Science Hits and Misses

First up, check out Nanoparticles Keep Brain Cells Alive.

Secondly, find out if you write like a girl (or boy). Scientists claim to be able to tell with an 80% accuracy whether the author is male or female. So far, the Gender Genie is about 60% wrong according to its own stats, as of August 20, 2003.

It said an email I wrote recently was "male", while a story I'd written a long time back, with a first person narrarator who was female, was labeled "female". This would be more interesting if another story I wrote in the more typical third person was labeled as "male", but it still came out "female". Sounds screwy to me.

However, in the spirit of goofy fun, commenters are encouraged to "analyze" their own writing and report the results.

Posted by Chad Lundgren on Wednesday, August 20, 2003 (Link)

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Blue Man Group

I went to see Blue Man Group as couple of nights ago with my girlfriend Karen and her family. My two word review: very cool.

The opening acts were Tracy Bonham, who plays a wicked fiddle version of Led Zeppelin, among her other musical talents, and Venus Hum, which was more like Venus Ho-hum with their lead singer's voice barely audible on the first song and an incomprehensible drone or whine on the other tired techo songs. You can share in some of the crapiness by visiting their twitchy website.

The concert used huge video screens to have the audience do Rock Concert Movements such as #1 which is of course the head bob, and #3, which is the downward jump. Blue Man Group managed to simultaneously mock rock concerts, with a sarcastically large backing band, and throw a pretty good concert, all while keeping their trademark inventiveness and visual eye-candy intact.

I was worried for a second when they brought Venus Ho-Hum out again, but even they couldn't ruin a piece together with Blue Man Group that was a re-working of Cream's "I Feel Free". The ending was a resounding version of Baba O'Reilly that worked beautifully with Tracy Bonham playing some wicked fiddle.

No, I don't have pictures. I'm not that guy.

Posted by Chad Lundgren on Sunday, August 3, 2003 (Link)

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