jfiore | October 5, 2007The latest from the Washington Post is that Olympic track star Marion Jones has admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs.
Track star Marion Jones has acknowledged using steroids as she prepared for the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney and is scheduled to plead guilty today in New York to two counts of lying to federal agents about her drug use and an unrelated financial matter, according to a letter Jones sent to close family and friends.
This article makes for an interesting continuation to the recent entry regarding Geb's new marathon record. What kind of drugs could increase performance?…
bushwells | October 4, 2007Last Saturday (09/29) found me ambling around the DeCordova Sculpture Park in Lincoln MA. When I lived in Cambridge and indulged in hobbyjogging with a few other women, the sculpture park was a frequent pit (bathroom) stop during our long weekend runs on the Lincoln Conservation Trust trail system. In the summer, these runs were often followed by a cooling plunge into Walden Pond. Sorry about the brief nostalgic reverie, but hey, I'm old. It happens.
The DeCordova highlights contemporary sculpture with some pieces on permanent display and others as temporary installations. Sculptures…
jfiore | October 2, 2007Here in the upper Mohawk Valley of central NY, we are accustomed to an abundance of water. Heck, the city of Utica typically receives around 100 inches of snow per year and that's nothing compared to the Tug Hill Plateau just north. The summer of 2007 has been notable for a lack of rainfall, though, with some areas seeing only 10 percent of their normal rainfall during September. In fact, some areas are now on water restriction (no washing your car, watering the lawn, or stuff like that).
About 15 minutes north of town is the Hinckley Reservoir (known locally as Hinckley Lake) which was…
jfiore | September 30, 2007Well, running great Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopa broke Paul Tergat's four-year-old marathon record of 2:04:55 at Berlin this morning with an amazing 2:04:26. Details here and here.
This works out to an average pace of 4:44.8 per mile or 2:56.9 per km over 26.2 miles (42.2 km). Geb's sustained energy output is mind boggling compared to that of the average 34 year old (or just about any human runner for that matter).
bushwells | September 29, 2007One of my spawn attempted to take a photo of our household araneidid. He eschewed the flash because he didn't want to frighten the spider, so the photo is blurred. However, the colors and patterns of the charlotte can be discerned and are kinda striking.
bushwells | September 28, 2007Gene Expression's Razib used a catchy little title for the article in which he referenced DNA Unraveled by Colin Nickerson for the Boston Globe. How overarching the role of RNA will be for the regulation of gene expression throughout the genome is still up for grabs, but one can't deny that there's fascinating and uncharted territory to be explored.
Predictably, the folks at the Discovery Institute leapt all over Nickerson's article as further implication that complexity = Intelligent Design, and the old "scientists don't know everything therefore the theory of evolution is not true" canard…
bushwells | September 28, 2007Er, make that just pumpkin. This little critter was caught crimson fisted packing her saddle bags with pumpkin pollen recently. I wonder if they fly around looking for some nutmeg and cinnamon, too?
In any case, in spite of the numerous pumpkin blossoms that have been produced in the garden over the past couple of months, not a single pumpkin has emerged. Of course, this particular pumpkin patch was a bit of a lark, coming from the seeds of last year's jack-o-lantern. My guess is that this particular variety isn't particularly fertile, in spite of the bee's knees.
Note: This was originally…
jfiore | September 27, 2007This week's Electronic Engineering Times features a short article on the upcoming USB 3.0 spec. The main highlight is a target transfer rate of 4 Gigabits/second (10 times the current rate) providing usable data at 300 Megabytes/second. This rate would challenge IEEE 1394 (AKA FireWire). USB 3.0 is being referred to as "Super Speed USB" and will be "hardware agnostic" according to the article, meaning it could be implemented over copper or optical cabling.
This third variant on the USB theme will adopt a new physical layer, splitting data and acknowledge signals onto separate paths. On the…
bushwells | September 27, 2007I mentioned in my previous entry the sense of transcendence I feel when I observe the green light passing through a tree's leaves. My neighborhood woods on Princeton Ridge is full of tall trees, including beeches which are my favorite arboreal species. Part of that sense of wonder stems (har) from my knowledge of the inter-relatedness of the tree and myself, my lack of chlorophyll notwithstanding.
John Stiller of East Carolina University contends that we humans are more closely akin to plants than we are to fungi. The following article from ABC Science (that's the Australian Broadcasting…
bushwells | September 27, 2007Richard Dawkin's Unweaving the Rainbow: Science Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder is on my active reading docket. The book has been around for a while (published in 1998), but it's proving to be a most enjoyable discovery as I continue to read it. So far, I concur with complete reviews' take on the book. It is a marvelous paean to the majesty and artistry of science. Dawkins' sense of wonder very much resonates with my own - that feeling of transcendence when I look at light shining through green leaves or the transformations of calculations that are revealed as a colorful abstract…
bushwells | September 25, 2007I previously confessed that I subscribe to that glossy hardcopy glut of advertising called Vanity Fair. Invariably, the mag contains photo spreads of ripple-ab'ed dudes hawking various men's cologne. All this to mask delicious or stinky or neutral 5alpha-androst-16-en-3-one (androstenone); based on one's genetic variation in the olfactory receptor that binds this steroid, it will smell sweet or icky or not at all. Razib at Gene Expression already covered the recent article in Nature - please see a world of sensory difference.
The Nature article addressed genetic polymorphisms of the…
bushwells | September 24, 2007Found scuttling around in my docbushwell at gmail inbox:
Needless to say, I was slightly disturbed when greeted with those images. My learned correspondent wrote the accompanying letter:
Dr. Bushwell:
My research has confirmed existence of several genera of the wolf spider Pardosa (Araneae, Lycosidae), such as the rabid wolf spider Rabidosa (Araneae, Lycosidae) and the oriental wolf spider Passiena (Lycosidae, Pardosinae). However, I have found no evidence of the FUCKING WOLF SPIDER! genus documented in Science Blogs. Ahem. Isn't science supposed to be about facts?
Nevertheless,…
bushwells | September 21, 2007I didn't shuffle through the digital shoe box of photos for flower porn today, so I'm offering something else.
A few posts back, LOLTHULHU made an appearance. It's a parody of LOLCATS. With regard to the latter and the former, here's what the blog formerly known as the Table of Malcontents (now Ectomo) had to say:
Is there anything more loathsome, more indicative of the rife idiot stupidity of the Internet than the LOLCats meme? The endless repetition of the exact same joke (photograph of surprised cat + implausible misspelling) done over and over and over again. Have you ever opened…
bushwells | September 20, 2007Speaking as a mother who breastfed both of my kids and was a card-carrying member of LaLeche League (an uneasy relationship since I worked outside the home but valuable all the same for many other reasons), I figured I'd weigh in on this, but not from the Facebook angle. There are plenty of other offerings among my SciBlings on the Facebook debacle, and I am sure you can find them via the main page so I am not linking them here. I can't say I am surprised at FB's reactionary response to the photos of the mother in question. Breastfeeding is ridiculously sexualized in the US.
So here I…
bushwells | September 20, 2007When I find myself in times of trouble
Ben and Jerry's comes to me
Snarfing Chunky Monkey so sweetly, so sweetly.
When stressed, some folks barely eat and consequently lose weight. Others, including myself, reach for high-fat-high-sugar (HFS) foods in an attempt to ameliorate the angst. Although the connection between stress and overeating is not fully understood, the evidence until recently focused on centrally acting (brain & spinal cord) mechanisms, e.g., hypothalamic control of food consumption and metabolism.
However, Lydia Kuo et al. (1) reported recently in Nature Medicine that…
bushwells | September 19, 2007Steinn (Dynamics of Cats) reports that Mars Invades Peru.
This must be smack-dab in the middle of physical-type scientists' radar screen since my Rocket Scientist(tm) friend sent a similar blurb from Yahoo News.
I expect Scully and Mulder have been called in to investigate. Rocket Scientist(tm) mysteriously alluded to the Colour Out of Space in his e-mail, signing off with the baffling words:
Ph-nglui mglw'nath Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
The Thing From Beyond the Stars is either a meteorite that released volatiles or a man-made object containing similar gaseous substances as Steinn…
bushwells | September 19, 2007Once again, my brothers and sisters, it is that grazhny Talk Like a Pirate Day. What hound-and-horny chepooka is this, I ask you? That PZ chelloveck and other SciBling lewdies Corpus Callosum, Grrl Scientist, and Dr. Free-Ride guff away when they slooshy Pirate. I say "Yarbles!" to that. There should be a "Govoreet Like a Droog Day." I think that would be real horrorshow.
Nadsat Dictionary
bushwells | September 19, 2007Via Technovelgy - Where Science Meets Fiction, here's an article on a wild display surface upon which small panels move with precision and "ripple," creating strange, almost biologically protoplasmic motion:
HypoSurface Walls Are Full of Life.
Bill Christensen, the author of the Technovelgy article on HypoSurface notes that this technology is a close approximation of science fiction writer J.G. Ballard's warped domiciles:
HypoSurface is a pretty good implementation of the plastex walls in J.G. Ballard's psychotropic houses from his 1960's Vermillion Sands stories:
It was a beautiful room all…
jfiore | September 17, 2007It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was.. Oops. Sorry, already been done. Start again.
The other day I brought up some thoughts concerning the high cost of college textbooks. In the arena of science and engineering there are issues with the fairly narrow audience and resultant low volume, and some difficulties with the used book market. There is, of course, the issue of the publishers. I am going to risk having my snout slapped by biting the hand that feeds me, but hey, I noticed something the other day that has my head spinning anyway.
I teach an introductory course in…
jfiore | September 17, 2007The latest Embedded Systems Design features an overview of their annual comprehensive programmer's survey. ESD (an unfortunate acronym for a hardware journal) has offered the same survey for the past few years to engineers and programmers in both the USA and Europe, seeking info on their current and anticipated needs, projects, tools, and the like (N>1000 for the past three surveys). There are many useful tidbits in here but one in particular caught my eye, and that's the trend in development languages used.
Embedded programming is considerably different from the more typical desktop…