clock | July 23, 2006Inspired by RPM of Evolgen, I ask, how many people in your school/University, or town, or state, are blogging, especially about science?
First, I don't know of anyone from my University who blog privately, though you can probably search the MSNBlogs etc. for schools and locales. But, folks at North Carolina State University started, just a few months ago, their own blogging service, called WolfBlogs, using Webroller as the platform. There are still not that many blogs there, most are still trying to figure out how to do this thing, but a few have taken off nicely, and a couple are science-…
clock | July 23, 2006The Synapse #3 is up on Neurophilosopher's blog.
Carnival of the Godless #45 is up on Beware of the Dogma.
The Tar Heel Tavern #74 ("BeatTheHeat edition) is up on Moomin' Light.
clock | July 23, 2006Did you know the origin of the phrase "Every time you masturbate (or do whataver in the context), God kills a kitten"? I just found out that Wikipedia has a full illustrated history - which is hillarious.
clock | July 23, 2006Pam: 'Creationist' says IRS is out to get him on Kent Hovind
Shakespeare's Sister reviews (again) Fussell's 'Class'
Lance: Castaway (Thoreau, Darwin, Sexton)
Paul the Spud: As The World Burns on Inhofe and global warming.
Pam: Q of the day - Unfortunate interiors on the horrible interior decorating style of the 1970s.
Lindsay links to an interview with George Lakoff and some of her commenters display the usual misunderstanding of Lakoff's ideas and of the concept of framing, and believe that Truth and policy proposals will win on their own.
Lance: Sharks, seals, foxes, pink jellyfish, and…
clock | July 22, 2006A question from Fred Gould:
Density dependence or just food limitation - Does anyone know of studies that can determine if the long length of development and small size of adult Aedes coming from containers in natural situations is due to competition among the larvae in the containers for food, or just due to the food resources being so diluted in the containers that each larva has a hard time filtering enough water to get sufficient nutrients?
If you know the answer, leave a comment on his blog.
clock | July 22, 2006Yesterday, I heard the announcement on NPR for Diane Rehm's Monday show and recoiled in horror as it appeared she used the terms "animal welfare" and "animal rights" interchangeably.
Unfortunately, these two terms apply to philosophical opposites. It is like interchangeably using the terms "WWII history" and "Holocaust denial", or "climate science" and "global warming denial", or "evolutionary biology" and "evolution denial" (aka Creationism in its various stripes including Intelligent Design Creationism).
What is common to all these pairs of terms is that one is legitimate line of work…
clock | July 22, 2006Researchers Identify Very First Neurons In The 'Thinking' Brain:
Researchers at Yale School of Medicine and the University of Oxford have identified the very first neurons in what develops into the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that makes humans human. The findings published in Nature Neuroscience show that the first neurons, or "predecessors," as the researchers called them, are in place 31 days after fertilization. This is much earlier than previously thought and well before development of arms, legs or eyes.
"Thinking brain" and "what makes human human" are journalistic phrases…
clock | July 22, 2006Today's Raleigh News and Observer has a nice article about Elizabeth Edwards (the smartest of the 2004 Democratic candidate quartet), her battle with cancer and her new book (including a couple of short excerpts):
Edwards emerges from cancer with grace:
Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of former Democratic vice presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. John Edwards, says in a new book that she survived a harrowing battle with advanced breast cancer last year that left her too depleted for public appearances.
Largely out of the public eye since her husband's loss to the Bush-Cheney ticket in 2004,…
clock | July 22, 2006Top secret blogger for CIA fired, shut down:
Christine Axsmith, a software contractor for the CIA, considered her blog a success within the select circle of people who could actually see it.
Only people with top secret security clearances could read her musings, which were posted on Intelink, the intelligence community's classified intranet. Writing as Covert Communications, CC for short, she opined in her online journal on such national security conundrums as stagflation, the war of ideas in the Middle East and -- in her most popular post -- bad food in the CIA cafeteria.
But the hundreds of…
clock | July 22, 2006Apparently, it's not over until it's over. The removal of the cohabitation law I wrote about yesterday may apply only to a few people in NC, not the whole state: Cohabitation law ruling doesn't apply statewide:
Legal experts said Friday that a Superior Court judge declaring a law that makes it a crime for unmarried couples to live together unconstitutional doesn't apply statewide.
Judge Ben Alford's ruling affects only those involved in the litigation: the Pender County Sheriff's Office, Pender County Sheriff Carson Smith, Ben David, the district attorney in Pender and New Hanover counties,…
clock | July 22, 2006Link found on Ed Cone's blog: The Fog of Cable:
As someone who lives and breathes Middle East politics and media, I have had the bizarre -- and frustrating -- experience of watching the current conflict play out on U.S. cable television, and I am reminded once again why many Americans have such a limited -- and distorted -- view of the world.
---------snip-------------
There is plenty of room on cable television for politicized talk shows of all stripes. But in allowing -- or, rather, ordering -- its respected news correspondents to appear on such shows, the networks are trading credibility…
clock | July 22, 2006This is by far the most popular of the four installments in this series because it contains the nifty puzzle exercise. Click on the spider-web-clock icon to see the comments on the original post.
Just like last week, I have scheduled this post to appear at the time when I am actually teaching this very lab again. If there are any notable difference, I'll let you know in the afternoon.
When teaching the lecture portion of the course, I naturally have to prepare the lectures in advance, and each lecture has to cover a particular topic. This makes biology somewhat fragmentary and I try to use…
clock | July 22, 2006The Authoritarian Streak in the Conservative Movement:
The despotic personality types we see in the Bush White House have their origins in the amoral politics practiced by the low-lifes of the Nixon administration.
That is an excerpt from John Dean's new book (which is on my amazon wishlist....cough, cough...).
clock | July 21, 2006According to the referrers pages of my Sitemeter, a lot of you are excited by strange penises, strange penises, strange penises and strange penises (or something like it). So, today we have to move to a different topic, traffic-be-damned, for those without phallic fixations. So, read on....
If science is all you care for you can skip to the bottom of the post because the main character of today's story will be introduced with a poem (also found here):
The Conjugation of the Paramecium
by Muriel Rukeyser
This has nothing
to do with
propagating
The species
is continued
as so many are
(among…
clock | July 21, 2006Survey questions themselves may affect behavior:
Simply asking college students who are inclined to take drugs about their illegal-drug use in a survey may increase the behavior, according to a study that's making researchers understandably nervous.
"We ask people questions, and that does change behavior," study co-author Gavan Fitzsimons, a marketing professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, said Thursday. The provocative effect, he added, can be "much greater than most of us would like to believe."
Read the rest, it is quite interesting. My first thought - can frequent…
clock | July 21, 2006Technorati treats each of SEED blogs as anindividual entity but also the whole scienceblogs.com site as a single blog. Over the past week or so, the SB gradually moved up from #51 to #32 on the Top 100 Most Popular Blogs list. More you link to each one of us, or the site as a whole, higher up we'll get. Do you think we can overtake at least Michelle Malkin? At least we write empirically correct blogposts....
clock | July 21, 2006Judge rules against cohabitation law:
"Those of you shacking up, have no fear: A judge has thrown out a 201-year-old North Carolina law making it illegal for unmarried couples to live together."
--------------snip---------------
"I am absolutely thrilled with the court's decision," Hobbs, 41, said in a statement. "I just didn't think it was any of my employer's business whether I was married or not, as long as I was good at my job, and I am happy that no one else will ever have to be subjected to this law. I couldn't believe that I was being given this ultimatum to choose between my…
clock | July 21, 2006Owner of the very popular French blog, La Petite Anglaise got Dooced:
She kept her popular blog anonymous, never revealing her full name or workplace. But despite her attempts at secrecy, her employer found out and fired her -- unusual in labor-protected France, where workers have strong legal protections.
It does not matter that nobody has any idea what he name of the company is or even in what city it is located. If you blog, you are automatically suspect and can be fired. We'll see what the French courts think about this. Liberte, ....
On the same day, in the same newspaper, David Broder…
clock | July 21, 2006
I wrote this on September 21, 2004, as a reaction to the misunderstanding of Lakoff's term "Nurturant Parent". Slightly edited (eliminated bad links and such).
Discussions of Lakoff's theory are going on in several places in the blogosphere, including on DailyKos and many other places...just Google it and you'll be floored. Spend some times reading the comments - there is some good thinking there.
There is something happening in these discussions that really bothers me. There is a number of people, including some who claim to have read "Moral Politics", who object to the use of family-based…