First of all, I have to say that I’m addicted to the internet. The internet was down in my flat for about a day and a half, and I was just lost. I couldn’t talk to Ines on the internet phone. I couldn’t read the news. I couldn’t send files between my work and home computer. I couldn’t download anything. I couldn’t blog! It was kinda scary. I need to stock up on some decent literature for the next internet loss.

Since my internet was gone, I haven’t been thinking of anything clever to write on the blog, so I’ll just talk about some miscellaneous stuff. First, something about parasites (surprise). I was dissecting fish this week to collect some worms. Here’s an interesting thing about parasites: they are nearly always aggregated to some degree. That means that most of the parasites are found in just a few hosts. To illustrate, this series of numbers represents the numbers of parasites taken from individual hosts: 0, 0, 1, 0, 2, 0, 1, 0, 50, 1, 0, 7, 0, 18, 0, 2, 0, etc. See how most of the parasites are in just a couple hosts? It kinda makes opening fish up like a treasure hunt. Did we catch that fish with 100 worms? The one that was eating the wrong critters and/or has a bad immune system? Parasites that infect humans have the same distributional pattern….just in case you were wondering. I feel like I should spend more time outlining and explaining the negative binomial distribution of parasites, but I don’t want anyone to fall asleep before the next topic (there is always time for other blog posts about parasites).

Second topic is rock n roll (Homer: I’ve finally tapped into that spirit of self-destruction that makes rock n roll the king of musics.). I checked out a band called “The Bronx” today because thePRP gave them a good review. It reminds me a bit of Refused, a modern fusion of punk and more straightforward rock. Also, The Blood Brothers have a few new songs up on myspace that are awesome. If you don’t know The Blood Brothers, maybe you should pass on this…they are an acquired taste. On the other hand, their new songs are bit tamer and more focused than their older stuff, so, what the hell, everyone just check it out. Yet another band that should be checked out is Dresden Dolls. They released a new album a while back, and the few songs I’ve heard from it are pretty cool. Not my usual style, but sometimes you have to try new things. Ok, I’ll stop dropping band names…after all, I’m not the rock expert on this blog.

Dan