Search Content

Displaying results 3051 - 3100 of 87950

Obituary: Rare Two-Headed Snake Dies

tags: We, two-headed snake, reptile, World Aquarium Leonard Sonnenschein, president of the World Aquarium in St. Louis, holds We, a two-headed albino rat snake. The snake came to the aquarium's attention when its previous owner distributed a circular offering it for sale days after its birth. The aquarium paid $15,000, knowing full well that most two-headed snakes don't live more than a few months. [larger] A rare two-headed albino rat snake, appropriately named "We," died this past weekend. The 8-year-old rat snake, the main attraction at the World Aquarium located inside the downtown…

More Discovery Institute bulldung on the way to my door

Supposedly, the Next Big Thing in the Intelligent Design creationism movement is Stephen Meyer's new book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). Meyer is wandering about the country, peddling absurd op-eds and flogging his book in bad talks. Here's a good summary of one of his presentations in Seattle: To sum up, Meyer's argument is as follows: (1) According to Bill Gates, DNA is like a computer program. (2) Because I am unfamiliar with the field known as genetic programming, every computer program I've ever heard of has had a developer. (3…

Rude and foolish Kansans

Kansas Citizens for Science has a troll who brought up a post of mine, and a reader asked for a clarification…so I made two short comments in reply. That prompted a comment here from someone named "Dave". Mr. Myers, at Kansas Citizens for Science we are fighting a tough battle to have the present school board replaced. When you, and Robert Madison who invited you over (and who is an outspoken atheist) link your atheism to science, going beyond anything science can provide, you are playing in to the hands of our opponents. The primaries here are coming up, and having atheists swarming our site…

Should you buy a hybrid car?

Last summer we were driving up north, in our Prius, and one of those coal rollers tailgated us for a while, then passed us. On the right. On the median. Jerk. When we were trying to decide whether or not to buy a Prius, last winter, I looked into the usual things one looks into. I learned from the internet and various people that we'd never recover the extra cost of buying a Prius, because they were so expensive. So I got a little information together and called a dealer. "I'm thinking of buying either a Subaru Forester to replace our old and beat up Forester, or a Prius. But I've been…

The Search for Noah's Ark

Yet again, some intrepid explorers are preparing to trudge up Mt. Ararat to find Noah's Ark: A joint U.S.-Turkish team of 10 explorers plans to make the arduous trek up Turkeys tallest mountain, at 17,820 feet (5,430 meters), from July 15 to Aug. 15, subject to the approval of the Turkish government, said Daniel P. McGivern, president of ShamrockThe Trinity Corp. of Honolulu, Hawaii. The goal: to enter what they believe to be a mammoth structure some 45 feet high, 75 feet wide and up to 450 feet long (14 by 23 by 138 meters) that was exposed in part by last summers heat wave in Europe. I'll…

DonorsChoose: Better Viewing for Students

Continuing the theme of highlighting the occasional particularly worthy proposal, have a look at "Better Viewing for Students", which pretty much encapsulates everything you need to know about the reasons for the fundraising drive. The proposal is asking for money to buy an overhead projector for classroom use-- not a computer projector, an old-school overhead. Why would anybody want that? Well, there's some educational jargon to justify it, but the real reason is here: What makes these needs more pressing is the fact that traditional teaching can not take place in my classroom. The…

What's the Next "Harry Potter"?

No, I'm not talking about Harry Potter books-- there won't be any more of those for a while, at least until J. K. Rowling decides she really needs to buy Bolivia. I'm talking about "Harry Potter" the cultural phenomenon-- the inescapable, endlessly hyped mass-culture Event that everybody talks about and obsesses over. The question is this: What will be the next "Harry Potter" style mass-culture phenomenon? "That's ridiculous," you say, "Nobody saw the Potter thing coming, so how could we possibly predict the next 'Harry Potter' scale phenomenon?" True enough, but think about this: The Potter…

New Year's Eve Lowering of the Opossum

I just sent out an e-mail to a bunch of friends asking what they were doing this New Year's Eve. We'll be at home in the City of Medicine drinking a bottle of 1997 Grongnet "Special Club" Champagne. Then I'll try to do a 8K trail run being held tomorrow at Duke Forest. Feel free to join me - I'll be the 151-year-old dead guy wearing these shoes. But in Brasstown, NC, (right at the NC-TN-GA tri-state border) they will be dropping the opossum - yes, the famed New Year's Possum Drop. It's a non-alcoholic family event that begins with a blessing and singing of church songs followed by the…

Live Earth disconnect

I promised myself I would go easy on the Live Earth spectacle, despite the easy pickings on the hypocrisy watch. But just how much can one skeptic take? Watching Sting admit he could do more to reduce his carbon footprint was one thing (ya think?), but the Pledge and the only "actions" being asked of those paying attention put me over the edge. On the one hand, my man Al Gore and his fellow climate action campaigners did work a policy goal of an international treaty that calls for a 90 percent reduction in "global pollution" by developed countries (50 percent for everyone else) into the…

Big time beast

Little Dougie (aka Ian Murphy) has hit the big time: he punked the Governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, by calling him up and pretending to be über-Rethuglican puppet master David Koch…and Walker believed him and babbled like a little kid on Santa's lap. It's a self-aggrandizing embarrassment, with Walker bragging about how he was Reaganesque, that he was pitting stereotypical blue-collar workers against the unions, and how he has a baseball bat in his office that he'd use to enforce his demands with the Democrats. It's dreadful stuff, and when caught with his guard down it's very clear that…

Kittens, Aww, Wook at the Cute Wittle Kittens

Another contribution to Science in the Public Disinterest (see last contribution, on nanotech and golfballs): this one tells us about "Cat Lovers Lining Up for No-Sneeze Kitties." And I've got only one response: Yeeeeeeaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!!!!!! By the by, Joseph at Corpus Callosum picked up on earlier reports of this, back in June, and it looks like "progress" is being made. I feel obliged to keep the desirous public in the know. Allerca, a smalll California biotech company, is making headway: Last month, an Allerca public relations consultant, Julie Chytrowsky, kept Joshua, an Allerca cat…

Data-free framing courtesy of Nisbet

Matt Nisbet has coughed up yet another post on PZ and framing. It begins: You don’t have to be a social scientist to recognize that the distribution of opinion among people who comment at Scienceblogs is very different from the perspective found among the wider science community and even among leaders in the atheist movement. As I pointed out: This is a little data-free, now isn’t it? No information on views "among the wider science community" and a link to a single comment by D.J. Grothe (who may or may nor be a leader "in the atheist movement"). As I said before, the issue here is not…

My thoughts on Nisbet

Apparently Nisbet thinks we should desist from pointing out what a fiasco this whole affair has been for the supporters of Expelled. Apparently he thinks this is helping the enemy. He also thinks Dawkins and Myers should return to their seat at the back of the bus. Perhaps that might be true about "new atheism" (and I have stated my views on that before), but this isn’t about atheism. It is about a dumb move that was made by Mark Mathis and the supporters of Expelled. It is about how they are spinning their stupidity through lies and mistruths. It is about how their dumb little movie twists…

SEED demands a post

...and they shall have one!! The question: How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various grad students, post-docs, etc. find time to fulfill their primary objectives (day jobs) and blog so prolifically?... Well the answer is... we don't!!! I'm definitely not going to be one of SEED's most prolific bloggers, but I would bet that most of us don't find the time, we make the time. Unfortunately this time may come at the expense of spouses, kids, hanging out with friends, exercise, fishing, whatever. So perhaps the better question is... why do we do it? I can't speak for…

A scientific excuse for why I gained weight working on my dissertation

It seems that if you eat on a full brain you are more likely to make poor eating decisions. So here's the schtick via Weighty Matters: Simple experimental design. Take 165 undergraduate students and enroll them in a study you tell them is about memory and where as part of their reward for inclusion, they'll be given a snack. Ask half of them to memorize a 2 digit number and the other half a 7 digit number and once they've memorized their numbers ask them to go into a second room where they are faced with their snack choice - either a piece of chocolate cake or a cup of fruit salad. Track…

Travie McCoy and Bruno Mars are crying.

In which I embarrass myself even more. You can download it here Lyrics: PhD (rewrite of Travie McCoy's "Billionaire") I wanna get my PhD so fricking bad Get all of those jobs I never can I wanna be on the cover of Science Magazine And all your future research will cite me Oh every time I close my eyes I see my name with letters on the side Oh call me doctor if you don't mind, oh yeah You'll see, my life will be complete When I get my PhD I would have an office of my own Where I can be alone, buy myself a nice chair Close my eyes and sit there You know, I'll prolly make my TAs do the grading…

Lawdy Lawd

We often forget who really did in New Orleans: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, with its ridiculous projects like the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet ("Mr. Go"), which quite literally welcomed storm surges into the city. But you won't forget after reading Michael Grunwald's great feature in the latest New Republic. You need a subscription or something, but believe me, it's worth it. The article puts me in mind of lyrics by Mike West, a fantastic New Orleans singer songwriter whom I now suspect is displaced, in a song called "Corps of Engineers": there's been a lot of talk about widening the…

Ad placement does not constitute endorsement

One of the joys of being on Scienceblogs is getting to watch the ever-changing banner and sidebar ads that are placed by the marketing folks at Seed. Unfortunately, the people making the advertising decisions are not scientists, nor do they vet their ad choices with us before running them. So, sometimes we bloggers aren't so thrilled with what pops up alongside our writing. And right now, I'm not so thrilled with the ad for Bjorn Lomborg's book, Cool It! showing up in the side bar. Now, I'll admit that I haven't read the book, but what I've heard of it tells me that Lomborg has cherry-picked…

Americans Hate Their Jobs More Than Ever

Ok, no nobody really *likes* to work. Even if you like your job, there are some days that you'd rather just sleep in or not have to jump through hoops or deal with your boss' same old TPS-report complaints. A recent survey (2006 General Social Survey) of 27,000 random Americans noted that less than 1/2 of Americans are satisfied with their jobs, with the trend being greatest for the under-25 crowd and weakest for the 55+ group. Seems about right, as most of the jobs you have when you're young are awful, and at 55 years old you've got retirement on the horizon. Twenty years ago, the first…

My Pi Day Entry: "Yes, PeCan" Pi

Rumor has it there's going to be a no-holds-barred culinary throwdown here at Scienceblogs in honor of Pi Day. Personally, I need little excuse to make a pie. And the staffer needs little excuse to eat pie - particularly pecan pie. So here is my entry. . . .the "Yes, PeCan" Pi. As pies go, this is a simple one that can handle some imprecision. It's a little different every time I do it. And in the spirit of 3.141592-oh-whatever-who-cares, I embrace freely rounding off quantities whenever I feel like it.* In fact, I used my ubercool but uberimprecise Equal Measure to make this Pi: "Yes,…

Animated Dracula Syphilis! STDs in 1973 (updated!)

This is un freaking real. My friend John O at Armed With Science has dug up a classic animated film produced for the National Naval Medical Center in 1973. It starts with an awards ceremony for the "Communicable Disease of the Year," hosted by the Grim Reaper (who turns out to know a lot about medical history.) The top prize is won by the Dracula-esque Count Spirochete (AKA syphilis), over the vociferous objections of a shortlist of other diseases, including smallpox ("I've scarred and disfigured millions of people!") and gonorrhea (who resembles a lavender Tribble with a pitchfork). The…

After this Saturday, it's all gravy!

This post brought to you by my intense desire to avoid grading any more papers. More than a dozen years ago, when I earned my Ph.D. in chemistry, I made what many at the time viewed as a financially reckless decision and purchased academic regalia rather than just renting it. At the time, there was apparently just one company who even made the regalia for the university from which I earned my degree. Given their monopoly, they could charge a bundle -- almost $600 -- for the gown, hood, and mortarboard. (Despite the price, I would also argue that the uniform still needed modifications to be…

Chaotic delights always come in threes

The winds are blowing off of the Rockies, hitting the Front Range with brute force. The winds make walking around campus either fun or near impossible, and shake my townhome with enough force to rattle the ornaments on the mantel. The odd thing about the winds is the warmth.... it isn’t the slightest bit chilly. Still, the leaves have fallen from the trees around the school buildings, left to now dance around in the breeze. That shaking mantel is covered in tinsel and lights.... nevermind the warmth; it’s nearly the holidays! So, here’s an odd assortment of things to do on a windy Tuesday…

Medact on Iraq health

Medact, a UK health charity has a new study on the effects of the war on health and the health system in Iraq. Some extracts: A recent scientific study has suggested that upwards of 100,000 Iraqis may have died since the 2003 coalition invasion, mostly from violence, mainly air strikes by coalition forces. Most of those reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children. Many thousands of conflict-related injuries were also sustained. Infant mortality has risen because of lack of access to skilled help in childbirth, as well as because of…

Monkey Juice

by Katie the Lowly Intern Does the sinking feeling of knowing you could have gotten what you wanted had you made better choices in life sound familiar? Like how if in college, had you gotten a real degree, set goals for yourself, and not tried to buy friendships with your credit card, you could possibly now have a steady job, ambition, and friends? If it does, then you may rest easier tonight knowing there is a term for that: "fictive thinking". And guess what... monkeys get it too! Researchers at Duke University have concluded that monkeys don't respond solely to direct punishment or…

You'll Love How Deep We Go

Via Rick, news on the wire is that the deepest spot in the ocean may soon be included in a marine monument. As mentioned earlier today, my Saipan colleague Angelo Villagomez is leading the charge on the creation of a new marine monument in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). The proposed monument would in part recognize the significance of the Mariana Trench, which at a depth of 6.8 miles is the deepest part of the world's oceans, and the deepest location on the surface of the Earth's crust. The deepest part of the ocean, and deepest part in the earth's crust, is Marianas…

A tale of two terrorists

So the failure of an underpants bomb on an airplane has led to a massive rethinking of our entire approach to airline security, as well as our intelligence analysis. Conservatives think it should also prompt us to rethink closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay, and keep terrorism trials out of federal courts. And yet, today we are reminded that the nation was far less galvanized by a more successful act of recent terrorism. Because today: James W. von Brunn, who was accused of fatally shooting a security guard at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in June, died on…

Warning: contains FDA approved drug

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) doesn't want Americans to buy legal pharmaceutical products from Canada where the identical drug is considerably cheaper because the imported drug might not be safe. Those unreliable Canadians. Better to pay top dollar for heparin from the American subsidiary of a Big Pharma multinational, Baxter Healthcare. Except that the active ingredient in Baxter's intravenous heparin came from China. From an uninspected plant. And there was indeed a safety problem: More than 350 adverse reactions to the drug have been reported to the FDA since the end of 2007,…

Getting the word out on cancer in IBM workers

by Dick Clapp The publication of my article on mortality among IBM workers was the culmination of a two and a half year process. I obtained the data, which included information on the deaths of nearly 32,000 former workers who had died between 1969 and 2001, when I served as an expert witness in a lawsuit brought against IBM on behalf of employees who had developed cancer after working at the companyâs San Jose facility. I found that among the workers, the death rates from several cancersâincluding cancers of some digestive organs, kidneys, brain and central nervous system, melanoma of the…

"Computer On Fire" - An Ordinary Family's Oral History of Technology

The IBM 705 Data Processing System, introduced in 1954. The 705 would rarely run more than 3 or 4 hours without a major breakdown. It was not unusual to encounter a 705 that was ablaze." This should give all of us pause the next time our PC crashes! What is your family's history? Have you ever reflected on what their lives was like, when life was seemingly simpler? What if we could take a snapshot of our lives, our families, just one, every ten years? What was your family doing 100 years ago? Let me share some "snapshots" of our ordinary family {a personal and idiosyncratic point of…

Here's some of my money for a research grant. Please charge me again.

If you live in the US pay taxes and some of those taxes go to support important basic research into the causes of disease. Most of that research is disbursed through an elaborate peer-reviewed granting system at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The point of doing that research is to tell the world scientific community what you have found. "Normal" scientific progress is incremental, building on the work of other scientists. Paying for that research has been shown to be a good investment that has paid for itself many times over. But if you've paid for it once in taxes, why should you…

On Nymity

The whole issue of pseudonymity has come up again, both on Google+ and on ScienceBlogs. While I've been on the Internet for nigh on 20 years, my initial point of entry was through a Usenet group that strongly preferred real names (or something real-name-ish). As a result, I've never tried to maintain a separate Internet name-- all of my Usenet posting and all of my blogging has been under my real name. So I don't have a great deal invested in the question, on a personal level. There are a couple of points, though, that I think are worth making about the recent discussion: 1) There's a much-…

Reading Is Reading, but Books Are Not Fungible

The New York Times front page yesterday sported an article with the oh-so-hip headline "Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?." This turned out to be impressively stupid even by the standards of articles with clumsy slang in the headlines: Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association. As teenagers' scores on…

"Going Direct": NSF Launches Science Nation

The future of science journalism and communication will involve three key strategies: 1. "Going broad" and reaching a diversity of audiences across non-traditional media platforms such as entertainment film and television, new genres of documentary film, new forms of multi-media storytelling, new genres involving satire and comedy, and through collaborations with the creative arts. 2. "Going deep" and creating new non-profit forms of digital science journalism, especially at the local or regional level, that offer rich reservoirs of information via content contributed by professional…

Video game recalled to avoid offending conservative Muslim video game players

... wait, wait, does this make any sense at all? Wouldn't the conservative Muslim clerics normally call for the gruesome execution of children who play video games because they involve the creation and manipulation of images of humans and animals? So Koranic lyrics in a background song ... that is just salt on the wounds, right? Here's the story from the BBC: Copies of LittleBigPlanet are being recalled from shops worldwide after it emerged that a background music track contained two phrases from the Koran. Sony issued an apology for any offence that its use of the backing track might have…

Turn out the troops and give them hell

Scott Hatfield is asking for assistance: one of the old school Liars for Jesus, Don Patton, is going to be speaking at his public high school. This is disgraceful. Patton is a sleazy fraud, and to have him abuse public school facilities with his dishonesty is completely inappropriate; confine him to the churches, where nonstop lies are a regular feature. Scott asks what can be done. Here's my general prescription for dealing with these slimy hoaxsters: Advertise. These guys feed on an ignorant audience; they get a lot of praise by packing auditoriums with the most stupid people they can…

About that ad predicting the fall of Darwinism in 2013…

I know, I know already. We're getting creationist and religious ads appearing on the right sidebar. Seed has farmed out some of their ad space to a generic ad provider, which doesn't pay us much and which stuffs in ridiculous ads from any old desperate wanker who wants to buy some attention. In this particular case, I know the guy behind the ad: he was one of those obsessed cranks who, for a while, was sending me nagging emails every day demanding that I read his ReVoLuTiOnArY ThEoRy. I guess he got tired of the cold shoulder and decided to buy space on the web, a sure measure of exactly how…

Two old posts about Hillary Clinton

I wrote this on January 28, 2006. Was I wrong then? Is that wrong now? Have things changed in the meantime? Lefty Blogosphere and the Love/Hate of Hillary ------------------------------------------------ Chris Bowers on MyDD recently had a post asking why the Progressive blogosphere does not like Hillary Clinton. Here's a little bit from Chris: Now I can explain what this all has to do with Hillary Clinton. As obvious as I thought my last point was, it is probably even more obvious by now that Hillary Clinton is, um, not exactly the most popular Democrat within the blogosphere and the…

The ubiquitous Neil Shubin…

…has another interview online.

Science Journalism/Communication week in review

Lots of interesting stuff this week, so I decided to put everything in a single post - makes it easier for everyone.... First, there was a very nice article in Columbia Journalism Review (which someone subscribed me to - I guess because my name appeared there the other week....someone is trying to remind me how it feels to read stuff written on actual paper!) about the beginning of a resurgence of science journalism in North Carolina. The article covers all the bases, focusing mostly on the new Monday science pages produced collaboratively by The Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News &…

From the bench to the Hill: science policy (and sale shopping)

On Wednesday, I gave a breakout session talk on science policy jobs at MIT. I love talking about science policy, so it's not too hard to get me to do it - it's harder to get me to stop - and we had a great group of Boston-area grad students who asked excellent questions. Very fun. The talk did force me to reflect on how different things are in my life since I left the bench. I'm certainly working no fewer hours (apparently Scienceblogs has been experiencing a denial of service attack this week, and I did not even notice. Bad sign). I still often have to do things I don't particularly enjoy,…

"Just print it!"

A common response, including in the comments at Book of Trogool, to raising digital-preservation issues is a chortle of "Guess print doesn't seem so bad now! Let's just print everything out, and then we'll be fine!" Leaving aside my own visceral irritation at that rather rude and dismissive response—no, we won't. "Just print it out" doesn't stand up to a moment's scrutiny. Let us scrutinize a moment, shall we? Problem number one is the variety of digital materials that become useless the instant they are printed, or cannot be "printed" at all. Hypertext. High-resolution imaging, as from…

The Arts as a Healing Balm for Mansplaining's Psychic Ills

March is women's history month, but don't let that circumscribe your fun. You can get together with a posse of your like-minded women friends and mock mansplainers anytime. Now, I know many of you have just recently learned that there even existed a name you could attach to this annoying behavior plaguing your existence. Believe me, I know how important naming experience is - that's why I have a whole category assigned to the topic. But your joy need not begin and end with just knowing that the craptastic manifestations you've been subjected to are (1) not your fault, (2) part of a larger…

Missed the Simpsons last night?

You can watch it online.

Global food crisis

Speigel Online. Check this graphic.

Internet and Information Overload

Thanks for your patience while I was on vacation. If I wasn't so jet-lagged, I'd probably feel really relaxed. (I'm currently in that circadian netherworld that not even caffeine can fix.) Hopefully, I'll get around to blogging about the books I read while away. But for now, let me just say that I enjoyed my break from the internet. I think we underestimate the cognitive toll of being online all day. At first, I experienced the usual symptoms of withdrawal: there was the vague unease of disconnection, of being severed from this infinitude of information. But then I realized that I didn't…

Offal is Good

The offal refers to.... ....those parts of a meat animal which are used as food but which are not skeletal muscle. The term literally means "off fall", or the pieces which fall from a carcase when it is butchered. Originally the word applied principally to the entrails. It now covers insides including the HEART, LIVER, and LUNGS (collectively known as the pluck), all abdominal organs and extremities: TAILS, FEET, and HEAD including BRAINS and TONGUE. In the USA the expressions "organ meats" or "variety meats" are used instead. Offal from birds is usually referred to as GIBLETS. Another,…

Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in a hybrid economy. New York: Penguin, 2008. 327pp.

"The past can survive only if it can beat out the future" (p. 142) Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Laurence Lessig is a great and important book, one that should be read by anyone interested in the future of the Internet, culture and expression. This book is a plea and an argument for a business model for culture and creativity, one in which supporters of the arts are willing to pay creators directly for their output. I'm not convinced. I'm also not not convinced. Like the best non-fiction, this book engages you in an argument. I literally found myself…

Greed and Buffoonery in Academic Publishing

I've just signed another one of Sage Publications' ridiculous publishing agreements, prompting Aard's first re-run of an entry from my old blog. Here's something from 29 September 2006. I agreed to a really crappy business deal today. For a long time, academic journals from commercial publishers have grown in number and become more and more expensive. Individual scholars can no longer afford subscribing to them at all, and most research libraries have to prioritise strictly when choosing which ones to take. There is a successful resistance movement against these tendencies, Open Access…

Should technology be banned from the classroom?

I'm the department Luddite. I use Powerpoint less often than any of my colleagues, and I'm the person who argues that rooms in a new building need to be designed to allow natural light and views when desired (as well as be able to be darkened adequately). But I'm also the person in my department who plays around with our newish course management system (Moodle), experimenting with a variety of online assignments and quizzes and data-sharing. And I'm the only person to have taught a "lecture" class that met in a computer classroom. (And, of course, I blog, and Tweet, and I was on Usenet before…