November 2010 “Happy Birthday!” Thread

Known Muser birthdays and “K Days” this month*:

11-02 Tesseract’s 6K Day
11-14 Mango’s birthday (1998 – green and blue and goldish-yellow)
11-16 Kiwimuncher’s birthday (1992 – green)
11-18 Cello-Playing Mathematician’s birthday (1993 – violet)
11-18 Enceladus’s birthday (1996 – purple, blue, and black)
11-24 peary moppins’s birthday (1997 – blue)
11-26 starr’s birthday (1996 – purple, pink, and silver)
11-27 Purple Panda’s birthday (1991 – purple)
11-27 Dodecahedron’s birthday (1993 – green)

You turn 5,000 days old this month if you were born between February 23 and March 24, 1997.
You turn 6,000 days old this month if you were born between May 30 and June 28, 1994.
You turn 7,000 days old this month if you were born between September 3 and October 2, 1991.

You have been on the blog for six months of you started posting in May.

*Note: Listed MBers who have been inactive for several months won’t appear on next year’s birthday calendar unless they show up again.

Happy Hagfish Day!

Talk Like a Pirate Day 2010 may be just a happy memory, but you salty sea dogs still have an excuse to party. The conservation group Whale Times has declared today (October 20) “Hagfish Day” to celebrate all weird and/or ugly denizens of the sea. The group’s website (at www . whaletimes . org/HagfishDay . htm) features a gallery of underwater grotesques and directions for hagfish-related activities, some of them involving copious quantities of slime (a hagfish hallmark). Altogether Muserly, we deem.

Slow Moderation Ahead

Two GAPAs will be traveling on Monday (October 11), so delayed moderation is a distinct possibility for much of the day.

MuseBlog is sorry for the inconvenience, which is due to its moderators’ possessing physical bodies that need to be laboriously transported from place to place. In the future, the Administrators hope to exchange their cumbersome proton-and-neutron-based bodies for electron-based models that can be transported at near-instantaneous speeds via wireless networks. Until the upgrade is complete, similar slowdowns are bound to occur from time to time, and we entreat your understanding.

October 2010 “Happy Birthday!” Thread

Known Muser birthdays and “K Days” this month*:

10-01 Kiki the Great’s birthday (1995 – black and red)
10-01 Cliff Eagle’s 6K Day
10-09 Gimanator’s birthday (1993 – purple)
10-09 Bismarck’s birthday
10-10 Keiffer’s 5K Day
10-12 Ebeth’s birthday (1991 – blue or octarine)
10-13 Paul Baker’s birthday
10-16 Kagcomix’s birthday (1993 – green)
10-19 LittleBasementKitten’s birthday (1997)
10-20 Goldendoodle’s birthrday (1994 – evergreen and gold)
10-23 kokopelli #13’s birthday (1992 – camouflage)
10-25 Red-tailed HAWK’s birthday (1994 – blue)
10-25 Randomosity 101’s birthday (1995 – blue, green, orange, and black)
10-25 Nthanda the Laugher’s 7K Day

You turn 5,000 days old this month if you were born between and January 23 and February 22, 1997.
You turn 6,000 days old this month if you were born between April 29 and May 29, 1994.
You turn 7,000 days old this month if you were born between August 3 and September 2, 1991.

You will have been on MuseBlog for six months if you started posting in April.

*Note: Listed MBers who have been inactive for several months won’t appear on next year’s birthday calendar unless they show up again.

Muse Academy Halloween Ball 2010 — Planning Thread

MA’s big annual autumn event is fast approaching, so it’s time to start nailing down some details. Creativity is encouraged, but remember: Muse Academy and all its functions are subject to physical laws and contemporary technology. No antigravity or unlimited sources of free energy, please!

Here’s how the ball unfolded last year.

Alter Ego Thread, v. 2010.2

Who can explain why these threads are so popular? We sure can’t.

The rules: Pick a pseudonym; guess who the other pseudonymous posters are while they try to guess you. That’s all there is to it.

Continued from 2010.1.

REMINDER: Check your posts before sending them — the preview button is useful for that. The Administrators will not rescue you if you accidentally submit one under your “real” blogname or post elsewhere with your alter ego.

Study Hall

Here’s how you’ve probably been told to study: Pick a special place for studying, and stick with it. Focus on one thing at a time. And remember your learning style (visual, right-brain, left-brain, etc.).

Wrong, wrong, wrong, say a couple of studies of studying, recently reported in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/health/views/07mind.html). When psychologists examine how people really learn things, a lot of popular, well-meaning advice turns out to be wrong. Variety, it turns out, works a lot better than repetitive, blinkered drilling. Vary the place, vary the material (as athletes and musicians have been doing for a long time). And so a new strain of well-meaning advice is born.

Now that you’re back in school and hitting your stride, we figured you’d have something to say on this topic. What have you been told about studying? What do you actually do? How do you like the results?

Talk Like a Pirate, Continued

Attention, MuseBloggers!

Just to be annoying for fun, we’ve decided to keep our English-to-Pirate translation plug-in running for an extra day. During that time, everything you post will automatically turn into pirate-speak. If you find that obnoxiously distracting, that’s the idea we’re sorry. Everything will be back to normal (or at least “normal”) on Tuesday, unless we change our minds.