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"Seeing the Tree for the Forest"

One of my favorite recent sub-features at McSweeney's is Lawrence Weschler's Convergences Contest. I am stunned yet again with today's artful entry (#28), sent to L.W. by Walter Murch: [caption from the site: "Logging trees in a Swedish forest, as seen from the air"]

Dow Apologizes for Bhopal Disaster on BBC News

Okay, so this is actually from last year's anniversary of the Bhopal disaster. And it's not actually a representative from Dow, but Andy Bichlbaum of The Yes Men. But wouldn't it be nice if the perpetrators of this tragedy actually had come clean?

KPFA Morning Show

I'll be on this show from 8:30 to 9:00 am PT, or 11:30 to 12 pm ET today. I realize that's not a lot of notice. But you should be able to figure out how to listen in from here....

Photo of the Day #48: Gorilla Skull

Yet another skull from the AMNH Hall of Primates, this time of a gorilla. This skull is quite different from those of the other apes I've put up recently, especially in the presence of a prominent sagittal crest for the attachment of jaw muscles.

Want

Via Laughing Squid, we learn that students at the UK's Strode College were tasked with building outfits from cardboard packaging, and one created this whimsical number. If they'd just incorporate the technology from these prosthetic tentacles, this would be the greatest thing ever.

Where do the foreign born work?

The New York Times has an awesome interactive map which shows which sectors the foreign born from various countries are concentrated. Nothing too surprising, but nice to see it quantitatively displayed. Below the fold screenshots from "Computer software developers" and "Skilled construction workers."

Birdbooker Report 90

tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books "How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird literature." --Edgar Kincaid The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…

Environment and Humanities Weekly Channel Highlights 9-30-08

In this post: the large versions of the Environment and Humanities channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week. Environment. A glacier off the coast of Patagonia. From Flickr, by angela7dreams Humanities. De humani corporis fabrica in Hunting Library, San Marino, CA. From Flickr, by brewbooks Reader comments of the week: It wouldn't be a week at the Environment Channel without some global warming news, and this time it comes courtesy of James Hrynyshyn at Island of Doubt. James looked into All you ever wanted to know about the Global Carbon Budget but were…

Medicine, Brain and Technology Channel Update 9-26-08

In this post: the large versions of the Medicine and Health, Brain and Behavior and Technology channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week. Medicine and Health. From Flickr, by sevenbirches Brain and Behavior. From Flickr, by Mandroid Technology. Control electronics for the sidereal tracker stepper motor. From Flickr, by PhliarShamim Reader comments of the week: Things got a little sexy at Scienceblogs over the last few weeks with both the Brain and Behavior and the Medicine and Health channels looking at a subject Scienceblog readers are all too…

Making chocolate and biomanufacturing

Theo chocolate is situated in a neighborhood called Fremont, in the city of Seattle, in the former Redhook brewery. I used to consult for Redhook in my microbiology days, when I had access to a -80°C freezer and a proper microscope, so the building has a comfortable feel and some pleasant memories. These days the bar is gone and the aromas are more like roasting coffee than brewing beer. Most of machinery, though, is surprisingly similar. The equipment is very much the same as the equipment you'd find in many kinds of biotech manufacturing facilities. There are giant scales, fermenters,…

How does a single nucleotide change make influenza virus resistant to a drug?

Two protein structures from an avian influenza virus are shown below. One form of the protein makes influenza virus resistant to Oseltamivir (Tamiflu®) Don't worry, these proteins aren't from H5N1, but they do come from a related influenza virus that also infects birds. technorati tags: molecular models, protein structures, influenza, bioinformatics, Cn3D One protein structure is from a strain that is sensitive to an anti-viral drug called "Tamiflu®". The other structure is from the same virus, except there's a slight difference. A single base change in the viral RNA changed the codon that…

Lady Hope was a piker

This is really weird. Dr Imad Hassan claims to have proven Darwinian theory from the Qur'an and the Bible. Only…his version of Darwinian theory is a bit eccentric. Then we disclosed that the word 'Adam' is a simple Arabic term for 'convertible' or 'adaptable'. It is a collective description by God in the scriptures for a species of lower creatures which became 'adaptable' for radical change after long evolutionary processes. We followed the description of modifying the 'Adams' and arrived at the conclusion that there were many individuals, males and females, who were converted to…

Biology as a second language: what is a vector?

Vizzini: He didn't fall? Inconceivable! Inigio: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. - William Goldman, The Princess Bride Excuse me while I temporarily interrupt the genome sequencing series to define a word. Artifacts in the classroom It's disorienting. You learn a word in certain context. You're sure of it's meaning and then you end up in a situation where people use the word in a completely unexpected way and no one else seems bothered by this! I had this happen once with the word "artifact." I had organized a conference and some workshop…

Bird flu: no use hiding behind a mask

[Oh, my. Thanks to my readers at CIDRAP (tip of the hat!) I have become aware the story linked below on masks is an old one, something Crof at H5N1 calls a ghost story. The NewsNow aggregator I use has been doing this a lot lately, so I have been alert, but in this case I had it in my head there was a new mask report and I didn't check the date carefully. Everything I said in the post is still true, but it isn't new. In fact I said much the same thing when it first came out -- a year ago! Anyway, my apologies to readers. I hate to make mistakes like this.] The National Academies os Science'…

Soon, we'll be reading your minds!

No, not really, but this is still a cool result: investigators have used an MRI to read images off the visual cortex. They presented subjects with some simple symbols and letters, scanned their brains, and read off the image from the data — and it was even legible! Here are some examples of, first, the images presented to the subjects, then a set of individual patterns from the cortex read in single measurements, and then, finally, the average of the single scans. I think you can all read the word "neuron" in there. Reconstructed visual images. The reconstruction results of all trials for…

ScienceOnline2010 - introducing the participants

Continuing with the introductions... I got some nice positive feedback about this series - makes it easier for people to get to know everyone little by little instead of digging through the entire list of everyone who's registered for the conference all at once. Rebecca Skloot is an accomplished science writer, currently excited about the publication of her first book (to universal accolades) The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. She is a SciBling, blogging here on Culture Dish and can be found on Twitter. The Keynote Speaker at last year's conference, this time Rebecca will lead three…

Advice to the G8: Reducing Maternal and Child Mortality

Officials from G8 countries will be gathering in Toronto next month, and scientific bodies from the eight countries (e.g., the Royal Society of Canada and US National Academy of Science) have developed a joint statement about what the G8 should do improve the health of women in children. They begin by citing the Millennium Development Goals of reducing under-five child mortality by two-thirds and maternal mortality by three-quarters by 2015; they note that we've seen "some progress in global child health" but the maternal-mortality reduction goal "remains a distant target." The statement…

Coal miner battles MSHA for tougher coal dust limit

An underground coal miner who works in eastern Kentucky took the next step in his legal battle to force the Secretary of Labor to reduce respirable dust levels in our nation's coal mines.  It started in March 2008 when Scott Howard of Lechter County, KY filed a lawsuit in federal court (Howard v. Chao) against the Secretary of Labor and the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) asking the Court to compel the Labor Department to issue a more protective health standard to prevent coal miners from developing black lung.  On Monday, Mr. Howard's attorneys, Nathan Fetty and…

Choosing a Medical Specialty IV -- Interviews!

The process of choosing a medical specialty, and applying for residency programs is nearly complete as I have returned from my tour of the West Coast and am nearly done with interview season. This is when medical students travel the country at great (and unreimbursed) expense to find their future training program. When all is said and done, all your research into programs and time spent interviewing boils down to a simple question. Do you want to work with these people for the next 3-7 years of your life? It's also nice to see the cities where you may live and get a feel for the type of…

The threat of emerging poxviruses: replacements for smallpox?

1980 marked a milestone in infectious disease epidemiology: the World Health Organization declared the smallpox virus eradicated in the wild. However, while smallpox currently exists only in frozen stocks, poxviruses as a class certainly haven't disappeared. A related virus, monkeypox, regularly causes illness in Africa, and even spread half a world away in the American midwest. Additionally, Africa isn't the only area with endemic poxvirus infections. Brazil has been dealing with their own poxvirus outbreak, and poxviruses have popped up in Europe as well. More on both of those after…

Scaphokogia!

Yay: day 3 of seriously frickin' weird cetacean skull week. While we've previously been looking at the skulls of extant species, this time we have a fossil (or, actually, a diagram of one: from Muizon 1988). It's Scaphokogia cochlearis from the Miocene Pisco Formation of Peru, described by Muizon (1988). Exhibiting an incredible amount of cranial asymmetry and a wide, round supracranial basin, it's clearly a physeteroid (sperm whale), and the presence of slit-like antorbital notches, absence of nasals and other characters indicate that it's a kogiid (Muizon 1991) (if you need help with the…

Tet Zoo picture of the day # 19

No temnospondyls for you: mystery pictures strike back! Congratulations in advance to the bright spark who can successfully identify what's shown above - and you don't have to get the identification down to the species, the genus will do. To the rest of you, commisserations in advance. No time for a post today, but coming next: Crassigyrinus, giant Carboniferous tadpole from hell (© Tet Zoo 2007. All rights reserved). UPDATE (added 3-7-2007): the answer is... As so many of you correctly guessed, it's part of a frogmouth, and in particular a Tawny frogmouth Podargus strigoides, the only one…

Using the Abacus, part 2: Multiplication

Once you can add on an abacus, the next thing to learn is multiplication. Like addition, it follows pretty closely on the old pencil-and-paper method. But it's worth taking the time to look closely and see it step by step, because it's an important subroutine (to use a programming term) that will be useful in more complicated stuff. Just for clarity, I'll write out the basic pencil and paper algorithm: 1. Write down a "0" for the initial value of the result. 1. For each digit si in the *second number* number, from right to left 1. For each digit dj in the first number, from right to left…

Yet more extreme Triassic weirdness: Vancleavea

Congrats yet again to Sterling Nesbitt and colleagues on the publication of another one of those insane Triassic hellasaurs, this time the surreal archosauriform* Vancleavea campi (Nesbitt et al. 2009) [adjacent life restoration by Sterling Nesbitt]. Vancleavea was named by Long & Murry (1995) and is well represented by various bits and pieces from the Upper Triassic of the southwestern USA (interestingly, it seems to have been around for a long time: like, 20 million years or so). Its affinities were initially unclear: all that was clear was that it was a weird, armoured diapsid reptile…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 15 new articles in PLoS ONE this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Detection and Molecular Characterization of 9000-Year-Old Mycobacterium tuberculosis from a Neolithic Settlement in the Eastern Mediterranean: Mycobacterium tuberculosis is the principal etiologic agent of human tuberculosis. It has no environmental reservoir and is believed to have co-evolved with its host over millennia. This is supported by…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Prey Not Hard-wired To Fear Predators: Are Asian elk hard-wired to fear the Siberian tigers who stalk them" When wolves disappear from the forest, are moose still afraid of them? No, according to a study by Wildlife Conservation Society scientist Dr. Joel Berger, who says that several large prey species, including moose, caribou and elk, only fear predators they regularly encounter. If you take away wolves, you take away fear. That is a critical piece of knowledge as biologists and public agencies increase efforts to re-introduce large carnivores to places where they have been exterminated…

2006 Perseids - this weekend

The Perseid meteor shower in mid August is one of the more reliable and bright meteor showers seen in the northern hemisphere. This year they'll be back this weekend, viewing will be mediocre, especially from North America... radiant map - from 2002, but they'll come from same location - look for the "W" of Cassiopea low to the northeast after sunset, try to catch the time after sunset but before Moon rise (not very long right now...); for best viewing use averted vision - ie focus on Cassiopea and look down to the right, then scan the sky around this - sweep your eyes in a 30-45 degree…

Eyjafjallajökull - jökulhlaup!

Flash flood alert at Markárfljót and Fljótshlíð in Iceland. The real flood is finally here... Almannavarnir (Civil Defence Authority) in Iceland has issued a general urgent evacuation alert for Fljótshlíð - a scenic farming area southwest of Eyjafjallajökull due to major flooding. Gígsjöull lets go - from visir.is from mbl.is There were two previous flood surges yesterday, but it was known that the bulk of the ice cap was still in place, melting. The few km3 of water had only two places to go - it could go up, as steam explosions carrying ash, or break out sideways and come down the…

Funnels and Tornadoes and Lightning, Oh my!

MAJeff with your morning weather. My dad took this picture and sent it to me last weekend. It's a cold water air funnel. I thought it was cool, so I'm sharing it When I first saw the picture, my reaction was, "OH, NO!" A couple summers ago, my dad's business was hit by a tornado. As he tells it, the sirens went off, so he and everyone in the building went to the central storage room because it had no windows (no basement in this building). The building starts to rumble and shake, as it tends to do when you take a direct hit from a tornado. After a bit, things start to calm down, and folks…

U.S. Library of Congress to archive Twitter

From Twitter, here's the announcement: Have you ever sent out a "tweet" on the popular Twitter social media service? Congratulations: Your 140 characters or less will now be housed in the Library of Congress. That's right. Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter's inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That's a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions. We thought it fitting to give the initial heads-up to the Twitter community itself via our own feed @librarycongress. (…

Diesel exhaust a human carcinogen concludes WHO's cancer panel

A panel of scientific experts convened by the World Health Organization's (WHO) International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) concluded today that diesel engine exhaust is carcinogenic to humans.   Previously, the IARC classification for diesel exhaust was "probably carcinogenic to humans," but with the publication of additional epidemiological and toxicological studies over the last 20 years, the expert panel determined there was sufficient evidence to change the compound's cancer designation.   The IARC panel wrote: "The scientific evidence was reviewed thoroughly by the Working Group…

Trial of Mining CEO Blankenship: Quotes from Week 3

The criminal trial of former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship went into its third week. Jurors heard testimony from Upper Big Branch (UBB) coal miners Stanley “Goose” Stewart, Richard “Smurf” Hutchens, and Scott Halstead, UBB superintendent Rick Hodge, and MSHA investigator Keith McElroy, among others. At the end of this third week of the trial, the 15 jurors have heard the testimony of 21 witnesses. Thanks to the Charleston Gazette-Mail’s Ken Ward Jr. and Joel Ebert, I can select and share some of my favorite quotes from this week's proceedings. Performance Coal president Chris Blanchard,…

A Day Spent With Diggers

Spent most of the day in Stockholm County Council's building in town, where our new County Archaeologist Maria Malmlöf had convened a seminar for the region's excavation units. The agenda was for everybody to present some highlights from last contract archaeology season in Stockholm County. These seminars have apparently been going on for years, but since I don't work in contract archaeology I haven't been invited before. This time a friend told me about the event, I asked the organisers if I might come, and they bid me welcome. I really like events like these: it's so rare for me to meet my…

AR4 SPM sea level proves more interesting than expected

Its probably a measure of how accepted the bulk of the AR4 SPM is, that the most interesting discussion about it seems to center around the sea level rise uncertainty ranges. There does indeed seem to be some confusion here... RP Jr explores this, and points out that it would have been nice had the IPCC made a comparison easier, with which I agree (and complains about the take on this from the most authoritative source, of course RC; though as far as I can see he is wrong to say that we assert that the range isn't lower). But (before venturing onto the minutiae) I'll say that as far as I can…

"Please Let Us Tear Down Our Church"

Sweden has been going through a process of secularisation and de-Christianisation for more than half a century. In the same period, rural population figures have dwindled as people move to towns and cities to study and find jobs. One result of all this is that rural churches, of which there are thousands, see very few visitors these days. The non-conformist 20th century wooden ones are steadily becoming converted into summer houses or torn down in most parts of Sweden. However, of the parish churches belonging to what was until recently the Protestant State Church of Sweden, only two were…

Observations Show Climate Sensitivity Is Not Very High

This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic. Objection: Taking into account the logarithmic effect of CO2 on temperature, the 35% increase we have already seen in concentrations represents about 3/4 of the total forcing to be expected from a CO2 doubling. Since we have warmed about .7oC so far, we should only expect about .3oC more for a doubling from pre-industrial levels, so about 1oC not 3oC as the scientists predict. Clearly the climate model sensitivity to CO2 is much too high. Answer:…

O'Reilly on Gay Marriage Statistics

If you didn't see it live on TV, you should see this transcript of Bill O'Reilly making a fool of himself while interviewing William Eskridge and Darren Spedale. They are the authors of a book called Gay Marriage for Better or For Worse: What We've Learned from the Evidence. O'Reilly claims to have gone over the statistics in the book "all afternoon", but then he draws the most absurd conclusion from them. Eskridge and Spedale show that in those nations that have gay marriage in one form or another, the state of traditional marriage actually improved after gay marriage became a legal reality…

Heartland?

Interesting leaked docs fro the Heartland folk: see DeSmogBlog. [Update: in all fairness, I should point out that Heartland are currently claiming that some of the documents are fake. The truth or otherwise of this is yet to be determined. See follow-up.] From their highlights, funding goes primarily to Craig Idso ($11,600 per month), Fred Singer ($5,000 per month, plus expenses), Robert Carter ($1,667 per month), and a number of other individuals... We have also pledged to help raise around $90,000 in 2012 for Anthony Watts to help him create a new website to track temperature station data…

Historic climate change deal with legal powers agreed by Cabinet?

That is what The Grauniad said over the weekend. Cabinet ministers have agreed a far-reaching, legally binding "green deal" that will commit the UK to two decades of drastic cuts in carbon emissions. The package will require sweeping changes to domestic life, transport and business and will place Britain at the forefront of the global battle against climate change. We all know what happens to people in the forefront of battle: they get shot dead. My initial reaction is: this is a very bad idea. The cabinet apparently wills the ends, and realises it will have major consequences, but it doesn't…

229-235/366: Phone Snapshot Photo Dump

The week leading up to our cruise was crazy busy for me, with a bunch of travel for work. Which means you get a collection of cell-phone snapshots from that week, since I didn't bring the good camera with me on all those trips. 229/366: Man the Barricades SteelyKid and the Pip behind a wall of sticks. There are some paths running into the woods near the kids' day care, and the older kids decided to wall one of these off by wedging sticks between trees on either side. Because kids. It's an impressive bit of work, until somebody huffs and puffs and blows it all down. 230/366: Quad The…

Q & A: How can anything come from a black hole?

"Consideration of particle emission from black holes would seem to suggest that God not only plays dice, but also sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen." -Stephen Hawking Last week, I wrote about how high-energy cosmic rays strike Earth's atmosphere and wind up bombarding everything on Earth's surface with super-fast moving particles, some of which are even unstable! In passing, I mentioned that these cosmic rays (mostly protons) come from a variety of sources, such as the Sun, neutron stars, supernova remnants, the centers of galaxies, and (everyone's favorite) black holes. (…

Have We Fallen This Far?

As a measure of just how far our political system has fallen, the White House has actually put out the word that President Bush is now taking unscripted questions from audiences when he makes appearances around the country: Bush has been taking questions from audience members in recent speeches, and the White House says none has been prescreened. It's a throwback to the folksy style on the campaign trail that helped him win re-election and a departure from the heavily scripted speeches that were the norm last year. Someone remarked the other day after I posted James Madison's Memorial and…

Giant X-Ray Machine to be Hurled Into Space!

It is called NuStar, for "Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array," and NASA will be launching this giant thing that looks like a dumpster on March 14th. NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, mission is seen here being lowered into its shipping container at Orbital Sciences Corporation in Dulles, Va. The spacecraft is headed to Vandenberg Air Force Base in Central California, where it will be mated to its rocket. It is scheduled to launch from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands on March 14. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Orbital When you look at the sky with your…

March Pieces Of My Mind #3

Investigated a midden on the commuter train as I went into town for a doom metal gig. Untouched WW2 resistance arms cache found in a cave near Bergen. Sadly no archaeological involvement. Everything dealt with by police explosives experts. Greek Western heroine: Kalamata Jane. So annoying when people write about patently incorrect beliefs held in the past or in far parts of the world as "knowledge". They're going to drill cores of the limestone that fills the dino killer crater and look at what happened after the impact. A car is a device that allows you to charge your phone using…

Getting rid of a problem instead of solving A Major Problem

Some of you might remember this story from last year: Evolution: Crime Fighting Machine A hospital technician, David Kwiatkowski, has been accused of stealing pain medication (100 times as potent at morphine) and sterile needles from surgical patients.  Not only did patients not get the pain medication they needed, Kwiatkowski also exposed them to Hepatitis C, which he knew he was infected with for several years. The story was a good 'teachable moment' for how scientists can use evolutionary biology in a courtroom. Alas, none of that fun and interesting science was needed, as Kwiatkowski…

Shermer and the Drake Equation

To how many technological civilisations is our galaxy home at this moment? It would be nice to know, so we could estimate our chances of ever coming into contact with somebody out there. In 1961, astronomer Francis Drake suggested a number of parameters relevant to this issue, and summarised them in an equation that bears his name to this day. One of the parameters is the mean life-span of a technological civilisation. In issue 2008:2 of Skeptic Magazine that reached me today, Michael Shermer has an interesting paper where he states that of Drake's parameters, the mean life-span is actually…

My Favorite Bloggers

Jon Rowe is guest blogging at Sandefur's place this week, which is great because I only have to go to one place to find both of their posts for a while. Already, Jon has a great post up about Harry Jaffa and his views of homosexuality, and Timothy has a follow-up to it extending one of the arguments with a wonderful passage on the "nudist fallacy" from Daniel Dennett's amazing book, Freedom Evolves. Meanwhile, Jason Kuznicki is back from his family Christmas with a post about the anti-gay views of Orson Scott Card that reminds us once again what a gifted writer he really is. The first part,…

The Invented Legal Basis for the UC Lawsuit

One of the most fascinating things about the lawsuit against the UC is that they appear to have pulled the legal arguments out of thin air. For instance, the ACSI states in their newsletter: ACSI seeks to preserve the right of Christian school graduates to attend the college or university of their choice. I can't imagine what makes them think that anyone, Christian or otherwise, has a right to attend the college or university of their choice. When I was turned down as a transfer student to the University of Chicago, I wasn't happy about it, but I certainly didn't think my rights had been…

Conference Blogging: DAMOP Day 1

With attendees still trickling in after Tuesday's storms upset pretty much every mode of travel in Alberta, the DAMOP meeting opened with the Plenary Prize Session, and the first two talks were probably the highlight of the day, as far as I was concerned. Jun Ye and Jim Bergquist both work in precision measurement, and do some astonishing things. Jun Ye talked about experiments with ultra-stable lasers, including so-called "frequency combs" which are lasers with a huge range of evenly spaced modes. The frequencies of these modes are all multiples of a single frequency, so they can be used to…

Two dogs got off

Hands down, the most memorable phrase spoken by DR. Charles Jackson at our 'debate' tonight. It was a ton of fun, you guys! Might be a few days before the video is up, but it was fun! Few short comments before I get to sleep (1 hour of presentations, 2.5 of Q&A, Im seepy). 1. Jackson couldnt have illustrated the parrot-nature of Creationists any better. After I talked about an endogenization event in lemurs (theres more to the story, I blag about it soon!), part of Jacksons rebuttal was reading sentences from the papers I had just talked about 2 minutes earlier. He didnt understand a…