grrlscientist | June 22, 2006The Brazil-Japan World Cup game was amazing. Despite the lopsided score (4-1), the game was beautiful to watch, unlike the USA-Ghana game, which was mostly just a duty to watch because, you know, I am an American who really likes football (soccer). No; unlike USA-Ghana, the Brazil-Japan match was special; they made every minute of the game into something thrilling, exciting, fun; and they treated each other with such respect, too. It was a very clean game, despite the importance of the outcome -- no red cards, and few (no?) yellow cards, and no elbows in the eyeballs, for example.
Just as an…
grrlscientist | June 22, 2006This was not a pretty game. Neither Team Ghana nor Team USA showed any particular skill or passion; Ghana simply outlasted USA, and honestly, Team USA was its own worst enemy, so Team Ghana only had to sit back and allow the USA to destroy themselves. So easy. Mechanical.
If this game was a novel, it would have had a brilliant plot but would lack depth and character development, and the prose would have sucked, with the rare exception of one or two sentences (McBride, USA) .. but a good novel does not rest upon a few high quality sentences or paragraphs.
Team USA needs red uniforms. Okay,…
grrlscientist | June 22, 2006Uh-oh! Things are not looking good for Team USA in World Cup action: first, they aren't wearing red uniforms. Second, the American team captain, Claudio Reyna, was carted away on a stretcher after losing the ball to a player on Ghana's team -- who immediately scored a goal. I am not sure if Reyna broke a leg or if he was suicidal, but either way, he's under observation.
[A few minutes later]
Okay, my peeps, Team USA is still not looking good. They are playing as if the entire team is suffering from a hangover. Considering this is a "do or die" game, you'd think Team USA would be hothothot.…
grrlscientist | June 21, 2006A reader wrote to tell me that my wee rant about Stephen Hawking's comments was quoted -- but not linked! can you believe it? -- in a piece that appeared yesterday on Spiked.
Um, yeah. This is good .. I guess.
grrlscientist | June 21, 2006An informed public and open debate is vital to a healthy democracy, but they depend upon free access to the facts. A free and fair media is indispensable to democracy because they are the only institution that can regularly question the president and other public officials. However, not everyone thinks that the American media has been doing their job recently. One of those people is Helen Thomas.
Thomas is a journalist who has covered Washington news for more than 60 years. In her new book, Watchdogs of Democracy? The waning Washington press corps and how it has failed the public (NYC:…
grrlscientist | June 20, 2006I want to share this amusing video with all of you, particularly with one very special reader, Joe [surname elided to protect him from his stupidity], who was so moved by this piece that I wrote that he has been emailing repeatedly to let me know that I am a poorly-educated liar. In fact, Joe was so inspired by my writing that he ignored my request to stop filling my email box with his offensive, narrow-minded tripe by responding with this erudite and truly revealing message;
You are presumptuous. Stop trying to enlighten the world with your parroting of evolutionary dogma. I am not going to…
grrlscientist | June 20, 2006For those of you who are following the World Cup, I ran across an article this morning at that has quite a few links that describe the science of World Cup soccer. Linked from this article are interesting studies showing that teams who wear red uniforms are most likely to win, that winning is great but losing is safer for the fans, and that "heading the ball" is associated with an increased risk of motor neuron disease.
Read this article for these and more interesting reports of soccer-based or inspired research.
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tags: science, soccer, research
grrlscientist | June 19, 2006
Every time I heard that stupid song, that's what I thought the Beach Boys were singing, too! It took years before I could hear them singing "Barbra Ann" instead.
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tags: streaming video, satire, parody, humor, Iran
grrlscientist | June 19, 2006
Soccer-playing carrion crow, Corvus corone
(This is a captive domesticated bird).
Image: Koichi Harada, Asahi Shimbun/AP.
Birds in Science
Filling a gap in the evolution of birds, scientists have dug up fossils of a bird, Gansus yumenensis (pictured), that lived 110 million years ago and looked remarkably like a small modern-day waterfowl. The finding, reported recently in the journal Science, supports the notion that all living birds, from ostriches to ducks to hummingbirds, descended from an ancestor that lived by the shore. In 2004, researchers led by Hai-lu You of the Chinese Academy…
grrlscientist | June 19, 2006Did you know that Dutch football (soccer) fans' orange lederhosen offended the Fédération Internationale de Football Association or FIFA, because they carry the logo for the Dutch beer, Bavaria? The Dutch brewery that makes Bavaria beer is not a sponsor for the games, so officials did not want the logo to be seen in the stadium -- especially since several thousand screaming fans were wearing identical lederhosen.
What makes these pants so special? In addition to their garrish orange color, these were special pants for other reasons; they came with the tail of a lion, Holland's national…
grrlscientist | June 17, 2006This entry is for everyone who thinks that World Cup soccer (futbol) is not popular in the USA, think again: it's danged popular in Manhattan right now! At this moment, I am sitting in a pub, watching the USA-Italy game and there are at least 70 people crowded in here watching along with me, including three other women.
Needless to say, there is plenty of profanity here, especially after the two three missed USA goals and the one successful Italian goal. And there was plenty of cheering after the American goal and plenty more after Mastroeni De Rossie was kicked out of the game because he…
grrlscientist | June 17, 2006
I am talking about Bill Gates, of course.
Most people have read the recent reports that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates's personal net worth exceeds 40 billion dollars. Consider that he made this money in the 22 years or so since Microsoft was founded in 1975. If you assume he worked 14 hours a day on every business day of the year since then, that means he's been making money at a staggering half-million dollars per hour, approximately $150 per second.
Gates owns $27,381,883,256.00 ($27.38 billion) of Microsoft stock, a sum that is greater than the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of most…
grrlscientist | June 16, 2006I woke up this morning, feeling under the weather, so I have not been doing much writing today. Sorry about that. I had planned to put together a few more pieces for you to read today, but analgesics have dulled my writing ambitions along with my pain. I did download three scientific papers this afternoon that I plan to write about this evening and over the weekend, so you can be looking for those pieces. Until then, I hope that my answer to this week's question from the Mothership will satisfy you.
Question How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various grad students, post-docs…
grrlscientist | June 15, 2006Okay, my peeps, when you ask questions, I try to hunt down the relevant expert or individual quoted in a news story if I don't know the answer myself and I pass on your questions to that person (or to the webmaster at their site) and then .. I hope for the best.
This time, one of the people cited in a news story did respond to one of my readers' queries, so I am very happy to share that response with all of you, especially because it is quite interesting (but aren't all of these science-y things interesting?).
Mark Paris wrote;
Wouldn't this actually be a partial halo as opposed to a…
grrlscientist | June 15, 2006Okay, after I finished writing that last piece of breaking science news, I am ready to relax with some thought-free fun and games for a little while. How about going out to a restaurant for something to eat? Oh, living in NYC as I do, I forgot that some people have to drive a car instead of hopping onto the subway. Of course, driving a car means that you have to park the danged thang, which can pose a problem in and of itself.
Can you park a car without crashing it? This little test might interest you; it's a test that gives you 60 seconds to park that little yellow car in the highlighted…
grrlscientist | June 15, 2006
Artist's rendition of Gansus yumenensis
on a lake in Changma Basin, China approximately 115-110 million years ago.
Illustration: Mark A. Klingler / CMNH.
In 1984, a paper was published in China (in Chinese) that described a new bird species from the early Cretaceous period, based on part of a fossilized left foot bone that had been discovered in northwestern China by a team of paleoichthyologists in 1981. This bone was determined to be part of an ancient tern-sized bird, later named Gansus yumenensis (for the Chinese province of Gansu, and Yumen, the nearest somewhat large town to where…
grrlscientist | June 15, 2006Okay, my peeps, my story is coming very soon. I am downloading the pictures now, but this is taking longer than I want it to. Grr! But I can say now that this story is about an amazing paper that came out today in Science, and this paper will change the way we all think about avian evolution.
Even better, I am almost certain that several of the authors will respond to reader comments! Well, give them a chance to come back down to planet Earth, okay? They did say they can begin responding to reader comments tomorrow. The AAAS flew them in to Washington DC for a press conference this morning,…
grrlscientist | June 15, 2006
Amazona auropalliata
Image: by BirdZoo
As a parrot breeder, companion and researcher, I can unequivocally say that I have been keeping a secret, a powerful secret that, once revealed, will change the way that humans view themselves and their place in the world, especially in relation to parrots. This morning, a reader, Sara, pointed out to me in an email that this secret has been revealed at long last.
As described at McSweeney's in this recently published open letter to The Amazon Parrot I Have Been Supporting For Over 15 Years Who Still Tries To Bite Me For No Apparent Reason, parrots…
grrlscientist | June 14, 2006I have a very cool surprise for you, dear readers, tomorrow at 2 pm EST. Get ready; it'll knock your socks off.
grrlscientist | June 14, 2006
I guess these advertizers haven't heard about avian influenza yet nor about how cats appear to be surprisingly susceptible to it.
Well, big cats, anyway.
Hat tip: Dawn, via Brainstorm #9.
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tags: advertizing