catdynamics | August 8, 2006PP brings up the infamous Katz letter, and Chad furthers the discussion.
It is topical, although the source is quite dated. Check out the discussion at Chad's place, I am too jaded to pontificate right now.
PS: Is anyone really offering $35k for postdocs still?
catdynamics | August 8, 2006Dr Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, has a book out: "The Language of God". It is about his conversion to evangelical christianity and he tries to lay out a case for religion in no conflict with science, while also tackling creationists and religions fundamentalists.
Haven't read the book, but am feeling less inclined to after Collins gives (yet another) interview in Salon.
Must say, it sounds like a good pitch for a Templeton Prize though. best of luck with that.
PZ has already dissected the interview, but since Collins is a physicist I feel an urge to comment also...…
catdynamics | August 7, 2006XKCD - comics
They're funny, they're science, and everyone is blogging them.
For a good reason. Pile in, and link.
catdynamics | August 7, 2006From NASAwatch:
"How do we motivate students to study astrobiology if this science is not favored in the budget?" asked a teacher. "If they want to work for government money, they must look at what the government wants - not what they think it should want. If they want to work with something the government doesn't want, they'll have to find other money to fund it," Griffin stated."
Fair enough.
But, how do you motivate students to study astrobiology, or any particular subfield, if the government changes its mind about what it wants on a shorter time scale than it takes to graduate students,…
catdynamics | August 4, 2006WaPo's Froomkin is scary today.
Short version: White House aides have regular study groups, on Biblical Revelations, the Imminence of the Apocalypse, "Left Behind" trash literature, and Intelligent Design.
Read it all the way through...
I suppose this makes the root of some of the policies coming out more comprehensible, if less rational.
Shall we say that this does not seem to be a terribly productive way for the White House staff to be spending their time. Maybe this is their "quiet period"?
catdynamics | August 4, 2006Friday, and I'm late.
Oh mighty iPod, we gots to know, will OJ 287 go into outburst this autumn as predicted by one of the main binary black hole models?
Whoosh goes the randomizer.
Whoosh.
The Covering: We Wish You a Merry Christmas - Cranberry Singers
The Crossing: Il Menuetto and Trio - Mozart
The Crown: The Carnival of the Animals
The Root: The Prophet (Allah Leka Netchi ) - Alpha Blondy
The Past: For You - Tracy Chapman
The Future: Straight to Hell (Live) - Clash
The Questioner: Accident Waiting to Happen (Live: Bootleg)- Billy Bragg
The House: The Only Mistake - Joy Division
The…
catdynamics | August 4, 2006Doc Charles examines the joy of blueberries,
and all the wonderful reasons why we should enjoy them.
It has been a good year here for blueberries, warm and sunny with just enough rain, and not too heavy mostly. The strawberries and cherries were beat up, but the raspberries seem to be doing ok, especially the late fruiting varieties. We also had a fabulous crop of wild vine berries and black raspberries. We had to skip on the formers, since we had some painting (and stripping/sanding) done right by the bushes.
Courtesy "Everybody Eats": MH Lipton
With the munchkins it is hard to do much…
catdynamics | August 3, 2006Tara has shown me the error of my ways.
The correct answer is Real Genius.
Closely followed by The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.
I should also give a nod to The Rocky Horror Picture Show for their representation of the lives of scientists, although the actual science was somewhat sketchy.
All of course were Good Movies.
catdynamics | August 3, 2006Hurra Torpedo Rock
seen on Making Light - Teresa is a lucky woman.
PS in case you are wondering about the title Matt explains
catdynamics | August 2, 2006What movie do you think does something admirable (though not necessarily accurate) regarding science? Bonus points for answering whether the chosen movie is any good generally....
Er, Bladerunner?
Forbidden Planet - if only for subversively introducing Shakespeare to teenage boys.
Deep Impact had its moments, more bad than good, but it came out so well in comparison with Armageddon...
Contact had some redeeming features. So did 2001 Space Odyssey (and not just the soundtrack, overrated!)
The Day the Earth Stood Still? Fat Man and Little Boy?
I've heard good things about Gattaca. The first…
catdynamics | August 2, 2006Somewhere out there, in some splendid ivory tower, a Professor of Theoretical Law is working on a new Grand Theory of the Unified Executive, which he hopes will overturn the increasingly obsolete Standard Model of three independent sources of Law, Justice and Executive Power (who ordered those anyway?).
This will simplify Law and Order tremendously, and make actual enacting and implementation of law much simpler, showing finally the underlying Unity of All Law.
To be this man is what all pre-law and law students aspire to. It is the career track that essentially all law schools aim their…
catdynamics | August 2, 2006Tangled Bank #59 is up at Science and Reason
Charles also proposes a Unilateral Declaration of Independence - that physical science blogs have their own blog carnival. Tangled Bank is heavy on bio, it is true.
The two could of course co-exist peacefully, but only if the new carnival comes up with a genuinely snazzy name. Also since there's more of them, I'd vote for a monthly phys sci blog carnival, rather than biweekly.
catdynamics | August 1, 2006
RS Ophiuchi is a famous recurrent nova.
Recently it had an outburst, brightening from magnitude 11 (hundred times fainter than faintest star visible to the naked eye) to fifth magnitude - faint but visible to the naked eye.
Recent analysis of the outburst (and here) suggest that RS Ophi is high mass and the mass grows with each outburst. If so, it will soon explode as a supernova.
Novae have been known for centuries. They are a "new stars", appearing in the sky where no star was before. We now know that they are sudden brightening of a faint pre-existing star. Brightness increase is…
catdynamics | August 1, 2006 So, I sorta dropped my beloved 12" a few weeks ago, and ignoring the cosmetic dents, a couple of the interfaces are not quite their helpful normal selves, and I infer imminent SuperDrive failure. Plus there's the ominous light rattle sound...
So... the MacBookPro: worth getting Real Soon Now, or should I wait as long as I can until they expand the range and increase options?
While I'm at it: any thoughts on the new Mac desktops? Is it worth scrounging and hoarding old G5s for posterity, or go with the flow? Or go back to linuxboxes?
catdynamics | July 31, 2006i humped your hummer - video blogs
seen on Boing Boing strangely enough
this offsets the incredibly obnoxious tofu hummer ad, almost
catdynamics | July 31, 2006The issue of what to do with surplus frozen embryos has had high profile recently
As has a recent french study on nature vs nurture in IQ development, in particular both the elasticity of IQ (is it sensitive to nurture early on but "rebounds" towards the genetic mean as you age?) and the role of the opportunities for intellectual stimulation to develop IQ potential (as opposed to diet or environmental insults etc).
So... IF the snowflake baby adoption ever took off big time - enough for a serious sample to be studied.
And, IF, someone simultaneously funded a long time study of the development…
catdynamics | July 31, 2006Good catch by Cocktail Party Physics...
Prof Blair Hedges applies genetic error clock techniques to date manuscripts and books!
Ok, so I don't read PSU Press Releases either...
"The discovery that the wood blocks and metal plates used for printmaking deteriorate at a clock-like rate means that we can now use the prints as a "print clock" for determining the date a work was printed," says Blair Hedges, professor of biology at Penn State and author of the paper describing the research, which will be published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical…
catdynamics | July 31, 2006About ten years ago I heard Fred Hoyle give a talk where he argues that "junk" DNA segments in fact must code for something else - his particular conjecture was that they coded for structural instructions (the example he used was the shape of leaves).
It was intriguing, there is a lot of junk DNA in some genomes, but on the other hand we understand how it comes about as a result of transcription errors and mutations - genes are truncated or erroneously partly duplicated, or skipped over, leaving randomly mutating junk which is both added to and deleted under weak secondary selection.
Further…
catdynamics | July 31, 2006Avida is Caltech's Digital Life Laboratory "auto-adaptive genetic system".
I first came across it when I heard one of the DLab researchers (Adami, I think) give talk at Astrobio'04.
Thought it was neat. And filed under "check it out sometime".
The recent discussion on evolution and synthetic life made me think of it again, so I visited the DLab website, and behold, there is an Avida executable for the Mac.
5 minutes later I am command of my own 100x100 world, running a 10,000 generation mutation and adaption experiment - few thousand generations in I see 12 surviving lineages, and it looks…