MuseBlog

This isn’t Muse-related, but it’s worth knowing:

Today, the journal Nature publishes the first map of the platypus genome. It turns out that this strange and wonderful animal is strange and wonderful on the inside, too. Google “platypus genome” to find out more (and notice how artfully news reporters avoid writing the plural of “platypus”).

Continued from v. 2008.1.

The List:

Muslim: FantasyFan?!?!

Jewish: Sphinx, Quintessentia, hypermoocow, FairyDragon
Reform: yellowsharpiemarker, Sobriquet, Cliff Eagle Teh Pwnage
Reconstructionist: Kiki The Great, Anata~ChinTsu
Conservative: Copper Bigfoot, Brave Sir Robin, Zyviva, The Insane Blue Sage, RainbowFish
Orthodox: Phoenix, Jessie, groundhog22
Jewish Atheist: Lizzie, emmatheduck, speller73

Christian: Vendaval, Donaldo, MontgomeryGurl, Ninja For Christ, Eccentric the Afterthought, Lady Cinnamon Moon, IBCF, muselover, jammin j
Lutheran: Queen-o-random, Capricious
Catholic: Kiara, Romana2, Ebeth, davidude, Piggy the Proud Catholic, Tumsymonster
Eastern Orthodox: Sunrunner Bramblewood, Dotty ‘Kay
Quaker: Zallie, Red Tailed HAWK, Liesolotte, Purple Panda, Taiwan Hippo Fan
Protestant: book_addict, VanZepplin, Otzi, Kagcomix
Mormon (LDS): Skwerl Overlord, Veralidaine, Zyka
Methodist: grnqween2011, bibliorose
Presbyterian: Elizabeth, gimanator, Kari
UCC:The Man For Aeiou
Catholic by birth, unsure now: Beavo
Catholic plus Jewish holidays: Gaea
Christian Science Midnight Fiddler
Presbyterian + Hannukah and Passover Nthanda the Laugher

Hindu: ♥ shriya siolashrwa jeffica ♥

Buddhist: 100% cotton

Agnostic: Sweet Melpomene, curious and questioning, SupremeMuser2000, Lady Visala of Reverie, Gwendolyn, Alice (?), POSOC

Wiccan: emogrl, FairyDragon

Mixed Bag of Random Beliefs: Pentatonikk, Unintended Pun, Gwendolyn of the Eastern Seas, Otzi, Axa, elassë~adael, curious and questioning, Musketeer Number, Sweet Melpomene, Drops of Jupiter

Druid Reconstructionist: Millie

Atheist: Skipper Nancy, johnkerry, Purple Panda, Taiwan Hippo Fan, Darth Yoda, Lizzie, penguini, violindino, Yup, Bobbyjkl, First Sorceress, Shadowkat, curious and questioning, Potato Chip, Cat’s Meow, C++darkmage, Drops of Jupiter, La Mort, nerdz_r00l, The Bookworm, Kokonilly
Spiritual Atheist: The Bev, Harmony with short red hair
Radical Atheist: Queenie J, Drops of Jupiter, dark duke of darkness, agagabagabag
Happy Atheist: philosophical.bunny, Hypatia, â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’

Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM): Necromancer, Vixen in the Eyes of the Moon, Kokonilly

Asatruar: Frigid Symphony

Green Cow: curious and questioning

The Church of the Carrot: emmatheduck, Unintended Pun, NerdAndProudOf It, Beatlesrockr

Very Confused: lifewithoutsuffering

Graeco-agnosticism: /gradster(1)/

Non-practicing Believer of Subwayism: Faye Beauchamp

Dumr-Sirism/Jedi (on Earth): KaiYves

Unitarian Universalist: Logogeo96

Unlike the random thread, this discussion thread stays on topic until the topic changes.

Newcomers should read The Rules and The Guide before plunging in.

Current topic: Movies
Dance and dancing (all kinds)
The game known as football by some and soccer by others

We’re not sure who you were or how you did it, but you sure could do it. If you were who you said you were, then you were born sometime near this date in 1564 (or at any rate were christened three days later). And 444 is four times eleventy-one, which has got to be good, no?

Our intrepid scriptwriters forge ahead….

Continued from Script Frenzy Countdown

In which Musers research the habits, tendencies, proclivities, inclinations, preferences, and predilections of other Musers.

Continued from version 2008.1.

NASA says this week’s waxing crescent moon is worth seeing:

http :// science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/04apr_crescentmoon.htm?list104748

Unlike the random thread, this discussion thread stays on topic until the topic changes.

Newcomers should read The Rules and The Guide before plunging in.

Current topic: What’s cute?
Hating weddings
Food with no sugar added
Would you rather..?
Favorite fantasy characters
Injuries (worst, weirdest, funniest, etc.)
What’s the topic going to be?

Beforehand: What are your plans for the day? What sort of foolery do you have in the works? How will you avoid becoming an April Fool yourself?

Afterward: Well? How did it go?

(By special request of our New Zealand friends at Muse Academy South, for whom days start earlier than they do in blog time.)

By popular request. Continued from the 2007 edition.

For communicating in other languages and in variants of this one.

Long-term MBer Lizzie sent us three sound files of her playing the violin. It took us several days to convert them to blog-friendly format (sorry, Lizzie), but here they are at last: Part 1, Part 2, and Cadenza.

Here’s Lizzie’s description:

A few months ago, I asked the blog if anyone would be interested in
hearing a recording of my playing. Several people responded
positively, so I went off and recorded me playing the concerto I was
working on at the time, which was the first movement of Paganini
Concerto no. 1. Since the piece is about 20 minutes long and really
hard to play through well at one sitting, I split it into three parts
(the first part, the part that comes after that and approx. 50
measures of rest, and the cadenza that comes after the second part).
Hopefully, I included them all in attachments in a format that you can
open / post. The first part is probably the best, the second part
contains some really cool parts that may, alas, be slightly out of
tune (or more than slightly, but hey, I’m still a student, and I’m
getting better), and the third part the hardest and most showy (Sauret
cadenza. I swear, that man must have had a horrible childhood or
something, and had this unresolved grudge against the world of
violin-playing, and decided to get it out by writing the hardest, most
evil cadenza he could think of).

During last week’s Muserly get-together, Alice, Cat’s Meow, and IBCF — all loyal members of Muse Academy’s Spector House — recorded themselves singing the house song (with lyrics by POSOC). You can hear an MP3 file of the performance by clicking right here.

The event now sets sail for the history books, the photo albums, and bloglore. Reports thus far proclaim the meeting of our Washington State Kokonventioneers to be a success enjoyed by all.

By special request of KaiYves, during our sojourn on the “Muse Academy” blog.

The vernal equinox occurs at 12:38 a.m. (blog time, i.e., U.S. Central Daylight time) on Thursday, March 20. By the time most of you read this, it will be spring in the northern hemisphere. Oh, and happy autumn to MBers in New Zealand and other points south of the equator.

Yes, this is a day early, but Vixen in the Eyes of the Moon sent a card and may not be here on the 17th.

Born 14 March 1879; died 18 April 1955.

Almost belated best wishes to the memory of someone who saw the world in a new, unexpected way that turned out, as far as we can tell so far, to be right.

It’s 3/14 in the United States — any excuse for a party, we say. (We’ll celebrate again on July 22.)

For those of you who don’t know, Script Frenzy is NaNoWriMo’s younger sibling, specifically for scripts. This year its auspicious opening day is April 1st. For those of you who don’t know what NaNoWriMo is…that’s National Novel Writing Month.

Continued at long last from version 2007.2.

Unlike the random thread, this discussion thread stays on topic until the topic changes.

Newcomers should read The Rules and The Guide before plunging in.

Current topic: Princesses (real, not fictional, and emphatically not Disney; requested by Kokonilly)
Fairy tales and Disney and such
Spelling mistakes (including one in Harry Potter)
Plans for Easter/spring break and Favorite colors

…Just Sailed Under Nine Palace Elephants.”

That’s the prize-winning mnemonic that a 10-year-old girl in Montana came up with for keeping straight the planets and dwarf planets of the solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Eris.

The news story doesn’t say whether she’s a Muser, but it seems likely. You can read about it here (spaces have been added to the URL, as usual, to keep spambots from tracing links back to us):

www.space. com/news/ap-080227-planet-mnemonic-contest. html

Of course, we’d be interested in hearing about any other good mnemonics you’ve learned or invented.

February 29 is rarer than a day in June, though less rare than February 30 (which never comes at all). Conservationists are marking the occasion this year by kicking off the Year of the Frog — not to be confused with the Year of the Rat on the Chinese calendar, which, confusingly, this also is.

Leap Day is also the traditional day when women may propose marriage to men (or, presumably, ask them out) — something that maidenly modesty forbids the other 99.9452% of the time.

How was your Leap Day?

It’s visible from the eastern half of North America to Western Europe, and points south. Worth a look if it’s not too cloudy where you are. Details are available at NASA’s eclipse page (delinked version below; paste it into your browser, and delete the spaces before “gov” and “html”):

sunearth.gsfc.nasa. gov/eclipse/lunar. html