PunkAssBlog.com

I’ve had a good week, so let’s spread some joy:

Stephen Colbert gets his picture into the National Portrait Gallery.

The museum agreed to give him a limited six-week showing — right between the bathrooms near the “America’s Presidents” exhibit. Museum officials say that’s an “appropriate place.”

Japan makes strawberry-covered chocolates.

Take for example one of FCOM’s products, a strawberry infused with white chocolate. On the outside it’s an everyday garden-variety dried strawberry, but break the surface and it looks like the fruit contains white chocolate in its fibers.

The trick is to first freeze-dry the strawberry to remove the water, and then infuse the white chocolate into the spaces left behind.

Over at Penny Arcade, Tycho addresses Townhall’s recent foray into wadding their panties over an imaginary, alternate-universe version of Mass Effect:

After breathless prose in the original piece about orgies and sodomy, acts which are manifested nowhere in the product he’s discussing, he literally begins to fantasize in the body of the text about a machine that can rape people - and rape them “orgasmically” - at a distance. He does not warrant our time, but I will speak in the clear manner that one must when managing animals: these things are not simulated by this or any other piece of entertainment software available at retail. Indeed, it was precisely the lack of sodomy that created a stir before release.

The first week of the last semester of classes has started well enough. I’m taking Jackson E&M this semester, for those out there who know what that means, and a nanobiotechnology class that might result in a post about MEMS and transistors and how your computer chips get made.

I have my first turn at one of our student leadership positions; not the one I wanted because I never asked for that one, but the one no one else wanted. It is the hot potato of student governance and it’s all mine.

And finally, a middle school teacher used the daughter of a guy in another department to launch his dream of a University-Middle School collaborative project being run by a woman who hopes that our introduction to a couple of gifted classes will ’spontaneously organize’ into a science fair in May. At this point, I’m in it for the laughter - we’re supposed to list our ‘research interests’ so that the kids can pick an appropriate mentor. If the introduction sessions are any indication, the guy who does cryptography and the guy who writes video games will be mentoring 25 kids a piece, while the rest of us in materials science, math and biology will get our afternoons back. I certainly don’t want to work with any 12 year old who already has an interest in ’semi-conductive nanoparticles or ink jet printing non-standard materials’, both things I am/have working/ed on. Get that kid some sports or something, because there is plenty of time for that shit later. So far, the only definite mentor-mentee relationship that has blossomed is between an Israeli math student and a young girl, united by their love of shopping and the color pink.