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The 6% Solution to Human-Chimpanzee Divergence

This past summer, Matt Hahn presented a talk at the Society for Molecular Biology Evolution meeting and Evolution 2006 entitled "The 17% Solution: Gene Family Divergence Between Human And Chimpanzee". The basic premise was that, even though humans and chimps are ~99% identical at the DNA sequence level, they differ substantially in copy number variants. That is, the two species have different amounts of genes from certain gene families, which Hahn estimated as a 17% difference in genes between them. Given the amount of copy number polymorphism within humans, it should come as no surprise that…

What Could the Farm Bill Accomplish?

Kari Hamerschlag has a post up about the upcoming Farm Bill and its potential to move money away from large scale industrial agriculture and towards smaller producers. For most small farmers producing for local markets, the idea is heady - after all, the economics agriculture are tenuous for many of us - we get all of the burdens of regulation without any of the economies of scale that accompany large scale agriculture. Most small producers are driven, then, to serve communities that can pay, rather than necessarily their poorer rural neighbors (although all of us do some of that too). We…

Birds in the News 157

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Yellow-eyed Junco, Junco phaeonotus, Cave Creek Canyon AZ Image: Dave Rintoul, June 2008 [larger view]. People Hurting Birds The Greater Sage-Grouse, a species whose population has declined 93% from historic numbers and that is on the U.S. WatchList of birds of highest conservation concern, is facing a severe decline in the amount of suitable breeding habitat due to energy development. Oil and gas drilling in the region have been booming, driving the birds out of many breeding areas, or leks. In addition, wind farm…

More on the Republican War on Science

Fellow ScienceBlogling Chris Mooney comped me a copy of the second edition of his book, The Republican War on Science, and I have finally managed to get around to writing a review of it. Here's the short version: buy this book. It details exactly what the Bush Administration has done to U.S. science. Chris also does the truth a service; he refuses to engage in Compulsive Centrist Disorder. Yes, here are idiots on the Left who hold anti-science beliefs, but the predominant threat--one that holds the reigns of power in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches--is from the Right…

Happy Birthday to the hard drive

September 13, 1956 was an important date in computer history. That's when IBM shipped its first hard drive. As Steven Levy tells us in Newsweek, it was the size of two refrigerators and weighed a ton. Lot figurately. Literally. Leasing cost $250,000 a year (2006 dollars). But it was considered a wonder: "It was about the size of two large refrigerators, about as tall as a person stands, and though it used vacuum tubes, it was always running," recalls Jim Porter, who worked at Crown Zellerbach in San Francisco in the mid-'50s and would proudly take people to the basement to see what he claims…

Reading Diary: Cooler smarter: Practical steps for low carbon living by The Union of Concerned Scientists

You know the old saying about the weather -- everybody complains but nobody does anything about it! Well, the same can be said about climate change -- everybody complains but nobody does anything about it. And that's partly because of political gridlock, denial and inaction at the highest levels across numerous jurisdictions around the world. But it's also because most of us really don't have a clear idea what we can do about it. In other words, what actions can we as individuals take to fight climate change? I think we all have a sense that if we could aggregate millions and billions…

Welsh Coal Miners Did it Their Way

Back in 1994, 240 coal miners in Hirwaun, Wales bought the Tower Colliery where they were employed.  The UK government was de-nationalizing the coal mines and the pit was scheduled to close.  The miners took charge of their own livelihood, used their severence-layoff pay and borrowed money, to buy the coal mine. "In its first year, one of the oldest continuously worked pits in the world made a profit of two million pounds (~ $1 million US) ...[and] provided jobs for hundreds of miners."  (Reuters here)] Last week, the miners and the community said their final goodbye to the Tower Colliery…

Who's Looking After the Cooks' Lungs?

OSHA? No.  It's Andrew Schneider and his colleagues at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.  In "Flavoring Additive Puts Professional Cooks at Risk," the reporter describes a study commissioned by the newspaper to determine how much of the butter-flavoring agent diacetyl becomes airborne when used in a restaurant cook's work setting.  Exposure to diacetyl is associated with the severe lung disease bronchiolitis obliterans in microwave popcorn plant workers and others, yet Schneider writes: "Government indifference to the possible threat posed by breathing diacetyl is epidemic.  The CPSC…

Not all blogs are tech blogs

In one of those "if you like this you may also like this" e-mails from Amazon.com, I got a suggestion I may like a book called Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World's Top Bloggers. So, I took a look. I've been blogging since 2004, so I thought I knew who the top bloggers were and could find it interesting to see what they had to say. As it turns out, the title is a misnomer. It should be "......American Top TECH Bloggers". I recognize three names (Anderson, Scoble, Rubel). Perhaps they say interesting things in the interviews, as observers of the blogosphere. But, I am not…

Another Open Laboratory 2009 review

David Bradley read the book and liked it. Perhaps you'll like it, too. If you use the code "SHOWERS" in April during check-out you will get 10% off. Just go here right now and click on "Buy now" ;-) Under the fold - OpenLab2010 entries so far, and the submission buttons: ============================ A Blog Around The Clock: What does it mean that a nation is 'Unscientific'? A Blog Around The Clock: My latest scientific paper: Extended Laying Interval of Ultimate Eggs of the Eastern Bluebird Anthropology in Practice: The Irish Diaspora: Why Even Trinidadians Are a Little Irish Back Re(action…

Academia, a test case for banking sector.

So, having established that Obama is NOT truly beholden to the financiers, what may happen to settle the financial world and straighten the economy. No, really, he is not: no more than he is beholden to, say UC or Harvard. I mean it is not like his administration is stuffed with academics from those venerable institutions... er, well, you know what I mean. But, clearly, with his #1 contributor, UC, having been sorted, we now have a guide for what we may do about the financiers. We furlough the banksters! Brilliant! Seriously. Note that in academia, the furloughs increase as you go up the…

True Lab Stories: Strangest Group Meeting Ever

This isn't the usual story about lab mishaps, but I'm not quite sure what other category to put it in. It is a true story about my lab in grad school, though, so we'll call it a True Lab Story. The mid-90's was not a great time to be working in a government lab, particularly NIST. I mean, it was better than being out on the street, but funding was kind of tight, and the "Contract With America" Republicans of '94 were making noises about massive spending cuts, and threatening to eliminate the Department of Commerce altogether (mostly because they hated Ron Brown, the first Secretary of…

You are old father William

'You are old', said the youth, 'and your jaws are too weak For anything tougher than suet; Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak - Pray, how did you manage to do it?' 'In my youth', said his father, 'I took to the law, And argued each case with my wife; And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw, Has lasted the rest of my life.' [1] Yes, yet another post with zero science but don't go away - there is some rowing later after the tedious bits. And so: exhibit 1 is the glasses, which you'll immeadiately note are varifocals. I have spent the past 2 years…

CDMS rumors: What they'll find and what it'll mean

Trying to squash a rumor is like trying to unring a bell. -Shana Alexander Around the internet, blogs are all abuzz that an experiment searching for dark matter, CDMS, has cancelled all of their upcoming announcements and will be holding a special press conference on the 18th (this Friday!) to release their latest findings. Here's what you can expect. First off, here's how it works. They take a bunch of hockey-puck shaped detectors, shield them at the bottom of a mine shaft deep beneath the Earth (in Soudan, MN), and try to measure these very rare events of dark matter particles (which can…

Seipp on Fallaci

Cathy Seipp has an interesting essay in the LA Times about a visit to City Lights, the legendary San Francisco book store and why, despite its long history of proudly promoting banned books, they refuse to carry Oriana Fallaci's The Force of Reason: So, although my friend is no fan of Ward Churchill, the faux Indian and discredited professor who notoriously called 9/11 victims "little Eichmanns," he didn't really mind seeing piles of Churchill's books prominently displayed on a table as he walked in. However it did occur to him that perhaps the long-delayed translation of Oriana Fallaci's new…

Why it matters that the US Olympic Team will wear Chinese made uniforms

There are all kinds of reasons why it does not matter, apparently, that the US Athletes participating in this summer's Olympics in London will be wearing uniforms made in China. These reasons are things like "Everything is made in China" and "They don't make clothing in America anyway" and so on and so forth. But there are also reasons that it matters and that team should, in fact, be wearing uniforms made in US shops. Union shops. Did you know that when a political party runs a candidate or pushes an issue, and they make t-shirts, bumper stickers, and other artifacts of rhetoric, they get…

Ethanol Falsehood Examined

Learning is easy. Getting it right is harder. Expunging falsehoods is hardest, but most rewarding. There is a "meme" (using the definition of a meme as something most people in a certain community think whether it is true or not) that to produce one gallon of Ethanol for fuel you have to use some larger number (I've heard two, and I've heard five) gallons of gasoline. In an ideal world there would be farms with giant solar collectors and wind generators. These devices would produce electricity to run distilling machines and hybrid tractors and such. On the farm would be grown GMO plants…

How do you save small town charm?

I've mentioned before that I grew up in Kent, Washington. It was a middling-sized town of 15,000 people way back then, and I rather like small town living, but I didn't like Kent, and I can trace my dislike to one specific event. The town had a classic movie theater, the Vale. As a kid, I loved that theater: we'd go out of our way on our walk home from school to check out the movie posters, anticipating the shows we'd see on the Saturday matinee. It was not an upscale theater, and we got a steady diet of "B" horror movie features — stuff like Die, Monster, Die and Frankenstein Conquers the…

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Obsessive Categorization

We're once again in the "things are in the pipeline, but nothing has been posted recently" mode, which is a good excuse for some Amazon neepery. Since the AP review came out, and was printed in 20-odd papers, the sales rank has climbed back into the four digits, and has spent the last few days hovering around 2,000. This is pretty respectable, and Amazon proudly touts it as being "#1 in Books > Science > Physics > Quantum Theory," which sounds nice. Of course, what does that really mean? If you click through to the "Quantum Theory" subcategory, you'll see that it's a weird…

DeVos Contributed to Dominionists

Except I think it was a different DeVos.  As linked by href="http://markmaynard.com/index.php/2006/09/27/devos_the_domionist" rel="tag">Mark Maynard, the irascibly analytical frontman for the href="http://www.monkeypowertrio.com/" rel="tag">Monkey Power Trio, Rolling Stone has href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/7235393/the_crusaders/">an article that states: ...The godfather of the Dominionists is href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._James_Kennedy">D. James Kennedy [link added], the most influential evangelical you've never heard of... ...While the…

News.

So what would the elementary quantum of solace be? The soliton? I haven't actually seen Quantum of Solace yet, but I'm going to make a point to go at some time this week. The last Bond flick was great, and I have high hopes for this one. Most sequels don't quite live up to their predecessors, but by most accounts this one comes quite close. And this is the year that gave us The Dark Knight, after all. Wall-E is about to be out in a few days, and that is probably the best or second best film of the last year. Seen it yet? If not, for shame. Go buy it. (That's the Blu-Ray version, but…

Sunday Function

...you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk? - Dirty Harry The laws of probability, like most of the mathematical rules that govern the world, are a relatively recent discovery. Ancient people like the Romans loved to gamble as much as we do, and they had at least some idea of how certain kinds of odds worked, but they'd probably have been flummoxed by many of the mathematical tools we use today to study chance. But then again, how many people at your average casino understand how to calculate the probabilities that govern the flow of their money? Well…

Can soccer goalkeepers influence penalty kicks?

Penalty kicks are nearly universally reviled among soccer fans, yet they remain an important part of the game. The sport is so exhausting that extending it beyond 30 minutes of extra time in a playoff game could be dangerous for the players. Typically in playoff or championship matches, tie games get decided by a penalty kick competition. But penalty kicks offer such an advantage to the shooter that it often seems like dumb luck when a goalkeeper manages to make a save. The usual strategy is simply to dive randomly to the left or right, and hope you guessed right. Why not just flip a coin to…

Chimpanzees Are NOT Pets!

You've likely already seen this story all over the news: Chimp's owner calls vicious mauling 'freak thing' STAMFORD, Conn. (AP) -- The owner of a 200-pound chimpanzee that viciously mauled a Stamford woman calls the incident "a freak thing," but says her pet was not a "horrible" animal. Sandra Herold told NBC's "Today Show" in an interview aired Wednesday that Travis, her 14-year-old chimpanzee, was like a son to her. Herold tried to save her friend by stabbing the chimp with a butcher knife and bludgeoning it with a shovel. I have extremely strong emotions concerning this particular issue…

Sex & Science At Sixteen

If you watch prime time tv, music videos, or walk past a magazine stand, it would appear that the average adolescent male has sex on the brain. I never gave it much thought, although regular readers know by now I'm not particularly comfortable with any kind of generalization. We humans are a diverse bunch. If we're to assume the guys are most motivated in pursuing a relationship because of sex, there sure are plenty of anomalies. And isn't our reality hugely the result of cultural norms? Family experience? Social expectations? So uh, no, I don't quite buy research that attempts to…

Sell ScienceBlogs To Microsoft?

Steve Ballmer tells reporters that href="http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/10/ballmer-microso.html">Microsoft will buy 20 companies a year for the next 5 years, paying "between 50 or 100 million to a couple hundred million each."  He also gave his email address, for anyone to use if they have something to sell. So, I went out to my garage to see if I had any old companies laying around.  Nope.   Then it struck me: we could sell ScienceBlogs!   What would Microsoft get in the deal?   A modicum of favorable attention (nobody has ill will toward ScienceBlogs), some positive…

Mommy Monday: Lazy weekends

I think my colleagues are sometimes incredulous that I have lived in Mystery State for almost 5 months now and still have seen nothing of its natural environment.I haven't been to the Mountains or the Water. I haven't even been to State Just to the South, despite it being a mere 30 minutes away. I'd love to go to Mountains, and I'd love to go to Water. I'd love to get out of metropolitan Mystery City for once. My hiking boots still have Northwest mud on them, for crying out loud. Not getting to know the land around me is affecting me personally (I'm having a hard time realizing that this…

The Tao of Revisions (for a Young Author)

Back at the beginning of the month, I boldly announced my intentions to finish all the reviewer comments on a revise-and-resubmit paper. In that post, I calculated that with ~25 comments to address " if I just average one a day, it should be easily manageable." Now look over at the left hand column where the InaDWriMo button is displaying my status. (For the record, as 11/13/2007 it says "1 of 21 completed.") By the count of my ticker, I have hardly made any progress. But I swear I have been working on the revisions. I spent a couple of hours yesterday, and worked on things off and on last…

What Do Iran and California Have in Common?

Answer: they are the top two producing areas in the world of a foodstuff that is getting lots of attention lately for its health benefits. What is this item? Well... ...it originated in the Holy Land and was a favorite of the Queen of Sheba. ...it was first imported to the United States in the 1880s, but didn't really become popular until the early 20th century. ...the first seed planted in America was by a California scientist in 1930, but it didn't mature until twenty years later and wasn't able to be harvested here until 1976! Can you guess what this amazing member of the Sumac family…

Energy Scales

Bacteria are tiny. Compared to our cells, they can seem insignificant. There are about ten times more bacteria cells in your gut *right now* than there are human cells in your entire body, but they only make up about 5% of your mass. They're tiny, but they're successful - they live in places we can't, they can metabolize things we can't, and they're everywhere. Despite this success, there's some things they don't do, like multicellularity, but why? PZ has a great review of a recent paper in Nature that tries to answer that question, so I don't need to recapitulate it, but I have just a couple…

Rep. Bachmann, Leeches And Other Cures

Photo: Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine. When the leech begins its work - using its 360 minuscule teeth to scissor in - he laughs, "Now we are into business!" (Andrew Plucinski, hirudotherapist.) Could leeches help Rep. Michele Bachmann's affliction? This is not a joke, and is not intended in any way to be disrespectful towards Rep. Bachmann's challenge of dealing with migraine headaches, recently reported in the context of her candidacy for President of the United States. Migraines affect an estimated 36 million Americans, regardless of their political opinions. How an…

More details emerge in Texas nurse whistleblower affair

The story of the Texas nurses who were fired and prosecuted for reporting a flaky doctor just keeps getting better. This case was surprising in that it at first seemed to be a clear abuse of power by local officials but on deeper exploration involved a whole army of unorthodox medical thinkers (my prior coverage of the case is here).  This case was surprising in that it at first seemed to be a clear abuse of power by local officials  but on deeper exploration involved a whole army of unorthodox medical thinkers. In Kermit, TX, two nurses at a small community hospital registered complaints…

"I do believe in spooks. I do believe in spooks. I do! I do! I do!"

Actually, I don't believe in "spooks," ESP, alien abductions, or much of the other paranormal rot that crops up so often this time of year, but apparently 24% of 1,013 polled adults do. While I take issue with surveys asking a relatively insignificant amount of people their opinion and then projecting those numbers on the whole of the population, I have run into many people who have some, erm, interesting ideas about rather ordinary phenomena. I've been told that cats can detect human souls, that saber-tooth cats were aquatic predators and bit their prey sideways, that there are living…

On rating risk

In discussions of the subprime mortgage crisis and the CDS crisis which grew out of it, a lot is made of the failure of federal regulators, and a bit is made of the failure of securities rating firms (who blew it by giving disastrously risky products very safe ratings). The latter failure is often excused on the basis that there wasn't enough background data to accurately model the risks of these new products, though it is rightly noted that the firms had a financial interest in turning a blind eye to any data which would have led them to produce less rosy estimates of risk. Similar…

Thoughts from Kairo

From Nadia El-Awady's twitter feed on this first full day of freedom in Egypt: An amazing thing happened yesterday. My country is free. For the first time in its history it is free. (cont) This came about in the most wonderful way. We did not have a military coup. A foreign country did not invade us to bring us democracy (cont) Normal people like you and me went out to the streets peacefully and demanded their freedom. An amazing thing happened yesterday. Those normal people were faced with tremendous hardship in the process. At times they were attacked with brute police force and some died…

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

I saw the newest Transformers movie today. In terms of the cast, there were really only two who I felt were necessary in any way to the development of the film. Optimus Prime and Megan Fox.* Slate has a spoiler filled review which hits many of the aspects which I think are relevant. I don't watch many films in the theater, on average about 1 every 6 months. I've loaded up this spring since I saw the Star Trek reboot. I'm not a huge Trekkie, I've seen most of TOS & TNG episodes, but not so much of Voyager or DS9, and hardly any of Enterprise. I also didn't watch many of the films. But I'…

What Not to Wear, Farmer Edition

A reader, who asks to remain anonymous writes me that her graduate school boyfriend (soon hopefully to be fiance) has decided he wants a farm. He's looking for jobs in rural areas, and wants them to buy land together. The boyfriend grew up in rural Albania and is apparently pretty comfortable in agriculture. My reader, who grew up in suburban Michigan, is not. This is all new to her - she thought she was marrying a plain old potential academic (botany). The thought, as she puts it, that he might look at real plants in the dirt, rather than under a microscope and that said dirt might come…

Friday Fun: We all believed in science at some point...or did we?

The world is going to hell in a hand basket. But at least we can laugh as we're sucked relentlessly into the Hellmouth. Maybe if we all collectively understood science and evidence better, the path to Hell wouldn't be quite so straight and narrow. So maybe that's what's making me think of these particular funny bits today. And by funny I mean so funny in hurts. First up, we have retired basketball superstar Shaquille O'Neal, who apparently really and truly believes the world is flat. He has a doctorate in Education, by the way, which I just can't even.   Shaquille O'Neal agrees with Kyrie…

Fish owls in reverse

By popular request, in this and in a few later articles I'll be reposting the rest of the Ten Bird Meme text originally posted at Tet Zoo ver 1 in 2006 (where appropriate, I've added corrections and updates). The 'Ten Bird' birds I've covered so far are Ifrita, Shoebill, Tibetan ground-pecker, and Flying steamer duck. And here we continue with... Blakiston's fish owl Bubo blakistoni [images from here]. If you think evolutionary convergences are cool, then you'll love reversals. Morphological features or aspects of behaviour that have been modified during the evolution of a lineage don't have…

It had wool, and armour plates, a massive beak, horns, and it smelled veeeeery bad: whatever happened to the Tecolutla monster?

Yay for day.... (counts) ... four of sea monster week. This time another familiar carcass image... well, familiar to me anyway. This remarkable object/shapeless hunk is the Tecolutla monster, collected from Palmar de Susana between Tecolutla and Nautla, Veracruz, Mexico, in 1969. Initially encountered by a group of farmers who chanced upon it in the dead of night* (apparently when it was still alive), they kept it secret for a week but eventually informed the Tecolutla mayor, Professor César Guerrero. Believing it to be a crashed plane (this story gets better and better), he organised a…

The Big Monty Hall Book Gets Reviewed in Science

And mostly favorably, too. You might need a subscription to read the review, alas. The reviewer is Donald Granberg, a sociologist (now retired) at the University of Missouri. He published several papers on the MHP during the nineties. I liked this part of the review: The author does a masterful job of tracing the problem back to its origin. And this part: One difficulty with word problems is their ambiguity. Rosenhouse does a superb job of reducing, if not eliminating, this source of endless argumentation with his canonical version. Not to mention this part: The Monty Hall Problem…

Does the demographic transition have a biological cause?

The demographic transition -- the tendency for richer societies to have fewer rather than more children -- is, I think, most often attributed to social causes. For a variety of reasons -- because each child costs more, because they are more likely to survive and take of parents in old age, because of social stigma associated with large families, because of birth control, etc. -- couples in richer countries often choose to have 2 children rather than 10. This demographic transition accounts for the increasing age of the population in Western countries, as I discussed in an earlier post. I…

Entertaining ENGINEERING.COM Returns as Festival Sponsor!

ENGINEERING.COM, with its mission to inform, inspire and entertain the world's engineers -- and future engineers -- is returning as a key sponsor of the USA Science & Engineering Festival and Expo in 2014. Widely known for having its fingers directly on the pulse of the fascinating, ever-evolving realm of engineering innovation, ENGINEERING.COM will help expand the scope and reach of Festival excitement, education and inspiration by serving once again as the event's official videographer, which will include capturing the bevy of high-profile activity taking place during Expo finale…

Occupational Health News Roundup

Wage theft – when employers fail to pay workers what they’ve earned – has been in the news lately: In a lawsuit that could become a class-action suit, two former Apple store employees allege that the company failed to pay employees for time spent waiting for bag searches – time they say the employer required them to spend at the worksite, but for which they were off the clock and not paid. In California, a joint enforcement action by the California Labor Commissioner’s office and CalOSHA (part of the multi-agency Labor Enforcement Task Force) at a Holiday Inn Express construction site has…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Interaction Of Just Two Genes Governs Coloration Patterns In Mice: Biologists at Harvard University and the University of California, San Diego, have found that a simple interaction between just two genes determines the patterns of fur coloration that camouflage mice against their background, protecting them from many predators. The work, published recently in the journal PLoS Biology, marks one of the few instances in which specific genetic changes have been linked to an organism's ability to survive in the wild. More... Birds Learn To Fly With A Little Help From Their Ancestors: A…

Good News for Endangered Species

Klamath River, Oregon. Photo by Dave Menke, USFWS. Click on image for a MUCH larger view in its own window. Do you wonder what happened with that online letter to the US Senate that I posted to my blog awhile ago, soliciting scientists' signatures regarding the upcoming rewrite of the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA)? I finally have some good news to share with you. As some of you might remember, the 1973 ESA is currently being considered for reauthorization by congress, and a rewrite by California Congressman Richard Pombo, a Republican who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee,…

The Ultimate Proof of Creation!

We're in big trouble on our trip to the Creation "Museum", people. We're going on 7 August, and on that very same day, they are planning to present… THE ULTIMATE PROOF OF CREATION!!! What is the Ultimate Proof of Creation, you might ask? There is a defense for creation that is powerful, conclusive, and has no true rebuttal. As such, it is an irrefutable argument--an "ultimate proof" of the Christian worldview. This presentation will equip you to engage an unbeliever, even a staunch atheist, using proven techniques. Holy crap! It's a trap! I'm going to be bringing along a whole mob of young…

Birding Babylon: A Soldier's Journal from Iraq

Birding Babylon -- does the title of this book sound familiar to you? If so, then you, like me, are one of thousands of people who have been reading the author's blog with the same name. Birding Babylon: A Soldier's Journal from Iraq by Jonathan Trouern-Trend (2006, Sierra Club Books), is one of only a handful of published books out there that began as a series of entries "posted" on a public blog instead of a proposal sitting on an agent's desk. But even when it was "only" a blog, excerpts were quoted in the media and the author was interviewed at least once (by National Public Radio) while…

Obsolete lab skills are what we teach best

Bora had an enjoyable post yesterday on obsolete lab skills. I can empathize because I have a pretty good collection of obsolete lab skills myself. These days I'm rarely (okay, never) called upon to do rocket immunoelectrophoresis, take blood from a rat's tail, culture tumor cells in the anterior eye chamber of a frog, locate obscure parasites in solutions of liquid nitrogen, or inoculate Kalanchoe leaves with pathogenic bacteria. (Wow! It sounds like I worked for the three witches in MacBeth! Fire burn and cauldron bubble!) I don't entirely think that my lab skills are "obsolete." I…

Book Review: Erotic Refugees

I'll tell you two things up front: this book is my friend's first published novel; and I would have read it with great enjoyment even if I had no idea who the guy was. Paddy Kelly classifies it astutely as “Dick lit / Romantic comedy”: it's Bridget Jones or Sex and the City, only from a male perspective. The plot revolves around the love lives of two young Irishmen in 00s Stockholm: one a neurotic recent divorcé and part-time single dad, the other a carefree ladies man. They've both ended up in Sweden for love, as “erotic refugees”. And here's a freebie for future literature scholars trying…