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Kev Leitch (LeftBrainRightBrain) live-twitters his vasectomy

With tears in my eyes and my head bowed in deep respect, I share with you the account of Kevin Leitch's vasectomy via Twitter: http://twitter.com/kevleitch Kev is an autism and manic depression advocate in West Midlands, UK, who blogs at LeftBrainRightBrain and was one of my earliest followers on Twitter. (P.S. you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/abelpharmboy) All Twittering in response, which includes Kev's own tweets, can be found using the hashtag, #kevsnip. I first learned of his plans via Twitter but he also posted his scheme here. I am largely credited with the first…

Science in the Media: Rude or Ailing Health?

If anyone's in London or thereabouts on the 31st of March, come and see me and a few other science journalists discuss the state of science in the media at City University. The discussion follows a recent government report, entitled Science in the Media: Securing the Future. The report declared that science coverage (in the UK, at least) was in "rude health", while is somewhat different to the picture that others have painted. I'll be discussing the report as well as, presumably, other matters about science journalism along with a panel of veteran UK journalists. I assume that I have been…

ICQIT 2009

Any quantum people in the area of Japan in early December might be interested in ICQIT 2009. Submission deadline fast approaching (Sep 30): The International Conference on Quantum Information and Technology ICQIT2009 will be held at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo, Japan from 2nd to 5th December 2009. ICQIT2009 focuses on the following topics: QKD and quantum networks, Large Scale QIP and architecture design. Quantum Information Theory Quantum Algorithms Measurement Based QIP Optical QIP Implementations, Solid State QIP implementations, SQUID systems ICQIT2009 is now open for…

Happenings in the Quantum World: August 7, 2008

Summer school in November, Quantum crypto is to legit to quit, quantum Pagerank, and no prayer in quantum prayer. An email about a summer school in Australia: Dear Colleagues Please forgive us if you receive this multiple times... We would like to circulate notice of the inaugural 2008 Asher Peres International Summer School in Physics which will take place in Chowder Bay, Sydney Harbor, from 17-22 November 2008 in memory of Professor Asher Peres The 2008 school is entitled: From Qubits to Black Holes and is organised jointly between Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia), and the Technion…

Collaborative Wikis and Research

Over at Machine Learning (Theory), the Learner points to a Scientific American article on Science 2.0 which discusses various efforts in bringing scientists into the 21st century, and scientists reluctance to openly discuss their research in progress in public forums. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I started blogging about my own research. First of all, I'm pretty sure it would bore a large number of people into a deep comatose sleep from which they would never emerge. On the other hand, I'm not a very smart guy, so exposing my work to the vast power of the intertube's collective…

Tracking Framing Effects in the McCain Climate Ad

As I wrote last week, in John McCain's recent television ad focusing on global warming, he frames his position as a pragmatic "middle way" approach between the two extremes of denying there is a problem and resorting to heavy taxation and regulation. The ad even ends by offering up the complementary frames that global warming is in fact a national security problem and involves a moral duty to future generations. Perhaps most notably, the ad opens by using imagery of more intense hurricanes, a "pandora's box" framing that has led to claims of alarmism directed at advocates such as Al Gore. So…

In Wisconsin, An Offline Discussion About Expelled Strategy

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. The reality of this perceptual gap was reinforced for me over the last two days as I gave the latest round of Framing Science talks at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. At the two campus presentations, roughly 150 faculty and students turned out to share in a very thoughtful and inspiring discussion about new directions in science…

Systers Pass-It-On Grants

Say you are a woman in computing. Maybe you're struggling to get through school. Maybe you're trying to start up a mentoring program, or have a great project idea, or are facing a career transition. And maybe you need some funds to get your project/schooling/transition off the ground, or at least help it along. There's a program that might be of assistance.... The Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology, and the Systers Online Community, sponsor a program called Pass-It-On Grants. The idea behind the grants is to develop a network of women, who provide financial assistance to their…

NOW can we all agree on using less oil?

It turns out that some really smart people at the University of Wisconsin have discovered a way to make sugar into gasoline, diesel, or even jet fuel. This discovery means that just about any plant can be turned into fuel - not ethanol, which would require designing and mass producing vehicles capable of using it. The fuel created by these scientists can be used as-is in the cars we already own. The new technology creates "a conventional fuel that happens to be made from sustainable sources," according to lead chemical engineer of the research James Dumesic. OK - how great is this? We are…

Slippery Ground: SSRI-Study Fallout Spreads

The ripples from the PLOS Medicine antidepressants-don't-work study by Kirsch et alia, which I covered below, just keep spreading. Those who want to follow it can do well by visiting or bookmarking this search I did (an ingenious Google News search for "Kirsch SSRI"). It seems to be tracking the press coverage pretty well. Note that the heavier and higher-profile coverage comes mainly from UK. As far as I can tell, none of the top 3 or 4 US papers have yet covered it. This blog search should help as well. Some of the more notable responses since yesterday: Science weighs in. The Times…

Euro-update 5: What to do when you've got nothing you HAVE to do

Here in Tuscany, the Munger family has rented a vacation house for a couple of weeks. Typically the day's biggest event is preparing dinner. Otherwise we generally just lounge around the house, admire the view, read, or converse over a glass of wine. Today we thought we needed a project, so Nora and I decided to try and make our own Sudoku puzzle. It's actually more difficult than you might think. You can't just randomly fill in squares in a grid to make a Sudoku puzzle that works. Then it's another challenge to create a set of clues that will result in one unique solution. After several…

Casual Fridays: What's an appropriate email sign-off?

A recent New York Times article suggests that signing off an email message with "Best" is an indication that a relationship is cooling down. Businessman Chad Troutwine claims that using "Best" to sign off is more like a brush-off: Mr. Troutwine is not alone in thinking that an e-mail sender who writes "Best," then a name, is offering something close to a brush-off. He said he chooses his own business sign-offs in a descending order of cordiality, from "Warmest regards" to "All the best" to a curt "Sincerely." There's naturally been a lot of casual conversation about this article online, so we…

Answering a "Burning" Question: How do UTI-causing Bacteria Stick to Bladder Cells?

In news that may shake the cranberry juice industry to its core, new atomic-level "snapshots" reveal how bacteria such as E. coli produce and secrete sticky appendages called pili, which help the microbes attach to and infect human bladder cells. These crystal structures -- produced at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) at Brookhaven Lab and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France -- unravel a complex choreography of protein-protein interactions that will aid in the design of new antibacterial drugs. Finding ways to interfere with pili formation could help…

Watch Oligodendrocytes Move in Vivo!

If you remember back from when I was at the Society for Neuroscience, I saw a talk by Bruce Appel where he showed videos of oligodendrocytes migrating and myelinating in the zebrafish. Oligodendrocytes are the myelin forming cell in the central nervous system of vertebrates -- the cells that coat axons in a sheet of fat called myelin that helps the axons conduct action potentials more quickly. At a point in oligodendrocyte development the oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs) have to migrate out from the ventral part of the spine to cover the axons in the spinal cord. However, this…

Flipping through the uncanniest of books

This little video from Abebooks is the closest I've ever gotten to flipping through a copy of the Codex Seraphinianus. What a truly weird book. I particularly love it when the staid narrator reveals his "favorite" illustration - a roller skater murdered by a monstrous pen. What?! The Codex reminds me of If You're Afraid of the Dark, Remember the Night Rainbow by Cooper Edens. My mom had a copy and I used to flip through it as a child, confused and not a little disturbed. I still took things too literally to appreciate the visual non sequiturs, combined with the nonsensical text ("If you…

Science blogging event in London

If you're in London, you might be interested in this event, which has been organised by the Royal Institution in collaboration with Nature Network: Blogging science Dr Ben Goldacre, Dr Jennifer Rohn, Ed Yong Thursday 28 February 2008 7.00pm-8.30pm What is it like to work in a lab? What's the latest science news? How can you tell good science from quackery? The answers to all these questions can be found in blogs, and in this event you'll meet the people who are writing them. There are literally tens of millions of blogs online. Some read like personal diaries, while others are built round…

Lillybridge II: 20th Century Photo Essay, continued

While the world changes around us, does regular, ordinary life change as well? The Lillybridge Collection shows simple, ordinary life, 100 years ago. From that simplicity, personality emerges. Charles S. Lillybridge didn't bother to seek the rich and the famous. Rather, he preferred his neighbors, ordinary people, living in a shanty town off of the South Platte River. By 1910, Denver was a growing city, constructing five story buildings. Instead of seeking these marvels of the day--many now long gone--Lillybridge sought out the young and the old, the working stiffs, the grandmothers, and the…

Move over Ken Ham: Museum of the Aquatic Ape now open

Alternative museums are all the rage these days, from the million-dollar animatronics of the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum to the quaint if ramshackle Genesis Expo in Portsmouth, UK. Lying somewhere between the two is The Museum of the Aquatic Ape, a virtual repository of all your alternative evolution needs. The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis is a fringe evolutionary theory that claims many of our distinct human traits (subcutaneous fat, lack of hair, etc) are best explained by a period of semi-aquatic living. So far it has gained little, if any, traction on the minds of evolutionary…

Kaitlin Thaney moves on...

I tend to want to make posts on Creative Commons related topics at the CC blog, but this is essentially a personal post, and I also want to have it as widely read in our community as possible. Today is Kaitlin Thaney's last day at CC. She's been working for us on the Science Commons project for a long time - starting part time in mid 2006, full time in early 2007 - and she's been an absolutely essential part of our success over the years. I first met Kaitlin because she was interning, while finishing at Northeastern, for a joint MIT-Microsoft project called iCampus. She started showing up at…

Google Health

Google Health, the latest service from Google, was recently launched as a beta version. Online personal health services have been around for a while (including Revolution Health and Microsoft's HealthVault) but here's what Google says is different about theirs: 1.Portability:Through Google Health, you will be able to have access and control over your health data from anywhere. People who travel will be able to move health data between their various health providers seamlessly and with total control. 2.Ease of use: Clean, easy-to-use user experience that makes managing your health…

Tidbits, 30 March 2010

Tuesday seems a good day for tidbits. (I am head-down in my UKSG presentation and class stuff at the moment, so kindly forgive posting slowness.) One argument I rarely see made for open access that should perhaps be made more often is that it reduces friction in both accessing and providing information. Want to reduce the overhead of responding to FOIA requests? Post the information online. Data, data, we love data! Data is at the heart of new science ecosystem and Preserving the Data Harvest. Oh, and if you hadn't noticed, The Data Singularity is Here. Some good lay-level explanations of…

Adding a category

I'm still at Science Online 2010 and will have observations on it later, but first I'd like to acknowledge and celebrate a resource that has been absolutely crucial to my professional career—and indeed, to my profession. Open Access News, under the able direction of Peter Suber and Gavin Baker, has for years been the single best source of smart information and informed opinion for open-access advocates. Both Peter and Gavin are taking their shows on the road, and while OAN will continue, it won't be what it was. OAN has been my first info-stop as long as I've been a librarian. I will miss it…

More reaction to Mother Jones article on Lott

Mark Kleiman writes: What seems to me even more striking, though Mooney doesn't mention it, is the difference in the way the two are treated in the mainstream press: while no news article about Bellesiles could fail to mention the controversy about Arming America, Lott---who made up an on-line persona who praised him to the skies and claimed on his behalf academic appointments the real John Lott never received, and who still claims to have done a survey with 2000 respondents which reached an utterly implausible finding and of which no evidentiary trace can be found---still gets treated as…

Another tricky day

I wanted to sleep in this morning, but somehow it's tough to change gears that quickly. I don't normally get up too early---6:30---but I really felt like sleeping in. I made it to 7:00. That early, I have the house to myself, so I brewed up a pot of some killer new coffee that Dr. Free-Ride sent me (thanks!) and enjoyed the silence. After an all-too-short period of peace and quiet I had to wake up PalKid. I'm a bit blown away by how busy my little family is. MrsPal had to work most of the day so I took PalKid to dance after being "forced" to make "daddy waffles" (from scratch). The dance…

Defending Dr. Bob Sears: On the affinity between "integrative medicine" and antivaccine views

It’s been nearly three weeks since we learned that the Medical Board of California had initiated disciplinary proceedings against the most famous antivaccine physician not named Andrew Wakefield. I’m referring, of course, to “Dr. Bob” Sears, author of The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for Your Child and creator of an “alternate” vaccine schedule that “spreads out the vaccines.” Unfortunately, it’s a book that’s been very influential, in particular promoting the idea of “too many too soon” and claiming that delaying vaccines will reduce a child’s risk of autism. Basically, the…

Causation, Correlation and Sport Science

Looks like the show Sport Science (on ESPN) might take the place of Fetch! With Ruff Ruffman as the target of my bad-science attacks. Note: it looks like ESPN has the short episode I will be attacking online, so check it out. Let me start off with the big problem (which The Onion already talked about). Why do you want to make a show about science that has really terrible science (if you can even call it science)? I really don't get that. If you want to just talk about cool sports stuff, do that. Please don't call it science. Ok. Now on to the particular attack. In the last episode,…

Science Goes YouTube

This is a briliant idea: Youtube for test tubes. Instead of trying to translate the methodology of experiments into technical prose, why not just videotape the experiments? Most of the time, science is just a fancy form of manual labor, and as most researchers can tell you, trying to replicate a lab experiment is often an exercise in hermeneutics. So why not just show people exactly how it's done? Cemile Guldal pays attention to details. Her tattoo of a DNA double-helix, for example, doesn't wrap quite all the way around her right arm because doing so would have distorted the major and minor…

Coywolves; hybrid wolf-coyotes in New England?

This article pointed me to this interesting paper, Rapid adaptive evolution of northeastern coyotes via hybridization with wolves: The dramatic expansion of the geographical range of coyotes over the last 90 years is partly explained by changes to the landscape and local extinctions of wolves, but hybridization may also have facilitated their movement. We present mtDNA sequence data from 686 eastern coyotes and measurements of 196 skulls related to their two-front colonization pattern. We find evidence for hybridization with Great Lakes wolves only along the northern front, which is…

Friday Sprog Blogging: limits on screen time.

Dr. Free-Ride: I know you have some views, maybe, or questions, or something, about the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations about children, adolescents, and television. Although it's not actually just television, it's other screens, too. So, first off, can I get your general reaction to the fact that your pediatrician even has a view about what you should be doing with respect to screen time? Elder offspring: (Piteous wailing.) Dr. Free-Ride: That's rather inarticulate. Elder offspring: (Poses like the figure in "The Scream") Dr. Free-Ride: While this shows that you've been…

Some of My Readers Are Brilliant (Fear the Teachers' Union)

I appreciate all of you (well, except for a couple of conservatroll assholes), but this comment by "The Teachers Union" in response to a rightwing screed left in the comments is brilliant. First, the rightwing screed: Ha. You're full of shit. The gay baiting (Foster, Haggard, Mehlman), race baiting (Steele, Harry Belafonte Calls Black Republicans tyrants, Gov. Blackwell) and hyporcisy (e.g., Michael Moore and Al Gore not practicing what they teach) comes from the democrap side. Special interests? How about Teachers Union, Abortion death mills and welfare frauds? Why should money that I have…

Gender gap in politics

One of the truisms of American politics for the past generation has been the "gender gap" whereby women tend to lean toward the Democrats and men toward the Republicans. This gap has become part of the background assumptions of American political commentary to the point that right-wing polemicist Ann Coulter has proposed restricting the vote to men. Though Coulter's proposal is obviously ludicrous, there isn't that much objection to the assumption she makes that women support the Left party and men the Right. That's been empirically a valid judgment in the United States for the past…

When a Creationist Rear-Ends Someone's Car...

...it ultimately leads the Mad Biologist to a very irreverent, but accurate, description of the scientific method. Someone I know recently had said someone's car rear-ended. For reasons not worth going into*, said someone used The Google, and discovered that the person who ran into said someone is an intelligent design creationist (Intelligent Driving?). This information comes by way of a post responding to a letter that the creationist wrote to the Boston Globe. The post contains this superb description of the scientific method as applied to intelligent design creationism (italics mine…

Homeopathic treatments for tropical disease

I have a lot of tolerance for eccentricity as long as it doesn't hurt anyone. I'm a western physician who believes strongly in modern medical science, but I'm not as rabid and offended by alternative medicine as many of my colleagues. As long as it doesn't hurt anyone. Which unfortunately it frequently does. Take homeopathy. The guiding principles of homeopathy are (1) "like cures like"; (2) remedies are taken in very low doses (one might say vanishingly low doses, like one part of remedy to a trillion parts of water); (3) there is a single remedy for every illness, although finding it might…

The eBook Users' Bill of Rights

This one is via Christina Pikas, Bobbi Newman and Sarah-Houghton-Jan, who originated it. It's released under a CC0 license, so please feel free to repost, remix and whatever else strikes your fancy. This arises from the current controversy in the library world (and beyond) about a particular publisher restricting the number of checkouts a library ebook can have before the library needs to pay for it again. Bobbi Newman collects a lot of relevant posts here if you're interested. I may post about the situation in more detail later this week. The eBook Users Bill of Rights: Every eBook user…

Could Scientific Thinking Help Curb Consumer Fraud?

The Federal Trade Commission just released their second report on Consumer Fraud in the United States. Since it is full of interesting information, I'm going to do several posts on the Commission's findings. First a quick notes about methods: this report presents findings from 3,888 telephonic interviews of Spanish and English speaking adults. The Commission oversampled to ensure that several minority groups were strongly represented, because it is believed that inadequate attention is being paid in particular to scams against Latinos with limited English skills. Despite the limitations of…

Read this Post! WSJ on Subliminal Advertising

Cynthia Crossen writes in today's Journal about subliminal advertising: At a New York press conference 50 years ago, a market researcher, James Vicary, announced he had invented a way to make people buy things whether they wanted them or not. It was called subliminal advertising. He had tested the process at a New Jersey movie theater, he said, where he had flashed the words "Eat Popcorn" or "Coca-Cola" on the screen every five seconds as the films played. The words came and went so fast -- in three-thousandths of a second -- that the audience didn't know they'd seen them. Yet sales of…

My picks from ScienceDaily

More Than Just Being A Sentimental Fool: The Psychology Of Nostalgia: In the 17th and 18th centuries, nostalgia was viewed as a medical disease, complete with symptoms including weeping, irregular heartbeat and anorexia. By the 20th century, nostalgia was regarded as a psychiatric disorder, with symptoms such as insomnia, anxiety and depression and was confined to a few groups (e.g. first year boarding students and immigrants). Only recently have psychologists begun focusing on the positive and potentially therapeutic aspects of nostalgia, report University of Southampton psychologist…

A quick update

I've been neglecting you, O Readers! It's been a busy couple of days out here in sunny Arizona — they keep telling me it is a surprisingly cool weekend, which I take to mean it is a blazing hellhole most of the time — and I've been having a grand time attending talks and deferring any worries about what I'm going to say tonight. Here are a few of the highlights: I had a very nice dinner with some weirdos from ASU, and also had a well attended meetup at Rúla Búla. The Trophy Wife and daughter attended for the first time, and they were clearly baffled by all those strange people who wanted…

17 years in harbour

Hvalur 8 RE-388 The Icelandic whaling fleet has been in harbour for 17 years now. The International Whaling Commission is meeting in St Kitts right now the whaling nations may have bought in enough minor nations to get a majority in favour of resuming whaling although under voting rules that is only a moral victory, takes a super-majority to resume. This may seem like cheating, buying votes of nations, and it is. But what is sauce for the goose... the tactic of bringing in minor and landlocked nations to vote on whaling was an innovation by anti-whaling environmentalists 20-30 years ago..…

11 Ideas About Which I May Be Wrong

Not me actually, but Joshua Kim on the blog Technology and Learning. Kim's blog is easily the most relevant to libraries of the Inside Higher Ed BlogU stable, even more so than the apparently defunct Keywords from a Librarian which always seemed bizarrely stuck in 1979. Anyways, Kim's latest piece is 11 Ideas About Which I May Be Wrong, but really should have been titled "11 Things that you're going to have to convince that I'm wrong." While some of the items are a bit narrowly defined and perhaps not too relevant to the library world, I think on most of them he's pretty well right on…

The Lights Stay On Inside a Black Hole!

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. -Vladimir Nabokov Last Friday, I posed a question to you, and you kindly responded by voting as to whether, when you crossed the event horizon of a black hole, the lights would stay on or go off. The results so far? What do I have to say? Good for you! Just because no light gets out doesn't mean that you can't see the light that comes in! When you're in your spaceship, very few things matter. You could be in a strong gravitational field, like exists…

Buckyball Magnets Banned

UPDATE: The initial info I got clearly stated that this kind of magnet was being generally banned, but Nanodots, a brand name, and possibly some other brands are not being banned. "Buckyball" is the brand being banned. I wonder, can a company call themselves "buckyball" and trademark that name? Original story: I actually suggested this as a holiday gift NOT FOR KIDS a while back, so I want to tell you the latest news. Neodymium magnets are ver powerful magnets that use the rare earth neodynium element. They are very powerful. The toys consist of little round balls that stick to each…

Wheel of Fortune #Fail UPDATED TWICE

You have probably already seen the cringworthy Youtube Video of the famous Wheel of Fortune Fail in which a college student makes three awful blunders and loses the game. Well, I'm here to tell you about another Wheel of Fortune Fail that is even worse. Pat Sajak, the famous host of the long running game show, turns out to be a rabid Climate Change Science Denialist. Here's a recent tweet by Pat: I now believe global warming alarmists are unpatriotic racists knowingly misleading for their own ends. Good night. — Pat Sajak (@patsajak) May 20, 2014 Here's a screenshot of the same tweet…

Absolutely Last Second Holiday Gifts Made In America!!!

I just saw something on TV about people running around with "Made in America" tee-shirts trying to talk everyone else into buying Christmas presents that were made in America, and naturally, my cynical self wondered which East or Southeast Asian Sweat Shops the tee-shirts were made in. So I looked and it turns out that at least some of these shirts are actually made in America! So that's cool. So, it got me thinking, what other cool last second gifts are there that are Made in America that an American Citizen might want to buy for their Uncle they forgot to get a present for. And there…

Links for 2011-04-24

nanoscale views: Public funding of science, and access to information "While this is an interesting topic, I'd rather discuss a related issue:  How much public funding triggers the need to make something publicly available?  For example, suppose I used NSF funding to buy a coaxial cable for $5 as part of project A.  Then, later on, I use that coax in project B, which is funded at the $100K level by a non-public source.  I don't think any reasonable person would then argue that all of project B's results should become public domain because of 0.005% public support.  When does the obligation…

Links for 2010-09-12

R.W. Wood's lecture demonstrations (1897-1905) | Skulls in the Stars In the early years of the 20th century, however, the most important physics journals published in English were the Philosophical Magazine and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Truly important results would appear in those journals first, and Physical Review was a second or third tier journal to which authors relegated their incremental and pedagogical discoveries. A number of authors contributed suggested lecture demonstrations, but none was as productive as Wood, who by my count published 5 demonstrates…

How many hours do people really work? And what's the relationship between hours worked and success? A few polls for you.

Amazing momma-scientist Janus Prof asked me to ask y'all how many hours you really work. Janus Prof is just completing her first year on the tenure-track at a prestigious university, and in the course of that year, she also gave birth to her first child and was diagnosed with an uncurable, chronic illness that limits her work hours. Yet she's also managed to get her lab up and running, recruit students, teach, and write a CAREER proposal. (I get out of breath just thinking about it.) So Janus Prof was understandably inspired to read a recent post from Dr. Mom, in which she admits that she…

The Best Book Ever. Period.

I have tried really hard not to write a blog post about this book for awhile now, but I had to move recently, and in packing and unpacking I happened to run across my copy of it at least a dozen times. I can't resist it any longer. For those of you who have read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you probably think you've read the best book that has ever been written. Well, you're close, but not quite there (if you haven't read Hitchhiker's, I don't really know what to tell you - you can't even imagine the best book). The best book ever written is by Douglas Adams, but it's not his…

World Ocean Day: A Tribute to the Underdogs

Happy World Ocean Day! (Soon there will be a Happy Anti-Celebration Day in the same way we have Buy Nothing Day; each and every day will be filled with some Hallmark turf--the branding of our calendar year). Don't forget this Ocean Day to 1) check out the newly added book lists and 2) visit the Carnival of the Blue over at Blogfish. This Ocean Day my thoughts are with the ocean underdogs. I'm talking small pelagics, sea cucumbers, eels, hagfish, limpits, blennies. I am talking about the little things that make the oceans tick. I am even talking about salmon. Salmon? Yes, salmon.…

O.K. not the answer to the Puzzle Fantastica puzzle, but the answer to the "This is soooo fricking cool" query.

I felt bad not putting up the answer to the Puzzle Fantastica in the previous post, so to compensate, I'm prepared to give out the answer to a previous question I had concerning a mysterious looking contraption. In fact, here it is at this link specifically, and as well, it pertains to this picture below. Basically, it's an attempt to provide info on how to perform polymerase chain reactions, but on the cheap so to speak. Which involved building your own thermal cycler and fortuitously led to an opportunity to publish the article at MAKE (which BTW has thrilled my engineering colleagues to…