Dammit Jim!

I’ve got an upcoming (simple, very low-key) wedding and managed to put off getting a ring until the last moment (shoppings for jewelry is not really on my top 10 list). So I had pretty simple requirements; 1) silvery (which, since platinum is too expensive and you have to baby silver, I thought meant white gold), 2) affordable (over $400 really started me thinking about how much better other toys or travel sounded), 3) some sort of pattern or carving so it wasn’t just a boring band and 4) available within a couple weeks (me procrastinate?). After looking at about ten or so local jewelry shops, I was starting to get pretty depressed. Most of the rings were boring or really didn’t seem to look right (e.g. diamonds) and the few that I took a shine to either would take a month or more to resize/order or were way outside of what I felt like paying. Once I started running into the same rings in different shops (always suspiciously identically 50% off), I decided it was time to see what the internet had to offer.

After a bunch of googling, the online shops also seemed pretty generic and boring (although a bit cheaper). Then I started noticing the “alternative” metal rings. Apparently, rings made of silverish titanium or tungsten are gaining in popularity. Titanium is harder, lighter and a lot cheaper than gold and tungsten is apparently unscratchably hard (but shatterable) and a bit cheaper than gold. Having a ring made out of a cool metal instead of sissy precious metals sounded pretty cool (although maybe just a touch of classy metals might be good). But again a lot of the rings seemed sort of boring and/or expensive. The tungsten rings especially seem to have few choices and none with any good patterns or carving (I guess because they’re so hard to cut).

Then I found Boone Rings. Apparently a guy down in Georgia used to make titanium bike parts but decided to take his knowledge of titanium (and CNC machine) and switch to making rings. From his website, you can pick from about a hundred ring styles and then pick what metals to include in the ring, what curvature and width to make the ring and what sort of polish to finish the ring with. The idea of designing my own ring sounded pretty cool and a few of the various polishes seemed to scratch my itch for a pattern on the ring. So many choices led to analysis paralysis but I finally ended up deciding on a peened ring with palladium (pretty cool sounding fancy silverish metal) and white gold inlays. I also ordered a smaller peened white gold inlay one for the fiancee since she’s always worried about messing up her slightly fancy engagement ring and we thought it’d be kind of cool to have matching rings. Amazingly they arrived at my house 4 days later.

They sure look good. I like how the inlays are sort of hidden in the peened pattern.

I wasn’t sure what the ring widths looked like compared to fingers and I couldn’t get google to give me any good image of various widths on hands so for any similar googlers here is what 3mm ring and a 7mm ring look on fingers.

So if you’re looking for good looking (and extremely fast) custom rings with great customer service, I recommend Boone Rings.

I like to monitor my comments by RSS. That keeps all the fun blog related stuff in the feed reader and leaves my email for important stuff. Unfortunately, this has resulted in some comments languishing unnoticed in the moderation queue since there doesn’t seem to be an easy way (that I found with a quick search) to get the comments awaiting moderation into a feed. So here is a very simple plugin to put comments awaiting moderation into an RSS feed.

Features

• RSS feed of comments awaiting moderation

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I just checked in here and found the last couple days of comments missing. Luckily, they were stored in gmail and I think I restored them all. But if you left a comment recently and it isn’t here now, it’s not that I don’t like you (just that my host apparently doesn’t like me).

A couple of the comments were pings and I wouldn’t have know how to get them back if I hadn’t messed around with pinging for my WP_PingPreserver plugin, so I figured it might be useful to put up a quick bit on how to recover lost pings. You’ll need to know a little bit about php to use it I guess but if you don’t know php and need to restore some pings let me know and I’ll make up a quick plugin. So here’s some simple (i.e. probably not perfectly to specifications) php code to restore lost pings on Wordpress:

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Welcome to the 104th edition of the Tangled Bank blog carnival (a biweekly showcase of good biology posts selected by the authors themselves). Rigorous calculations and archaelogical research have revealed that this is the Tangled Bank’s 4th birthday. In the birthday spirit, several people sent appropriately themed presents.

Chris gave some great gifts (with a few caveats); a protien to resist radiation (may cause cancer), an enzyme to live longer, slimmer and stronger (but anti-socially and so far only in mice), and a transcription factor that can reverse skin aging (also in mice).

Even more microbiological gifts came in. steppen wolf wrapped up a nice box of cancer-fighting microRNA while Nimravid added some surprisingly robust bacterial gene networks. Finally, Ed chipped in a giant symbiotic bacteria with 40,000 copies of DNA and some influenza virus (straight from the flu’s tropical Asian source) and I contributed some cancer fighting bacteria.

I’m running out of synonyms for “give” and ways to twist submissions into presents, so let’s leave the birthday party behind and see the rest of the submissions.

First some plant related posts. Ocean Rambles has a bunch of nice pictures of the endangered Garry Oak ecosystem (and spring flowers) on Vancouver Island. Also concerned for plants, rENNISance woman links to the new idea of plant dignity (and a very odd stem cell comment thread).

On cultivated plants, Jeremy warns that relatively little money is being spent on farming research, especially for developing countries that need it most, and urges farmers to stop being pushed around by an agricultural corporation that sounds like the RIAA of farming (plus health effects).

Continuing the topic of corporate machinations, Biotunes describes an article (and personal experience) about bias in medical publications. On the lighter side of medicine, you can play doctor in space with a cool little flash game from the BBC.

Moving on to scheming of the creationist sort, Greg theorizes why physics doesn’t have argumentum ad Nazium documentaries and points out that biology at the molecular scale is difficult to comprehend. Monado gives an example of this difficulty by comparing creationist drawings to a real electron micrograph of a flagellum. Late update: On the topic of pseudoscience, Podblack Cat asks “are women more superstitious?” (and throws in quite a literature review for the topic).

As an antidote to that intelligent design, Alvaro has details on making new neurons and a bunch of interviews of neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists.

Finally, 10,000 Birds (the only returning blog from Tangled Bank #1 [this post if you're curious]) describes coots (the bird, not the elderly).

I hope you enjoyed this Tangled Bank. The next edition is at the Beagle Project. You can email submissions to the hosts directly here or here or to the standard host@tangledbank.net before May 14th. Here’s to four years of biology blogging carnivals and hopefully many more.

It looks like Gravatar has added Identicons and MonsterIDs to their system. I’d been wondering when they would add something like this since it seems like such a simple and useful addition. I was thinking my plugins wouldn’t get much use now but it seems like they’ve gotten quite a few hits in the last few days. Not sure if that’s related to Gravatar or just random but I guess some people are still finding them useful.

So I guess I’ll keep maintaining the plugins since unfortunately Gravatar doesn’t really give you all the configuration possibilities of WP_Identicon or the hand drawn monsters of WP_MonsterID.

Speaking of hand drawn, Lemm, the kind illustrator that drew up the new monsters, has (re?)started No More Tangerines, a blog showing off some of her art. It’s pretty cool to see the progression her drawings go through.