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Reading Diary: Les Rêveurs lunaires: Quatre génies qui ont changé l'Histoire by Cédric Villani and Baudoin

A bit of a change of pace for me and my reviewing habits -- a book written in French! Of course, books about science or scientists are pretty typical review fodder for me. And even more typically, graphic novels about science or scientists are incredibly common for me to review. But books in French? This is a first. During my recent month-long stay in Paris (sabbatical life FTW!) one of the things I really enjoyed about the City of Light was the profusion of bookstores. Bookstores, record stores, bandes dessinées stores, every neighbourhood had a least a handful of good ones. Which is in…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 150 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays): A Blog Around The Clock: Yes, Archaea also have circadian clocks! A Blog Around The Clock: Why social insects do not suffer from ill effects of rotating and night shift work? A Blog Around The Clock:…

Open Laboratory 2010 - submissions so far

The list is growing fast - check the submissions to date and get inspired to submit something of your own - an essay, a poem, a cartoon or original art. The Submission form is here so you can get started. Under the fold are entries so far, as well as buttons and the bookmarklet. The instructions for submitting are here. You can buy the last four annual collections here. You can read Prefaces and Introductions to older editions here. ============================ A Blog Around The Clock: What does it mean that a nation is 'Unscientific'? A Blog Around The Clock: My latest scientific paper:…

Study finds high support for public health interventions, few worries about encroaching 'nanny state'

by Kim Krisberg When it comes to public health law, it seems the least coercive path may also be the one of least resistance. In a new study published this month in Health Affairs, researchers found that the public does, indeed, support legal interventions aimed at curbing noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and obesity. However, they're more likely to support interventions that create the conditions that help people make the healthy choice on their own. They're less likely to back laws and regulations perceived as infringing on individual liberties. It's a delicate…

Trump Won. What Next?

Remember those clowns a few weeks ago? The scary clowns? I think they were trying to tell us something. Did you know that 235,248,000 people are eligible to vote in the United States? Fewer than 120,000,000 of those people bothered to show up to vote this year, and turnout was considered high. Of those, about half, or one quarter of the voting population, elected a clown as our leader, because the clown promised to take steps to ensure a continued white majority in the United States. That’s what happened in my world last night. What happened in your world? Between the bouts of…

Who Really Needs Math?

The Washington Post recently published an op-ed by mathematician G. V. Ramanathan. The subject? Mathematics education. It is a mix of good points and bad points. Let's have a look. Twenty-seven years have passed since the publication of the report “A Nation at Risk,” which warned of dire consequences if we did not reform our educational system. This report, not unlike the Sputnik scare of the 1950s, offered tremendous opportunities to universities and colleges to create and sell mathematics education programs. Unfortunately, the marketing of math has become similar to the marketing of…

Boobquake: Valid science communication event or just a bunch of boobs ... quaking?

This is a somewhat stream of consciousness response to an interview of Michael McRae by Tokenskeptic followed by an interview with Desiree Schell of Skeptically Speaking. Please go listen to the podcast, it is quite good. How much change has happened in the way the world views crazy religious beliefs because of boobquake? How much change in the way we cause change has happened because of the critique of boobquake? I'd say a little of each, but not much of either. I think that the critique of boobquake is somewhat disproportionate to the event. Boobquake was clearly never meant to be that…

Another enemy of the Hitler Zombie

Via Ed Brayton, I've learned of an interesting commentary by Sasha Abramsky on a topic that's near and dear to my heart. Well, its' more like a major pet peeve, one that irritates me so much that two years ago I even created a character who's made regular, albeit increasingly infrequent, appearances on this blog. I'm talking, of course, about the Hitler Zombie, everybody's favorite undead Führer whose chomp on a pundit's brain results in stupid and ridiculously overblown Nazi analogies. Indeed, such analogies irritate me sufficiently that at times my attacks on them have been described by…

Oh, no! GMOs are going to kill your babies and permanently change your gene expression!

Heidi Stevenson amuses me. I know, I know, I've started a previous post with exactly this sentence a mere month ago, but it's so damned appropriate that I can't help but try it again. A homeopath (which means that she's reality-challenged to begin with), she's produced some of the most hilariously off-base, pseudoscientific, and downright antiscientific articles I've ever seen. Examples include the times when she launched a truly nonsensical attack on Stephen Barrett of Quackwatch, lectured scientists about anecdotal evidence, or, most hilariously of all, utterly misunderstood the concept of…

The Tragic Sense and the Need for Connection

Dave Pollard's latest at Salon is an interesting cry in the dark about how hard it is to connect with others when you see collapse coming. My guess is that some of my readers will respond with a great deal of identification, while others will be annoyed by Pollard - but I think it bears some considering. For me, what's interesting about this is the most basic and ordinary social challenge - because this is a painful, hard and ugly place to do the most important work of adaptation from - building community. But in observing that it is painful, hard and ugly, I do not mean to imply it is…

We'll always have Paris

If you are upset about Trump and upset about Trump pulling the US out of the Paris agreement, please let me help you get through the day. Trump announcing that the US is pulling out of Paris does not mean the end of Paris, the end of action on climate change, or much else about global warming. I'll explain why in a moment. The US pulling out of Paris could even be interpreted as better than the US staying in. I'll explain that too. I'm not saying that Trump should have pulled out, I'm just saying that at the moment, if you are deeply concerned about the climate and the future, which you…

Promoting a scientific mind

Posted by LisaJ I find it astounding in this day and age, with the many grand scientific discoveries and advances we've seen and in our increasingly technologically dependent world, that a large proportion of our population (at least in Canada and the US, with which I have more personal experience) seems uninterested in understanding and learning about science. We have a wealth of information available at our fingertips and an educational system with the potential to accommodate any type of scientific mind, but yet we science-minded individuals are not in the majority. We are a culture that…

By the Pricking of My Thumb

Something Wicked This Way Comes Friday, August 13th the Astronomy Decadal Survey Report is released... Good thing we're not superstitious, eh? The Decadal Survey is a clever thing, that Astronomy invented. Every 10 years, natch, a panel of astronomers, and sub-panels, and sub-sub-panels, and ad-hoc-sub-sub-sub-panels, get together under the leadership of a senior and unimpeachable scientist, and prioritize US national efforts for the field for the next decade. Last year was a decadal year, and Roger Blandford (Stanford) chaired it. The panel is run by the National Research Council and…

Occupational Health News Roundup

Americans increasingly want to know that their steaks were humanely raised or their produce was organically grown, but what about the people who picked that produce or cared for those cows? Where’s the concern for the workers behind our food? Reporter Stephen Lurie explored that question in an article published last week in Vox. He writes: Organic and environmentally sustainable certifications lead consumers to supposedly wholesome products, but they hold no guarantees about the wholesomeness of the companies that produce those goods. Sitting down to a farm-to-table meal at a chic restaurant…

Evolution vs. Lit Crit (Part One)

The Autumn 2006 issue of The American Scholar features a lengthy article entitled, “Getting it All Wrong: Biolculture Critiques Cultural Critique. It's author is Brian Boyd, a professor of English at The University of Auckland in New Zealand. The premise of the article is that English professors have rendered themselves irrelevant and even a bit silly by refusing to acknowledge the role of biology, especially evolution, in shaping human culture and knowledge. In particular that branch of study known as literary theory comes off looking foolish because it makes pronouncements completely…

A Constructive Rebuttal To "The Body Impolitic"

Recently, an older post I made regarding AIDS in Africa was included in a Feminism carnival. The Body Impolitic saw fit to take my assesment of the situation to task, and I feel the need to respond to what I believe is a gross mis-representation of my post. Specifically, that it was somehow derogatory to people of size. My post was this: As more and more women are acquiring AIDS in South Africa, a new trend is emerging: in order to not look HIV positive, women are becoming obese in large numbers. According to the Independent Online, half of all women in South Africa are overweight, and almost…

Questionable Classic: Boy Was That Stupid

Since I'm currently out of town, original content is going to be in short supply for a few days. Fortunately, there are a few things I've written over the years that I think people might still enjoy (or at least tolerate). Since they didn't get read much when I first posted them, I thought I'd give them another chance. This one threatens to get a bit recursive - it's a trip down memory lane to look at another trip down memory lane. It was originally posted at the old blog on 6 September 2005. Just when I had begun to think that we had pretty much scraped the bottom of the barrel of…

Ode to Rocky

A nostalgic post, reposted. Nostalgically. Analyzing 30 years of data detailing a large rabies virus outbreak among North American raccoons, researchers at Emory University have revealed how initial demographic, ecological and genetic processes simultaneously shaped the virus?s geographic spread over time. The study appears online in the Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences. That?s the start of an interesting report on Science Daily. And it reminds me of living through the Great Rabid Raccoon Outbreak in Massachusetts about 15 years back. (Not to be confused with this rabies…

Anthropology of Charlie Sheen's "Jezebels"

Today/NBC Source. Charlie Sheen with his live-in girlfriends Rachel Oberlin, center, and model Natalie Kenly, left. The Charlie Sheen media storm this week has invoked a wide range of responses, from the inane to the profane to the profound. One commentator referred to this coverage as a reality TV "Rorschach test" {those ink blots that reveal psychological insights, some believe.) Frankly, I did not pay attention beyond the ambient noise produced by my TV set while getting ready for a new day, until I came across an Op-Ed in The New York Times by Anna Holmes, "The Disposable Woman."…

An Archival Treasure: Singing Mice?

Sometimes, when trolling through your institution's journal subscriptions online, you wander into a treasure trove. I happened upon such a treasure trove recently: the Journal of Animal Behavior, which was published for just six years, between 1911 and 1916. The studies described in this journal were being conducted at a time when experimental psychology was just emerging as a serious scientific discipline. In 1881, for example, Wilhelm Wundt organized the first scientific journal devoted to psychological science. The first laboratory for experimental psychology was established at Yale…

How I spent the last few days

I am sad to say I missed the American Atheists 2013 National Convention — it sounds like it was a blast, but I was booked up with a series of talks out in lovely warm sunny Seattle. Here's what I've been up to. On Wednesday, I talked to Seattle Atheists on "Moving Atheism Beyond Science". I argued that modern atheism is built on the twin pillars of anti-religion and science, and not that there's anything wrong with either of those, but that we have to have a wider foundation. In particular, I defied the recent trend to broaden science to encompass morality — I see that more as a conservative…

MythBusters - Testing Bullet Proof and Bullet Speeds

On MythBusters this week, Adam and Jamie tested the bullet-proofness of various objects. The one that sticks in my mind is the ipod. The said there was a report of a solider being shot by an AK-47, but he was saved because the bullet hit his ipod. To test this, Adam shot an AK-47 at an ipod and it went through. Their conclusion was that he was also wearing body armor. I am not sure I like that conclusion. Why would someone report that the ipod saved him if he was also wearing body armor? Maybe they would, but not sure. I was thinking, maybe the bullet went through the ipod because they…

Bio Databases 2014

By @finchtalk (Todd Smith) In 2014 and beyond Finchtalk will be contributing to Digitalbio’s blog at this site. We kick off 2014 with Finchtalk’s traditional post on the annual database issue from Nucleic Acids Research (NAR). Biological data and databases are ever expanding. This year was no exception as the number of databases tracked by NAR grew from 1512 to 1552. In the leadoff introduction [1] the authors summarize this year’s issue and the status of the NAR index. The 21st issue includes 185 articles with 58 new databases and 123 updates. In the 1552 database repository, 193 had their…

Clubs, spurs, spikes and claws on the hands of birds (part I)

All too few people seem to realise that birds have hands*; it's just that these parts of the body are - normally - mostly obscured from view by the feathers. While the main role of the bird hand is to support remiges (the big wing feathers), less well known is that many birds possess claws, spurs, spikes and knobs on their hands and wrists that they use in offence or defence [avian hand skeletons below will be identified and discussed in part II]. * Two groups of birds atrophied and eventually lost their hands during evolution. Hesperornithines - a group of toothed, foot-propelled diving…

Birds in the News 125

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Common merganser, Mergus merganser, and chicks. Orphaned image [larger view]. People Hurting Birds The number of migratory songbirds returning to North America has gone into sharp decline due to the unregulated use of highly toxic pesticides and other chemicals across Latin America. Ornithologists blame the demand for out-of-season fruit and vegetables and other crops in North America and Europe for the destruction of tens of millions of passerine birds. By some counts, half of the songbirds that warbled across…

Transitions

Whenever I spot some old thread suddenly getting a surge of new comments, I can guess what has happened: a creationist or two has come to visit. That's happening right now on this very short article that mentions the peppered moths; we're up above 200 comments now, and it seems to have very little to do with moths anymore. Instead, we've got a creationist complaining about the absence of transitional species and the Cambrian 'explosion', with a little quote-mining of Richard Dawkins. You commenters are taking care of him ably, but there are just a few things I want to mention, and a few…

Load-balancing of goals in the prefrontal cortex (aka, why you want a third hemisphere)

How does the brain deal with the need to pursue multiple goals simultaneously, particularly if they are associated with different reward values? One idea, perhaps far-fetched, is that the brain might divvy up responsibility for tracking these goals & rewards: for example, the left hemisphere might respond to a primary goal, and the right hemisphere to secondary goals. To me, this kind of simple division of labor smells like lots of ridiculous and outdated hemispheric asymmetry theories. That's why I'm dumbfounded that new evidence provides startling support for it, as reported in a…

Does simply brandishing a gun cause attackers to flee 98% of the time?

[On Sep 14 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof. I also emailed it to John Lott. ] Way back in 1993 in talk.politics.guns, C. D. Tavares wrote: The answer is that the gun never needs to be fired in 98% of the instances of a successful self-defense with a gun. The criminals just leave abruptly, instead." When I queried him about this, he quickly corrected his error: Kleck says in the magazine "Social Problems" (2/88): "there were about 8,700-16,600 non-fatal, legally permissible woundings of criminals by gun armed civilians" annually, and "the rest of the one million estimated…

Is it all over for corals?

Photo by Dr. William Precht. A recent study published in Science Express by Dr. Kent Carpenter of Old Dominion University and a consortium of nearly thirty coral reef ecologists has determined that one-third of coral face increased extinction threat due to climate change and local anthropogenic influences. Carpenter refers to the current problem as "the human meteor"; in reference to the meteor impacts that helped send the dinosaurs hurtling towards extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Era. At that time, one third of extant coral species went extinct along with dinosaurs. Online…

Science and Math With an 'Edge' -- Learning Is Best When It's Messy and Unpredictable

By Larry Bock Founder and organizer, USA Science & Engineering Festival The world runs on science and math, but let's face it, to get this across effectively to young students we sometimes have to get a little, well... messy. No one knows this better than math and science author Sean Connolly who's gained a reputation with kids and teachers alike for breathing life into such potentially stuffy scientific tenets as Boyle's Law and Bernoulli's Principle through hands-on demonstrations and experiments that involve everything from potato guns and cola geysers to film-canister rockets and…

How the flu virus performs cap snatching

Nature has just published another new paper on the basic biology of influenza virus. Unlike other recent papers it doesn't purport to reveal the secret of why some flu (e.g., H5N1, 1918 H1N1) is so virulent and "normal" seasonal influenza much less so. Instead it involves a process and structures that are the same in both bird and human influenza viruses, which is one reason to pay special attention to it. The structural mechanism is important enough to be retained unaltered in viruses with diverse host preferences and it also becomes a potential target for drugs or vaccines that would work…

Shift work: Marketing medication for symptoms instead of addressing the hazard

“Shift work refers to work that takes place outside of traditional 9-to-5 daytime hours. If you work nights or rotating shifts, you are a shift worker. Many people who work shifts are at risk for developing shift work disorder (SWD) and may experience excessive sleepiness (ES) on the job.” So says the website designed to market the drug known as Nuvigil, sold by Cephalon, a subsidiary of Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, Ltd. Approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2007 to treat narcolepsy and obstructive sleep apnea and the excessive sleepiness that may come with working a…

Isopods At The Gate: Interview with Kevin Zelnio

Kevin Zelnio celebrates invertebrates on his blog The Other 95% and, at the second Science Blogging Conference four weeks ago, it was announced that he has joined the Deep Sea News blog and thus officially became a SciBling (with all the associated hazing rituals involving beer). Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your scientific background? What is your Real Life job? I'm a PhD student at Penn State hopefully in my final year. My scientific training is in invertebrate zoology and marine ecology. I…

Oh My God, the ACLU are Terrorists!

In today's Carnival of the Vanities is a link to an article on this blog about a strange church/state ruling. The facts of the case are that the Byron, California school district has a very controversial 3 week unit in their World History class for middle school students in which, in order to teach them about the history of Islam, they have students memorize and recite Muslim prayers from the Quran, simulate Muslim worship and even participate in some sort of Jihad game that simulates the Crusades. This naturally got some parents quite irate and they filed a lawsuit to stop it, assisted by…

Terrorists are Writing Our School Curriculum!

In perusing Jen Shroder's hysterical website, I came across this little gem, which I debunked back in January. It claims that this alleged terrorist, Alamoudi, helped write the guidelines on religion in schools that allows schools to induct kids into Islam. It's complete and utter nonsense, of course, and it's based upon a Newsmax article entitled Jailed Terror Suspect Helped ACLU Draft Schools' Anti-Christian Rules. Big shock that Shroder swallowed this bunch of nonsense hook, line and sinker, without bothering to check it for accuracy. Here is what I wrote in response to another blogger…

Ruse Defends the Independence View

Philosopher Michael Ruse has an article in the current issue of the academic journal Zygon. It is called, “Why I Am an Accommodationist and Proud Of It.” In it, he proposes to defend the notion that science and religion are simply independent of one another, and therefore cannot really be in conflict. The article is not freely available online, but I will transcribe a few bits as we go. It is nothing that Ruse hasn't been saying for years, however. The paper goes on for fourteen pages, but it is ultimately nothing more than God of the gaps stuff. There are certain questions that science…

This Is Your Brain...On Art

This is an image of a human brain.  It is constructed using an imaging method known as diffusion spectrum imaging.  The technique has been discussed at href="http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2008/07/hi_res_brain_topology_map.php">Neurophilosophy and href="http://anthropology.net/2008/07/01/diffusion-spectrum-imaging-used-to-map-the-structural-core-of-human-cerebral-cortex/">Anthropology.net; both posts were based upon a paper in href="http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0060159">PLOS Biology. The image above is…

The mercury militia go to court

I've been a bit remiss when it comes to writing about the lunacy in which it is claimed that vaccines cause autism, allegedly due to the mercury in the thimerosal preservative that was in most childhood vaccines until the end of 2002, when it was removed from all but flu vaccines. It turns out that the class action suit by parents who think that vaccines caused their children's autism will be going to court in June. Hearings for this suit, known as the Autism Omnibus, will mark a new phase in the pseudoscientific pursuit of "compensation" for nonexistent "vaccine injuries." Even though…

Global warming skeptics: Punk'd!

Hilarious. Even though I risk bringing back some of the anthropogenic global warming "skeptics" (in reality pseudoskeptics) here, this is too rich not to mention, because it reminds me of how advocates of all stripes of pseudoscience react, particularly advocates of alternative medicine, most of whom wouldn't recognize a well-designed study if it bit them on the behind. Apparently, Rush Limbaugh and the usual suspects fell for a rather obvious hoax in the form of an online journal article: Daniel A Klein*, Mandeep J Gupta*, Philip Cooper**, Arne FR Jansson**. Carbon dioxide production by…

The monster says, "Arbeit macht frei"

November 4, 2008 11:15 PM EST A mousy little man sat, shaking his head in his hands, limned against the wall by the flickering blue glow of a flat screen TV. On the television, a huge crowd swelled in Grant Park in Chicago. The excitement was palpable, with a constant dull roar of the crowd that swelled periodically as the crowd thought that they saw the man whom they'd come to see. The mousy man muttered, "How could this have happened?" He slumped back into his chair. "How?" On the television, the object of his hatred strode upon the stage in front of the adoring crowd and began to speak.…

The Sustainable Marriage

I'll be offline much of the next few days for the Passover holiday. This is a subject we're talking about in the Adapting-in-Place class, and one that comes up a lot - how do you make environmental changes with a spouse who isn't on board? What happens when this strains your marriage? I get emails more or less constantly on this subject: "I want to prepare for peak oil/live more sustainably/change my life to deal with climate change and my spouse (and/or the rest of my family) don't want to, or don't think it is important enough." This is something I've heard over and over - marriages…

Reviewing the TMobile G1 - aka the Google Android Phone

Once again, please don't forget about our DonorsChoose drive! Please click in the panel to you left, and go make a donation to help schools get the supplies they need to be able to teach math! Most people must have heard by now that about a week ago, T-mobile released the first Android based phone, with software by Google. I've been using an Android as a tester for about 6 weeks, and I'm now allowed to talk about it, so I thought I'd post a review from the viewpoint of an extreme geek. Please excuse the low quality of the images; I took the pictures using my iPhone. Obviously, there's a…

A Curmudgeon's and Improv's Guide to Outliers: Introduction

So I picked up Malcolm Gladwell's newest book Outliers: The Story of Success the other day, as I'm sure many of you will be doing on your next trip to the airport (where stands of Gladwell's hardcover book, marked down thirty percent, block your every exit through the already cramped airport bookstores.) Gladwell's books are fun, but I find myself often disagreeing with his analysis, so I thought it would be entertaining to take my time reading his latest and jot down my thoughts as I progress. Well "entertaining" in that "holy shit dude you are pedantic" sort of way. Note that I really do…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: How can you make acupuncture even more unbelievable? Oh, yes, add "harmonic" healing!

Vibrations. After a year and a half of doing Your Friday Dose of Woo every week with only a couple of breaks, it's all I can feel or hear sometimes. Vibrations. What is it about woo and "vibrations," "harmonics," or "waves," anyway? It doesn't matter if it's sound waves or electromagnetic waves. Somehow the denizens of Woo World seem to think that vibrations have special powers beyond what physicists tell us that they have, such as the ability to transmit energy. Hardly a week goes by, it seems, when I don't encounter claims by woo-meisters such as being able to "raise cellular vibration"…

An anonymous Canadian foundation grants $4 million to study "integrative oncology"

Supporters of science-based medicine and keeping pseudoscience out of medicine have a few years to prepare for an onslaught of crappy studies “proving” the value of “integrative” oncology. No doubt at this point you’re wondering just what the heck Orac is talking about. I will tell you. It involves an institution we’ve encountered before and a naturopath we’ve met before, specifically the Ottawa Integrative Cancer Centre and Dugald Seely, ND (translation: Not a Doctor), FABNO (translation: Not an Oncologist). Somehow, Dugald Seely and his brother Andrew have somehow scored some sweet,…

The Tribeca Film Festival's disingenuous excuse for screening an antivaccine propaganda film by Andrew Wakefield

I wasn't sure if I was going to write about this again so soon, because one post seemed adequate to describe the massive dump that the Tribeca Film Festival just took on reality by announcing the screening of a pseudoscientific antivaccine propaganda film by The One Antivaccine Quack To Rule Them All, Andrew Wakefield. Any skeptic with an interest in medicine and vaccines knows that he's one man most responsible for creating the myth that the MMR vaccine can cause autism. As a result, MMR vaccine uptake plummeted in the UK, and the measles came roaring back. I speculated why this might have…

Q&A: Dr. Boris Behncke answers your Italian volcano questions, Part 2

Here is Part 2 of the Q&A with Dr. Boris Behncke. You can also check out Part 1. Undated image of Stromboli in eruption. (Shirakawa Akira) 1. Would a large scale eruption (VEI 5 or greater) of Mt. Etna like the ones occurred in 122 BC and 1500 BC (disputed) be possible again in the foreseeable future? Or is the volcano slowly "dying" although the last eruption ended in July 2009 has been one of the longest ever recorded? 2. Not really related to volcanism, but close: does INGV plan to distribute seismic data from seismic stations of its Rete Sismica Nazionale, including stations from…

So, you want to be an astrophysicist? Part 1 redux.

You are at university. Do you like stars, and stuff? We revisit old ruminations on career paths 'cause it is topical... Another rehashed blast from the past. Should you do astronomy as an undergrad? (the following is in part shamelessly cribbed from a colleague’s previous freshman seminar for our majors): Do you like stars and stuff? If not, you probably should look for an alternative to astronomy, on the general principle that at this stage of life you should at least try to do things you actually like. If you do, good for you. Now, do you have the aptitude? Professional astrophysics/…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 160 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays): A Blog Around The Clock: Yes, Archaea also have circadian clocks! A Blog Around The Clock: Why social insects do not suffer from ill effects of rotating and night shift work? A Blog…

Bill Gates steps in it in a good way, declares vaccine-autism link an "absolute lie"

I never thought I'd be praising Bill Gates, being a Mac person and all and not being at all fond of Microsoft, but it's impossible for me not to in the wake of a recent interview Gates did with CNN's chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta. As you probably know, since retiring from Microsoft, Bill Gates has dedicated himself to philanthropy in the form of the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. One of the greatest works of this foundation has been to initiate vaccination programs in the Third World. These activities are likely to save thousands, if not millions, of lives over…