clock | July 29, 2006 Want this badge?
If you are hot and thirsty, come by the Tar Heel Tavern for a drink or two. This is the 75th meeting and Erin is paying the first round...
clock | July 29, 2006In 50 days of its existence, this blog has received 636 comments. The SEED sciencebloggers already promote each other a lot, so I want to give a shout-out to my most regular commenters who are NOT themselves SB bloggers or SEED staff (or myself - after all I posted the most comments while responding to others). I happily include people who I disagree with here - spam and trolling has been deleted long ago and is not counted in the totals.
Plus, at some point in the future (perhaps on December 31st), I will do this again and the person with the greatest number of comments will get to…
clock | July 29, 2006
You Are a Blogging Expert
You got 8/8 correct!
You know so much about blogging, you should blog for a living.
How Much Do You Know About Blogging?
clock | July 29, 2006Disowning Conservative Politics Is Costly for Pastor:
Sermons like Mr. Boyd's are hardly typical in today's evangelical churches. But the upheaval at Woodland Hills is an example of the internal debates now going on in some evangelical colleges, magazines and churches. A common concern is that the Christian message is being compromised by the tendency to tie evangelical Christianity to the Republican Party and American nationalism, especially through the war in Iraq.
Interesting, even for the usually conservatively-slanted results on AOL online polls:
What do you think of Rev. Boyd's views on…
clock | July 29, 2006
You Passed 8th Grade Science
Congratulations, you got 8/8 correct!
Could You Pass 8th Grade Science?
Watch out! One question has a correct answer and a MORE correct answer, and in another question they meant "neutron", not "neuron".
(Hat-tip: John Lynch)
clock | July 29, 2006 While I am teaching the biology lab, I set this post to show up automatically at the same time. It describes what we do today, the same stuff we did back on March 26, 2006:
This week we had a busy lab, which means I did not have time for much inpired talking like I did last time. We did some exercises together as a group, while some other exercises were set as stations arund the room and each student did them alone, at their own time.
First, the students used the staining technique they learned last week to find out what kinds of organisms live on their fingers. They saw bacteria from…
clock | July 29, 2006Here is the forth and final part of the introduction to SEED sciencebloggers. Check out the first part, the second part and the third part if you have missed them before. There ain't no eleven left, so today we have only ten (but I hear there will be a couple more soon....):
Jake Young of Pure Pedantry is a neuroscience student and the founder of The Synapse. His interests are broad, as in Economics as Evolution, Practice over Innate Ability, Chronicles of Higher Ed Symposium on Academic Blogging and Hummers vs. Hybrids Redux: On Corporate Research, but you really need to read everything…
clock | July 29, 2006The media is all excited about the news that Daniel Radcliffe will star as Alan Strang in Peter Schaffer's "Equus" in New York next spring. Of course, they all focus on the fact that there is a naked sex scene at the end, ignoring the fact that this is a difficult role in an excellent play. I am glad that he is growing up as an actor and taking serious roles instead of fluff that some other young actors tend to do at that age.
clock | July 28, 2006As always, animal porn is under the fold:
You have probably heard that a female praying mantis eats her mate's head during the mating process. You may imagine the process to go something like this:
Actually, there are many species of praying mantises and in most of them sexual cannibalism is quite rare. It occurs much more often in the laboratory than out in the field. Apparently, the lights and sounds of a laboratory are stressful to the female so she acts aggressively in response.
The praying mantises are very aggressive predators and they can eat quite a lot of food, preferring soft-…
clock | July 28, 2006
This post from September 09, 2004, was my first education about Rapturists:
Read these articles carefully (some are long, but please persist) and freeze. You'll get goosebumps...at least.
Apocalypse Bush!
Why Care for the Planet When the End Times are Almost Here? Vote Bush and Hop On the Salvation Train!
The Covert Kingdom
Thy Will be Done, On Earth as It is in Texas
"Thank you Gawd for giving us strawng leaders like President Bush during this crieeesis. Praise you Lord and guide him in this battle with Satan's Muslim armies."
The Church of Bush
What liberal infidels will never understand…
clock | July 28, 2006Here is the third part of the introduction to SEED sciencebloggers, the next eleven (check out the first part and the second part if you have missed them before) of my SiBlings:
Razib of Gene Expression and I go back a long way of .....friendly disagreement on pretty much everything. But he certainly knows his population genetics inside out. Check out Bumping uglies with the Neandertal (aka but they did interbreed!), The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, preface & chapter 1 or Introgression, what's in a word? to get your Mendel, Fisher, Haldane and Wright education.
MarkCC of Good…
clock | July 27, 2006Orcinus: Conserving orcas, and humans too
Shakespeare's Sister: Off-Limits Humor
Echidne Of The Snakes: Divorce -- Preparing For Travels in Wingnuttia
clock | July 27, 2006In an interview in Time magazine, Morgan Spurlock said, among else (and you should go and read the "else"):
We've started to make science and empirical evidence not nearly as important as punditry--people wusing p.r.-speak to push a corporate or political agenda. I think we need to turn scientists back into the rock stars they are.
Chris brought this quote to the bloggers' attention and Shelley was the first to respond:
I find this quote so refreshing (not just because it places us scientists up on a lofty pedestal), because it validates scientific authority figures as someone worth listening…
clock | July 27, 2006The latest AskTheScienceBlogger question is:
"I heard that within 15 years, global warming will have made Napa County too hot to grow good wine grapes. Is that true? What other changes are we going to see during our lifetimes because of global warming?..."
Answer under the fold....
I am not a big wine connoisseur, though I like an occasional glass of French burgundy, German riesling, Adriatic cabernet or Argentinian malbec. Also, I heard that wine is generally thought to be good for you (although you should take every claim in that article with a grain of salt, e.g., aboutmelatonin in wine…
clock | July 27, 2006 This post I first wrote on February 28, 2005, then re-posted here on December 10, 2005. About conservative relativism and the assault on academia:
I have hinted several times (here, here, here and here) before that relativism (including moral relativism) is not consistent with the liberal core model (in Lakoffian sense). Instead, postmodernism is used these days as a tactic by conservatives to push their pre-modern views within a modern society. In other words, faced with the reality of a modern world, the only way conservatives can re-intorduce their medieval ideas is by invoking…
clock | July 27, 2006Here is the second part of the introduction to SEED sciencebloggers, the next eleven (check out the first part if you have missed it yesterday). I hope you like them and appreciate the breadth and depth of writing here (so, yes, if you have a blog, and you are registered with Technorati - which if you have a blog you should be - please make scienceblogs.com, as well as any or all individual blogs here that you may like, one of your favourites)
Have you checked Digital Biology Fridays on Discovering Biology in a Digital World yet? Sandra Porter shows you how YOU can do molecular biology at…
clock | July 26, 2006Change Of Shift #3 is up on Emergiblog.
Carnival of Education #77 is up on Text Savvy.
clock | July 26, 2006If you are interested in mammoths, or if mammoths make the news, the first place to go is Archy: WOOLLY MAMMOTH LINKED TO SCIENCE FRAUD!!!