June 17, 2008
I know this call was kinda last minute, but I hope some of you have called in. And if you did, you may have heard yourself on the radio - the audio clips of your reviews are now uploaded here. Even if you didn't, keep an eye on the site and perhaps one week the question will get you all fired up…
June 17, 2008
First Successful Reverse Vasectomy On Endangered Species Performed At The National Zoo:
Veterinarians at the Smithsonian's National Zoo performed the first successful reverse vasectomy on a Przewalski's horse (E. ferus przewalskii; E. caballus przewalskii--classification debated), pronounced zshah-…
June 17, 2008
Follow up on this story (re-check the links within for background):
Jeff Jarvis: AP, hole, dig
Patrick Nielsen Hayden: The Associated Press wants to charge you $12.50 to quote five words from them
Cory Doctorow: Associated Press expects you to pay to license 5-word quotations (and reserves the…
June 17, 2008
There are 61 cool new papers in PLoS ONE this week - take a look at these for starters:
Risk and Ethical Concerns of Hunting Male Elephant: Behavioural and Physiological Assays of the Remaining Elephants:
Hunting of male African elephants may pose ethical and risk concerns, particularly given their…
June 17, 2008
Cabinet of Curiosities #8 is up on Walking the Berkshires
Grand Rounds Vol. 4 No. 39 are up on Marianas Eye Blog
Carnival of the Green #125 is up on The Conservation Report
The Seventy First Philosophers' Karneval is up on The Ends of Thought
The 129th Carnival of Homeschooling is up on Apollos…
June 17, 2008
My Chemical Journey
Discount thoughts
Optical Futures
Brain Blogger
Chance and Necessity
SciLink Blog
June 16, 2008
The beauty of "spacing" children many years apart lies in the fact that parents have time to learn the mistakes that were made with the older ones - which permits them to make exactly the opposite mistakes with the younger ones.
- Sydney J. Harris
June 16, 2008
Humor Shown To Be Fundamental To Our Success As A Species:
First universal theory of humour answers how and why we find things funny. Published June 12, The Pattern Recognition Theory of Humour by Alastair Clarke answers the centuries old question of what is humour. Clarke explains how and why we…
June 16, 2008
A dozen or so years ago, I drove my Biochemistry prof to tears with questions - she had 200 people in front of her and she tried hard to make Biochem interesting enough not to get us all bored to tears, and she was pretty good at that, as much as it is possible not to make people bored to tears…
June 16, 2008
A number of my SciBlings (and their commenters) try to explain:
Janet
Chad
Martin
PhysioProf
DrugMonkey
Brian Switek
Alice
Jeremy Bruno
Grrrrrl
June 16, 2008
In the wake of great success of the Classic Science Papers Challenge, gg of Skulls in the Stars and I have decided to turn this into a regular monthly blog carnival.
Thus, gg has set up a carnival homepage and issued the call for posts and hosts.
You can read more about the carnival - named "The…
June 15, 2008
It is the neglect of timely repair that makes rebuilding necessary.
- Richard Whately
June 15, 2008
Mystery of Mysteries
SAGACITY HARBOR
Psychescientia
Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities
A Man With A Ph.D.
June 15, 2008
It's always interesting to hear what Eszter has to say about academics and blogging. She is right that the environment has changed and that more and more people know what blogs are and appreciate them (not everyone, though, but those are not academics, really).
She is also right that the term "…
June 15, 2008
If I knew how to write well, I would have written something like this.
June 15, 2008
I briefly noted this study yesterday, but now W. D. Craft analyzes it in great detail:
I am pessimistic that the authors' more careful conclusions and recommendations will be noticed. Instead I fear we're in for more naive calls for "abstinence education" and coerced virginity pledges.
June 15, 2008
Also from Miriam, not the famous old (and beloved by my kids) rote memorization of elements - but you will never forget these few basic facts about a few major elements, because it is presented in a viscerally fun way:
June 15, 2008
Miriam points to this set of pictures of the development of the chicken embryo. As I have written before, I did have to learn how to precisely stage the chick embryos, both the older stages and the early stages, in order to manipulate them at exactly the right time. Cool pics.
June 14, 2008
Practical people would be more practical if they would take a little more time for dreaming.
- J. P. McEvoy
June 14, 2008
Last night, my daughter and I went to hear the NC Symphony at the Green here in Southern Village. The entire square was packed (a couple of thousand people?). It was very enjoyable and an interesting choice of pieces. What was more interesting, and I am not sure I liked it, is the chosen ORDER…
June 14, 2008
You have to act quickly, though:
We've been airing audio comments on our new national public radio
show, The Takeaway (http://www.thetakeaway.org), for the past couple
of weeks. On Monday, we want to highlight your scientificky thoughts
on "THE INCREDIBLE HULK" and "THE HAPPENING".
There's a lot of…
June 14, 2008
Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome Linked To Irregular Menstrual Cycles, Premenstrual Symptoms In Women:
Women with delayed sleep phase syndrome are more likely to report irregular menstrual cycles and premenstrual symptoms, according to a research abstract that will be presented on June 10 at SLEEP 2008…
June 14, 2008
Obligatory Reading of the Day: The crazies and Obama:
If there is a President Obama come next Jan. 20, normal folks better brace for what the right-wing crazies have in mind. Because it's becoming clear that they are winding themselves up now for a fresh spate of violence if Obama wins.
You can…
June 14, 2008
Anne-Marie found this article:
London's Natural History Museum is to decorate the ceiling of one of its major rooms with a permanent art installation, inspired by evolutionary theory, in honour of Charles Darwin's bicentennial. The 10 shortlisted entrants have now been announced and their ideas are…
June 14, 2008
Associated Press is going to go extinct, due to being incorrigibly idiotic. In the era of blogs, Creative Commons licences, Open Source, Open Access... they are working actively at stopping traffic to their site!!! How much more stupid can they be? And the way they try to bully everyone around…
June 13, 2008
Humor is, I think, the subtlest and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers.
- Leo C. Rosten
June 13, 2008
Mysterious Mountain Dinosaur May Be New Species:
A partial dinosaur skeleton unearthed in 1971 from a remote British Columbia site is the first ever found in Canadian mountains and may represent a new species, according to a recent examination by a University of Alberta researcher.
Memory Loss…
June 13, 2008
Carnival of Space #58 is up on Universe Today
Friday Ark #195 is up on Modulator
June 12, 2008
The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.
- Dante Alighieri
June 12, 2008
The article is here, but it is too long for me and my attention span to read through. I got a snippet, though:
But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but…
