, I will present to you a topic that’s very much up for discussion ahead of time and give you a couple of leads and then when I write about it the next day, you can feel a bit more informed to discuss it in the comments if you so choose. It’s meant to be an act of encouraging discussion as a means of encouraging critical thinking. If it works it will probably most likely pop up on Sundays when I don’t have a guest author to prepare you for a topic I’ll discuss on Mondays. For now, though, I’ll do it today to talk about tomorrow’s topic. Which is…

Also known as the “Denisova hominin,” the X-woman is based on discovery of a finger-bone and subsequent sequencing of mitochondrial DNA from that sample that could – based on one interpretation – indicate that she is of a previously-undiscovered species of the Homo genus that existed along-side Homo sapiens. So far Neanderthals are the only species we’re certain did just that and, while consensus is greater now than ever that H. floresiensis was a unique species, the issue is still far from a closed-case and there is as of yet no evidence they interacted with modern humans in the same way Neanderthals are known to have; they might have been geographically isolated for the duration of their existence as a species.

So this is a Really Big Deal for Paleontology, this finger bone, and no one with letters behind his or her name who digs in the dirt for a living is being allowed to stay neutral on this one. Which is sort of how science works. And so I’d like to talk about it. Fortunately for me, Carl Zimmer has already encapsulated the controversy in one post. He’s good like that, what with the writing and all. It’s pretty dense for Biology laypersons but if you can glean a thing or two then you might be able to see things in a way I haven’t thought about.

So give it a whirl. Look into it a bit, sleep on it, and tomorrow – probably around 11 or noon Eastern since I’m still not quite caught up (believe it or not I’ve got one of them Day Jobs, too, and taking yesterday off meant extra work today) – I’ll post my thoughts on it and you can say what you think – even if it’s not necessarily about the science but more about what the discovery means to how we perceive ourselves as a unique species – and we can all pretend we’re grown-ups on the Internet. Or I can link to more videos combining Star Trek references and fart jokes. Really, I’m cool with it either way.

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