Below the fold is the third report from Kevin. This time it really gets interesting, even fascinating! Hunting snakes, rural China, the people....Kevin has interesting observations about everything. Since the way Kevin embeds pictures in MSWord makes it very tricky to extract them and still have them look decent, I urge you to go check out the photos he managed to upload onto Photobucket. Enjoy: Xiagu report (she-ah-gu) 27 May At first I was not near as impressed with Xiagu as I was with Jiuchong. It was much bigger and less personal. We arrived late afternoon on the 27th. Of course I…
This is an early post of mine concerning the approaches to teaching science. It was first published on March 15, 2005. I have employed both of the methods described in this post since then. The jigsaw puzzle works much better as it is more fun. I have described how it actually went in the classroom here: A few days ago, PZ Myers of the Pharyngula fame (not the pharyngula stage, though - much more advanced in development) wrote a post (that links to this article about creative ways to teach scientific method: "I found that I had to teach the nature of science at both the undergraduate…
The big day - 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikola Tesla - is approaching fast - July 10th. I am sure that I will remind you of this a couple of more times until then - I have a couple of posts about him in the making - but first look at the older posts in which I have mentioned him so far....[more under the fold] Just the other day, I wrote about the significance of Bryant Park in NYC - you'll have to click to see what it has to do with Tesla. Then, I wrote how much I am eagerly anticipating the new movie in which David Bowie will play Tesla. It was based on the book "Prestige" which (…
The very first edition of Change Of Shift, the new carnival of nursing is up on the wonderful Kim's Emergiblog.
A delightful World Cup-themed edition of I and the Bird is up on The Hawk Owls' Nest. A great round-up and an excellent example of creative hosting. Next edition is the First Year Anniversary of the carnival, so it goes back home to 10000 Birds. The theme is "why you blog, why you bird, or why you blog about birds". Send your entries to Mike by July 5.
I am a science teacher. I think I am actually a pretty good science teacher. So, it came to me as a surprise as how much I was baffled by the new SEED AskTheScienceBlogger question: What makes a good science teacher?... The answer, I guess, depends on the precise definitions of the words "makes", "good", "science" and "teacher". [read the rest under the fold] Is this the question about inherent talents shared by the good science teachers, or the methods one may use to turn a lousy or mediocre teacher into a good one? Being extroverted helps. Being a natural performer helps. Loving…
Via Accidental Blogger, come these truly amazing photos of Hindu ascetics playing soccer. I wish they qualified for the World Cup! On only slightly more serious note, Ruchira Paul has an interesting post on Soccer and Political Theory. Dou you agree with the premise?
Gavin de Beer died on this day in 1972. Aydin Ãrstan wrote the best post for the occasion (also cross-posted on Transitions)
Tangled Bank #56 is up on Centrerion. Although I e-mailed in a few posts, none got published - ah, well.
My post about sleep has been translated by Davide 'Folletto' Casali into Italian, and posted on his blog. You can see the translated post here. If you can read Italian (and even you do not - just for fun, and to reward his hard work), go and look around his blog.
Carnival of the Liberals is up on Varkam's portion of the group-blog Neural Gourmet. This is a competitive carnival where the host picks the Ten Best Posts of the week, out of several dozens entries. I am very happy to see that Top Ten this week include four posts from science blogs, and of those, two are from scienceblogs.com.
Saturday, May 27th After revising our strategy - substituting quality for quantity - we had a good night's sleep and woke up at a more decent time on Saturday morning. I took the kids down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast for some delicious pancakes and waffles, while Mrs. Coturnix went to buy some matinee tickets for whichever (family-friendly) Broadway show she could get. 'Wicked' was the first choice, but those tickets have been sold out for months in advance. A couple of hours later, after waiting in the long line twice, she finally got a good deal on tickets for Spamalot from a…
Here is the first of Kevin's e-mailed reports from China, dated June 1-3, 2006. In it, you will be able to see pictures of some natural beauty he saw in China, then another kind of natural beauty he saw in China, then yet another kind of natural beauty he saw in China.... I love the way he writes - he should (will?) be a great blogger. What a combination of a travelogue, a personal diary, and lab notes of a research scientist - all in one, the three aspects of it connected seamlessly into a single narrative. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. So, without further ado, here is Kevin:…
This was my December 29, 2004 post written in reaction to media reports on the "sixth sense" in animals, avoiding the tsunami by climbing to high ground: What's Really Important? This What's Really Not That Important, But I Can't Help It? Did Animals Sense Tsunami? I hate it when they say "sixth sense"! Days of Aristotle and his Five Senses are long gone. Even we have more than five sensory modalities. Various animals (and even plants) have many more. The original five are vision, audition, olfaction, gustation and touch. Photoreception is not just vision and is not a unitary modality. There…
New Teaching Carnival (HigherEd) is up on Raining Cats And Dogma. The latest edition of the Carnival of Education is up on Why Homeschool. Bird-themed Carnival of Homeschooling is up on HomeSchoolBuzz.E
Again, Janet has an update: At last count, we've gotten $12,325.59 (not counting the $10,000 match from SEED) from 152 generous donors -- that's an average of $81.09 per donor. There is more, and hopefully more people will donate between now and July 1st.
For a particularly juicy manner of dealing with a global warming denier (and general wackjob) Dennis Prager, read Amanda's delicious rant: Gasbag expands as global temperatures rise.
Let's see how many people incapable of spelling 'plane' arrive here by the way of Google. But I am talking about a real 'plain' - a big one, in China, and about some very real live snakes as well! A good friend (and ex-neighbor) of mine, Kevin Messenger, is in China right now, surveying herpetofauna (that is - reptiles and amphibians, for the non-biologists here) in a remote area of central China, rarely visited by Weesterners, and never before surveyed by scientists. He is one of those natural-born herpetologists - he lives, breathes and dreams snakes. When I lived in Raleigh I would often…
Yes, I know that I am supposed to be the resident expert on all things temporal (check the name of this blog, after all), and I am actually very interested in the topic of subjective perception of time (in humans, among others), but I did not say anything about the latest study on the Aymara language in which the space-time metaphors are reversed in comparison to most/all (is it not all or is it really all?) other known languages. SEED just released an article on the topic as well. Blogosphere covered the story quite a lot, but I was waiting for the real experts on this to chime in, and they…
New edition of the medical carnival is up on Psychological Perspectives.