My Top Five ‘I Should Be Working…But I’m Learning Biology, Honest!’ Sites

Yes, getting back to work and slowly directing my energies away from reflecting on the sadness from the last few months and seeing if I can get back into the office by throwing myself bodily at the door and upending the piles of research papers from the stacks that have started to collect dust. Moments like these make me grateful for hungry silverfish.

Today I’ve been on conference calls that not-nearly-but-close-enough worked and then sifting through emails that have to be sent / didn’t get through / why is the email so slow (oh, the wireless is down, duh) – and working on the next two episodes of the podcast Token Skeptic. Ahrhrghrhrghagrhrghhh and so forth.

When procrastination is nowhere near the top of your ‘to do’ list, there’s a lot of things the internet can do to be unhelpful in the most entertaining fashion. I tend towards the sites that spark some inspiration or make me laugh/think/ revisit again and again to see if they’ve been recognised for an award for their general science wonderfulness.

So, I’m going to let the internet distract you for a while instead. While this isn’t an exhaustive list, it’s certainly one that I recommend for various reasons, which I’ll waffle on in individually-packed paragraphs and thus waste another half-hour or so. See, even writing this is a great distraction from checking over the bibilography, it’s kind of a win-win situation… er, kind of.

1) Save Your Breath for Running Ponies – If David Attenborough thought to set one of his award-winning BBC animal series in an Australian sitcom and threw in some sharp one-liners about dating advice, he might have a hope in hell of being somewhere close to being this damned smart. References included, so you can break out a few new tabs and pretend that you’re doing cross-referencing, when in fact you’re hurting your stomach from not laughing aloud.

“Topping my list of things that stick in my craw about Australian TV right now is that we don’t get BBC’s new documentary series, Life. If we did, we’d know all about the unusual courtship behaviour of one of the largest species of bees in the world, the Australian Dawson’s bee (Amegilla dawsoni)…

…She’ll be like, “Ugh, whatever. Hey what’s your name?” And she’ll go home with the other toughest Dawson’s Bee sauntering around that particular plant, but not before they make you wait around for ten more minutes while she decides which flower she wants to pollinate because all of a sudden she’s developed a highly sophisticated palate that you wouldn’t understand because you have no class… Bet those stupid lolcat pictures don’t seem so stupid now, huh brawny Dawson’s Bee?

You’ll spend hours learning about palentology and biology, without realising that you’re suddenly caught up in the snark of a randomly hilarious short story. Short stories which should be printed out and tacked onto the cages of the animals mentioned at your local zoo just for snorfs.

2) Digital Cuttlefish – yes, I know I mention them ALL the time, but they were the one who directed me to Running Ponies, so it’s a no-brainer to think of them next:

It’s a tragic little story, more than just a little odd:
My suspicion is, an octopus had just invented “god”;
When he told the other fishes, most dismissed him as a fool,
They had never heard such nonsense in their years in fishy school.
His relatives, embarrassed by his ineffective search,
Through a misplaced sense of sympathy, signed up and joined his church.

If you’re a Pharyngula reader, you’ll recognise their ‘Molly’ winning work popping up in the comments all the time, with poetic adventures and sharp commentary on the mad (the anti-vaccination crowd), bad reasoning (er, God doesn’t like octopus and that’s God’s way?), weird (“Eulogy for Gary Aldridge“), and downright biological-awareness-raising. This blog makes me want to run away to New York and write sonnets in the Science Museum. I plan on doing that again one day.

Someone should invite Digital Cuttlefish to present at a science conference, by the way. Get moving on it.

3) NCBI ROFL (note, they’re so good that they’ve been picked up by Discover Magazine, so expect to be redirected there this year.

Two molecular and cell biology grad students at UC Berkeley point out funny, bizarre, and questionable biomedical research articles and make you want to research Harry Potter’s headaches so you can get published too. The one with the clowns, however, seems just downright terrifying:

Clowns for the prevention of preoperative anxiety in children: a randomized controlled trial.

“OBJECTIVE: To determine if specially trained professional clowns allayed preoperative anxiety and resulted in a smooth anesthetic induction compared to the use of midazolam or no intervention. METHODS: This was a randomized, controlled, and blinded study conducted with children 3-8 years of age undergoing general anesthesia and elective outpatient surgery. Patients were assigned to one of three groups: Group 1 did not receive midazolam or clown presence; group 2 received 0.5 mg x kg(-1) oral midazolam 30 min before surgery up to a maximum of 15 mg; and group 3 had two specially trained clowns present upon arrival to the preoperative holding area and throughout operating room (OR) entrance and mask application for inhalation induction of anesthesia. The children were videotaped for later grading.

ARGRHHH THERE’S A CLOWN HOLDING THE ANESTHESIA MASK… actually, that’s be a hallmark of a cool sci-fi/horror, wouldn’t it?

4) Improbable Research. All the research that ends up being showcased for the IgNobel awards. Dr Karl’s research on belly button fluff is in there. Adam Savage wishes his results from ‘A Survey to Yield an Accurate Taxonomy of Idioms Pertaining to Large and Small Amounts’ was.

5) Alom Shaha – he was interviewed for the Skeptic Zone podcast (episode #22) and is probably the only person I know who has as much energy and passion for science as my friend Mike McRae does. And they ask questions and have projects on the go all the time. So, go there and get some inspiration!

Now I have to fight the silverfish and wrestle back my Psychology textbook. Enjoy your Sunday.

Tagged as: Australia, Biology, blogging, comedy, funny, Links Elsewhere, news, poetry, recommended sites, science blogs, science poetry, top five list