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Links for 2012-02-29

scott_lynch: Against Big Bird, The Gods Themselves Contend In Vain I was a hard-core Sesame Street viewer from about 1979 to 1984, and my memories of the show are the sort of deep nostalgic tangle you'd expect, with a great deal of idiosyncratic noise blended into the signal. So, for many years, I carried around a vague but emotionally vivid recollection of a Sesame Street episode in which Big Bird and Snuffleupagus had witnessed the the passage of a soul to the ancient Egyptian afterlife, complete with the weighing of the human heart against a feather. I shit you not. "What is unacceptable…

FT: The Big Green Bang: how renewable energy became unstoppable

A happy story for once. Isn't that nice? The Big Green Bang: how renewable energy became unstoppable (archive) from those commie pinkos at the FT: ...the disruptive impact of green energy on companies — and entire industries — around the world. After years of hype and false starts, the shift to clean power has begun to accelerate at a pace that has taken the most experienced experts by surprise... Wind and solar parks are being built at unprecedented rates, threatening the business models of established power companies. Electric cars that were hard to even buy eight years ago are selling at…

Moses Viney

This week was Founder's Day at Union, one of the three big academic-procession events of the year (the others being Convocation in the fall, and Commencement in June), and this year's event had a clear theme about race and equality, with the keynote speech being given by James McPherson on Union's connection to the abolitionist movement in the early 1800's. In addition to McPherson's talk, there was the official unveiling of a portrait of Moses Viney, an escaped slave who came to Schenectady and became a coachman and messenger for Eliphalet Nott, the towering figure of the College's early…

Technical Analysis as an Indicator

Personally I'm very skeptical of technical analysis, but that's just because I am skeptical of easy answers. But try to parse this article over at bloomberg titled "Stock Charts Fail Forecast Test in Complete S&P Miss." We begin with Ever since the Standard & Poor's 500 Index peaked in October 2007, six of eight strategies -- which are supposed to make money whether stocks rise or fall -- failed, according to back-testing data compiled by Bloomberg. As the bear market erased $11 trillion from the value of U.S. equities, buy and sell signals from those six technical indicators…

Why health insurance reform is doomed

I know we're just hours away from the nail-biting climax of the Copenhagen conference at which the fate of humanity hangs in the balance (or not), but a Daily Kos post explaining why efforts to reform health insurance in the U.S. have amounted to nothing has fallen into my "must read" category. One paragraph should be enough to whet your appetite for outrage/resignation: So here's what you have to understand. If the health insurance and financial industries really felt scared by any particular politician or political party, or their lobbying efforts were inadequate, they could throw them out…

Lighting underwater photos

We see this happen all the time here in Hawaii: Tourists go snorkeling -- sometimes for the first time in their lives -- and they are excited by what they see. They decide they want to take pictures of all the pretty fishies and corals to show their friends back home. They buy a single use waterproof camera, they snap away, and they are sorely disappointed when they see the result. Most of the photos are blurry, and though they thought they were shooting in color, all of the images are monochrome -- blue monochrome. For quite a few reasons, taking photos underwater is very different from…

An Important Message for Undergrad RAs

As graduate students, we all invariably, at one point or another, mentor or oversee an undergraduate research assistant who is doing research in our labs either on a volunteer basis or for credit. Occasionally in the summer, they get paid to do it, if the lab has an active grant with funding for that. In my graduate career, I've overseen a handful of undergrad RAs. Sometimes they were helping with general lab tasks, sometimes they were helping with my own research. When I was an undergrad, I, myself, was an undergrad RA. When I was an undergrad RA, I regularly brought snacks in to the lab to…

Do You Have to Grow Food?

Because of the enormous impact of agriculture on climate change, pick up any book about "green" solutions and you'll find the suggestions that you grow a vegetable garden. Bang into the "we can't go on as we are" end of the environmental movement (mine), and you'll see the general assumption that growing food is part of any process of adaptation to lower resource use. This often then morphs into the assumption that all of us should be able to grow all of our food, or a vast majority of it - that sustainability means the country life for everyone. You might think that because I do produce a…

Poll crashing makes the news

PBS has an article on poll crashing, which interviews yours truly and Greg Laden about our curious penchant for sending mobs out to vote on silly online polls. They also interview some of the recipients of the floods…and no one seems to mind.

I've been there!

Down House in Kent has been closed for renovations, but it's been opened to the public again. Take a tour of the place online — it sounds like there were some significant additions to the exhibits. Which means, of course, that I have to go back again soon.

Pollan Alert

In this Sunday's NY Times Magazine (not available online yet), Michael Pollan will have the cover story: "The Age of Nutritionism: How Scientists have Ruined the Way We Eat." Looking forward to reading (and perhaps blogging) it. Update: You can now read it here.

Open Access in Italian

The podcast of the radio interview with Derek Law and me about Open Access is now available online. Most of the show is in Italian, but if you cannot understand it, our interview is in English and it starts at the 22:07 minute point.

What is Your Inner Child Like?

Your Inner Child Is Surprised You see many things through the eyes of a child. Meaning, you're rarely cynical or jaded. You cherish all of the details in life. Easily fascinated, you enjoy experiencing new things. How Is Your Inner Child? tags: online quiz

Fish Quiz

In an effort to help us learn more about our common ancestor with the fishes, I found a quiz that tests your knowledge of modern fish. (Pictured above: Coelacanth. Image linked to source) My score - 100% That was rather easy, wasn't it? tags: fish, online quiz

I am a Parisian At Heart

tags: online quiz How about you? You Should Learn French C'est super! You appreciate the finer things in life... wine, art, cheese, love affairs. You are definitely a Parisian at heart. You just need your tongue to catch up... What Language Should You Learn?

Name That Robot

tags: Name that Robot, online quiz, fun and games I know you all have suspected this, but now you finally have confirmation that it's true; I am not a robot geek! I correctly named three robots (or maybe four, but that would have been an accident, I assure you). Wow!

Hank Fox rises again

One of our regulars here is Hank Fox, and some of you may have noticed his website has been rather static lately. Check again! He's back at it, and in case you're looking for a professional proofreader and editor, he's offering his services online.

Encephalon, and Tangled Bank on the way

The newest edition of Encephalon is online. And while you're thinking about science carnivals, I'll remind you that the next Tangled Bank will be at Archaeoporn on Wednesday, so it's time to send those links in to me or host@tangledbank.net.

Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards

This man, if you didn't already know, is a musical genius, and in just under a month he releases Orphans, a three disk compilation of unreleased material. Already available online is the seven minute ditty "Road to Peace," Waits' take on the Middle East and the current administration.

Some Sunday Reading

I have just been notified that the Spring edition of the Virginia Quarterly Review will feature articles on evolution and ID by Niles Eldredge, Michael Ruse, Thomas Eisner, Robert M. Sapolsky and David Quammen. To celebrate Darwin Day, the Review has put Eldredge's essay online.

Old-school medical wonders, from London Museum

Below, the "jugum penis," designed to prevent "nocturnal lincontinence" (aka masturbation). One of many wonders in a new London Science Museum online exhibit of historical medical objects called "Brought to Life," as featured in this New Scientist photo essay. Don't try these at home.

Projectile Motion with a Spreadsheet

Basically, the title says it all. Here is a short tutorial on projectile motion calculations with a spreadsheet. Record your screencast online I left out a lot of details, so maybe these links will help: Spreadsheet tutorial for numerical calculations (video) More details on numerical calculations Projectile motion

Yet Another E. Coli Outbreak. Yet Another Regulatory Failure.

By David Michaels This morningâs AP wire brings news of yet another E. Coli outbreak, this one resulting in 14 hospitalizations (so far) among customers of a âTaco Johnâsâ restaurant in Cedar Falls, Iowa. This follows the Taco Bell E. Coli outbreak, with more than 60 cases in 5 states. Which followed the spinach E. Coli outbreak that sickened 200 people. The FDA may be doing a terrific job investigating each of these outbreaks, but has failed in its primary mission: to prevent the outbreaks in the first place. The FDA is suffering from the effects of being part of a government that no longer…

Lazowska on the politicization of science and our uninspiring educational system

This is an excellent brief overview of the crucial problems in American education by Ed Lazowska, a computer scientist and engineer at the University of Washington who also served on an advisory committee under GW Bush. From his first hand view, he does not seem kindly disposed towards Republican policies in science. Presidential scientific advisory committees have been politicized. I have seen this firsthand. The general denigration of science emanating from the White House, and the near completee failure of the President's Science Advisor, Jack Marburger, to speak out, is poisonous. Right…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Antony Williams

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Antony Williams from ChemSpider to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (…

Periodic Table of the ScienceBlogs, Part 2: Blogs A-C

The Periodic Table of the ScienceBlogs rolls on, with a brief description of every blog in the system. Use it to find your new favorite. A Blog Around the Clock Categories: Brain & Behavior, Biology Bora Zivkovic, better known online as 'Coturnix,' created A Blog Around the Clock as a fusion of his three old blogs: Science and Politics, Circadiana, and The Magic School Bus. Bora was born in the former Yugoslavia, where he trained horses, got his black belt in karate, and studied veterinary medicine. In 1991, he emigrated to the USA, settling in North Carolina and earning an MS degree in…

AIP Syllabus and a Quick Request

Just a reminder, my last Adapting-In-Place class for the forseeable future begins on Tuesday - here's the syllabus if you are interested in joining us. Week 1 - How to evaluate what you have. We're going to concentrate on figuring out what the major concerns are for your place and your community. We'll talk about your region and its climate, culture and resources, your house itself, your community and neighborhood - the challenges you forsee and maybe ones you haven't thought about yet, and your personal circumstances - how much money, time and energy you have to deal with it. How does…

ScienceOnline'09 - introducing the participants 8

Let's highlight some more of the participants of this year's ScienceOnline09 conference: Dixie-Ann Sawin is a Research Fellow in the Neurotoxicology Group at NIEHS. Amy Sayle is the Educator in the Adult Programs at the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center in Chapel Hill, NC. Scicurious is a graduate student in Physiology and Pharmacology and my SciBling, on Neurotopia (v.2.0). She will co-moderate the session on the Web and the History of Science. Sciencewoman is, well, my SciBling and a Sciencewoman. Allison Scripa is a Science Librarian at Virginia Tech. Megan Scudellari is a freelance…

Hindawi Responds

Paul Peters, Hindawi Publishing The Scholarly Open Access web site says that Open Access journal house Hindawi Publishing may show some predatory characteristics. I've simply called Hindawi "dodgy". Their Chief Strategy Officer Paul Peters commented here on the blog and then swiftly replied to some questions of mine, showing that the firm realises that its on-line reputation is important to success. Here's what Mr. Peters says. MR: Why did Hindawi's Journal of Archaeology go on-line months before it had any papers? This is generally the case for all new journals that we launch, and I…

On the Need for "Short Story Club"

So, the Hugo awards were handed out a little while ago, with half of the prose fiction categories going to "No Award" and the other half to works I voted below "No Award." Whee. I'm not really interested in rehashing the controversy, though I will note that Abigail Nussbaum's take is probably the one I most agree with. With the release of the nominating stats, a number of people released "what might've been" ballots, stripping out the slate nominees-- Tobias Buckell's was the first I saw, so I'll link that. I saw a lot of people exclaiming over how awesome that would've been, and found myself…

Intro to ERVs: Why EVERYONE should care about ERVs!

I wasnt going to talk about this until later, but a commenter/troll left a comment on my last post: Umm, Do retroviruses have any clinical relevance whatsoever? Top ten killers in USA per CDC: Heart disease: 652,091 Cancer: 559,312 Stroke: 143,579 Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 130,933 Accidents: 117,809 Diabetes: 75,119 Alzheimer's disease: 71,599 Influenza/Pneumonia: 63,001 Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 43,901 Septicemia: 34,136 Do you see any retroviruses on this list? Do you now understand why you toil away at 10 bucks/hour? Your work has not an iota of relevance to…

Links for 2009-10-02

Physics Buzz: Space invaders: cosmic rays arrive for their 100th birthday "Cosmic rays constantly bombard earth's atmosphere at a rate of about 100 per square meter per second, but they don't make it through intact. They collide with atmospheric molecules, setting of a cascading shower of secondary particles, such as neutrinos and muons. Researchers probably wish there was less stuff between us and them; because they're messengers from the deep, so to speak, they could offer clues to black holes and supernova. But most of what eventually reaches the ground is very low in energy; above the…

National Academies to Host Seminar on Science Communication

Readers in the DC area will definitely want to check out the upcoming event on June 23 at the National Academies. Details are posted below. I hope to be able to attend and to report back on some collected remarks. It will be interesting to compare the thoughts of the assembled practitioners with the conclusions from the article we published last week at Nature Biotechnology, which synthesized relevant research in the fields of science communication, ethics, and policy and highlighted eight key recommendations. The National Academies Presents: An Educational Event on Science Communication The…

The (Wrong) Reason For Everything

There is a nice piece in The New Republic (Jan 16th, unfortunately not online) titled "A Reason For Everything" in which Alan Wolfe reviews Rodney Stark's book The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (Random, 2005; Amazon). Stark is a sociologist (rather than an historian) at Baylor University, and has previously written such works as For The Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton, 2003; Amazon), One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism (Princeton, 2001; Amazon) and…

Yes it is true, you can now make your own stem cells

Today three papers came out, two in Nature, and one in the inaugural edition of Cell Stem Cell, that basically confirm the results from last year's landmark manuscript by Kazutoshi Takahashi and Shinya Yamanaka (for details on this paper, see this post). Just to remind you, in that original publication Takahashi and Yamanaka describe how they reprogrammed connective tissue cells (called a fibroblasts) into stem cell like entities, by introducing four active genes (Oct3/4, Klf4, Sox2 and c-Myc). The resulting iPS cells (induced pluripotent stem cells) could differentiate into any number of…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Andrea Novicki

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Andrea Novicki from the Duke CIT blog to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your…

Good Writing Needs Editing

Inspired by Leigh Butler at tor.com, I've been re-reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books. This happened to coincide with my recent vicious cold, which is good, because they're great sickbed reading. Most of my re-reading has been done on my Palm, which miraculously came loaded with electronic copies of all the books. These are of, shall we say, variable quality, and riddled with typos, including one hilarious bit in which Rand is pursued by "Trollops." It's a little like reading the Wheel of Time as written by Matthew Yglesias. As a result, the re-read is also serving as a nice reminder…

Some Sunday Links

Here's some good links from the weekend. First, the sciency stuff: Radiolytically produced hydrogen gas powers subsurface microbial ecosystems. Coturnix links to three good posts about antibiotics In light of the discussion by my fellow ScienceBloglings about the state of scientific journalism, it's interesting to see what Cent Uygur thinks is wrong with political reporting (hint: it's not the reporters, it's the editors). When it comes to vaccination breakthroughs, read the fine print. From our own Benevolent Seed Overlords, an article about another fish/amphibian transitional fossil.…

Do You Read News About Science at Least Once per Week (poll)?

TheTimes Online had a poll on one of their blogs last month, asking their readers if science in their free time is a 'guy-thing'? Who is reading their blog? So I thought I'd also write a poll asking something similar. The poll (below the jump) was written quickly, but with the intention of gathering as much data as possible from answers to that one question (If you check their poll and mine, you'll find the data I am collecting is somewhat different from theirs). I am going to let the poll run for one month and will summarize the answers at the end. I admit that I am as curious as you are…

80% of US Electricity from "Clean" Sources by 2035?

The good news is that everyone was more or less happy about Obama's stated energy policy last night. The Republicans were happy because Obama was talking about a "clean standard" which actually means "let's burn fossil fuels in a barely less harmful way" - ie, let's switch some dirty coal to natural gas, and pretend that "clean" coal is a reality, and that nuclear plants will come online rapidly and without massive subsidies. The Democrats were happy because some Republicans might tolerate a "clean energy" standard that takes emphasis off solar and wind. And everyone was happy because we'…

ScienceOnline'09 - be a sponsor

Are you or your company/organization in a position to sponsor the conference? It is organized and run by volunteers, registration is free, but putting this together still takes some money and effort. For this, we rely on our sponsors and volunteers. There are several ways that you can sponsor the event: Provide a grant Cash grants provide us funds to pay for discussion leaders' travel and lodging, travel grants for students, tote bags and t-shirts (see below), wifi tech support, meals and refreshments, meeting supplies and more. Publicity Display ads placed in your magazine or newsletter,…

If you thought that OA-evangelism is an intellectual game - think again!

Yes, I know, Gavin is a dear colleague and a friend, but his latest article, Excluding the poor from accessing biomedical literature: A rights violation that impedes global health, is just brilliant. A must-read for all concerned with healthcare, medical information and OA publishing: In this article, I take a rights-based view of this current crisis of restricted access to the results of scientific and medical research. Such research is conducted in the interests of the public, and yet the results are largely kept out of the public domain by traditional corporate publishers who own them,…

Student Science Blogging, Part II

A few days ago I wrote about the Zoo School in Asheboro, NC. It is even better than I thought - I got in touch with their lead teacher and she told me that all of their students have laptops in the classroom with wireless access. Their classrooms also have Smartboards and other cool technology. And they are very interested in their students utilizing the Web in a variety of ways, including blogging. And obviously, some of them already are, as one of the students discovered the post on her own and posted this comment that I want to promote to the front page: I am a Senior at the North…

Weekly News Roundups

I would like to introduce to Scienceblogs a feature from the old Illconsidered site, the weekly "A week of GW News" posts. These posts are an accumulation of all the important global warming related news, science and blog content posted online in the preceeding week. I will post it at the beginning of each week, hopefully Sunday or Monday. This weekly post is a monumental feat but I wish to strongly emphasize that it is not a feat of mine! I do a very small amount of html massaging to get it into the blogging software but the lion's share of the credit for this service goes to H. E. Taylor…

Buckled Roads, Broken Buoys, and Doomed Satellites

Two related things came across my desk this morning that should concern anyone who sees climate change as an important issue. In Germany, the roads are buckling and breaking because of excessive heat, and there seems to be inadequate funding to re-engineer them. Here's a photograph from Spiegel Online of what happens when the rubber meets the road (where the rubber is global warming): "Crack on the A93 at Abensberg: Here the pad burst through the intense heat, a motorcyclist built so a fatal accident." (google translated) Meanwhile, over at The Guardian, John Abraham has a post describing…

Purse Torment Tavern

Dear Reader Dveej asked me to write some more about the Purse Torment Tavern south of Stockholm. Its name is Pungpinan which is pretty funny, as pung doesn't just mean purse or pouch, but in modern Swedish more commonly scrotum. The name might thus be translated "Purse Torment" or "Pain in the Ball Sack", or even "Scrotum Torture". (Boy am I gonna get hits from the S/M porn surfers now.) The heyday of the Purse Torment Tavern lasted from about 1670 to 1805. This was back in the era of horse-drawn carriages, when Sweden was covered by a dense grid of rest stops where you could change horses…

The most daunting numbers I've seen yet

This week's Nature has a horribly depressing article. If you're a graduate student, don't read any further. Really, stop. I hate to see young biologists cry. NSF data show that the number of students in US graduate programmes in the biological sciences has increased steadily since 1966. In 2005, around 7,000 graduates earned a doctorate. But the number of biomedical PhDs with academic tenure has remained steady since 1981, at just over 20,000. During that period the percentage of US biomedical PhDs with tenure or tenure-track jobs dropped from nearly 45% to just below 30%. 7,000 students per…

Can We Hit It and Quit?

We're back in town, and I'll schedule some science stuff for later today, but first I want to take a moment to note the passing of the hardest working man in show business. Much as we'd like to see him shake the cape off and run back to the mike one more time, James Brown is dead. It's difficult to overstate Brown's importance for modern music, though every media outlet in the country is going to give it a shot this week. He's probably more important than Elvis, though it'd be a near thing. He more or less invented the sound that became the basis of modern soul, hip-hop, and rap, and whether…

Kickin' Back

Made it home Friday evening after another bout of airline nonsense-- they had replaced the plane for my flight into Albany with a smaller aircraft, so my email boarding pass assigned me to a nonexistent seat. Which had been corrected in their computer, but was never communicated to me, or to several other passengers who found themselves holding boarding passes from online that had the same seat assignments as passengers who had printed them at the airport. To be fair to Delta, this was the only glitch out of four flights, but it was a doozy. Anyway, DAMOP was a lot of fun, but exhausting. So…

Will somebody please write a decent, university-level beekeeping textbook?

Time for a little rant. I've been assembling the syllabus for a summer beekeeping course here at the University of Illinois- the first time we've offered beekeeping as a regular class in over 30 years- and I've run into an annoying snag: the lack of a suitable textbook. There's no shortage of books about bees. From The Beekeeper's Handbook to Beekeeping for Dummies, hundreds of volumes have been penned for the starting hobbyist. Others are works of literary art, like Sue Hubbell's musings in A Book of Bees. The internet hosts online forums and thousands of how-to beekeeping videos. Many of…