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Dr. Jeff Schweitzer Talks About Moral Life in a Random World

Who: Dr. Jeff Schweitzer What: free public presentation, "Moral Life in a Random World" Where: SLC Conference Center, 352 7th avenue (between 29th and 30th streets), 16th floor. When: 700pm, Thursday, 9 July Dr. Jeff Schweitzer is a scientist who has written extensively on morality, religion, politics and science -- and who served as science advisor to former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore. Schweitzer will talk about how we each have within us the awesome power to create our own meaning in life, our own sense of purpose, our own destiny. He will address how…

Virtual Autopsy at House of Sweden

Doesn't that title sound weird - like an experimental film? It may help to know that House of Sweden is Sweden's embassy in Washington, DC - a lovely glass building on the Potomac. If you're in the DC area, you should get on their mailing list, because they host interesting science-related panel discussions and receptions. Yesterday, they opened a new exhibit - the Virtual Autopsy Table. It's a touch-screen tabletop that lets you slice into, rotate, and magnify an MRI-based 3D representation of the human body, all with a brush of a hand: The Virtual Autopsy Table from Norrkö…

PIG MONKEY!!!

Oh good God. We are reprinting this article in its entirety from the Orange News because it is just too good. Check it! Curious locals flocked to the home of owner Feng Changlin after news of the piglet spread in Fengzhang village, Xiping township. "It's hideous. No one will be willing to buy it, and it scares the family to even look at it!" Feng told Oriental Today. He says the piglet looks just like a monkey, with two thin lips, a small nose and two big eyes. Its rear legs are also much longer than its forelegs, causing it to jump instead of walk. Feng's wife said the monkey-faced piglet…

Talk Origins wants to buy Expelled. Can you help them?

Apparently, when you make a movie, there's this box of stuff left over that someone has to own. It can include things like the original unedited film/video, from which the director and editors selected/cherry picked what they wanted to include, as well as various correspondences and documents and stuff. The company that produced that horrid piece of drek known as "Expelled! No Intelligence Allowed" has gone out of business (a little Darwinian process at work, may we assume?) and the box of stuff that resulted from that film is now on the auction block. The auctioneer's gavel will strike this…

Royal Mail celebrates 350 years of the Royal Society

A set of special commemorative stamps is being launched today to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society. The stamps feature ten of the most prominent historical fellows, as chosen by leading figures in the society today. How many can you name? Answers below the fold! Each scientist is displayed with an image representing their contribution to the world. The fellows, and the field of their acheivement, are as follows: Robert Boyle - Chemistry Sir Isaac Newton - Optics Benjamin Franklin - Electricity Edward Jenner - Vaccination Charles Babbage - Computing Alfred Russell…

Thanks

Some of you might already be aware of this, but whenever you click on one of the books I have in the "currently reading" section of this blog, my ridiculously-massive wishlist, or any other link to amazon.com and then buy something, I receive between 4% to 6% of the price of that sale. It doesn't cost you anything (so don't worry), but as a result I've been able to accumulate a fair amount of credit with amazon.com to further add to my bookshelves. In fact, I was able to acquire Carnivorous Nights, Schaller's classic The Serengeti Lion, and (a true bargain) a 1st edition copy of Francis…

Squid brain ties

these are pretty freaking cool. Someone should buy me one!

Leave John Alone!

Cpt. J.S. McCain III has come under a lot of unwarranted criticism recently. May I say, first of all, that I respect and honour McCain's service to the USA, its air force, and the Douglas Aircraft Company. Two of McCain's recent responses to questions have come under extensive criticism, particularly on the intertoobs: 1) that he was unable to remember, precisely, how many houses he and his wife happened to own at that precise moment, and; 2) that to be considered "rich", rather than middle class, required an income of order $5 million per year. These responses are much misunderstood, and I'…

Soft Equals Death

As noted many times, FutureBaby is due in July, which means we're at the point in the process where we need to start acquiring, or at least registering for, Stuff. Of which there is a frightening amount. Kate's big on consumer research, so we picked up the Baby Bargains book that several people recommended (this being 2008, they also have a blog), and Kate has been going through it carefully. I'm more happy-go-lucky than she is, so I've been a little more casual about it, just reading the chapter-opening lists of essential information, and not the reviews of specific products. I have to say,…

Ravlunda Cemetery Rebuttal

In 2009, geologist Nils Axel Mörner and Bob G. Lind (and a distinguished third author who was not consulted about having his name on the publication) had a paper published in Geografiska Annaler about the Ravlunda 169 cemetery. This was an outcome of the pair's unauthorised digging at the site in 2007. The paper is a mess and shouldn't have been accepted. Tellingly, the topic is archaeology and quaternary geology, while none of the authors is an archaeologist and the journal is about geography. Now Alun Salt and I have replied to Mörner & Lind's paper, also in Geografiska Annaler. At…

NASA Astrobiology Roadmap 5: Planetary Conditions for Life

The final session in the online discussion of the NASA Astrobiology Roadmap is today from 4-5 pm eastern. Go to Astrobiology Future to sign in to the live web chat. Questions and comments will be taken both from call-ins and from written questions. The online discussion will be moderated by Dr Francis McCubbin from UNM, Dr Sean Raymond from Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux, and yours truly... The live session will, as with the other Roadmap sessions, be followed by a week long opportunity to input questions, ideas and topics for discussion at The Astrobiology Future Forum. The four…

More Aussie astroturf

The Australian Environmental Foundation is a brand new environmental organization. Unfortunately they have chosen a very similar name to the long established Australian Conservation Foundation, so similar that the ACF has sued for trademark infringement. Probably the best way to keep them apart is to remember that the Australian Conservation Foundation is a grass roots organization with a goal of preserving forests, while the Australian Environmental Foundation is an astroturf organization with a goal of preserving logging companies. The AEF's spokesperson is Kersten Gentle, Victorian State…

Shelley in Newsweek

Newsweek has a story online today about a passage, in a book published by Wiley, that was recently discovered to have been plagiarized (D'oh!) from Wikipedia. Fellow ScienceBlogger Shelley of Retrospectacle gets a mention, though, for her run-in with Wiley earlier this year over her inclusion of a few figures from a Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture article in a blog post... a post that just so happened to be slightly critical of the article's press release. From Newsweek: In an ironic wrinkle, this isn't Wiley's first embarrassing encounter with new media. In April, Shelley…

Remembrances of books past

Our university library is having a book sale today, one of those unfortunate but necessary events where they purge old or duplicate items from the collections to make room for new books, and I had to make a quick browse. What did I discover but an old children's book that startled me with fearful and powerful remembrances — this is a book that I checked out from the Kent Public Library when I was ten years old. That's the Golden Guide to Mammals by Herbert S. Zim and Donald F. Hoffmeister, copyright 1955. It features "218 ANIMALS IN FULL COLOR", with maps of their distribution and short…

Medicine 2.0 Carnival: Web 2.0 technologies and the practice of medicine

This month's edition of Medicine 2.0 focuses on connections. You'll learn how new technologies are empowering patients by connecting them with their own health records, connecting patients and paramedics with doctors, and connecting doctors with each other. Nothing connects like Web 2.0. Let's hit the Midway! Many submissions to this carnival certainly captured the carnival spirit. I had just become resigned to the notion of scouring the internet myself, looking for posts that would fit today's collection, when a couple of days ago, I was inundated with email submissions. Great! I thought,…

Paralysis from chiropractic session

My blog posts seem to run in themes - sort of like when after you buy a car, you see other people driving that model all over the place. Yesterday we posted about homicide charges being leveled against an unlicensed California chiropractor operating a clinic out of his garage. That post garnered a large number of hits from a related story in the Canadian National Post, where our blog was linked under "More from the Web." An Alberta woman has launched a $529-million class-action lawsuit against provincial chiropractors after a neck adjustment allegedly left her paralyzed. Sandra Gay Nette, of…

DIY for mad scientists

19th century anatomical study cabinet #1 Alex cf, 2008 The undisputed modern master of the horrifying cryptozoological specimen is Alex cf, bane of vampires and cthulhu spawn. Unfortunately, there's an immense demand for his work, and he isn't very prolific. So how's a girl to fill her curiosity cabinet - especially with Halloween right around the corner? Luckily, Repository For Bottled Monsters turned up a great DIY project: how to bottle your own mad-scientist monstrosities. Check out these jars, created using inexpensive plastic toys from the dollar store: from imakeprojects.com These…

Waltzing Matilda - why were the three Australian dinosaurs published in PLoS ONE?

As I was traveling, I only briefly mentioned the brand new and exciting paleontology paper in PLoS ONE - New Mid-Cretaceous (Latest Albian) Dinosaurs from Winton, Queensland, Australia that was published on Thursday. Bex has written an introduction and will post a Media/Blog coverage (of which there was a lot!) summary probably tomorrow. The fossils were discovered, cleaned and analyzed by the Australian Age Of Dinosaurs non-profit organization, with a help of thousands of volunteers - the 'citizen scientists'. You can learn more from their press release. The importance of the publication of…

#scio10 aftermath: my tweets from "Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Session: Engaging underrepresented groups in online science media".

Session description: The conference timing may keep some attendees away in their hometowns participating in local MLK activities. Therefore, we are introducing a session to promote the principles of Dr King in the context of online science communication: promoting social justice and eliminating racism in areas ranging from healthcare to scientific career paths. We plan to take a different angle from the blogging about gender/race session: how do we cultivate emerging science writers from underrepresented groups to promote science, for example, in areas of health disparities (i.e., diabetes,…

Food Prices Are a Result of Speculation, Not Shortages

Unless a shortage is defined by a 0.1% decrease. Paul Krugman, with whom I often agree, has been crying hither and yon that rising food prices are a result of food shortages and not market speculation. This hasn't made much sense to me. First of all, we saw similar spikes in agriculture futures prices in 2006 that were clearly the result of financial speculation. First of all, as Alice Cook notes, we're producing historical high levels of wheat: Curse those stupid fucking natural history facts! But there is a predicted decrease in supply of about five percent. Cook argues that this…

The Fisherman and the MBA

Via my father I came across this anonymously authored modern day parable, which I think is a good analogue for the economic growth vs sustainability argument: An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them. The Mexican replied "only a little while". The American then asked why didn't he stay out longer and catch more fish. The Mexican said he had…

Critical thinking in video games

Another fluff post. Again, I apologize, but I think I whupted todays test, so I dont feel bad :P During tests weeks like this, I love to take study breaks by playing video games. Not 'WoW' games that end up distracting you more than relaxing you-- Im one of those 'alternative' gamers that has benefited from the third revolution in gaming. I luv brain games. Ive always loved the 'Zelda' series, but now there is a whole new group of 'brain games'-- 'Brain Age', 'Big Brain Academy', and the like. Theyre nice because they are a 'break', but Im not shutting my brain off entirely or…

Friday Grey Matters: Mexico Disregards Illegal Parrot Trade

Mexico has a lot of problems on its hands: pollution, emigration, drugs, poverty, pollution, to name a few. But Mexico also plays host to many endangered species and habitats, providing a very dangerous home to the animals lucky enough to live there. And these endangered animals, including rare parrots, have price tags: what they can fetch at market. At the Sonora Market, a bustling bazaar, traders illegally sell animals alongside exotic herbs and folk cures in the heart of Mexico City's often lawless center. Inside its labyrinthine corridors, conservationist Juan Carlos Cantu shudders as a…

Donors Choose: kids need us, with or without cheap theatrics

Update: you guys finished funding one of the projects below, which is incredibly generous.  I'm a big fan of micro-donations, so feel free to kick a buck or two into another project! --PalMD OK, you guys have been great. We've funded eight projects in needy Michigan schools, reaching 630 kids---and many of the projects are multi-year so even more kids will be reached. But from a strictly selfish viewpoint, I want more. One of my favorite bloggy friends, Dr. Isis, has brought out the big guns. She is offering to much public self-humiliation to encourage extra giving. I've got nothing on…

Product Warranties

Don't ever buy them. Ever. Each year, millions of people gladly pay an additional 10 to 50 percent of a product's original price to extend a warranty. These snap purchases help fuel a booming, $15 billion-a-year business and feed a lucrative profit stream for retailers that sell the warranties and companies that underwrite them. Many consumers do so because they say the plans provide them with peace of mind. The decision to buy an extended warranty defies the recommendations of economists, consumer advocates and product quality experts, who all warn that the plans rarely benefit consumers…

Wolverine vs Donald Duck

I'd totally pay good money to see that. Disney to buy Marvel

Deep thought

The UAW should buy GM and turn it into a worker-owned cooperative.

One last reminder...

...that I and a bunch of other ScienceBloggers will be at the following location from 2-4 PM today: Details: 2pm-4pm on Saturday, August 9 Social 795 8th Ave (close to 49th St.) New York, NY 10019 A couple of warnings: Point one: I'm a lot more boring and unassuming in person than I am on the blog. Really. Just ask my family and friends. As PZ would say, I don't breath fire or eviscerate alt-med mavens. If you're expecting the same level of scintillating (or not-so-scintillating) wit seen here, you're likely to be disappointed. Fortunately, my fellow ScienceBloggers will more than take up the…

The Endowment Effect

Here's a post from last summer*: I went jean shopping this weekend. Actually, I went to the mall to return a t-shirt but ended buying a pair of expensive denim pants. What happened? I made the mistake of entering the fitting room. And then the endowment effect hijacked my brain. Let me explain. The endowment effect is a well studied by-product of loss aversion, which is the fact that losing something hurts a disproportionate amount. (In other words, a loss hurts more than a gain feels good.) First diagnosed by Richard Thaler and Daniel Kahneman, the endowment effect stipulates that once…

People collect the weirdest things....

From paper airplanes to IBM Typewriters, from cold war calculators to cereal boxes, from condoms to condiments, and many, many more strange collections, all found at the Museum of Online Museums, thanks to Anne-Marie.

What Survives from 2013's Blogging?

Continuing the weekend theme of meta-blogging, one of the questions I've occasionally wondered about in doing top-posts lists for a given year is the problem of a bias against recency-- that is, that posts put up toward the end of the year are inherently at a disadvantage because they've had less time to integrate up the slow trickle of traffic that every page on the Internet gets. Obviously, this isn't a question that can be answered by data from 2014, but I have access to traffic stats back to mid-2012, so I can look at data for 2013. So, these are the top posts I put up in 2013 in terms of…

If newspapers die, investigative reporting will die as well. Really?

Timothy Burke: Journalism, Civil Society and 21st Century Reportage: As the failure of many newspapers looms and public radio cuts its journalistic offerings, the complaint against new media by established journalists gets sharper and sharper. The key rallying cry is that new media can't provide investigative reporting, that it can only piggyback on the work of the mainstream print and radio media, and that when the newspapers go, there goes investigative work and all the civic value it provided. As a starting point in a conversation about the future, this complaint is much more promising…

The Right Room for a Dialogue: New Policy on Anonymous Comments

I've long questioned the value of anonymous blogging or commenting. Much of the incivility online can be attributed to anonymity. And with a rare few exceptions, if you can't participate in a dialogue about issues without using your full name and true identity, then what you have to say is probably not that valuable. These long standing thoughts were called to mind again after reading a post by Andrew Revkin at Dot Earth. Quoting as the subject to his post a line from Monty Python "is this the right room for an argument?," Revkin writes: Michael Palin asked that question nearly 40 years…

Around the Web: Choosing Real-World Impact Over Impact Factor, Practicing Freedom in the Digital Library and more

Choosing Real-World Impact Over Impact Factor Practicing Freedom in the Digital Library Dandelions, Prestige, and the Measure of Scholars Programmers insist: “Everybody” does not need to learn to code Digital Decay by Bruce Sterling New York Public Library Rethinks Design CIOs Wear Second Hat (ie. head of small colleges libraries too) Can't Buy Us Love: The Declining Importance of Library Books and the Rising Importance of Special Collections A New Polemic: Libraries, MOOCs, and the Pedagogical Landscape Ethical reflections on MOOC-making (Rebecca Kukla) Why Teach English? Learning Styles:…

Annals of peanut butter: another kind of death

Another death to add to the nine already attributed to the peanut cum salmonella affair. This one is the company itself and the jobs of its employees. The Peanut Corporation of America (PCA) is going belly up. I don't mean Chapter 11 (reorganizing under the bankruptcy laws). I mean Chapter 7, as in liquidating. I wonder if this is an effort to wring as much private cash out of the business as possible before it gets its nuts sued off of it. So one company, many jobs, the deaths of 9 people and the illness of more than 600 others, half of them children. In dollar terms there's also the lost…

DonorsChoose: Weighing In

If you'd prefer a more positive approach to fundraising, here's another post to highlight a specific project, one of many that are asking for funding to meet depressingly basic needs. In this case, the proposal is titled "Weighing In", which is pretty accurate: Our 7th & 8th graders from our classes in Buffalo, NY are in need of scales to develop their measurement skills in science. My project needs 3 Triple Beam Balances. This is a high-poverty district (80% qualify for free lunch), and they're looking for $420 to buy scales for a science lab. You wouldn't think they'd need to go…

How to Teach Physics to Your Spanish Dog

I can't resist interrupting the relatively productive day I'm having working on the new book to point you to Conversación de fÃsica con mi perro, the Spanish-language edtion of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, which sports this spiffy cover: I haven't seen a physical copy of this yet, but the vanity search turned up this blog post, which just reproduces the cover copy, but does offer a sample chapter as a PDF. So, you know, if you want to try it before you buy it, there you go... This also explains the phone call I got yesterday from a journalist in Spain, who wanted to ask me about…

Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Humorous Status Updates

Chad Orzel now knows more than he would like to about the loathsome political views of some old acquaintances. Chad Orzel is pretty sure the people in question don't read the blog, or at least won't know he's talking about them. Chad Orzel is grateful for the feature that allows him to stop receiving those updates. Chad Orzel really wishes he had better killfile options, though. Chad Orzel longs for a Fire Upon the Deep style sentient AI killfile. Chad Orzel also wants better tools for distinguishing spam comments from slightly off-kilter real comments. Chad Orzel has nothing substantive to…

Tactical Bacon

"C" sends me a link of fantastic mmmm-ness. CMMG Tactical Bacon, TB-1, 9oz, 10+ Year Shelf Life: The ultimate tactical accessory, the new Tactical Bacon from CMMG ® is simply amazing. Kept in an aluminum can for a shelf life of 10+ years, the CMMG ® Tactical Bacon is more affordable than other pre-cooked bacon producers, who offer no tactical packaging for their product. Including 9 ounces of pre-cooked bacon goodness, comparable to 3 pounds of raw bacon, the CMMG ® Tactical Bacon is perfect for camping trips, survival situations, a snack at the range, zombie attacks, and many other…

Let them buy yachts

I'm just amazed that Texas citizens will elect congresspeople who will do things like this: In response to the worst state budget crisis since World War II, the Texas House has proposed slashing $27 billion from the budget, including huge cuts to education, nursing homes, and health care for the poor. Yet last Friday, the Texas House Ways and Means Committee approved a tax break for those who want to buy yachts costing $250,000 or more. I think every unemployed worker, everyone struggling by on minimum wage, every waitress working for less than minimum wage, every teacher watching her…

The Cookies Don't Lie

Who needs sophisticated tracking polls when you've got...cookies! A local bakery not far from where I live makes presidential candidate cookies for every presidential election. This year they added vice-presidential cookies. You can buy an Obama, McCain, Biden, or Palin cookie - and help predict the winner of the election in the process! Since the 1984 election, Weinrich's in Willow Grove has been icing its round red, white and blue cookies with the names and, this year, the faces of the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. And in every election but one, the sale of cookies…

Trashcan: hobs and goblins

I've been travelling a little to organise my move to Sydney. Love the building, the department, the people and the project. Not sure about Sydney... so anyway, nothing of substance from me for a while. Here's a lovely little essay about Newton pissing off most of the European intellectual giants of his time, by one of our commentators, Thony Christie, at Etherwave Propaganda. He truly was the most egotistical and curmudgeonly bastard of his time, matched only by his actual achievements. The latest Linnaeus' Legacy is up at Agricultural Biodiversity. They had the good taste to use one of mine…

Technology Rants

Well, maybe more like tidbits than rants. This is all Linux or ani-Windows stuff, so everyone else you get the clam-hand*. First, from Linux in Exile we have a discussion of virtual desktops. Virtual desktops, to me, make a GUI computer usable. GUI computers without them suck. Linux has them. Windows does not. Shut up and go read this. But sometimes you need to run Windows in a virtual machine (or some other thing must be run in a virtual machine). I've been playing around with this and its fun. Have a look at this. This is a cool new Linux-ready netbook that will run all day…

Donors Choose: we're in for some tough competition

Dr. Isis assures me that she will soon unveil a secret weapon to pull ahead in the Donors Choose challenge. I'm all for anything that helps kids, but c'mon---we can stay ahead. Even small donations help tons. For example, if 23 people give $10 each, we can buy a netbook for a classroom in need. There are plenty of other proposals from needy Michigan classrooms, too. Even a couple of bucks will help bring these projects closer to completion. If you can give a buck, or twenty of them, that's great, but if you can't, you can still help by tweeting, facebooking, etc. so that more people…

Galileoscope. 400 years in development, only about 50 bucks.

The #LearningSpace Google Hangout was talking today about the Galileoscope project. Galileo invented (I'm sure the story is more complex) the telescope and all that, and the Galileoscope project is HERE. The Galileoscope is a high-quality, low-cost telescope kit developed by a team of leading astronomers, optical engineers, and science educators. No matter where you live, with this easy-to-assemble, 50-mm (2-inch) diameter, 25- to 50-power achromatic refractor, you can see the celestial wonders that Galileo Galilei first glimpsed 400 years ago and that still delight stargazers today. These…

Christmas Crap!

Tired of the same old crap for Christmas? Why not buy some new crap?

You've got to be kidding me

Do you detect the little scientific and logical problem in this press release about a new prayer study? A ground-breaking online study was recently initiated to discover if Americans believe prayer has a place in medicine. Shannon Pierotti, a graduate student at USciences, is using a social networking basis for recruiting participants in a National survey to assess attitudes regarding the inclusion of spirituality and prayer in medical practice. What's "ground-breaking" about that? She's simply using an online poll, advertised on religious sites, to ask if respondents believe that magical…

Science's online education prize

Science has an award for online education resources (cutely named "SPORE"), and they want nominations by June 30. Here are their criteria: Rules of Eligibility for SPORE-2009: * The project must focus on science education. * The resources described must be freely available on the Internet. * The project can be targeted to students or teachers at the precollege or college level, or it can serve the informal education needs of the general public. * The Internet resources must be in English or include an English translation. * Nominations are welcome from all sources. Both…

ScienceOnline2010 session videos - Privacy, ethics, and disasters: how being online as a doctor changes everything Part 6

Privacy, ethics, and disasters: how being online as a doctor changes everything Saturday, January 16 at 10:15 - 11:20am E. Privacy, ethics, and disasters: how being online as a doctor changes everything - Pal MD and Val Jones. Description: We all know that there are potential pitfalls to having a prominent online presence, but for physicians, the implications affect more than just themselves. How should doctors and similar professionals manage their online life? What are the ethical and legal implications? Some preliminary reading can be found here.

ScienceOnline2010 session videos - Privacy, ethics, and disasters: how being online as a doctor changes everything Part 5

Privacy, ethics, and disasters: how being online as a doctor changes everything Saturday, January 16 at 10:15 - 11:20am E. Privacy, ethics, and disasters: how being online as a doctor changes everything - Pal MD and Val Jones. Description: We all know that there are potential pitfalls to having a prominent online presence, but for physicians, the implications affect more than just themselves. How should doctors and similar professionals manage their online life? What are the ethical and legal implications? Some preliminary reading can be found here.