clock | August 11, 2006Kevin leaves the countryside for a little vacation in the capital.
Beijing
1 August
It's August, absolutely the best month to be in the sandhills - I'm quite envious of Stateside people. We arrived in Beijing around 3pm today. We had taken the hard sleeper, so there were six of us in one room. When Dr. Li and I came in May we had the soft sleeper, which slept four people to a room. This was my second time on a train and I kind of prefer them. They are very calm, relaxing, there's nothing to do but read, write, or listen to music.
When we got out of the train station we hailed a cab. We had to…
clock | August 11, 2006 Before the days of Times Select, David Brooks used to provoke long rants twice a week. This post from October 24, 2004 is one of those.
David Brooks is so predictable. Every week or so, he comes up with a new scheme to explain the polarization of America. Each time he uses what seems to be different criteria, but are really just different terms. The funniest (and the worst) so far was the division into "spreadheet" and "paragraph" people (link: http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/opinion/9660863.htm?1c ). This week, he came up with yet another one (link: http://www.nytimes.com/…
clock | August 10, 2006The find of a knife flake together with a mammoth dated at 16,000 yo, spurs new speculations about pre-Clovis humans in the Americas. This is the clearest description I ever found of a possible alternative hypothesis to Bering-Clovis.
clock | August 10, 2006This is an interesting idea:
A novel way to advance the circadian cycle has been proposed as a way to solve the problem associated with the early starting times of middle and high schools. It has been recognized for some time that teen age students do not really wake up until well past the time they physically arrive at school. Researchers at Brown University have found that the student's blood contains large amounts of the sleep hormone, melatonin. Researchers at the Lighting Innovations Institute of John Carroll University are seeking funding to carry out a study to find out if their method…
clock | August 10, 2006A nice new study on ecological aspects of circadian rhythms:
To a tiny tadpole, life boils down to two basic missions: eat, and avoid being eaten. But there's a trade-off. The more a tadpole eats, the faster it grows big enough to transform into a frog; yet finding food requires being active, which ups the odds of becoming someone else's dinner.
Scientists have known that prey adjust their activity levels in response to predation risk, but new research by a University of Michigan graduate student shows that internal factors, such as biorhythms, temper their responses.
Michael Fraker, a…
clock | August 10, 2006Getting back to civilization...means having a Big Mac and realizing that watching MI3 dubbed in Chinese does not mean you miss anything of the brilliant plot and dialogue....
Yichang
(E-chong)
30 July
Today Vanessa and I left for Yichang. I got up around 6am and the bus left around 6:30. The driver took a different route than I remembered. During the drive I introduced and converted Vanessa to Metallica - at least the mellow side of Metallica. We arrived in the steaming hot town of Yichang at about 12:30pm. With its humidity and heat this town is like a sauna. Yichang is probably the biggest…
clock | August 10, 2006As the temperatures rise, different organisms respond differently. Some migrate to higher latitudes or altitudes. Others stay put but change the timing of reproduction and other seasonal activities. As a result, ecosystems get remodeled.
So, for instance, insect pollinators and flowers they pollinate may get out of sync.
Animals tend to use photoperiod as a major clue for seasonal timing, with temperature only modulating the response to some extent.
Plants, on the other hand, although they certainly can use photoperiod, are much more strongly influenced by temperature. Non-biologists who…
clock | August 10, 2006 This - "Apart From Being An Idiot, Horowitz Is Also An Unwiped Anal Orifice With Hemorrhoids" - is the worst and nastiest blog-post title I ever used. But I was furious. See why.... (first posted here on March 05, 2005, then republished here on December 10, 2005):
Chris is so nice. Way too nice. And naive. He actually contacted David Horowitz and offered to do a study that has a potential to PROVE Horowitz's claim that conservatives are discriminated against in the Academia. Read the whole episode here.
As you can see, my title is just an euphemistic version of what Horowitz called Chris!…
clock | August 10, 2006I hope PZ will comment on this study:
A humble aquarium fish may be the key to finding therapies capable of preventing the structural birth defects that account for one out of three infant deaths in the United States today.That is one of the implications of a new study published online August 8 in the journal Cell Metabolism. The paper describes a number of striking parallels between a rare but fatal human birth defect called Menkes disease and a lethal mutation in a small tropical fish called the zebrafish that has become an important animal model for studying early development.
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clock | August 10, 2006This is interesting:
Landscapes And Human Behavior:
On Arizona State University's (ASU) Polytechnic campus, graduate student families in the cluster of six houses abutting lush lawns and ornamental bushes spend time together talking while their kids play outside. Meanwhile, the families in a nearby cluster of six homes barely know each other. But that may be in part because their homes sit on native Sonoran desert, not nearly as conducive to recreation as the lush microclimate researchers created in the first neighborhood. Social scientists and biophysical ecologists are finding that…
clock | August 10, 2006My second guest-blogging post on Echidne Of The Snakes, about the potential to have Hooters fund some breast cancer research. Purposefully written to provoke. Cross-posted under the fold...
Abel PharmBoy of Terra Sigillata asked:
Can Hooters support the fight against breast cancer all without being perceived as capitalistic, misogynistic, or otherwise demeaning to women?
You need to read his whole post to see the context, i.e., exactly what kind of sponsorhip for exactly what kind of breast-cancer research. Definitely something that could be, if done carefully, be done in good taste, with…
clock | August 10, 2006My first post guest-blogging on Echidne Of The Snakes, cross-posted under the fold.
I did not know that Dr.B is just a little bit younger than me. Her wisdom makes me feel like a child.
Usually when I see that a post already has 170 comments I don't even start reading them, but the comments on this recent post of hers are worth your while (as well as people who commented on their own blogs and spawned their own comment threads, e.g., . Aunt B, Brooklynite and Steinn).
While the post is primarily about bringing a young son into the female locker-room to change, it is really about several…
clock | August 9, 2006In less than two weeks, Archy (the person - John McKay, not the blog, nor the cockroach) is going to have a biiiiiig birthday party.
He is not asking for presents - he only wants you to come to his place for the party and help him reach a goal.
And while you are there, you are supposed to look around and read - there is a lot of good stuff there!
clock | August 9, 2006Change of Shift, Volume One, Number Four is up on It's A Nursing Thing
Carnival of Education #79 is up on California LiveWire
clock | August 9, 2006Publius
Lance
my wife
Mike Dunford
Ezra, Ezra, Ezra, Ezra
Nicholas Beaudrot , Nicholas Beaudrot
Mike
John
Ed
Jim
Vintage
Mbair
BlueinMo
ChrisinDet
Shar
MGC
Shakespeare's Sister
Echidne
Lindsay, Lindsay, Lindsay
Pam, Pam
Ed Cone, Ed Cone
Josh
Drum, Drum
clock | August 9, 2006This is what we got yesterday:
PD-16 Plenax
Agfa Ansco Corporation, Binghamton, NY.
1930's
Lens: Hypar Anistigmat f6.3 103mm
T B 25 50 100
616 film
2 1/4 x 4 1/4 in.
One of those was sold on e-bay relatively recently for $85. Is there any possibility that one can find a stash of the old film used in this camera so I can give it try?
clock | August 9, 2006Every now and then, especially when the Right Wing comes up with another one of thos silly lists of supposedly conservative rock songs, a lot of people take a look at pop and rock (and hip-hop) songs and do some sociological analysis on them, trying to glean the way society is changing by the way song lyrics have changed.
That is fine, but I think that one needs to focus on the lyrics of country songs instead. Especially if one want to unserstand the mindset of rural/exurban/Southern voter, which seems to be a mystique to some coastal big-city liberals.
I have done that before and…
clock | August 9, 2006Dominant Meerkats Render Rivals Infertile:
When pregnant, dominant female meerkats subject their subordinates to escalating aggression and temporary eviction causing them to become overly stressed and as a result infertile, a new study finds.
Does Environment Influence Genes? Researcher Gives Hard Thoughts On Soft Inheritance:
Organisms, including humans, all inherit DNA from generation to generation, what biologists call hard inheritance, because the nucleotide sequence of DNA is constant and only changes by rare random mutation as it is passed down the generations.
But there also is…
clock | August 9, 2006From today's Quotes Of The Day:
As something of a student of history, I need to remember a number of numbers. Few of them remain easily in mind, although I normally can remember 1066, 1492, and 1776. It happens that on this day in 1776, Lorenzo Romano Amedeo Carlo Avogadro was born at Turin, Italy. Amedeo got his law degree at the age of sixteen, and did well, but ten years later began to study science. He made a number of breakthroughs regarding the nature of atoms and molecules, he was the first to realize that oxygen and hydrogen generally occur as molecules of two atoms. When it was…