Back to space nerdiness

I'm starting to think that Valentina Tereshkova doesn't age.

1963

2002

2011

IN GLORIOUS RUSSIA, WE HIDE SECRET OF IMMORTALITY FROM PITIFUL USA.

(She will always be one of my heroes.)

In which: my nerd flag flies

So I was telling a friend about how I'm working on a project for this archeology course I'm in, and she, jokingly, asks, "Do you have an Indy hat yet?"

And I'm about to say no, when all of a sudden I realize.... Actually, yes. I do have an Indiana Jones hat. I bought it in high school before I was even remotely interested in Anthropology.

Luckily she thought it was awesome. Even if I was slightly embarrassed to admit I own such a thing. (I wore it all week at International Thespian Festival one year. My drama teacher, upon seeing it, either called me "a dork" or "hopeless" or both. I don't quite remember.)

I might just have to dig it out and wear it more often. :< Let the nerd flag fly, right?

Let's kick off the New Year with a belated post about Doctor Who!

I somehow forgot to mention in one of my previous posts that some friends and I had a pow-wow on Christmas to watch the Doctor Who 2010 Christmas Special, which was pretty great. I enjoyed the flying sharks and references to marrying Marilyn Monroe, as it's fun to see the Doctor portrayed as anything other than an asexual autistic savant. I just got into Doctor Who in the last year or so, but you could say it's a series I really like. SO HEY, let's watch the trailer for next season and do a quick reaction post!

So what we have here is the trailer for season six, at least the first story arc, possibly more. So right off the bat we've got what are either aristocrats from the French Regency or Pirates, and also Nazis, and they're both looking for our favorite time traveling alien. (Those wacky Nazis.) It looks like the Doctor is chilling with Amy and River. I don't see Rory in any of these early scenes which makes me wonder where everyone's favorite Roman Centurion/Male Nurse has gotten off to. Amy in a fancy dress with a petticoat... cut to scary black man with a gun and the Doctor... in the oval office, requesting a SWAT team and some cookies.

If these are all scenes from the same episode, I am very curious what Steven Moffat and his team are up to. But, moving on...

Flyover of Monument Valley, Doctor in a stetson, OH HI RORY I SEE YOU MADE IT TO OUR LITTLE SHINDIG AFTER ALL. 8) Flashback to last season with the fez, oh hi River you are looking as Mary Sue as ever. Is the writing team sure this little expedition wasn't just an excuse to make the whole gang wear flannel? At any rate, it seems they've been recruited to work on something at Area 51 (this is the only reason the Doctor would ever be caught dead on American soil - to deal with an alien threat.

So it is implied that the Doctor, in bedraggled unshaven scientist mode, has summoned himself because he can't deal with this shit on his own. Okay then! And then shit gets real! Aliens! Amy running! Rory running! River naked!

Wait. Why is River naked?

If this is a hint that we are actually going to find out anything useful about River this season, that would be awesome, k thx Mr. Moffat.

So Amy's screaming, the Doctor is monologuing ominously, everyone looks pretty freaked out, and we see... a member of the Mos Eisley Cantina band?

ALRIGHT THEN. Bring on season six.

A cool few days:

SO JUST A QUICK RECAP OF MY LIFE SINCE SATURDAY.

True Grit / Sushi Pizza (better than it sounds) / Japaenese Soda (see above) / Wizarding World of Harry Potter (see below) / Animatronic Triceratops / Single Rider Line (Here's a reward for not bringing small children to a theme park!) / Roller coasters / Catching up with the bestie / Tron Legacy / Starbucks with the bestie / The Fountain of Youth archeological park / Gypsy Cab Co. / St. Augustine Pirate and Treasure Museum / Spinning / Interviewed and photographed for the Times Union (See Friday's metro section! Really I have no idea what is going on.)

I will elaborate on any of these points further upon request!

One week to Young Playwrights Inc. Conference!

What makes a human a human?

"Mitochondrial Eve" is about 100-200 thousand years ago in Africa. This refers to not a single individual, but a single population of perhaps a thousand or fewer individuals from whom all modern humans are descended. While some of the adaptations we see in modern humans are certainly the result of evolving to be smarter, faster, and adaptable, the fact is that your ancestors were all horribly inbred. The skull of H. sapiens is fucking weird looking. Check it out:

H. Erectus:

H. Heidelbergensis:

H. Neanderthalensis:

H. Sapiens.

Do we actually look anything like our nearest relatives? No. Because, just like in West Virginia, it's all relative in Africa 100KYA. Our reduced palette and weird shaped skull? It's probably because your ancestors were making it with their first cousins. What's the fastest way to tell if something is an anatomically-modern Homo Sapiens or not?

Well, if you've got a mandible, the question to ask is... Does it have a chin?

That's right. The fastest way to identify if you've got H. Sapiens or H. Something Else is that little buildup of bone at the base of the mandible. And where does that come from? Well, you're reducing the size of your jaw, and the bone has to go somewhere. And if you decide to move up the face, what's the next defining feature?

Anatomically modern humans have no retromolar space. While in earlier forms the jaw extends past the base of the third molar, in humans the jaw is squashed in to reduce prognathism. What do we pay for our markedly reduced alveolar prognathism? Well, if you've ever had a wisdom tooth pulled, you know - Our jaws can't hold all our teeth. We're evolving out our M3.

You know who else didn't have an M3? H. Florensiensis. "The Hobbit." An island population that, over the course of a few hundred thousand years, managed to reduce everything about itself. You know what they wound up with? Smaller jaws, no M3s, and teeth more jacked up than a Liverpudlian. (No offense to the Liverpudlians.)

So, everything that makes us human? Founder effect. Genetic bottlenecks and inbreeding.

Zoo day!

Today I went to the Bronx Zoo. It's kind of the wrong season for it, because it's cold and most of the animals are inside for the winter and it gets dark at like 4:30, but it was pretty fun. A lot of their exhibits (birds, primates, amphibians, reptiles....) are indoors, so we were still able to see them, and for $5 it's not really something to sniff at! Also they had tiger cubs and they were adorable. :) By the time we made it to the lions they'd already gone in for the day, though, and it seems like the zebras, wild dogs, and baboons were apparently never out at all today.

And it was cold and kind of an old, sad zoo with no sense to the layout and exhibits that were kind of prehistoric but it was fun and I met people and had a good time walking around talking to people.

Like some kind of weird fanfic (My friends are the best.)

So last night I finally sent my friend Caleb (who writes an amazing blog called Does This Make Me Look Hipster?) a copy of Like a Dog In Space since he's been begging to read the whole thing for literally forever. And he read it and loved it and raved about it, and then he was like, "I've had Katy Perry's song Firework stuck in my head this whole time."

Five minutes later, he was adjusting the song lyrics to vaguely summarize the plot of the play, and it was quite honestly the most awesome thing I've ever received.

With his permission, I'm reposting it here. (The first stanza is in capslock for some odd reason.)

DO YOU EVER FEEEEEL LIKE A DOG IN SPACE
DRIFTING, THE RUSSIANS LOSE THE RACE
DO YOU EVER FEEEEEL LIKE YOU'RE INANIMATE
HAVE NO WAY TO TALK, YOUR BEST FRIEND IS A ROCK
YOU HAVE TO FIIIILE THE PAPERWOOOORK GET MISTER PAPPEEEERS TO SIIIIIGN
JUST WEEEEEAR THE ROOOOOCK AND TRY NOT TO DIE
CAUSE BABY YOU'RE A MAAAAAAANEQUIN
FOR DECADES YOU WILL TRYYYYY TO WIN
MAKE US GO AW, AW, AW
CAUSE YOU'RE STILL NOT A COSMO NAW, NAW, NAW-UT
Do you ever feel like a dog in space,
Drifting past the moon,
No way to come back home?
Do you ever feel, feel inanimate,
Unimportant,
Like an old Maket?
Do you ever feel you’ve been decided for?
Your time’s already up and you have just barely begun.
Do you know that there’s
That there’s a guy for you
And he’ll help see you through
You’ve just gotta create
Your fate
And take
The bait
He’ll give
You life
Just open your eyes
‘Cause baby you’re a Mannequin!
Doomed from the start, never to win.
Show them all the mi- i- ight
The might that you personify-y-y.
Baby you’re a Mannequin!
Prove to them that you can win!
Make them go ah-ah-ah!
As you become a cosmona-a-aut!
You don’t have to feel like a dog in space.
‘Cause now you have a place
To help in the space race.
If you only knew
The possibilities
The opportunities
Borne from necessity
Could be they’d help you find
The place that you could go
A man whose sure to know a way to keep you comin’ home
Bring him a meteor
He’ll open up a door
It won’t be long before
He will help you create
Your fate
So don’t
Be late
He’ll set
A date
There’ll be no more dummy crates!
‘Cause baby you’re a Mannequin!
Doomed from the start, never to win.
Show them all the mi- i- ight
The might that you personify-y-y.
Baby you’re a Mannequin!
Prove to them that you can win!
Make them go ah-ah-ah!
As you become a cosmona-a-aut!
[This part didn’t need to be changed:]
Boom, boom, boom
Even brighter than the moon, moon, moon.
It’s always been inside of you
And now it’s time to let it through
‘Cause baby you’re a Human!
And now you have a chance to start again.
Leave them all behind in fli-igh-ight
And redefine what’s wrong and ri-igh-ight.
Baby you’re a Human!
Papers let you start again!
Be what they all said you’re no-no-not!
You will become a cosmonau-nau-naut!
Boom, boom, boom
Even brighter than the moon, moon, moon!
Boom, boom, boom,
Even brighter than the moon, moon, moon!

They're dogs! They're dogs in space!

So my friend Lydia and I have decided that we are going to find ourselves a Yuri's Night party to go to, come hell or high water, and if we don't then we'll throw our own, eat pizza and astronaut ice cream and mocktails, and watch space-themed movies and TV shows. There's a long-established Yuri's Night party in NYC, but it's 21-and-up, and we happen to be... nineteen. So yeah, that's unlikely.

But what I would really like to get ahold of is a copy of this cute little kids movie that will probably never see an american release. They're dogs! In space! Based on a true story! What more can you say about it?

Anyway, April 12th 2011 is the 55th anniversary of Vostok 1, and we are going to celebrate it one way or another.

Unrepentant dorkatude

My idea of a perfect day is getting up at nine AM, printing off an assignment, and hopping a C train uptown to the American Museum of Natural History, a place I am alarmed to say I am beginning to understand the floorplan of. To me, the AMNH is like Hogwarts. For one thing, it's basically a castle. For another thing, it seems like the layout is constantly changing. You take a twisting hallway and two staircases in search of the entrance, and you wind up in an exhibit hall you've never heard of or seen before.

I spent a whole day there today - an hour or so in the hall of human origins, followed by lunch (following a tip from my anthropology TA, I tried the brownies in the first floor cafe - delish!), followed by an IMAX documentary about the hubble space telescope (absolutely amazing), followed by something like four hours in the Hall of Vertibrate Origins, the Hall of Dinosaurs, and the Hall of Mammals and Their Extinct Relatives doing an assignment for Evolution of the Earth.

It was educational.

For example, did you know that reptiles aren't a scientific clade? A clade includes a common ancestor and all of its descended species. Since the reptile category excludes birds, who are descended from dinosaurs (and technically dinosaurs themselves, because the entire definition is based around a shared hip structure). This kind of thing makes me geek out unrepentantly.

I also really wanted to smash some heads together in the Hall of Human Origins.

Guy looking at an exhibit:

"So which one of these is the human arm, and which isn't?"

His friend, pointing to a chimpanzee's arm bones:

"That's the human one. It has an opposable thumb." (Pointing to the human arm) "That doesn't."

Me, interrupting because I think they're dumbasses:

"No, that's a human arm, and it does have an opposable thumb. All primates do."

The first guy:

"Thanks. Man, I told you so!"

The same guys, later:

"So, why didn't all the monkeys evolve into humans?"

And then I went over to the Space Center gift shop to see if they had any books that might be useful to me, but they didn't - I think I got the last copy of Two Sides of the Moon (book review is PFAD... when I finish it, but it's terrific so far) and they just never got more Astronaut Biographies in after that, or else they restock their book selection less often than every two weeks. I thought about getting some Astronaut Ice Cream because I haven't had any since I went to space camp in fifth grade, but then I decided that if I wanted to eat stale marshmallows I'd just eat stale marshmallows, and I didn't want to eat stale marshmallows just because it was nostalgic to me.

(Do real astronauts eat astronaut ice cream, or is it just a space center gift shop gimmick? I might need to investigate.

But all in all it was pretty awesome, and then later when I was waiting for the subway home I somehow managed to get into the same car as my roommate's boyfriend. Don't ask me how, but when the train stopped there was this white guy with dreadlocks sitting right in front of me and I was like, "...Bez?" and he was like, "Hi." New York is surprisingly small once you start to know and recognize people - you run into the same group of people everywhere, even when you least expect it.