When I was at Cal, I had to take a damn physical sciences course, so as a freshman, I took Integrative Biology 33, a famed Dinosaurs 101* sort of class usually taught by one Kevin Padian, who turned out to be one of the top five professors I ever had. Padian is Mr. Paleontology at Berkeley, and his classes are absolutely electric. The dude has the kind of passion for his work that is contagious. When you hear him talk about how birds developed from raptorish dinos, you get excited, not just because he pumps the story full of wonder and energy, but because the man knows his stuff like no one else, and he manages to work every last shred of evidence for his case into the folksy talk he's giving you.

But wait, he gets better. Here's how big a cross-discipline thinker Padian is: He taught a seminar in the English department, which I had the honor and pleasure of taking. The subject of the course was something like "Darwin's ideas in literature" — it was basically a survey of how Darwin's world-shaking theory of natural selection (not "evolution" — remember, that word appears nowhere in The Origin of Species) got into people's brains and stuck there and started dripping out into art and culture. We read Tess of the D'Urbervilles and The French Lieutenant's Woman with an eye toward Darwinian ideas emerging in plot and character motivation. It was fantastic stuff. more...

In 1997, in a handwritten note to Harriet Miers, George W. Bush wrote:

P.S. No more public scatology

[spotted at Boing Boing]

"PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail-in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard."

[spotted at robot wisdom]

At long last, I got off my ass and culled through all the pics I took at Burning Man this year, and put the best ones up in a gallery over in the museyroom.

My second Burn was different in many, many ways from my first, but it was nevertheless a fantastic experience. There were highlights I wouldn't dare talk about here, and low points that only make sense if you've been inside my head. There was growth. There were journeys, each and every day. I spent much of the week with a couple of friends whom I rarely see and who are as dear to me as anyone. And I came back to the default world feeling about fifteen degrees out of kilter, like I was looking at everything freshly, from a new angle. And that, in one sense, is what the Burn is all about.