Here’s a great Boston Phoenix article about Ken Miller, a Brown University bio professor.

If you studied college biology, there’s an 80% chance your first textbook was written by him. He’s that widely respected.

I didn’t know this, but he’s also a devout Catholic, and the article describes his battles with both creationists and atheists.

Worth a quick read if you’ve interested in the intersection of science and religion.

We find out the gender tomorrow. I’d love to hear some guesses.

If you’re wrong, no one will ever hold it against you. If you’re right, you get to pretend forever that you knew what would happen.

Boy or girl?

This site creates a cool heat map of one’s foursquare check-ins. As I’m big on walking, it’s no surprise that most of mine are near my apartment. I was surprised to see so much “heat” on Fillmore Street, though.

Time to update my 3 year-old tradition of documenting how I’m wished happy birthday by medium.

Here’s 2009 & 2008.

Some thoughts:

• Some friends sent along well-wishes via more than one medium. I double-counted them. I thought about only counting the first, or counting each one as a half, but figured that this exercise isn’t intended to gauge my own popularity so much as the popularity of each medium.
• Similarly, I thought about plotting it on a 100% axis, but liked that the absolute axis made two points:
  1. Facebook appears to be stealing “share” from email, but not other mediums.
  2. There seems to be a static amount of kindness generated by the combination of email, Facebook, and in-person greetings, and the other platforms are additive.
• This year was the first year that IM and Tumblr appeared on the list. IM may have been bigger in the past, but I was never signed on. Now I’m attached to IM almost all day long. Tumblr just recently turned on a “replies” feature sort of like comments, and my cousin-in-law, Sarah, took quick advantage.
• I wish there were an easy way to control for things like day-of-the-week and social media connections. I’ve got way more Facebook and Twitter friends now than in 2008, but I don’t have a great record of the historical counts. Oh well.

The whole thing is also a fun reminder of how lucky I am to have such great friends/family.

Got a mysterious phone call this AM:

“Brunch. Ella’s. 20 minutes.”

We took a risk, & showed up.

We were relieved to discover it was the Easons :-)

Looks like the matched the wall paint to a mango lassi.

Indian b-day buffet. I’m in curry-flavored heaven.