clock | August 30, 2006I And The Bird #31 is up on Migrateblog. Enjoy the poetry leading you to the best bird-writing on the Internet.
clock | August 30, 2006Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born on August 30th, 1797. She is very old now, but a team of mad scientists is working on resurrecting her with jolts of electricity.
clock | August 30, 2006Joe Lieberman's communications director, Dan Gerstein, claims the sun rises in the West. Seriously. And will not back down. What more proof you need to know that Lieberman is a Republican, waging his own "independent" war on science in hope of appeasing Inhofe & Co. all in the spirit of moderaiton and bipartisanship?
clock | August 30, 2006Now that the school has started, we (meaning 'ScienceBloggers') are getting feedback messages from science teachers who were able to buy supplies for their classes because you, our readers, pitched in back in June and donated mountains of money through the DonorsChoose program.
I want to thank you all again for doing such a good deed. And, as far as I can see, none of us has removed the DonorsChoose button from our sidebars, so you can always add some more to the science teaching projects of your choice.
P.S. The first note I got very early and do not have it any more in my mailbox The last…
clock | August 30, 2006Chad wrote a neat history of (or should we say 'evolution of') clocks, as in "timekeeping instruments". He points out the biological clocks are "...sort of messy application, from the standpoint of physics..." and he is right - for us biologists, messier the better. We wallow in mess, cherish ambiguity and relish in complexity. Anyway, he is talking about real clocks - things made by people to keep time. And he starts with a simple definition of what a clock is:
In order to really discuss the physics of timekeeping, you need to strip the idea of a clock down to the absolute bare…
clock | August 30, 2006Rush thinks one needs to slaughter a cow in order to get butter. And he blames liberals and the UN for being a fat idiot.
clock | August 30, 2006Carnival of the Liberals #20 is up on The Greenbelt - the next one will be in two weeks on Archy.
The latest Carnival of Homeschooling is up on Category Five - the next one will be next week on Why Homeschool.
clock | August 30, 2006
Re-post from May 17, 2006, under the fold...
When teaching biology, one has to cut up the syllabus into edible and digestible chunks, and it makes sense to cover various subdisciplines in separate lectures. As you know, I strive to find ways to make connections to students so they don't leave with a sense that all those subdisciplines are disconnected from each other, almost like separate sciences.
One obvious way to do it is to place everything heavily into an evolutionary context. Another way - and the two go hand-in-hand - is to find really cool diseases, like malaria, in which findings…
clock | August 30, 2006The school has started and I have not yet met my son's teachers, but he brought home his science textbook yesterday. Of course I had to take a look....and I really liked it! It is North Carolina Edition of McDougal Littell "Science" for 8th grade.
While I am still stunned that all of science is bunched together this late in schooling (I had physics, chemistry, earth science and biology as separate subjects from 5th through 12th grade every year), but at least the way this is bunched looks good. It is divided into five units, each taking, I guess, about two months to cover. The first unit…
clock | August 30, 2006If you are confused by the sheer number of ScienceBloggers and need to know who is who and what everyone writes about, you should check the periodic table of SciBlings. Then, check out more detailed descriptions of some of the blogs and keep checking in the following days for the descriptions of others. A graphic, looking just like a real periodic table may be in the making soon...
clock | August 30, 2006Mark Perakh debunks Chapter 16 of Jonathan Well's poor excuse of a book. The chapter is on alleged new "Lysenkoism" in today's American science, which has nothing to do with historical Lysenkoism.
clock | August 29, 2006Carnival of the Green #42 is up on The Disillusioned Kid.
Carnival of Education #82 is up on Thespis Journal.
Grand Rounds, V. 2, No. 49 is up on Protect the Airway.
clock | August 29, 2006Mr.WD continues with his series on "Postmodern" Christianity - here is It's still that old time religion, Part III.
Sara Robinson continues her series on authoritarians: Tunnels and Bridges, Part III: A Bigger World
clock | August 29, 2006Yesterday, we were putting down media reports on a study that purports that dolphins are not intelligent despite behavioral studies and big brains. Today, NYTimes has a much better article arguing that manatees, despite their small brains, are more intelligent than previously thought.
It is a longish article but well worth reading. The idea is that manatees don't have too small brains, but overlarge bodies, and, since they are herbivores with no prey or predators, they do not need to reserve vast portions of their brains for tackling hunting and defense.
Brain size has been linked by some…
clock | August 29, 2006Previously unopposed, "...the most notorious creationist on the Ohio State Board of Education, Deborah Owens Fink, has a challenger in the Novemeber 7th election." The election is non-partisan and the serious challenger is Tom Sawyer. You can get all of the details from Ed Brayton (as well as additional views by Chad, John and Kevin). Ed writes:
"Sawyer is the former mayor of Akron, a former state legislator and an 8 term US congressman from Ohio. Sawyer's bonafides for a board of education seat are impressive. He is a former school teacher, and husband of a school teacher. He was the…
clock | August 29, 2006From quite early on in my blogging endeavor, I was interested in exploring science blogging, what it is, what it can do, and what it can become. So, check out some of my earliest thoughts on this here and here.
Then, over about a month (from April 17, 2006 to May 17, 2006) I wrote a gazillion posts on this topic, and many science bloggers chimed in in the comments or on their own blogs. The repost of all of them together is under the fold. Check the originals (and comments) here:
April 17, 2006: Publishing hypotheses and data on a blog - is it going to happen on science blogs?
April 20,…
clock | August 29, 2006My SciBling Chris Mooney, the first science blogger I ever discovered (and whose blogroll let me into the scienceblogging world) is the author of one of the most important books of last year, The Republican War On Science.
I have read the hardcover as soon as I got it (and my copy was shipped in the first batch) and intend to read the paperback as soon as it arrives in my mailbox - which should be today or tomorrow as the book started shipping yesterday. Until your own copy arrives in the mail (and it will be soon, of course, as you are about to order it), you should check out the book…