Many of my fellow ScienceBloggers have recently declared their membership in
Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique. I’ve been busy, so I haven’t been able to get around to signing up until now. That’s a shame, since some of the badges appear to have been designed specifically for me!

So, here’s my list of badges.

The “Talking About Science” badge. Just ask my wife, my parents, my friends, strangers who’ve bumped into me on the street…

The “I Blog About Science” badge. Ok, so I really blog about math – even if you don’t really believe that math is a science, I touch on plenty of scientific topics in the course of my blogging.

The “Arts and Crafts” badge. Just look at some of the figures I’ve drawn for this blog. Isn’t that enough?

The “Destroyer of Quackery” badge. I think I’ve earned this one pretty solidly with my takedowns of Bill Dembski, Sal Cordova, and various bozos like them.

The “I can be a prick about science” badge. I’ve gotten plenty of emails telling me
that I’m a prick, or an asshole, or various other things, so it must be true, right?

The “Will gladly kick sexual harasser’s ass” badge. I’ve got some interesting
stories about this one, which would get me into trouble were I to describe them here.

The “I bet I know more computer languages than you, and I’m not afraid to talk about it” badge. Now come on, this one must have been designed just for me!

The “I will crush you with my math prowess” badge. Anyone who writes a math blog is clearly entitled to this badge.

The “I’m a scientist who is fundamentally opposed to administrative duties” badge. Come on, is there a real scientist anywhere who doesn’t deserve this badge?

The “experienced with electrical shock level 3” badge. There’s a story to go with this one. A few years ago, I developed some rather nasty RSI. Not the more common carpal tunnel, but what appeared to be compression of the ulnar nerve. My doctor sent me to a researching neurologist who specialized in RSI. Based on his initial exam, I looked like an absolutely classic case of ulnar compression – symptoms were so textbook perfect it was amazing. So he brought my in for an electromyelogram (EMG). In an EMG, they attach a probe to some extremity (fingers, toes, etc.) that will be able to measure nerve signals that reach that extremity; and then they use a nasty little gadget to zap you – a little want with two contacts on the end of it, which they use to send a jolt, which triggers nerve signals, and then they can measure how long it took for the signal produced by the zap to reach the probe. If the nerves are damaged by RSI, the transmission speed will be lower on the damaged pathway than on a normal one.

So the Doc hooks me up to this apparatus, and start zapping. Fortunately, he’s the kind of doc who’s really enthusiastic about his work, and loves to explain it. So as he’s doing this, he’s showing me the readouts, and explaining them. Only there was no indication of ulnar nerve damage showing. So he kept moving up the nerve – and as you move farther from the probe, the amount of current in the zap needs to increase. So at first, it wasn’t pleasant, but it was no big deal. But by the time he got to my collarbone, he was zapping me with 1/2 of an ampere. In the right circumstances, that could be enough to kill you. In these circumstances, it was harmless, but it hurt. So as he’s doing these tests, what an observer sitting outside the room would have heard was a constant cycle of “zap,OW!… Ooh, cool!”.

The “statistical linear regression” badge. Since my dad taught me about linear regression by the time I was in fourth grade, I clearly deserve this.