Last night we flipped on the tee-vee, and stumbled on a KCTS fundraiser: Dr. Daniel G. Amen in his self-produced show, "Change Your Brain, Change Your Life." If you missed it, you're in luck: it's showing fifteen more times locally. This is the same Dr. Daniel G. Amen featured on Quackwatch (his response) and whose claim to help "prevent" Alzheimer's was severely critiqued on Salon recently (once again, Amen responds). Whatever else is true (Amen......

Inspired by the news yesterday that Donald Brownlee, an astronomer from the University of Washington, has had a newly discovered space mineral named after him—Brownleeite—we have invented a simple new game. Most of us who have spent any time bored on the internet, or have bored friends who send us forwards about everything they find, know our porn star name. The formula for this is, of course, the name of your first pet and......

We sent special Killer Bugs correspondent Roger van Oosten to Town Hall last night to catch Richard "Hot Zone" Preston's talk. Post-decontamination, here is his report. Richard Preston, the award-winning author of The Hot Zone and Demon in the Freezer, had the Town Hall audience on his side with his very first words: “It’s freezing here! This is crazy!” Preston is on the lecture circuit pumping his new book Panic in Level 4, a collection......

We were very impressed by the great mobilization of Seaside, Oregon's Internet Defense Forces after our very first post about that town. Since then, we've had the pleasure to re-visit the place on several occasions, to eat at Herb's, and to exchange e-mails with residents. As a result, we have fallen deeper in love with both its charming small-town Americana as well as its gaudy tourism-pandering excesses. Seaside is the gold-standard and deliciously eponymous......

CHARITABLE INDULGENCES: If you're not too hungover from tonight's couture cocktails with Jack Mackenroth at Product Runway, something beautiful involving imported beer and fine Scotch is happening in Fremont both tonight and tomorrow: the HopScotch Spring Beer and Scotch Festival. The festival's a benefit for NW Folklife, so think of your purchase of extra tequila tastings as an act of springtime charity. 5 p.m.-12 a.m. Friday, 1 p.m.-12 a.m. Saturday // Fremont Studios, 155 N.......

BOOKS: Marjane Satrapi--she grew up in Iran so you don't have to--is speaking at the Moore tonight. Best known for her graphic memoir Persepolis (Now a major motion picture!), Satrapi is also the author and illustrator of Embroideries and Chicken with Plums, along with several children's books. 7:30 p.m. // Moore Theatre, 1932 Second Avenue // Tickets: $25-$32 SCIENCE: Buddhist-friendly pediatric psychiatrist Daniel Siegel, co-director of the UCLA Mindful Awareness Center, has written a......

MUSIC: The 2008 Pop Conference at EMP kicks off today (and runs through the 13th). There's more than 160 presenters across some forty panels. Tonight there's a keynote panel (inspired by the current EMP|SFM exhibition American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music) with Louie Perez of Los Lobos and Raul Pacheco of Ozomatli. Later on in the conference, a performance by Blue Scholars, a talk about being a "ghostwriter" by the king of the......

BOOKS: Attention Chicago-watchers: NPR's Peabody-Award-winning Scott Simon is at the Moore Theatre tonight reading from his new book, Windy City: A Novel of Politics. It's a political comedy for which Simon had to come up with names for his 50 fictional Chicago aldermen; his wife named all 50 for him but he's not co-crediting her with the writing. Well, well. This is his second novel; his first is about the making of a teenage......

MUSIC: Yes, we know, you wanted to catch Vampire Weekend at Neumos but the show's sold out. What we suggest you do instead is walk across the street to the Comet and enjoy Jet Lag Palm, The Antiques, Slow Skate (they're out sick), and Half Light. The bill is half local music, so it doesn't have to travel as far to get to your ears. Save the planet! 8pm doors // Comet Tavern, 922......

Kane Hall's Room 130 was almost full last night, for "The Psychology of Blink: Understanding How Our Minds Work Unconsciously," the last talk in the 2008 Edwards Psychology Lecture Series at the UW. The Blink part comes from a reference to Greenwald's work in chapter three of Gladwell's book. Dr. Anthony Greenwald gave an Implicit Association 101 talk, going back far enough to distinguish it from Freud's free association. The key difference is that he's......

THEATRE: Young Jean Lee's Theater Company presents Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven (A Show about White People in Love), which is an aggressively exotic title for someone raised in Pullman, WA.Writer/director Young Jean Lee's worst nightmare was to make a confessional, ethnic identity play with a flowery Asian-sounding title. So, the young NYC-based artist did just that [...] a character named "Korean-American" navigates increasingly disturbing levels of a pseudo-Korean world intercut with......

There are two more poets due in town for the Seattle Arts and Lectures Poetry Series, both in April. Lucille Clifton shows up at the Intiman on April 7, Edward Hirsch on April 21. We hadn't been to one of these poetry talks before, and since Irish feminist and poet Eavan Boland read from both her prose and poetry, we're not sure we got a typical experience. Whatever it was, we were happy we dropped......

BOOKS: Novelist Richard Powers reads tonight at Benaroya Hall for Seattle Arts and Lectures. The former computer programmer's latest book, The Echo Maker, is "a haunting novel about memory, identity, and the boundaries of neuroscience," (Booklist), and won the National Book Award and all sorts of "Best Book of the Year" awards in 2006. He's a novelist of "ideas"; David Foster Wallace is a big fan. Here's an interview in the P-I. 7:30pm //......

Sixty University of Washington professors have signed an open letter discussing the trend of unprepared students. Science and Math teachers at the UW have noticed a rising number of their incoming students can't do basic math. Some instructors claim they've had to dumb down their classes because of the increasing lack of math skills. Professor Cliff Mass, from the Atmospheric Science Department, gathered the signatures. He was inspired to write the letter because of......

Popular Science released its list of the 50 Greenest cities in the U.S. recently. Of course, liberal, green Seattle was on it. We came in eighth. It surprised no one at Seattlest HQ, however, that our neighbor to the South, namely Portland, came in first since some of us believe that Portland is better and we all love PDX regardless. Popular Science "collected survey data and government statistics for American cities of over 100,000 people......

We were trying to figure out how to gracefully suggest you go see U23D at the Seattle Science Center's IMAX before it closes (the run ends the 19th), when we ran into Mandy's blog. Mandy, take it away:i think U2 always reminded me of my dad. (not that this is a bad thing) but when i was little he might have put on some bono and cranked up the stereo. which i am pretty sure......

We just barely made it into Be Kind Rewind. Due to the previous night's snowstorm, director/brilliantly weird little man Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleep) didn't make it all. It's too bad, since his creative vision is what makes this film worth a viewing (in theaters soon). The cheesy storyline--after erasing the VHS inventory of a dying video store with magnets, Mos Def and Jack Black have to......

We don't claim to be an expert on male attractiveness, but if forced to rank television personalities by hotness or notness--well, let's just say that Bill Nye, "The Science Guy", would be closer to Willard Scott than to Matt Lauer. Nevertheless, women--even intelligent, attractive ones--are not immune to Nye's charms (whatever they may be). Take the case of Grammy-nominated oboist, former Stanford professor, and author Blair Tindall (at right). Tindall and Nye were married in......

The soul-crushingly young Jonah Lehrer was at Town Hall last night, his mere presence deriding our wasted time on the planet. At 25, he's been a line cook, a lab tech, and a Rhodes Scholar, and he's now an author (Proust Was a Neuroscientist), editor-at-large for SEED, and of course a blogger. (We were a pantry chef one night, and we learned how to "make" a crème brûlée with a propane blowtorch, but so far......

Last night the Old Pequliar was out of cider for the second week in a row. And we were sad, because we don't drink beer (sorry Geoff) and had to get through the quiz powered solely by a cheeseburger, criss-cut fries, and Diet Coke. Then the bartender revealed a cruel truth: All the pubs in Seattle are out of cider on tap, at least until the 17th. "There was a bad shipment," he said. One......

Jonah Lehrer, editor of Seed Magazine and author of the blog The Frontal Cortex has written a terrific book centered around this thesis: Creative people discovered truths about how our mind works well before scientists did. In the book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, Lehrer shows how the work of some famed authors, artists and even cooks anticipated neuroscience discoveries. Here's how he tells it:I actually argue that Proust anticipated some fundamental discoveries in modern neuroscience.......

Second chances are rare, but here you go, Seattle. Last time Great Northern came to town, y'all bunked out and went home instead of sticking around for the inevitable encore. The band pulled the plug, had a smoke and packed it in. And we were sad. Though it seems they were just here, Great Northern is touring again in support of their new EP, the appropriately titled, Sleepy Eepee. Check out the new songs here.......

Towards the very end of last night's People Talking and Singing, as the clock ticked past 10:00 and John Roderick announced he'd play another song and take a few requests from the audience, our butts chimed in: "Hey, this is starting to go on a little long." Our brains, and most of the rest of us, were enjoying themselves thoroughly. But Town Hall started life as a Christian Science church, and the pew we sat......

An HIV vaccine that helps you get HIV was not the idea behind the STEP Study, but that's what scientists are saying they got. 100 volunteers in the program were from Seattle, and the now-halted trial was co-sponsored by the Vaccine Trials Network, which works out of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. The Seattle Times and the P-I are both reporting on the story, which if nothing else illustrates a case of Donald Rumsfeld's......

Seventeen teams showed up at the Old Pequliar last night to see if our voice would give out. We managed to get through the evening without having a Peter Brady moment, but we're grateful to those of you who were willing to step up to the mic at a moment's notice. We thought we'd produced a slightly more difficult quiz than usual, but we were proven wrong -- every team got 40 or more......

Corner of 3rd and Union last night, the air's full of crazies. The rabid anti-Hillary crazies, fueled by and fueling right-wing panic even as they convince the mainstream that she's unelectable because she's so polarizing ("Just look at us!"). The Ron Paul crazies, all suited and tied. The 9/11 crazies in search of evil conspiracies. So what do the street crazies have to do with, say, the newspaper crazies? It's the possibility, however small, that......

A few weeks ago, Nobel Prize Laureate and co-discoverer of DNA Dr. James Watson blew through town, reflecting on how he's stayed away from stupid people, then delving into his now-customary slurry of sexist patois. Apparently he waited until he got across the pond to London to pull out the big guns:The 79-year-old geneticist said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that......

The first thing to know about Devra Davis is that she's not speaking from the sidelines: she's director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, is an environmental health expert, professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health and visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz School of Public Policy and Management. So when she said that the war on cancer has been almost......

In a well-paced one-hour lecture, Matthew Brzezinski provided a summary of Red Moon Rising, his new book about the Sputnik launch and its explosive political aftermath. Brzezinski admitted up front that this wasn't so much a science lecture as it was a political one. He explained the circumstances that led to the Sputnik launch--it was the side project of a few rocket scientists who had survived Siberian exile during Stalin's purges. And he described the......

"Keep in mind the name Matthew Brzezinski. This book feels like a practice run from a young author destined for big things." So says author Brian Burrough, upon reviewing Brzezinski's Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age. Brzezinski, says Burrough, is a born storyteller, and his narrative reads like a movie. Brzezinski is also, as you can see, dreamy. The book is about the early days of the space......