Author Archive for Jason

Gelatinous for the Masses

Published
by
Jason
on November 13, 2008
in Meta
. 1 Comment

As a follow up to a previous 30D2BBB post, I’ve made some minor updates to my About page and I’ve created a new header for the blog. This new image puts my mug up there right and center. Too creepy? Let me know.

Beyond All Believable Bounds: Happy Exploding Whale Day

Published
by
Jason
on November 12, 2008
in Life Oddquatic
. 0 Comments

November 12 is the 38th anniversary of the infamous exploding whale incident. Not sure how you celebrate this one without blubbering. From Wikipedia:

Exploding whales have been documented on two notable occasions, as well as several lesser-known ones. The most famous explosion occurred in the United States at Florence, Oregon, in 1970, when a dead sperm whale (originally reported to be a gray whale) was blown up by the Oregon Highway Division in an attempt to dispose of its rotting carcass. This incident became famous in the U.S. when American humorist Dave Barry wrote about it in his newspaper column after viewing a videotape of television footage of the explosion. It later became well-known internationally when the same footage circulated on the Internet.

Related Links:

CephaLOLpod: Elder Ones

Published
by
Jason
on November 12, 2008
in Life Oddquatic
. 5 Comments


The Interwebs are brimming with reports from The Census of Marine Life about cephalopod ancestors mucking about around Antarctica. They believe that the shallow-water cephalopod, Megaleledone setebos, is an evolutionary link to many of the world’s other deep-sea octopuses. The CoML press release was just released, but judging from the pub date of the Shrapnel cartoon above (February 21, 2008), Peter Barbyshire must have had an inkling of what was to come.

The census continues through 2010, and the CoML Web site is a evolving wealth of information. But as Sarah notes, while they are deep in the midst of discovery, it make take some time to make it all classroom friendly.

Of course, cephalopods have a lineage that goes much farther back than Megaleledone setebos. Christopher Taylor recently posted a couple of nice entries on cephalopod early evolution:

Modo del Polipo

Published
by
Jason
on November 11, 2008
in Gefilter Feeder
. 5 Comments

[via highsnobiety.com]

Black windbreaker with an image of purple octopus tentacles screened onto the hood and shoulders [200x225, 20K]
vngrd.org: Octopus Windbreaker - Black, medium

If I spoke Italian, had 94€ in my pocket and was not so extra-large, I might be able to wear one of these boss cephalopod windbreakers from VNGRD. It’s even got the cephalopodcast color scheme! Sadly, it is not available in my size. But they also have T’s and hoodies designed in a similar fashion. I suppose I could settle for an octopus umbrella (though I’d rather have an umbrella octopus, [umbrellopus?]).

Anyone know of other exciting invertebrate-inspired couture?


30D2BBB: Traffic Ahead

Published
by
Jason
on November 9, 2008
in Meta
. 3 Comments
Supplementary Web badge for the 30 Days to Being a Better Blogger program, modeled after a green and yellow highway sign [250x150, 16K]

This is my third entry in the 30 Days to Being a Better Blogger. Today’s topic is about traffic analysis: figuring out who’s visiting, where they’re coming from and how long they’re staying.

You may not know this, but as you route around the Interwebs, you leave a glistening trail of data behind. You produce this information mucus anytime you make contact with the Internet and it acts to both reduce friction and provide propulsion as you move from page to page. But this also means that just like some predatory flatworm, I can follow your spoor whenever you enter my domain. Lucky for both of us, I don’t do much with the data you secrete. And really there is no easy way for me to single anyone out for identification. I just see the aggregated image of all the visitors squiggling around the sidewalks of my site. With this, I can tell how folks find their way here and when they leave. I can also see where the trail dead ends (404) or is blocked (403).

To see these trails, I use a couple of different tools. In the beginning, I would just download the daily visitor logs as a spreadsheet and try to parse the tables out manually. After a couple thousand rows it would get tedious. Not that there is really that much traffic. It is just that every thing you touch gets tagged, every graphic, file and page and that adds up quickly. Fortunately my hosting company offers two options for parsing Web statistics easily, Webalizer or AWStats. Webalizer is the default and the one that I use. Because of this I can show you what it looks like when PZ Myers touches me.

cephalostats_october2008.gif

That big spike on 10/8/2008 is for International Cephalopod Appreciation Day. It’s a fun tradition and many people contribute to the bump, but Myers always ends up being the biggest skew. Webalizer also gives me monthly, daily and hourly statistics, as well as top URLs by hit and by Kilobytes and top entry and exit pages. Because of it, I also learned that oddly enough snapping turtle is one of the most frequent terms searched for on this site.

I have Google Analytics running too. Fun fact: the original company that developed Google’s analytic software was called Urchin Software Corporation and you can see their invertebrate mascot in this picture. Google usually gives a more nuanced and attractive image of my traffic than Webalizer. With it I can easily parse out the perennial popularity of my PowerBook/Macbook power adapter wrapping tutorial.

And because of all these traffic tools, I can easily see so many of you worming your way into my heart. Thanks for stopping by and please pick up a cookie while you are here.

Sleep Typing

Published
by
Jason
on November 9, 2008
in Book Gills and Personal
. 5 Comments

Hey, it’s NaNoWriMo time again. I had a dream about this back in June. I dreamt that I was trying to write my first novel. I could see myself sitting at an old-fashioned typewriter, pecking away, reading and re-reading the words you see below. I woke up and immediately wrote down for real what I could remember. It is not as good as I remember, but I thought it was novel :P enough to share.

In a very long room with an even longer table, Ed Stanwick was about to sit down to an elaborate meal. From the look of the imported linens, the silver and china you might think it was dinner but in fact it was brunch. Ed was an eleven week virgin to the world of high-finance, so he was not expecting the phone call he was about to receive. He was also not expecting the sudden departure party thrown for him at one of those swank bar with too many highballs and too much slipping on acrylic chairs. Nor was he expecting the prospect of spending the rest of his life in Thailand. But this story is not about him.

Instead, it is about Clairice, the girl Ed left behind. She told herself it would have hurt worse if they were married instead of just living together for five years.

30D2BBB: About the Cephalopodcast

Published
by
Jason
on November 8, 2008
in Meta
. 4 Comments
Supplementary Web badge for the 30 Days to Being a Better Blogger program, modeled after a green and yellow highway sign [250x150, 16K]

Continuing with the notion that this 30 Days business is something more linearly sequential than chronological, here’s my next entry. This one is supposed to be about cleaning up the About page, but I thought I’d work on my backstory instead.

Origins

Somewhere early in 2005 I got an iPod shuffle (thanks Aunt C!). Like a many men my age, I was still on dial-up and had a meager selection of CDs, most of which I did not like and hardly ever listened to. So what use was this new little nugget of technology? Fortunately, Apple soon added podcasting support in iTunes and I had more random audio than my one little gigabyte of portable media storage could carry. I quickly added broadband, a Mac mini and a 5G iPod (with video) to my home (how’s that for a halo effect?). Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to learn that my first podcast experience was something technological. Later I added things like science and the oceans to the mix. And somewhere during that time I became convinced that this was something that I could do*, despite a history of mild stage fright and and an overdeveloped sense of self-deprecation.

It was not until August that I woke up with a headache and the name of the show rattling around in my brain: The Cephalopodcast. It seemed more clever at the time, but I’ve since learned that there are a disheartening number of people who have never heard the word cephalopod before, much less know how to pronounce it or know what it means.

I knew I couldn’t have a podcast without a companion Web site, so I registered my first domain, found a hosting service, figured out how to install MySQL and Wordpress and wrote my first blog entry. It was not until December that I recorded and posted my first show (when RSS was not so simple) and it has been a middling success ever since.

What is this blog all about?

The tag line for the Cephalopodcast is science edu + ocean info. It is about:

  • science
  • education
  • science education
  • marine science
  • marine science education

You might notice a little overlap in those subject areas. Diagrammatically, it shapes up something like this:

cephalogram.gif

However, this is not a complete picture. If I am honest, there is actually another factor at play here, and a more accurate formula might look something like: (science edu + ocean info) x tech. Adding the tech multiplier might seem self-evident if you are reading this blog or listening to the podcast but I mention it for completeness sake. Also, there is an environmental variable which is sometimes thrown in to balance the equation.

*I mentioned my rationale for being here in an earlier entry.

Thanks for all the delish

Published
by
Jason
on November 8, 2008
in All Wild Right Outside
. 12 Comments
Monkfish on Victor Hugo market, Toulouse France. From www.noodlepie.com [179x240, 28K]
“Monkfish on Victor Hugo market, Toulouse France. From www.noodlepie.com“
Flickr photo: DSC06852.JPG, by noodlepie
Creative Commons license, Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

Monterey Bay Aquarium recently launched their online guide to sustainable sushi. It is part of their overall Seafood Watch program that aims to raise public awareness of sustainable fishing and consumer best practices. This monumental effort involves scientists, managers, citizens and fisherfolk working together to make recommendations on where and what to eat. You can read about all the steps and criteria for ranking in this handy PDF. Suffice to say, it seems thorough and it condenses all the information down into one of three recommendations: Best Choice; Good Alternative; Avoid. These are printed in an attractive format that fits in your wallet or mobile device. And after all that effort to make the decision easy, you’d think I’d be happy. But I am not.

It is because I recently had the option to order the monkfish. It is an animal whose name belies how truly monstrous it appears. Rather than being a sedate and cloistered creature, the monkfish looks as if it might consider me for a meal instead. But not knowing if it was better, best, or bad, I opened up the Seafood Watch Web site to check. After squinting at the margins and mashing the wrong link a few times, I eventually found out monkfish is a bad choice and avoided it and in so doing decided never to order seafood again.

For you see, I am tired of having doubts about what to eat from the sea. Call it blue-green ennui or environmental fatigue, it feels the same. That moment with the monkfish merely made me conscious of a preexisting behavior—I’ve been avoiding seafood for some time. Given the ocean of options at the fish counter, doubt inevitably washes over me and I instead settle for the tilapia or the “Delacata” because I think they are safe. With the snapper, the roughy or the hake, I am never sure. True, I could reference a handy guide, but no matter how sustainable it seems on paper, in practice I know that mongers will lie.

To be clear, I do not think that catfish are sea kittens. For me, it isn’t about the ethics of eating animals or if fish have feelings too. And I am not advocating a piscine proscription for anyone else. Instead, it’s about the recognition that I have too many doubts about what I am eating, more than any card or pamphlet can allay. I am not eating seafood now nor feel the need to eat it in the future and that is a decision which is, by default, sustainable. So, given the choice of A, B, or C, I am opting for D, none of the above. And I am happy with that.

Nom On

But let’s say you are someone who is inclined to nom on fish flesh. What to do? Of course, you can start by consulting the various online guides. And if that does not suffice, try a helping of Jacqueline Church’s blog where she is collecting sustainable seafood recipes to be published later this month. Or join an ocean wise Podmob and try to make a difference en masse.

30 Days to Being a Better Blogger

Published
by
Jason
on November 6, 2008
in Blog, Meta and Under the Bridge
. 16 Comments

Remember when I made that 100 days of 100 words blog challenge? Yeah, that did not turn out so well. But I thought, why not get back on the yo-yo and try a new dietchallenge? This one is called 30 Days to Being a Better Blogger. And since blogging is by nature an iterative process, no one will notice anyway, right?

This latest craze is an initiative started by Steven Dembo, author of the Teach42 blog and Online Community Manager for the Discovery Educator Network. A similar program is going on over at the National Blog Posting Month site (NaBloPoMo).

Steve has a Web badge to go along with the program, but I’ve made one too (above). Using the highway sign motif may be a tad trite, but it is the image that came to mind when I first heard of the 30 Days idea (and I already had the pieces handy). To me, the concept seems as much about distance as about time, like there is some destination up ahead on the Information Super Highway and each day is another mile marker along that road. Let me know what you think, or if you have a better idea.

The support wiki is at 30d2bbb.pbwiki.com. It is a work in progress, and if you would like to contribute, please join in. And keep your readers pointed here if you want to see where this thing goes. With any luck, it won’t end up in the drink again.

Carnival of the Blue #18: Deep Sea News

Published
by
Jason
on November 6, 2008
in Carnival of the Blue
. 2 Comments

Carnival Of The Blue logo, a blue sphere half-filled with water. [100x100, 7K]Carnival of the Blue #18 is now available for your consideration over at Deep Sea News. Deep Sea News is a World Wide Web famous blog that delves daily into the depths of the deep sea.


Next month’s festivities will be hosted at Waternotes. For a list of past Carnivals, visit the mothersite.

Mad Science! Vector Art Challenge

Published
by
Jason
on October 31, 2008
in Gefilter Feeder
. 0 Comments

If you need affordable, royalty-free stock art, iStockphoto is a good place to start looking. Each month they also have a challenge for their contributing artists and this month’s topic was MAD SCIENCE! Check out the link and scroll through the messages to see some of the maniacal results. Some of my favorites:

Also, here is a list of mad scientist from Wikipedia.

Undead Decapods

Published
by
Jason
on October 30, 2008
in Life Oddquatic
. 0 Comments

Greetings, foolish mortals, to the Haunted Marina! I am your ghost. Kindly motor forward and make room for everyone. There’s no reversing course now.

Fisherman tell tales of the eerie burblings of the ghost crabs and many a marine biologist knows the fearsome diaphanous form of the skeleton shrimp. But we begin our journey far from the briny depths, beginning here in a driveway near the home of one Mr. Peter William Eaves. While excavating the pavement, workers came across a curious and remarkable sight: an UNLUCKY number of crabs clawing their way up out of the ground. Read and watch as the astonishing tale is told:

While digging over a driveway, some workmen I know came across 13 living crabs. They were in a small, sealed chamber around 25 centimetres below the surface of the drive, which was surfaced with sand and gravel over a subsoil of pure sand and laid about 80 years ago. There have been no excavations on the site for at least 40 years. Most of the crabs are around 7 centimetres across, and a barnacle on the shell of one suggests they came from the sea. The nearest seawater - an estuary - is around 4 kilometres away and the sea itself considerably further.

I sense that you may not be totally convinced regarding the full veracity of Mr. Peter William Eaves claims. Is this truly a case of ancient undead crustaceans? Or is it merely a hoax, the combination of imagination and the discarded left-overs of a low country boil gone bad? I cannot say, but before you dismiss the story completely, consider this TRUE TALE of crab zombification.

In the darkness of the oceans live legendary creatures, from the mighty leviathans to the clasping krakens. But for a crab, the swift death of a closing maw or tentacle embrace would be welcomed compared to the fetid fate that awaits them if infected by the much smaller but much more monstrous RHIZOCEPHALAN. Also known as the SACCULINAN, these insidious beasts begin life innocently enough as innocuous larvae. But once settled on the crab’s carapace, they burrow in and begin sending out living, mind-controlling tendrils throughout the body of the crab host. They sap the crab of strength and force it to brood their feculent spawn. The crab cannot molt, or reproduce or burble for help and in every respect becomes a zombie slave.

But while horrifying in its own right, this still does not explain how undead driveway crabs could go unnoticed for so long? So let us leave the murky depths and turn to ROME, where we find that for millennia crabs have lived there almost unnoticed beneath the Romans’ noses. Since the reign of Trajan’s mighty empire, freshwater crabs have inhabited the canals and cloacas of Rome’s ruins, and what is more, they appear to be growing to GIGANTIC proportions. Perhaps it is no surprise that these creatures are thought to be another forgotten gift of the Greeks.

Well it appears we made it to the dock safely after all, although a little wet and still perplexed about the true nature of the undead driveway crabs. Please exit to your left and be sure to visit the a-scary-um. And Happy Halloween!

Toonsday: CephaLOLpod at Odd-fish.net

Published
by
Jason
on October 28, 2008
in 6 CephaLOLpod
. 3 Comments
Cartoon of a blowfish and an octopus sitting at a bar [273x285, 36K]
Panel 1 from the Barfly,© Phillip Blackman, odd-fish.net

You remember that Web comic I tried to start a couple of times? Well, if I had talent and more perseverance it would still not be half as good as Odd-fish, a comic by Phillip Blackman starring an octopus named Lovecraft and a pufferfish named Howard.

The funny thing is, when I thought about starting Pucker & Bloat, I originally considered using an octopus and a blowfish as the main characters. Guess that’s just proof that odd minds sink alike.

Below are a few of my favorite Odd-Fish so far. Start printing them out to add to you cubicle.

How many cephalopods does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Published
by
Jason
on October 24, 2008
in Gefilter Feeder
. 1 Comment

What happens when you cross Elizabeth Banks, energy conservation and a cephalopod non sequitur? You get the unscrewing of America.

Is That a Beagle in Your Pocket?

Published
by
Jason
on October 19, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 3 Comments

I am embarrased to admit it, but I am reading On The Origin of Species for the first time. I downloaded a copy of it to my iPhone using an e-reader called Stanza. I’ve read books this way before on my old Palm Tungsten and do not find the experience displeasurable. Some do. As Doctorow wrote, it helps to remember that, at this point in technological development, ebooks are still neither e nor book. But I have not tried a Kindle yet, so maybe that is better or more different but I suspect not. Anyway, I expect the percentage of people who object to evolution without having read this text is pretty high.

Simultaneous to my purusal of Chuck D, I am listening to an audio adaptation of John Darnton’s The Darwin Conspiracy. It is a fictionalized account of Darwin’s life, and historical liberties aside, it is well worth the cost of checking it out from the library. If you are stuck waiting in an airport (as I am) it won’t disappoint. The narration is split between the 1800s and the present day. The contemporaneous section follows a scientist who washes out of a research project in the Galapagos, among other set backs. It is a character type I’ve come across on a couple of occasions recently, namely the reluctant/dispassionate/incompetent scientist. It seems an especially weak trope and belies my experience. More on that when I am back to terra familia.

Crabby Chic

Published
by
Jason
on October 18, 2008
in All Wild Right Outside
. 1 Comment

Pictured below are a couple snaps from the Waterman’s Museum giftshop in Yorktown, VA. They’re selling art works from organicvase.com. The idea is clever enough: take some decorative pots and jars, leave them in the ocean long enough to let the benthic critters settle, giving each a unique, distressed apperance. They collect them after a few months, clean them up and sell each object for around $100-$200 a piece. Voila, crabby chic!

Seems sustainable and a better valuation of nautical novelties than the discount bin of seashells at my local drugstore. Not that I’d buy one. I’d prefer to make my own. :)