loom
Posts by this author
October 16, 2007
If you live anywhere near my home town of Guilford, Connecticut, I'd be delighted if you could join me Thursday at 7:30 at the Guilford Free Library for a talk, "Will Global Warming Redraw the Map of Life?" (flyer pdf) I'll be discussing extinction projections, assisted migration, and more.
October 11, 2007
It is an approximation of the locus of connectedness for the Julia sets of the family of functions f(z) = z^2 + lambda/(z^2) (rotated by pi/2). This is analogous to the standard Mandelbrot set (which applies to the family f(z) = z^2 + c), but holds additional fascination because for lambda values…
October 11, 2007
We do a pretty good job at appreciating the visible intricacies of nature: the antennae and legs and claws of a lobster, the geometrical order of the spots on a butterfly's wings. But a lot of nature's intricacies are hidden away inside single-celled creatures, such as the baker's yeast that makes…
October 10, 2007
Science writer Jessica Snyder Sachs has an interesting op-ed in today's New York Times, explaining why you should get your flu shot and skip the chicken pox parties. It's a taste of the material in her excellent new book, Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World (Full…
October 10, 2007
Chris Sloan, a senior editor at National Geographic Magazine, points me to a cluster of new blogs he and others at NG have just launched. Sloan's own blog includes a refreshingly frank discussion of the forged-fossil controversy NG was involved in a few years ago.
Science Blogs meanwhile continued…
October 8, 2007
Last week I appeared on bloggingheads.tv, talking about life in all its weirdness with science writer John Horgan. The folks at bloggingheads.tv wondered if I'd come back, perhaps bringing along a scientist to talk to. I said, Of course. The scientist I've invited along is Craig Venter.
In the…
October 5, 2007
In January I'll be running a workshop for science graduate students at Yale about how to write about science for non-scientists. It's going to be the second time around for me; last year's trial run was a wonderful experience, which confirmed to me that scientists-in-training these days want very…
October 4, 2007
"Just wanted to jump on the bandwagon with my own tribute to my scientific style. This is a tattoo of the word for Body, Spirit, Person, People, and Life in Owens Valley Paiute, written in International Phonetic Alphabet. I am a Linguist that specializes in Endangered languages and thought I…
October 3, 2007
I just installed a new banner from Carl Buell up top. Sort of 2001 meets parasitoid wasps. It's making the rest of the blog act funny for reasons I cannot divine, so the tech gods have been appealed to.
October 3, 2007
Last week I groused about having trouble with MySpace, which led others to leave some nasty comments of their own. In the interest of full disclosure, I should now report that I figured out the problem: I was not entering my password correctly. I apologize to the folks at MySpace for blaming them…
October 1, 2007
Good news--I've just won the National Academies 2007 Communication Award. Each year the prize is given out jointly by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Institute of Engineering, the National Research Council, and the Institute of Medicine in three categories. The category I entered was…
September 29, 2007
My talk with John Horgan on bloggingheads.tv is up. I'm sure the fact that the label "weird life" appears directly over my head was an accident (right, John?). Anyway, we had a good talk about parasites, aliens, and how to handle hype in science. I may have made some mistakes--feel free to fact-…
September 27, 2007
"My tattoo is from an Irving Geis illustration of DNA. I was attracted to his attention to the molecular detail while also drawing in a representational spiral that doesn't ignore the basic beauty of the double helix. This particular sequence (I've BLASTED) is too short to be specific to only one…
September 27, 2007
I'm going to be appearing this weekend on the strangely addictive show bloggingheads.tv. If you're not familiar with it, it's a show composed of two talking heads staring out of your screen at you, holding forth for an hour on whatever topic they choose (politics, television, science...). Actually…
September 27, 2007
It is a day to write about Giardia, and I am happy to say that I cannot do so from firsthand experience. Friends of mine have suffered infections of Giardia in their gut, but they haven't been terribly forthcoming about the details. It's not fun, they assure me, and it can last for months.…
September 26, 2007
A while back I mentioned I've gotten a Facebook page and a Myspace page. They've been fun to toy around with, and I wouldn't be surprised if they're a harbinger of how we will all trawl for online information in the future. But to those who are asking to be friends at Myspace, leaving messages for…
September 21, 2007
It's a brave new world for us book authors. Today's case in point: PZ Myers assigned some of his students to ready my book Soul Made Flesh, which chronicles how humanity figured out what the brain is for. Some of his students have bravely agreed to post their reports on the book on Myers's blog…
September 20, 2007
Mark sent this picture in, with this explanation:
I don't quite have a science tattoo, but I have a math tattoo. That's close enough, right?
Now, for the explanation. This is a formula called the Y Combinator. It is a fixed-point combinator in the lambda calculus and was discovered by Haskell…
September 19, 2007
The Scientist recently asked me to name the three best life-science blogs. I just sent them three ones I enjoy and read a lot--I find this sort of ranking to be interesting but fundamentally artificial. (I'd recommend all of the blogs on my blogroll on the left of your screen.)
I didn't realize…
September 17, 2007
My first book, At the Water's Edge, was graced by illustrations by the marvelous Carl Buell. He's got a lot of irons in the fire these days, including Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, which publishes this month. Paleontologist Donald Prothero is the author, and it's packed with…
September 17, 2007
I just took a survey about blogs about science, and you should too. Here's the description:
This survey attempts to access the opinions of bloggers, blog-readers, and non-blog folk in regards to the impact of blogs on the outside world. The authors of the survey are completing an academic…
September 16, 2007
You may be familiar with Pulse of the Planet as a radio show about nature, but Jim Metzner, its producer, just let me know that it now sports a pretty extensive web site, including a selection of diaries from scientists studying everything from lightning to sea turtles. Check it out.
September 13, 2007
"Attached is a photo of a tattoo I got immediately after turning in the final paperwork a little over two weeks ago for the completion of my Ph.D. in biological anthropology. It's the first evolutionary tree that Darwin sketched in his 1837 Notebook B on the transmutation of species." --Julienne…
September 10, 2007
The bloggers here at Scienceblogs all have other professional lives--professors, doctors, software engineers, and so on. My own line of work as a science writer can make blogging a bit awkward every now and then. Take, for instance, an article I wrote for tomorrow's New York Times about moray eels…
September 10, 2007
What do human spit, baker's yeast, and fly sex have in common? Together, they illustrate a way in which new kinds of genes evolve.
Scientists published a paper in Nature Genetics Sunday in which they studied an enzyme called amylase that's produced in saliva and breaks down starch. Human amylase…
September 8, 2007
Science Made Cool writes from Tokyo, describing the world's only parasite museum. Someday I'll get there...
Sadly, the keychain with the sushi worm embedded inside is not for sale online...
Update: Mark asks whether there's an American museum in Maryland. It's a collection, not a museum. I write…
September 7, 2007
Your scientific body art just keeps getting more attention. Can I just say that, as a science writer, I find it strange to get calls from other reporters wanting to interview me about other people's tattoos? Who put that in my job description? Anyway, here are a few links--
Wired: The Coolest…
September 6, 2007
I want to give readers of the Loom a heads up about book that I've edited that's coming out in November. The author is a very interesting writer named Charles Darwin.
In 1871 Charles Darwin published pretty much his first and last word about human evolution: The Descent of Man. It's a marvelous,…
September 6, 2007
At about a pound and a half, Mahakala omnogovae was certainly a cute dinosaur. But cuteness is not why paleontologists traveled to the remote ends of Mongolia to find it. It's part of a much bigger story.
Paleontologists have known for a while now that birds evolved from one group of dinosaurs…
September 6, 2007
I think he may be under the influence.
If not, thanks.
Okay--narcissism stops...now.