jlynch
Posts by this author
May 6, 2006
What happens when about 80 people wearing blue shirts and khakis enter a Best Buy store in New York? Confusion.
May 5, 2006
"All foreign wars, I do proclaim, live on blood and a mother's pain."
Mrs McGrath - an old Irish song, recently covered by Springsteen.
May 5, 2006
As Janet and RPM have noted, the mothership has initiated an "Ask A ScienceBlogger" feature - a weekly question that us SBers will (briefly) tackle. This week the question is "if you could cause one invention from the last hundred years never to have been made at all, which would it be, and why?"…
May 5, 2006
Steven Colbert claims the current administration is "soaring, not sinking. They are re-arranging the deck chairs - on the Hindenburg". Today, Porter Goss resigned as Director of the CIA. And today, in 1937, the Hindenburg was destroyed in Lakehurst, New Jersey. Apt.
May 5, 2006
Caught "Jazz at Lincoln Center Presents: Music of Miles Davis" last night at the Mesa Center for the Performing Arts. Great show, with Eddie Henderson (trumpet/leader), Jimmy Cobb (drums), Wayne Escoffery (tenor saxophone), Dave Kikoski (piano), Edward Howard (bass), and Steve Wilson (alto sax),…
May 3, 2006
No Se Nada highlights (and RPM picks it up) a picture of a statue of Louis Agassiz head-first in the ground after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. All very well. The piece goes on to say:
In response, David Starr Jordon [sic] - Stanford first president, a renowned scientist in his own right, and…
May 3, 2006
This little beauty is Vespa mandarinia, up to two inches long with a three inch wingspan, and a quarter inch stinger. The latter injects venom so strong that it can dissolve human tissue, but they normally feed on honeybees; "Just one of these hornets can kill 40 European honeybees a minute; a…
May 1, 2006
Coturnix says:
Teaching Biology without Evolution...
...is like teaching English without verbs. What is left are nouns and adjectives. DNA, enzyme, long bone, ductus arteriosus, pretty bird. Rote memorization. The reason why my (adult education) students are afraid of and bored with science to…
May 1, 2006
PZ says:
I'm willing to get along with and even support the religious, as long as they don't threaten to suborn secular institutions to privilege religious belief.
And I agree.
May 1, 2006
As of today, 2,401 US soldiers dead; over 2,150 since "major combat operations" were declared to be finished.
Over 34,000 civilian deaths.
Glad it's working out so well for everyone.
Edit: I'll note that Scott McClellan, when asked today whether the mission has been accomplished, replied "We are…
May 1, 2006
A new study of side-blotched lizards [Uta stansburiana] in California has revealed the genetic underpinnings of altruistic behavior in this common lizard species, providing new insights into the long-standing puzzle of how cooperation and altruism can evolve. The study, led by researchers at the…
May 1, 2006
This more or less encapsulates everything that is wrong with this country. Not only the sheer mind-numbing vapidity of the family, but the fact that this is seen as "news". Argh!
April 30, 2006
Seems that Stephen Colbert made things a little uncomfortable for Shrub at the White House Correspondent Dinner on Saturday night. He and Laura Bush were unsmiling at the end of Colbert's wonderful takedown. You can read more here, there is a transcript here, and a torrent of the video here.
As…
April 29, 2006
One last poem for National Poetry Month. I had a number to possible poems that I was considering, but in the end settled with Donagh MacDonagh's "Dublin Made Me" - I have a love-hate relationship with Dublin in that I loved what it was when I was growing up there and hate what it has become (a…
April 29, 2006
As usual, GrrlScientist started it ...
Your Theme Song is Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd
"There is no pain, you are receding.
A distant ship's smoke on the horizon.
You are only coming through in waves."
You haven't been feeling a lot lately, and you think that's a good thing.
The comfortable…
April 28, 2006
I'm procrastinating a little as, like Janet, I have a stack of grading staring at me. The good news is that two of my three classes this semester are over, the bad is that there is still grading to be done, along with end of semester administrivia. Still, two weeks should see it all over and me…
April 27, 2006
From Duke University:
Paleontologists at the Duke Lemur Center have assembled a new picture of a 35-million-year-old fossil mammal -- and they even have added a hint of sound.
By painstakingly measuring hundreds of specimens of a fossil mammal called Thyrohyrax, recovered from the famous fossil…
April 26, 2006
Mothers are important ... especially if you are a spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta). From the NSF:
Scientists have discovered that a dominant hyena puts her cubs on the road to success before they are born by passing on high levels of certain hormones that make her budding young leaders more…
April 26, 2006
Since GrrlScientist raised the stake by giving a poem by the zoologist Arthur O'Shaughnessy, here's one by marine biologist Walter Garstang (1868-1949) called "Ballad of the Veliger or how the Gastropod got its Twist" from 1928.
The Veliger's a lively tar, the liveliest afloat,
A whirling wheel on…
April 26, 2006
Ann Coulter's new book Godless: The Church of Liberalism will apparently deal (in part) with evolution:
Then, of course, there's the liberal creation myth: Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
For liberals, evolution is the touchstone that separates the enlightened from the benighted. But Coulter…
April 24, 2006
riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
So begins James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, a work that makes Ulysses read like Dr Seuss. I just love that phrase, "from swerve of shore to bend of bay…
April 24, 2006
Another poem for National Poetry Month, this time by W.H. Auden (my second favorite after Yeats). In this case, it's "Epitaph on a Tyrant" from 1939.
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And…
April 24, 2006
Haven't had time to read this yet as my print copy only arrived yesterday, but there's a review of Sean Carroll's From DNA to Diversity and Endless Forms Most Beautiful along with Kirschner & Gerhart's The Plausibility of Life in this week's New York Review of Books. For those of you who don't…
April 24, 2006
About a week ago, I asked readers to design a banner for the blog. Thanks to everyone who submitted an entry ... it was (trust me) a difficult choice. As you can probably see, we have a winner! The banner was designed by Dora Ng, an ex-student of mine who is a talented graphic designer, and…
April 23, 2006
In February, I introduced a Sun Catfish (Horabagrus brachysoma) into my tank. Since then, he's probably grown about three-quarters of an inch in length. The species is a member of the the catfish family Bagridae, a widely distributed and speciose (some 30 genera, 210 species) taxon. Bagrids have…
April 23, 2006
From the Associated Press:
Scientists have discovered a mutant gene that triggers the body to form a second, renegade skeleton, solving the mystery of a rare disease called FOP that imprisons children in bone for life.
The finding, reported Sunday, may one day lead to development of a drug, not…
April 23, 2006
Which cell organelle are you?
The ER
You scored 50 Industriousness, 51 Centrality, and 15 Causticity!
You're the Endoplasmic reticulum! The ER modifies proteins, makes macromolecules, and transfers substances throughout the cell. It has its own membrane, and translation of mRNA happens within…
April 22, 2006
The philosopher and chemist Michael Polanyi came up in a recent conversation I had with some colleagues, so I though I'd repost the following from last December ...
In 1999, Dembski established the Michael Polanyi Center - an ID institute - at Baylor University. As this article notes, Dembski…
April 21, 2006
One of the highlights of the Dover trial was the takedown of Michael Behe that occurred on Day 12, where Behe testified that "the scientific literature has no detailed testable answers on how the immune system could have arisen by random mutation and natural selection" only to be shown such…