CV’s spam filter has been a tad bit overenthusiastic these days, so I’ve recently had to troll through the spam to retrieve misfiled comments. As expected, the spam is a morass of viagra ads and truly horrid lists of porn-related search terms (where “horrid” means “things that Dan Savage would not approve of”). But lurking in there is a new breed of affirmation spam:

Warm greetings! Thanks for all the information, a very nice and well done site! Cheers.

I’d just like to thank you for taking the time to create this internet website. It has been extremely helpful

Moreover, now that they’re tired of thinking only of on-line casino gambling, spammers seem to wish to join the CV conversation:

Hey!, what made you want to write on Best Calculator Ever | Cosmic Variance? I was wondering, because I have been thinking about this since last Sunday.

I couldn’t understand some parts of this article Post: Juan Collar on Dark Matter Detection | Cosmic Variance, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.

I am not sure that I can completely understand your comments. Would you be so kind as to expand on your reasoning a little more before I comment.

Sometimes, though, the spammers enthusiasm for our work transcends their usual respectful admiration:

Hello, What a beautiful and awesome site. I adore what you’ve done with your setup and graphics. Thanks you so much.

You really poses much expertise on nalize Public Schools | Cosmic Variance. I really enjoyed going through your posting. I really appreciate it.

I love everything about this site!!

And at least among the spammers, our work is being appreciated.

Thank you. You have helped someone more than you could know.

And he will inform you of this desire … in song!

Via Cynical-C.

Spotted in the Google Ads sidebar of a news article:

Rediscovering this ancient Sesame Street skit has been my one source of joy while I slog through the writing of an immense, tedious, but necessary data paper.

Atrios is right, this is pretty amusing:

“Who is your favorite author?” Aleya Deatsch, 7, of West Des Moines asked Mr. Huckabee in one of those posing-like-a-shopping-mall-Santa moments.

Mr. Huckabee paused, then said his favorite author was Dr. Seuss.

In an interview afterward with the news media, Aleya said she was somewhat surprised. She thought the candidate would be reading at a higher level.

“My favorite author is C. S. Lewis,” she said.

If Aleya had been keeping up with blogs, she would have been less surprised at Huckabee’s reading level.

PhD Comics has a nice one page presentation about what life is like for a typical PhD student in observational astronomy:

The faculty version involves writing proposals pretty much all the time. It’s not nearly as funny. Trust me.

(hat tip: the Astrodyke)

As mentioned yesterday, I just gave a public lecture about dark energy.
I think the lecture went well. As Jamie said in the comments below, it was literally earthshaking.

Seriously, it seems I have learned out to control the movements of the earth’s crust. I had just finished a rather long leadup about what the universe is made of (from the pre-Socratics through to R&B bands) to introducing dark energy, had just mentioned the 1998 supernovae results on the accelerating universe, and showed my personal favorite graphic about dark energy, which I think I found several years ago in a google search —
and read the label of this lovely substance. Right after the words came out of my mouth, “Dark Energy, it Stinx, but it Rocks!”, the earth started shaking.

Yes, indeed, there was a 5.6 magnitude earthquake, just about 25 miles from where I was speaking, right in the middle of my talk. Right at the punchline. A bit of chaos ensued (doesn’t dark energy always have that effect on people?) but eventually I reigned them all back in with a witty remark and carried on.

Really, I swear I planned that. Can’t wait for the video.

UPDATE: the video is now available! The excitement occurs during minute 34.
“Dark Energy: a discovery so revolutionary, that it shook the earth.”

Academics, we’ve already decided, are sadly unfamiliar with guilty pleasures. But you know who are the true experts? Public radio show hosts.

Case in point: Peter Sagal, host of NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, has taken up the implicit challenge posed by William Bennett’s The Book of Virtues, the very existence of which is a monument to the cherished American freedom to expound upon things to which one stands as a shining counterexample. Peter has responded with The Book of Vice, a work that is both infinitely more entertaining and ultimately more educational about the nature of right and wrong.

I can go on a first-name here, as I know Peter from my Chicago days, and we’ve even indulged together in approximately three of the seven types of vice he explores in the book. (I’m also “friends” with Carl Kasell on Facebook, but that’s not a very elite group.) Like any new author, Peter has now started up a blog, and I was able to prevail on our friendship to secure Cosmic Variance a place on its very elite blogroll. You are doubtless imagining a tensely-negotiated quid pro quo according to which I would agree to plug the book, and of course you are correct. But all this talk of virtue and vice activated some tiny shred of conscience that I hadn’t previously suspected, so I actually waited to read the book before I mentioned it. And: it’s great! Which saves me a certain amount of light stepping, book-review-wise.

The conceit of the book is that, unlike bilious blowhard Bill Bennett, whose greatest pleasure in life (other than chain smoking and dropping millions at slot machines) is publicly condemning the moral failures of others, Peter is a genuinely generous and good-hearted person, even shading toward the vanilla in the workings of his everyday life. Vice, in other words, just isn’t his bag. So when he brings his charming wife Beth along on a fact-finding (and strictly non-participating) mission to a partner-swapping swinger’s club, he reports back from the perspective of a fascinated anthropologist, not that of a jaded connoisseur. And, like any good social scientist, he doesn’t pre-judge, but let’s the experimental data determine the conclusions.

As a result, not all vices come in for equal measures of condemnation or celebration. Swapping sexual partners? Kind of boring, and ridden with self-deception. Modern high-tech gluttony? Awesome.

In case you were wondering.

I’m definitely getting this T-shirt.

From Objective Ministries, via Cynical-C. (Be sure not to miss Project Pterosaur.)

Rumbling in the mix with Staff Seargent Max Fightmaster and Commander Flex Plexico in Cracked’s list of the 9 Manliest Names is…wait for it…drumroll please…

Max Planck.

Yes, this Max Planck. Our Max Planck. The guy with the constant named after him. Quoth Cracked:

He’ll hit you right in the goddamn face with a length of wood in a way that makes your quantums explode.

How the article missed astronomer Blair Savage, I don’t know.

(h/t Andrew Sullivan)