clock | June 17, 2008I 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 and you will do it and become instantly famous!
clock | June 17, 2008First 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-VAL-skeez. Przewalksi's horses are a horse species native to China and Mongolia that was declared extinct in the wild in 1970.
Lizards Pull A Wheelie:
Why bother running on hind legs when the four you've been given work perfectly well? This is the question that puzzles Christofer Clemente. For birds…
clock | June 17, 2008Follow 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 right to terminate your license)
Afarensis: AP to Bloggers: You Must Pay or Our Narcs Will Get You!
Patrick Nielsen Hayden: The Associated Press: worse than merely foolish
Oh, oh. Associated Press is sooooooo dead on arrival. Nice to have known you have existed, cavemen!
clock | June 17, 2008There 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 status as a charismatic species of high touristic value, yet which are capable of both killing people and damaging infrastructure. We quantified the effect of hunts of male elephants on (1) risk of attack or damage (11 hunts), and (2) behavioural (movement dynamics) and physiological (stress…
clock | June 17, 2008Cabinet 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 Academy
clock | June 17, 2008My Chemical Journey
Discount thoughts
Optical Futures
Brain Blogger
Chance and Necessity
SciLink Blog
clock | June 16, 2008The 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
clock | June 16, 2008Humor 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 find things funny and identifies the reason humour is common to all human societies, its fundamental role in the evolution of homo sapiens and its continuing importance in the cognitive development of infants.
Male Bird At Smithsonian's National Zoo Has Special Reason To Celebrate Father's Day:
How…
clock | June 16, 2008A 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 with Biochem. But my questions exasperated her mainly because she could not answer them, because, as I learned later, the field of biochemistry was not able to answer those questions yet at the time: questions about dynamics - how fast is a reaction, how long it takes for a pathway to go from…
clock | June 16, 2008A number of my SciBlings (and their commenters) try to explain:
Janet
Chad
Martin
PhysioProf
DrugMonkey
Brian Switek
Alice
Jeremy Bruno
Grrrrrl
clock | June 16, 2008In 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 Giants' Shoulders" - on the About page. In brief, once a month, the carnival will alight on one of the participating blogs. What kinds of blog posts are eligible?
Classic Papers - your blog post should describe what is in a paper that is considered to be a classical paper, or explanation why you…
clock | June 15, 2008It is the neglect of timely repair that makes rebuilding necessary.
- Richard Whately
clock | June 15, 2008Mystery of Mysteries
SAGACITY HARBOR
Psychescientia
Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities
A Man With A Ph.D.
clock | June 15, 2008It'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 "blog" is not very useful - a blog is a piece of software: it is what you do with it that affects how you are perceived by peers, which in turn can affect your career trajectory. There are examples of people who lost prospects due to their blogging, but that was either because they were foolish (their…
clock | June 15, 2008I 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.
clock | June 15, 2008Also 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:
clock | June 15, 2008Miriam 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.
clock | June 14, 2008Practical people would be more practical if they would take a little more time for dreaming.
- J. P. McEvoy
clock | June 14, 2008Last 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 of the pieces. The first half was filled with classics, the second half with pop stuff, including some not-well-known pieces. I am not sure that worked very well....
The concert started with Johann Strauss Sr.'s Radetzky March - a very powerful piece of music. But there is a reason why that is…